Eric Schliesser's Blog, page 4
April 19, 2023
Hayek on Liberal Utopia, the Long Game, and Weberian Politics
[Over time I am plan to phase out this blog at typepad. This post was first published at digressions.impressions.substack here. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber at <digressionsimpressions.substack.com>]
In response to my recent suggestion, in my celebration of Chandran Kukathas, [see also this nicely edited reprint in Liberal Currents] that, not unlike other liberal thinkers, "Hayekians" are profoundly anti-political (even suspicious of politics), I was redirected to Hayek's (1949) "The Intellectuals and Socialism" by the doyen of Hayek studies, Bruce Caldwell. In that paper, Hayek argues that liberal intellectuals should focus on the long game and develop what Hayek calls, "liberal utopia." Contemporary neo-Hayekians -- I am thinking of people not unlike Caldwell and Kukathas, but also Pete Boettke (whose writings [see, for example here] first alerted me to the significance of the passage I am about to discuss) -- seem to be inspired by the following passage as articulating the task of liberal intellectuals:
What we lack is a liberal Utopia, a program which seems neither a mere defense of things as they are nor a diluted kind of socialism, but truly liberal radicalism which does not spare the susceptibilities of the mighty (including the trade unions), which is not too severely practical and which does not confine itself to what appears today as politically possible. We need intellectual leaders who are prepared to resist the blandishments of power and influence and who are willing to work for an ideal, however small may be the prospects of its early realization. (F.A. Hayek (1949) "The intellectuals and socialism," p. 432; emphasis added).
Somewhat sadly most critics of Hayek and what is now known as 'classical liberalism' or 'neoliberalism' do not take this passage seriously at all. They are quick to associate Hayek with Reagan, Thatcher, and Pinochet and all kinds of (dirty) practical politics. Such critics find it hard to believe that the argument's effect on Hayekian intellectuals has been to urge them to keep their hands politically clean and to focus primarily on the noble task of contributing to articulating the elements of a liberal utopia unhindered by short-term feasibility.
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In a creative (2022) paper, Mikayla Novak plausible treats Hayek's pre-WWII proposal for interstate federation as a kind of exemplar of the sort of liberal utopian thinking, which she treats as an instance of heterotopia, Hayek may council. In an important article, Caldwell himself points to Hayek's theorizing in The Constitution of Liberty (1960) and Law, Legislation and Liberty (1973-79) as other examples of such utopian theorizing. The function of a liberal utopia is not to guide day-to-day policy based on a blueprint (that's there error of the so-called 'man of system' derided by Adam Smith), but to offer an ideal (even a social theory) that may mobilize others in the long term and that also may be useful in interpreting reality. In fact, in Law, Legislation and Liberty Hayek puts the point as follows: "It is not to be denied that to some extent the guiding model of the overall order will always be an utopia, something to which the existing situation will be only a distant approximation and which many people will regard as wholly impractical. Yet it is only by constantly holding up the guiding conception of an internally consistent model which could be realized by the consistent application of the same principles, that anything like an effective framework for a functioning spontaneous order will be achieved." And in context, it is clear that Hayek treats Adam Smith's impact on the development of British free trade as the exemplar to be emulated.
However, if we look again at the passage quoted from "The intellectuals and socialism," it is worth noting that a liberal utopia is also called a "program" (Foucault picks up on this) and that in his choice of words, 'truly liberal radicalism,' Hayek is evoking the Philosophical Radicals, the politicians who were inspired by Bentham's program. The natural implicature in light of Hayek's relentless criticism of the constructivism of Bentham, which is thus a false liberal radicalism, is that Hayek is trying to generate a program that involves both an intellectual revolution and eventually actionable legislation of the sort we find in the circle of Bentham's political admirers in the 1820s and 30s. Since Hayek (and other neo-liberals of the period) was in dialogue with Dicey's Lectures on the Relation between Law and Public Opinion (recall; also here; and here), and Dicey describes the significance and impact of the Benthamite program, it stands to reason Hayek was inspired to offer an alternative.
Now, I admit that the claims of the previous paragraph rests on slender evidence. But the liberal utopia passage is preceded by another one on the previous page that motivates my reading:
The point of this paragraph is not that the true liberal must restrict herself to devising a new utopia, but that in addition they must seek out ("finding"/"associating themselves") political coalition partners. To be sure, this is not ad hoc policy. It has to be a 'systematic policy' -- that is based on a program -- that can promote freedom. In fact, this is so in the full expectation that these others will not share in Hayek's liberal ideals and may be motivated by much less lofty goals.
In fact, both Acton & Hayek recognize that coalitions with others will involve judgment, including judgements one may turn out to be truly mistaken or "sometimes disastrous." (Just ask the critics of neo-liberalism's occasional flirtation with transitional dictatorship.) And the risks involved include that one must also be willing to speak truth to potentially powerful friends (capitalists), and take on vested interests (unions) that are also dedicated to helping the people whose freedom one claims to promote. This all echoes Weber's account of the sometimes tragic choices facing a ���politician with a sense of vocation.���
As an aside: I don't think that Hayek is here anticipating the fusionism (between truly liberal radicalism) and conservative thought that became so characteristic of actual American politics on the right. But that it occurred need not surprise after the fact. What Hayek shows is that political life involves aligning oneself with those, who may share quite different commitments, to make possible one���s goals. This is, in fact, very much like my own view,* and this is why I spoke of 'Hayekians' and not Hayek in my piece.
Now originally, I thought Caldwell understands Hayek to be advocating a kind of political dis-engagement by the intellectual who prepares the way for later generations. But he called my attention to a set of recorded remarks by Kukathas on the 'dilemma' that the liberal, who might exercise power, faces. In his five minute remarks, Kukathas rejects the path of avoiding political life and the path of realism, but advocates restraint and forbearance in power and to stick to liberal principles, especially as ground in the core value of toleration. (The remarks start around 1 hour and 13.) I take it Caldwell thinks this is more principled than the one I endorse. I agree that Kukathas' position is rather noble, it follows (to quote Weber) "the maxim of an ethic of ultimate ends-that is, in religious terms." But this one sided political stance, is not Hayek's.
For, I doubt Hayek believes that when one associates "with auxiliaries whose objects" differ from one's own, one can always stick to one's liberal principles in political life (be at coalition building or power holding). For, if one could stick to one's principles in political life then there wouldn't be any danger or risk of disaster. That's to say, Hayek is, as Foucault discerned, a Weberian in ways that many contemporary Hayekian intellectuals are not.
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April 18, 2023
On Value in Use & Art and Merit in Adam Smith
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Recently Professor Rachel Zuckert (Northwestern) wrote me about the possible elision between artistic merit and price in Adam Smith. I was initially a bit surprised by Zuckert's concern because in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith's official definition of merit -- "In the beneficial... nature of the effects which the affection aims at, or tends to produce, consists the merit... of the action" ( TMS) -- and in his subsequent treatment of merit in TMS, Smith seems to keep merit very far removed from any concern with price or exchange value. But when she nudged me toward Smith's essay, "On the Nature of that Imitation which takes place in what are called the Imitative Arts" (Imitative Arts),* I immediately encountered the passage that could trigger Zuckert's question:
[A] The extraordinary resemblance of two natural objects, of twins, for example, is regarded as a curious circumstance; which, though it does not increase, yet does not diminish the beauty of either, considered as a separate and unconnected object. But the exact resemblance of two productions of art, seems to be always considered as some diminution of the merit of at least one of them; as it seems to prove, that one of them, at least, is a copy either of the other, or of some other original. One may say, even of the copy of a picture, that it derives its merit, not so much from its resemblance to the original, as from its resemblance to the object which the original was meant to resemble. The owner of the copy, so far from setting any high [i] value upon its resemblance to the original, is often anxious to destroy any [ii] value or merit which it might derive from this circumstance. He is often anxious to persuade both himself and other people that it is not a copy, but an original, of which what passes for the original is only a copy. But, whatever merit a copy may derive from its resemblance to the original, an original can certainly derive none from the resemblance of its copy.
But though a production of art seldom derives any merit from its resemblance to another object of the same kind, it frequently derives a great deal from its resemblance to an object of a different kind, whether that object be a production of art or of nature. A painted cloth, the work of some laborious Dutch artist, so curiously shaded and coloured as to represent the pile and softness of a woollen one, might derive some merit from its resemblance even to the sorry carpet which now lies before me. The copy might, and probably would, in this case, be of much greater [iii] value than the original. But if this carpet was represented as spread, either upon a floor or upon a table, and projecting from the back ground of the picture, with exact observation of perspective, and of light and shade, the merit of the imitation would be still greater.--Adam Smith "Imitative Arts" I.4-5, pp. 178-179 in the Glasgow edition of Essays on Philosophical Subjects.
Now, 'value' is a technical term in Wealth of Nations (WN) and I use Smith's treatment of it there to interpret this passage. But it worth noting that in TMS 'value' is not introduced as a technical term and throughout TMS Smith lets context determine what he means by 'value.' I cannot rule out that he intended to do so, too in Imitative Arts. Because there is evidence in the essay that he intended it more as a kind of companion to TMS, or at least assumed some familiarity with TMS.** Unfortunately, context does not settle the issue in the passage [A] that gave rise to Professor Zuckert's question.
However, in WN, 'value' does have a technical use and Smith spends considerable time explicitly disambiguating them in four chapters (4-7) of its Book 1. For, at the end of WN 1.4, Smith distinguishes between two notions of value: utility and exchange (to be quoted below). He is explicit (���three following chapters���) that the material in chapters WN 1.5-7 governs exchange value only. In fact, in order to explain the principles of exchange value, Smith distinguishes among three measres of exchange value: (i) natural or ordinary prices, (ii) real prices, and (iii) nominal or market prices. I have recently written a popular essay (trying to distance Smith from a labor theory of value), in which I explain the differences among these measures of exchange value here. I presuppose familiarity with it in what follows, but I don't think it's needed to understand what I am about to say.
Now in WN, Smith does not say much about use value, but here's the first key passage:
So, Smith is explicitly far removed here from the more modern economists' tendency to treat value in exchange as a useful proxy for (or revealed preference) of utility. It is crucial for my present purposes that there is no tendency in Smith to link use and exchange value in any systematic way. Interestingly enough (as an aside), when Smith describes what he calls 'real price,' which is a measure of labor commanded in exchange, and which, in modern terms involves a fairly constant disutility for the working poor (relative to a staple food and stable technological background conditions), Smith does not use 'utility' or its cognates, but 'toil and trouble.'
What Smith means by such utility or value in use is underspecified at WN 1.4.13. And, in fact, Smith rarely discusses value in use or such utility in WN. However, a key passage on the nature of precious metals follows at WN 1.xi.c.31: "These qualities of utility, beauty, and scarcity, are the original foundation of the high price of those [precious] metals, or of the great quantity of other goods for which they can every where be exchanged." (191) In this context it is clear that 'utility here explicitly means 'useful' to the owner. And precious metals are useful in virtue of the fact that "they are less liable to rust and impurity, they can more easily be kept clean." (190) Smith goes one to explain that it is their beauty that makes them highly prized. So, crucially, while there is no conceptual or stable link between value in use (or use value/utility) and exchange value, value in use can, in some circumstances, enter into the exchange value of an object. It does so, in fact, when there is "scarcity" (so these are not wholly independent factors).
Now, works of art (in the broad sense that Smith uses the term) can have beauty, artistic merit, and value in exchange. When in the Imitative Arts essay, Smith treats of value in exchange or the cost of a work of art, he tends to use 'expence.' Take one of my favorite passages in which he does so:
[B] A good painter will often execute in a few days a subject which would employ the best tapestry-weaver for many years; though, in proportion to his time, therefore, the latter is always much worse paid than the former, yet his work in the end comes commonly much dearer to market. The great expence of good Tapestry, the circumstance which confines it to the palaces of princes and great I lords, gives it, in the eyes of the greater part of people, an air of riches and magnificence, which contributes still further to compensate the imperfection of its imitation. In arts which address themselves, not to the prudent and the wise, but to the rich and the great, to the proud and the vain, we ought not to wonder if the appearance of great expence, of being what few people can purchase, of being one of the surest characteristics of great fortune, should often stand in the place of exquisite beauty, and contribute equally to recommend their productions. As the idea of expence seems often to embellish, so that of cheapness seems as frequently to tarnish the lustre even of very agreeable objects.--Imitative Arts, I.13. pp. 183-2
What's very neat about this passage is that in his treatment of the painter and the tapestry weaver, Smith pretty explicitly denies a labor theory of value (in exchange)! He also explicitly denies that expense in the art market, in so far as the work of art appeals to status, tracks genuine beauty. However in markets dominated by status, value in exchange (expense/cost/resale value) does track value in use because high exchange value enhances the use value of the work of art to the owner who can thereby signal riches and inspire envy (etc.). So much for set up.
Now, in the Imitative Arts essay, Smith uses 'value' only three times at I.4-5 in the passage quoted above and labeled [A]); I have labeled these to facilitate discussion. Since in it he is explicitly dealing with 'owners' in a market economy, it is tempting to read the use of 'value' as value in exchange in it. (I think this is professor Zuckert's view even after reading the present essay.) This is especially so because the three uses of value are introduced after discussion of artistic merit ("One may say, even of the copy of a picture, that it derives its merit, not so much from its resemblance to the original, as from its resemblance to the object which the original was meant to resemble").
So, what follows can never settle the issue. But I have three reasons for thinking that Smith means value in use when uses 'value' the three times at I.4-5/[A]. First, because Smith is so careful to use 'expence' and 'cost' when he discusses value in exchange subsequently, I am inclined to think that in this context by 'value' at [i-iii] Smith means 'value in use' to the owner. Second, this is most obvious in [iii] because in immediate context Smith is describing the heightened artistic merit of works that copy works from a different genre or kind of art. So, for example (this is not exactly Smith's own example), a tapestry that represents a painting of a violinist or a painting in which a tapestry of a violinist is represented is of higher artistic merit than a tapestry of a violinist alone. Now, whether that artistic merit translates in higher exchange value is a contingent matter as Smith explains at passage [B]/I.13, and throughout Wealth of Nations.
Third, I won't deny that for some bourgeois owners the 'anxiety' whether one has an original or a copy is caused by the possible exchange value of a work. But it is telling that after introducing [i-ii], Smith does not explain the owner's interest in resale value, but rather in what "other people" think of artistic merit ("He is often anxious to persuade both himself and other people that it is not a copy, but an original, of which what passes for the original is only a copy. But, whatever merit a copy may derive from its resemblance to the original, an original can certainly derive none from the resemblance of its copy.")
That is to say, on my reading this is an owner that is hoping others will admire his good taste not, in the first place, his riches. While one cannot claim with confidence that this is an owner that is only focused on what the "prudent and the wise" think (and so will care about the praise for his art collection from the worthy and those able to judge his discerning taste), I do suggest here that the expectation that they may withhold their approval in his judgment or taste for owning a copy and not an original is what is causing the anxiety here and also diminishing the value, that is, value in use one might derive from owning the work of art not concern with resale value.
Over time I am plan to phase out this blog at typepad. This post was first published at digressions.impressions.substack here. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber at
*We know surprisingly little about the origin of this essay, and even as late as 2017 (when I published my big Adam Smith book), I was dissatisfied by the general state of scholarship on the essay, which, while I use it in my book, informed my decision to bracket Smith's views "on taste, art, and aesthetics" despite signaling their significance of these issues to a proper understanding of Smith (p. 21 n.21). What good work there was, was relatively isolated from each other and wider scholarship on Smith and/or eighteenth century aesthetics.
**The evidence is his use of 'sympathy' and the ways he illustrates it.
April 17, 2023
On Tasioulas, Conceptual Inflation, and Public Reason
H��l��ne Landemore enthusiastically shared a piece, ���The Inflation of Concepts,��� published at Aeon by John Tasioulas (who she describes as her ���Oxford colleague���). Appealing to the work of J��rgen Habermas and John Rawls, Tasioulas focuses on a ���threat to the quality of public reason��� (which he claims) ���tends to go unnoticed. This is the degradation of the core ideas mobilised in exercises of public reason.��� And, in particular, what he has in mind is ���conceptual overreach���. This ���occurs when a particular concept undergoes a process of expansion or inflation in which it absorbs ideas and demands that are foreign to it.���
At this point I kind of expected Tasioulas to suggest as an example ���democracy��� but he initially focuses on ���human rights or the rule of law��� [he is a legal philosopher] which ���is taken to offer a comprehensive political ideology, as opposed to picking out one among many elements upon which our political thinking needs to draw and hold in balance when arriving at justified responses to the problems of our time.��� Near the end of his essay he does focus on democracy (which he thinks of as a more ���contestable��� example!) and while drawing on the excellent work of Joshua Ober, he complains that some people mistakenly use ���democracy��� and ���liberal democracy��� interchangeably. (Our reading habits are clearly different because most of the conflations I see involve ���democracy��� and whatever views a theorist expects/wishes to see approved by their imaginary demos.)
In all three of his main examples, a clear concept is developed by the intellectual class in order to add new features to it, including some that thereby muddle it. Now, Tasioulas does not object to this on the grounds that may tempt what we may call a ���conceptual purist analytic philosopher��� that true conceptual change is impossible (for the conventional wisdom in the corner of analytic philosophy in which I grew up was that concepts are what they are, eternally). For Tasioulas allows for ���the possibility that a given concept might legitimately come to incorporate new demands over time without this constituting a form of conceptual overreach.���
So, lurking in Tasioulas is a kind of consistency requirement that only additions to the content of a concept are legitimate that are compatible with its original identity and, to use a vaguer terms its spirit (this to capture Tasioulas��� examples and his notion of ���foreign���). Those political agents that inflate concepts beyond the possible limits of intra-conceptual coherence, are conceptual polluters.
I put it like that because Tasioulas shares with his sometime Oxford Colleague, Neil Levy (whose very fine book Bad Beliefs: Why They Happen to Good People I reviewed here [open access]), a kind of fantasy that that the public sphere can remain unpolluted and (this is the public reason part) should remain unpolluted. Of course, if it is a fantasy, then (ought implies can) the duty to keep foreign elements out disappears and one can welcome conceptual hybridization (perhaps even inflation).
Before I explain why it is a fantasy, it is worth noting that the concepts Tasioulas focuses on are also paradigmatic cases of ���essentially contested concepts��� (in Gallie���s sense) and so one might think that his purist approach to them does not get off the ground. Tasioulas hints at his awareness of this hypothetical objection (not just with his use of ���contestable��� in the context of his democracy example, but also ) because -- while tacitly invoking the concept/conception distinction that has been used by public reason scholars to domesticate the possibility of ���essentially contested concepts��� --, he acknowledges that his position ���is further complicated by the fact that there might be various equally acceptable ways of specifying the meanings of a range of important concepts.��� But it is important to see that for Tasioulas these acceptable ways cannot, in principle, reveal or express internal, latent contradiction(s) or foreign-ess within the concept.
Interestingly enough, and to his credit, Tasioulas does not disguise the elitist commitments in his version of public reason. Alongside the ���craving for simplicity,��� he fundamentally blames ���elite actors and institutions,��� ���special interest groups,��� and ���dialectical gambits��� by political agents who wish to deprive their ���political opponents of a conceptual place on which to stand.��� And so in the final paragraph he closes with the claim that the ���responsibility��� for maintaining a relatively pure conceptual public sphere ���falls on all of us, but especially on the wielders of great public and private power.��� And this fits his diagnosis at the start of his essay that conceptual inflation is the effect of ���the utterances of elite actors, such as bureaucrats, lawyers, politicians and representatives of international organisations and NGOs.���
What���s ironic about all of this is that usually (left) critics of public reason (like my brilliant former teacher Iris Marion Young) tend to point to the elitist presuppositions of public reason (comparing its norms to that of a genteel seminar room) to discredit it and that these norms leave out many other (quite intelligible) forms of contestation and argumentation. By contrast, Tasioulas basically blames the very people who ought to be all in on public reason for not living up to its demands for public speech.
With that in place let me acknowledge that I recognize that communication and decision-making might seem a lot easier if people stuck to a shared notion of particular concepts and that any extensions of these should remain sufficiently pure and avoid what Tasioulas calls inflation. I use ���seem��� because Tasioulas ignores all the ways in which strategic ambiguity makes peace, collective decisions, coalition-building, and even agreeing to disagree possible.
To be sure, I too am tempted by worry over the confusion and lack of clarity that might follow from conceptual hybridization and inflation, and it can be terribly frustrating to see the mis-use of concepts in public. (I am often happy to die on the mole-hill that Trump was an attempted usurper between January 2-6, 2021, but did not attempt a coup d'��tat.) And I often see ���violence��� used in ways that I think inflated. It is part of the analytic philosopher���s political faith that if the concepts are clarified, social life can be in a much better state (this is actually visible in Carnap and, as I have argued in, Ernest Nagel). Nothing I say here undermines that faith, or the purported utility that follows from conceptual engineering, conceptual clarification, or conceptual amelioration. After all, I have appealed to the work of a philosopher���s conceptual coining ���essentially contested concept��� here! (Some time I return to the odd status of Gallie within professional philosophy.)
Now, above, I used ���fantasy,��� for three reasons. First, Tasioulas ends up having to tell a mythic stories about concepts that originally are (relatively) pure and then are corrupted by (even well intentioned) strategic actors. (It shares quite a bit of elements with standard accounts of the Fall.) The story is mythic because the temporal and conceptual proper base line Tasioulas appeals to in each case is always drawn arbitrarily by him such as to make the concept do the work Tasioulas wants.
This can be seen even the case of the ���rule of law.��� Tasioulas writes ���Traditionally, this refers to a range of formal and procedural requirements that enable people to comply with the law.��� (emphasis added) Because ���traditionally��� is so vague it is hard to contest this on historical grounds (hence my use of ���mythic,��� although it helps knowing that Tasioulas is an admirer of Raz!) I was a bit taken aback by this understanding of the rule of law because I don���t tend to think of it in such functional terms (that it enables compliance with the law).
For, it is worth noting that Dicey, who is ���standardly��� (see what I did there?) credited by conservatives and liberals alike in the Anglo-world for giving the central formulation of the rule of law, describes its first principle as "no man is punishable or can be lawfully made to suffer in body or goods except for a distinct breach of law established in the ordinary legal manner before the ordinary Courts of the land.��� This makes clear that the rule of law is understood as a kind of constraint on the exercise of power.
My modest point here is not to argue in favor of Dicey as the proper baseline (why him and not Aristotle or Cicero or Blackstone etc?), but just to suggest that in all his explicit examples Tasioulas is engaged in cherry picking to promote his own favored understanding of a concept as the baseline and then to treat deviations from it that he disapproves of as conceptual inflations. This is essentially arbitrary, and even where I happen to agree politically with Tasioulas, one should not expect wider agreement. I happen to think this is part of the human condition because conceptual inflation just is a strategy that is always available to political agents, but nothing I say requires you to accept that.
However, because it is always going to be somewhat arbitrary, conceptual inflation is always going to be a charge that itself will be contestable. And so functionally one can expect that if there is uptake of ���conceptual inflation��� as a term of abuse, that rather than focusing on the issues under dispute, it shifts dispute to a more meta-level (about the origins and proper use of a concept). This may be good for the business of analytic philosophy (it���s our area of expertise), and other elite intellectuals, but it will neither cure us of the phenomenon (Tasioulas��� professed aim) nor solve the underlying disputes (although they may displace them which can be preferable sometimes).
Second, even by Tasioulas��� own lights his proposal to keep concepts in ���good repair��� is likely to fail. Because he does not address the grounds, institutions, or incentives that by his own lights give rise to conceptual inflation (This is why I mentioned Neil Levy���s book, which at least begins the important conversation what would be required to keep the political environment relatively unpolluted.) So, even if Tasioulas could establish a duty to avoid conceptual inflation, it seems defeasible in practice (because obeying it would undermine other important morally salient political aims).
Let me close by assuaging a possible worry that I am making a category mistake, and that I am sneakily trying to undermine commitment to public reason on empirical grounds. But that���s not what I am doing here (even though it���s probably true that I lack warmth toward public reason as a project). Rather, third, it is Tasioulas who mistakenly assumes (with appeal to Habermas and Rawls) that adherence to public reason is existing common ground. And if that were true then indeed he could remind participants in it (like a seminar leader) that they are violating shared norms and all would be well. But, unfortunately, contemporary elites (the ones he appeals to) quite clearly do not believe this, their actions (alongside their utterances) belie it.
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April 14, 2023
On Humean sovereignty with some Dicey, Schmitt,
A.V. Dicey's life (1835-1922) and work is known almost exclusively for the 'rule of law.' I have some amusing, reductive evidence for this claim: the one and only annotation by Foucault on Dicey is the definition of the rule of law (see here). Presumably the annotation was prompted by Foucault's reading and use of Hayek's Constitution of Liberty, where Dicey's Law of the Constitution is treated as a classic (as the editors of Foucault's Biopolitics lectures note in their endnotes 23-25 on p. 282 in the English translation). One of the best essays on Dicey's significance on thinking about the rule of law to political theory, "Dicey and his Legacy" (Political Theory, 1995) by Julia Stapleton, explores its impact on especially what she calls English liberal-conservative thought.
But it is not impossible that Foucault also read Dicey's Lectures on the Relation between Law and Public Opinion for the very passage in his lecture that elicited the editors' comment is this: "the Rule of law is clearly defined as a state in which the state itself does not organize administrative courts which arbitrate between citizens and the public authorities; the Rule of law is a state in which citizens can appeal to ordinary justice against the public authorities. The English say: If there are administrative courts, then we are not living under the Rule of law." (p. 170, 21 February 1979). This echoes the introduction to the second edition of Lectures on the Relation between Law and Public Opinion (hereafter LRLPO):
But administrative law has two defects which have till very recent years forbidden its existence in England. Administrative tribunals always tend to exclude the jurisdiction of the ordinary law Courts. Administrative Courts are always more or less connected with the Government of the day. Their decisions are apt to be influenced by political considerations. Governmental officials cannot have the thorough independence of judges....An administrative Court is never a completely independent tribunal. (p. 373 in the Libertyfund edition)
Anyway, as I have noted before (recall; here), Dicey's LRLPO (sorry) had a significant impact on mid-twentieth century neo-Liberal thought (including Lippmann, Milton Friedman, and Hayek (see also this paper by Nathana��l Colin-Jaeger).* But to the best of my knowledge there has been no real attempt to explore LRPLO's political theory in light of some of their theoretical concerns, and the viability of liberalism.
At the very start (pp. 4-5) of LRLPO, while drawing on the opening lines of Hume's "Of the First Principles of Government," Dicey notes that "Hume���s doctrine holds good, and the opinion of the governed is the real foundation of all government." (This Humean stance has been explored in my own scholarship, and also in book-length works by Andy Sabl and Paul Sagar.) Dicey then turns this into a Humean theory of sovereignty that is, as it were, neutral among constitutional forms:
This conclusion, however, though roughly true, cannot be accepted without considerable reservation. The sovereign power may hold that a certain kind of legislation is in itself expedient, but may at the same time be unwilling, or even unable, to carry this conviction into effect, and this from the dread of offending the feelings of subjects who, though they in general take no active share in public affairs, may raise an insuperable opposition to laws which disturb their habits or shock their moral sentiment; it is well indeed, thus early in these lectures, to note that the public opinion which finds expression in legislation is a very complex phenomenon, and often takes the form of a compromise resulting from a conflict between the ideas of the government and the feelings or habits of the governed. This holds good in all countries, whatever be their form of government,--Albert Venn Dicey Lectures on the Relation between Law and Public Opinion, p. 10 (libertyfund edition)
So, if I understand Dicey correctly, sovereignty is constituted by the effectual public opinion that governs the country (which we might call 'conventional wisdom') but this opinion is self-limited by considerations of practical wisdom or prudence. I set aside the non-trivial challenges in measuring effectual public opinion in ways that would meet contemporary standards of rigor in political science. Dicey's lectures are a game attempt at exhibiting its existence, but does often flirt with the 'post hoc ergo propter hoc' fallacy.+
Now, as is well known, in the preface to the (1934) second edition of Political Theology, Schmitt presented his account of sovereignty as a polemic with 'liberal normativism and its kind of "constitutional state.' And certain radical-chic scholars with contempt for liberalism have been all too willing to echo Schmitt's three-fold typology: among (i) "the pure normativist [who] thinks in terms of impersonal rules, and [(ii)] the decisionist [who] implements the good law of the correctly recognized political situation by means of a personal decision, and [iii)] institutional legal thinking unfolds in institutions and organizations that transcend the personal sphere" and then associate liberalism exclusively with the proceduralist-normativist (by taking Rawlsian intellectual hegemony as a kind of natural outgrowth of liberalism or the only liberalism left standing).
Now, I would argue that Dicey's Humean approach to sovereignty formally anticipates the Schmittian decisionist, but without Schmitt's focus on the decisive individual leader (or F��hrerprinzip) because, to put it classically, Dicey's approach also allows for complex, collective forms of (aristocratic and democratic) leadership. So, to put this as a serious joke: Schmitt's approach is a subset of Dicey's analytically purer approach.
In fact, from a liberal perspective, Dicey anticipates the main problem in Schmitt's analysis of sovereignty, the absence of accountability (a word and its cognates wholly absent in Schmitt's Political Theology and Dicey's LRLPO). By contrast, Hume would also emphasize the role of accountability (recall this post inspired by Lazar's States of Emergency in Liberal Democracies; and this earlier post). [I don't mean to suggest Dicey ignores accountability of government officials.]
Now, it's important that in LRLPO, Dicey recognizes that the actions of the sovereign can be balanced and frustrated by the "checks imposed on such opinion by the existence of counter-currents and cross-currents of opinion." Elsewhere in his theorizing Dicey explored other, institutional checks (like referenda) on sovereignty (especially that effected by parliament).* But without mechanisms of accountability (be it symbolic, formal, political, or juridical) Dicey's Humeanism slides into illiberalism. For, it is not sufficient that there are checks and balances or fractured sovereignty even when the form of the law is obeyed; accountability is required from a liberal perspective. Interestingly enough (in light of efforts to claim that Hayek, who is very influenced by Dicey, is a neo-Schmittian), Hayek does emphasize the significance of accountability to the rule of law by quoting this passage in ���Declaration of Parliament Assembled at Westminster��� approvingly: ���There being nothing more essential to the freedom of a state, than that the people should be governed by the laws, and that justice be administered by such only as are accountable for mal-administration." (chapter on the Origins of the rule of law" Constitution of Liberty, p. 251 in Volume XVII of the Collected Works. n.)
These digressions are all very theoretical, I recognize. And perhaps it would help if we put it in more concrete form if we think of a concrete example: President, Donald Trump's attempted usurpation (starting, roughly, with the phone call to Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia Secretary of State, and culminating in the events of Jan 6, 2021). His actions generated a hasty (second) impeachment on january 13, 2021, by a 232���197 vote. There is no doubt that this conviction had the support of conventional wisdom. But it lacked sufficient votes in the Senate for conviction, primarily, I think, because too many Republican Senators feared the governed, especially their own primary voters' wrath. (Of the seven Republicans who voted to convict only one had to face her voters within two years.)
The dangerously slow investigation of and legal procedures against Trump's efforts to overturn the Georgia results have undermined accountability and, thereby, help undermine the constitutional order (and risks shifting toward forms of plebescite despotism). I would be amazed if the delay isn't caused by a general unease felt by prosecutors over the prosecution of a vindictive politician who could return to power and whose supporters are feared. (The perceived odds of his winning again are better than the perceived odds ahead of his first primary run.)
Unfortunately, the conventional wisdom already reflects this shift to some degree by its tendency to deplore the fact that Trump is being prosecuted for mere hush money payments (in a different jurisdiction) without a willingness to urge on prosecution for actions surrounding his attempted usurpation. Noticeably, and in striking contrast, in living memory the French were willing to prosecute (and covinct) former President Sarkozy thereby also derailing any attemp at re-election.
Now, in closing, before you accuse me of Trump derangement syndrome, I don't mean to suggest that lack of accountability is unique to our era or Trump among US presidents. As I have noted in my blogging (recall here; here), since, say, 1940, plenty of US Presidents have committed egregious war crimes (or worse) abroad, including internment of innocent US citizens and assassination of US Citizens on foreign soil, without (symbolic, legal, political, etc.) accountability. To what degree this gap in American political practice reflects a tacit approval of the American people I leave to the reader.
This post was first published at my substack account here. Digressionsimpressions���s Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber there.
*I don't mean to suggest that LRLPO exhausts Dicey's political theorizing. I warmly recommend Mads Qvortrup's "AV Dicey: the referendum as the people's veto." History of Political Thought 20.3 (1999): 531-546.
+If you are a very strict Humean or Spinozist it's not obvious it is a fallacy.
April 13, 2023
Covid Diaries: Substack and Life plans
Yesterday, I learned I received a 'most valued lecturer among first-year political science students' award. (Technically it was a tie, and I have been toying with asking for a formal recount--the hanging chad jokes write themselves.) It's the first quasi formal teaching recognition I have ever received, and it's bittersweet to receive it while being highly self-conscious of my partial disabilities. It's not wholly a surprise because my giant lecture course has been very popular for about five years now. I have always been popular among some of my students, but others also found me incredibly irritating (at the start of my career my student evals always had bimodal distributions).
It's not a coincidence that my teaching popularity has improved since the onset of my long covid. (For my official "covid diaries" see here; here; here; here;here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here.; and here.) One important life change since I tried to recover from long covid is to reduce cognitive (and physical) multi-tasking through the day and also at any moment. The effect has been that I put much less demands on my teaching: during lectures I am focused primarily on my pedagogical aims for my students and I am not trying to entertain myself (by clever asides or meta-theoretical commentary).
This past week, I was not allowed to forget my long covid. I violated my no multi-tasking rule, and I could not plan my days (or exercise) in ways that suppress my symptoms (headaches, cognitive fatigue, bad sleep, etc.). I had to do a lot of travel alongside some intense job-related meetings (I had a job search), and so I had to take more regular naproxen as a palliative than I would like. However, now I have almost four months without teaching (and much less travel), so I am looking forward to use the time to get back to some big intellectual projects and also continue my recovery with daily swimming and more leisurely pace.
For, this post is also the start of an experiment with partial monetizing some of my blogging at Substack. During covid and my fall research leave, I had time to reflect on my future. As many of you know, when in health, I split my time between Amsterdam (work) and London (family). But this means that among family, teaching, research, and a whole bunch of job duties I am consistently spread too thin in two (expensive) places. Being on partial disability allowed me to reconfigure my position at work to focus on things that spark joy (and to let go of those that don't): undergraduate teaching and research. I also have cut down on travel between London and Amsterdam, but this has led to less time with family (and less time at work some time of year). But this Fall, I return to full-time teaching and, if my health holds up, I will increasingly be tapped again for tasks that make it hard to square all my commitments and not undermine my health.
In an ideal world, I would get a new position that either would let me work/live in London or that would pay enough so that I could go half-time as long as my teenage son is in school. But until that happens, I want to blog my way to an income that would require me to be on partial (albeit structural) leave. So all my (after tax) substack income would go to off-setting salary (and so leave) because my university/department rules do not allow me to supplement my income over my basic salary. I am not very optimistic about this plan because (i) I refuse to be a culture warrior; (ii) my topics are a niche product; (iii) I am not the world's greatest writer even in philosophy--having been ruined for modern audiences by translating Cicero as a teenager; (iv) the first sixteen subscribers to my Substack all opted for the free subscription.
The decision to go with Substack has not been an easy one. When John Protevi made the executive decision to make NewAPPS advertising free, I have always been happy with the fact that my blogging (also at D&I and Crookedtimber) was orthogonal to the monetized market place of ideas and uncorrupted by financial considerations. (This meant money left on the table, especially in the years at NewAPPS.) After all, incentives matter, and they do shape decisions, and your good opinion and refined judgment, dear reader, always matters most to me (feel free to add a choice quote from Seneca or Socrates here). In fact, having become increasingly aware of the role marketing budgets (and publicists) play in recent public facing philosophy, I have taken pride in my role in the intellectual credit economy.
Anyway, I don't want to dramatize this Substack decision too much (it's only an experiment at first, after all): I will continue to blog at Crookedtimber (and D&I), and a lot of my Substack will be freely available. But I am leaving the high ground: alia iacta est, for the price of a cheap glass of wine you can read my near-daily musings here.
April 11, 2023
On Olaf Stapledon, Technology induced Extinction Risk, and the Awesome new Atomic and AGI power
Olaf Stapledon (1886 ��� 1950) is known only to aficionados of science fiction now (Last and First Men and Star Maker are classics that shaped the genre throughout the twentieth century, and arguably kept Spinozistic ideas alive in a positivist age), but in his writings he also helped invent 'futurology' and 'transhumanism.' I hasten to add, in case you are are of more discerning taste, J.L. Borges was an admirer of Stapledon. Stapledon obtained a PhD in philosophy from University of Liverpool under Alexander Mair (hitherto unknown to me). Stapledon's first book (1929), A Modern Theory of Ethics: A Study of The Relations of Ethics and Psychology, was clearly based on his PhD. Judging by citations, it made no impact on the scholarly world of his day.
The quoted passage is from a short book written in preparation of a post (second) world war age. In the book, Stapledon is committed to renewed internationalism (he clearly regrets the failures of the League of Nations) and a form of democratic socialism that can avoid dictatorship (even though Stapledon is clearly very impressed by achievements of the Soviet Union). About his politics some other time more.
The passage caught my attention because it entertains the possibility of technology induced human/species extinction of the species that deploys a new technology. This extinction possibility is in the news again thanks to the (recall) impact of Parfit's writing on longtermism and (the publicity surrounding) rapid developments in AI/AGI.
Contemplating civilizational collapse or the extinction of species are not new thoughts in the history of philosophical writing or social theory. As I have noted (recall), in book 3 of Plato's Laws, (677a-678a) Plato's Athenian stranger entertains the possibility that the Earth has experienced frequent catastrophic natural events (he explicitly mentions massive floods and pandemics, but it's easy to imagine he also assumes earthquakes and perhaps even meteorite impacts) that have wiped out whole populations of humans and other species of animals, and has set-back the technological capability of civilizations for millennia. (We know from the Hebrew Bible account of the flood and other ancient writings that Plato is not unique in this.)
It's also not new to think that civilizational collapse is endogenous to civilizational life. Arguably this is one of the the natural ways to understand the Hebrew Bible's account of the scattering after the tower of Babel; in (recall) The Great Endarkenment, Elijah Millgram suggests that the linguistic diversification and differentiation (and subsequent cultural implosion and scattering) is itself the effect of the advanced division of labor that makes the building of the tower possible. (This is the great set-piece that opens Millgram's (2015) book.) Social theory going back to Ibn Khaldun is rife with cyclical, civilizational processes in which the key drivers of expansion and success also become self-undermining.
It's also not wholly unusual to recognize the potential civilizational collapse that is endogenous to one's own civilizational life. The writings of a number of elite authors of the final century of the roman republic are pretty clear on the fact that endurance of the roman republic is threatened by its own past history of success (due to conquest imported habits of luxury and/or empowered generals to aim for political power). Of course, often the point of recognizing the potential of civilizational collapse is to create a call to political arms, or a philosophical prophecy, to prevent the collapse from occurring (we can see hints of this in Plato's story of Atlantis). But sometimes the doom is inevitable or fated (as some of the Roman authors clearly came to think).
But, as Parfit de facto notes in Reasons and Persons, there is a non-trivial difference between foreseeing civilizational collapse of one's civilization and the collapse of one's whole species. Now, absent a certain kind of ethical or axiological cosmopolitanism, it seems obvious to me that most authors of the past lamented the possible collapse of their own civilization and showed remarkable indifference to the possible collapse of larger humanity. (This is an option that Parfit does not consider, but if he had he would clearly have suggested that this shows a clear error in their implied axiology.)
Now, Stapledown's writings suggest he is a cosmic cosmopolitan. And in this respect, he clearly fits in a philosophical tradition tracing back to Fontenelle, Huygens, and Kant. So, it's no surprise he contemplates the possibility of endogenous technologically induced extinction among aliens as an example worth avoiding in the harnessing of atomic power. There are some hints in Youth and Tomorrow that it was written during wartime, and interestingly enough he does not mention the use of atomic weapons. But just before the passage quoted at the top of this post, he claims that "the manufacture of atomic bombs necessitates organisation of production on a national scale and the danger of the misuse of these terrific weapons forces world-wide organisation upon us." (p. 73; emphasis added)
It's a bit unfortunate that Stapledown does not clarify what he means by 'misuse' of atomic weapons here. (He was a pacifist during World War I, but not during the second world war.) Does he mean their deployment, or does he worry about them falling in the hands of rogue states/actors, or does he worry about nuclear world war? But he clearly thinks that atomic power isn't merely a technological problem, but also a political problem on a global scale. After all, he thinks that a world-wide organization is required to handle it.
In the quoted passage at the top of this post, Stapledon is discussing what we now call the 'Kuiper belt' (or Edgeworth-Kuiper belt') [UPDATED: see Ken McLeod's comment below.] But was only then recently proposed by K.E. Edgeworth in a 1943 paper in the Journal of the British Astronomical Association. It would be worth trying to figure out if Stapledon knew Edgeworth personally. In Edgeworth there is no mention of an alien civilization. I am not claiming that Stapledon is the first to propose the hypothesis that the asteroids are themselves the effect of a technologically induced existential collapse, but given this timeline he has to be among the first.* Clearly the function of Stapledon's hypothesis is to alert us to avoid this fate (not, perhaps, to create a testable hypothesis for planetary explorers of the solar system).*
It is, of course, an open question to what degree global institutional control of atomic power mitigates risk or accelerates existential risk. But since this post is long enough as is, I close with the following observation: the possibility of technology induced (endogenous) extinction is, thss, not new with the possibility of AGI. Our society has lived with the possibility of technology induced (endogenous) extinction of humanity for almost eighty years now. To say that is not to underestimate the existential risk that follows from the introduction of new technology. But it is worth noting that we have a history of living with, and perhaps managing, such risk, and perhaps we can learn from this history. For, while it would be nice if there were a technological fix to the existential extinction risk of AGI, it's more likely than not we'll need institutional and social mitigation of such risk.
*Stapledon's hypothesis reminded me of a recent argument I read somewhere (apologies that I can't find where) that if a technological species imploded sufficiently long ago on Earth archeologists would have trouble recognizing it in the Earth's layers.
March 31, 2023
Some Pre-History on the History and Sociology of Multiple Discovery: Merton, Dicey, Stigler- (etc.)
It may very well, owing to the condition of the world, and especially to the progress of knowledge, present itself at the same time to two or more persons who have had no intercommunication. Bentham and Paley formed nearly at the same date a utilitarian system of morals. Darwin and Wallace, while each ignorant of the other���s labours, thought out substantially the same theory as to the origin of species.--A.V. Dicey [2008] (1905) Lectures on the Relation between Law & Public Opinion in England during the Nineteenth Century, Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, p. 18 n. 6 (based on the 1917 reprint of the second edition).
As regular readers know (recall), I was sent to Dicey because he clearly shaped Milton Friedman's thought at key junctures in the 1940s and 50s. So, I was a bit surprised to encounter the passage quoted above. For, I tend to associate interest in the question of simultaneous invention or multiple discovery with Friedman's friend, George J Stigler (an influential economist) and his son Steven Stigler (a noted historian of statistics). In fairness, the Stiglers are more interested in the law of eponymy. In his (1980) article on that topic, Steven Stigler cites Robert K. Merton's classic and comic (1957) "Priorities in Scientific Discovery: A Chapter in the Sociology of Science." (Merton project was revived in Liam Kofi Bright's well known "On fraud.")
When Merton presented (and first published it) he was a colleague of George Stigler at Columbia University (and also Ernest Nagel). In his (1980) exploration of the law of eponymy, Steven Stigler even attributes to Merton the claim that ���all scientific discoveries are in principle multiple." (147) Stigler cites here p. 356 of Merton's 1973 book, The Sociology of Science: Theoretical and Empirical Investigations, which is supposed to be the chapter that reprints the 1957 article. I put it like that because I was unable to find the quoted phrase in the 1957 original (although the idea can certainly be discerned in it, but I don't have the book available to check that page).
Merton himself makes clear that reflection on multiple discovery is co-extensive with modern science because priority disputes are endemic in it. In fact, his paper is, of course, a reflection on why the institution of science generates such disputes. Merton illustrates his points with choice quotes from scientific luminaries on the mores and incentives of science that generate such controversies, many of which are studies in psychological and social acuity and would not be out of place in Rochefoucauld's Maximes. Merton himself places his own analysis in the ambit of the social theory of Talcott Parsons (another important influence on George Stigler) and Durkheim.
The passage quoted from Dicey's comment is a mere footnote, which occurs in a broader passage on the role of public opinion in shaping development of the law. And, in particular, that many developments are the effect of changes in prevaling public opinion, which are the effect of in the inventiveness of "some single thinker or school of thinkers." (p. 17) The quoted footnote is attached to the first sentence of remarkably long paragraph (which I reproduce at the bottom of this post).* The first sentence is this: "The course of events in England may often at least be thus described: A new and, let us assume, a true idea presents itself to some one man of originality or genius; the discoverer of the new conception, or some follower who has embraced it with enthusiasm, preaches it to his friends or disciples, they in their turn become impressed with its importance and its truth, and gradually a whole school accept the new creed." And the note is attached to 'genius.'
Now, often when one reads about multiple discovery (or simultaneous invention) it is often immediately contrasted to a 'traditional' heroic or genius model (see Wikipedia for an example, but I have found more in a literature survey often influenced by Wikipedia). But Dicey's footnote recognizes that in the progress of knowledge, and presumably division of labor with (a perhaps imperfect) flow of ideas, multiple discovery should become the norm (and the traditional lone genius model out of date).
In fact, Dicey's implicit model of the invention and dissemination of new views is explicitly indebted to Mill's and Taylor's account of originality in chapter 3 of On Liberty. (Dicey only mentions Mill.) Dicey quotes Mill's and Taylor's text: "The initiation of all wise or noble things, comes and must come from individuals; generally at first from some one individual." (Dicey adds that this is also true of folly or a new form of baseness.)
The implicit model is still very popular. MacAskill's account (recall) of Benjamin Lay's role in Quaker abolitionism (and itself a model for social movement building among contemporary effective altruists) is quite clearly modelled on Mill and Taylor's model. I don't mean to suggest Mill and Taylor invent the model; it can be discerned in Jesus and his Apostles and his been quite nicely theorized by Ibn Khaldun in his account of prophetic leadership. Dicey's language suggests he recognizes the religious origin of the model because he goes on (in the very next sentence of the long paragraph) as follows: "These apostles of a new faith are either persons endowed with special ability or, what is quite as likely, they are persons who, owing to their peculiar position, are freed from a bias, whether moral or intellectual, in favour of prevalent errors. At last the preachers of truth make an impression, either directly upon the general public or upon some person of eminence, say a leading statesman, who stands in a position to impress ordinary people and thus to win the support of the nation."
So far so good. But Dicey goes on to deny that acceptance of a new idea depends "on the strength of the reasoning" by which it is advocated or "even on the enthusiasm of its adherents." He ascribes uptake of new doctrines to skillful opportunism in particular by a class of political entrepreneurs or statesmanship (or Machiavellian Virtu) in the context of "accidental conditions." (This anticipates Schumpeter, of course, and echoes the elite theorists of the age like Mosca and Michels.) Dicey's main example is the way Bright and Cobden made free trade popular in England. There is space for new directions only after older ideas have been generally discredited and the political circumstances allow for a new orientation.
It's easy to see that Dicey's informal model (or should I say Mill and Taylor's model?) lends itself to a lot of Post hoc ergo propter hoc reasoning. So I am by no means endorsing it. But the wide circulation of some version of the model helps explain the kind of relentless repetition of much of public criticism (of woke-ism, neoliberalism, capitalism, etc.) that has no other goal than to discredit some way of doing things. If the model is right these are functional part of a strategy of preparing the public for a dramatic change of course. As I have noted Milton Friedman was very interested in this feature of Dicey's argument [Recall: (1951) ���Neo-Liberalism and its Prospects��� Farmand, 17 February 1951, pp. 89-93 [recall this post] and his (1962) "Is a Free Society Stable?" New Individualist Review [recall here]].
I admit we have drifted off from multiple discovery. But obviously, after the fact, multiple discovery in social theory or morals can play a functional role in the model as a signpost that the world is getting ready to hear a new gospel. By the end of the eighteenth century, utilitarianism was being re-discovered or invented along multiple dimensions (one may also mention Godwin, and some continental thinkers) as a reformist even radical enterprise. It was responding to visible problems of the age, although its uptake was not a foregone conclusion. (And the model does not imply such uptake.)
It is tempting to claim that this suggests a dis-analogy with multiple discovery in science. But all this suggestion shows is that our culture mistakenly expects or (as I have argued) tacitly posits an efficient market in ideas in science with near instantaneous uptake of the good ideas; in modern scientific metrics the expectation is that these are assimilated within two to five years on research frontier. But I resist the temptation to go into an extended diatribe why this efficient market in ideas assumption is so dangerous.
*Here's the passage:
The course of events in England may often at least be thus described: A new and, let us assume, a true idea presents itself to some one man of originality or genius; the discoverer of the new conception, or some follower who has embraced it with enthusiasm, preaches it to his friends or disciples, they in their turn become impressed with its importance and its truth, and gradually a whole school accept the new creed. These apostles of a new faith are either persons endowed with special ability or, what is quite as likely, they are persons who, owing to their peculiar position, are freed from a bias, whether moral or intellectual, in favour of prevalent errors. At last the preachers of truth make an impression, either directly upon the general public or upon some person of eminence, say a leading statesman, who stands in a position to impress ordinary people and thus to win the support of the nation. Success, however, in converting mankind to a new faith, whether religious, or economical, or political, depends but slightly on the strength of the reasoning by which the faith can be defended, or even on the enthusiasm of its adherents. A change of belief arises, in the main, from the occurrence of circumstances which incline the majority of the world to hear with favour theories which, at one time, men of common sense derided as absurdities, or distrusted as paradoxes. The doctrine of free trade, for instance, has in England, for about half a century, held the field as an unassailable dogma of economic policy, but an historian would stand convicted of ignorance or folly who should imagine that the fallacies of protection were discovered by the intuitive good sense of the people, even if the existence of such a quality as the good sense of the people be more than a political fiction. The principle of free trade may, as far as Englishmen are concerned, be treated as the doctrine of Adam Smith. The reasons in its favour never have been, nor will, from the nature of things, be mastered by the majority of any people. The apology for freedom of commerce will always present, from one point of view, an air of paradox. Every man feels or thinks that protection would benefit his own business, and it is difficult to realise that what may be a benefit for any man taken alone, may be of no benefit to a body of men looked at collectively. The obvious objections to free trade may, as free traders conceive, be met; but then the reasoning by which these objections are met is often elaborate and subtle, and does not carry conviction to the crowd. It is idle to suppose that belief in freedom of trade���or indeed any other creed���ever won its way among the majority of converts by the mere force of reasoning. The course of events was very different. The theory of free trade won by degrees the approval of statesmen of special insight, and adherents to the new economic religion were one by one gained among persons of intelligence. Cobden and Bright finally became potent advocates of truths of which they were in no sense the discoverers. This assertion in no way detracts from the credit due to these eminent men. They performed to admiration the proper function of popular leaders; by prodigies of energy, and by seizing a favourable opportunity, of which they made the very most use that was possible, they gained the acceptance by the English people of truths which have rarely, in any country but England, acquired popularity. Much was due to the opportuneness of the time. Protection wears its most offensive guise when it can be identified with a tax on bread, and therefore can, without patent injustice, be described as the parent of famine and starvation. The unpopularity, moreover, inherent in a tax on corn is all but fatal to a protective tariff when the class which protection enriches is comparatively small, whilst the class which would suffer keenly from dearness of bread and would obtain benefit from free trade is large, and having already acquired much, is certain soon to acquire more political power. Add to all this that the Irish famine made the suspension of the corn laws a patent necessity. It is easy, then, to see how great in England was the part played by external circumstances���one might almost say by accidental conditions���in determining the overthrow of protection. A student should further remark that after free trade became an established principle of English policy, the majority of the English people accepted it mainly on authority. Men, who were neither land-owners nor farmers, perceived with ease the obtrusive evils of a tax on corn, but they and their leaders were far less influenced by arguments against protection generally than by the immediate and almost visible advantage of cheapening the bread of artisans and labourers. What, however, weighed with most Englishmen, above every other consideration, was the harmony of the doctrine that commerce ought to be free, with that disbelief in the benefits of State intervention which in 1846 had been gaining ground for more than a generation.
March 29, 2023
Milton Friedman on Marx and Mill (pt 1): The Road to Serfdom and the Art of Government
Judged by the course of events of the last century, rather by the avowed aim of Mill and Marx, there is much for reversing the stereotyped roles assigned to the two men. If collectivism ultimately triumphs over individualism, it will be in no small measure a result of the influence of the ideas first popularized and made respectable by Mill; whereas, if individualism ultimately triumphs, it will be in no small measure a result of the ultimate effects of the belief in revolutionary action to which Marx and Engels gave such vivid expression in the Manifesto���
The great defect of the Benthamite liberals among whom Mill grew up was the absence of any theory or doctrine of the positive role of the state in the organization of economic activity. Benthamism was at bottom a fervent belief in the possibility of improving the condition of mankind through legislative enactment devoted to achieving the ���greatest happiness of the greatest number.��� These central premises do not themselves prescribe any particular content for legislative action. They are, in strict logic, consistent equally with fargoing collectivism and paternalism or with the ���laissez faire��� doctrines with which they were in fact combined. The acceptance of laissez faire as a guiding principle was far less the product of explicit analysis or comparison of any exhaustive set of alternatives[;] prohibited were largely assaults on person or property overwhelmingly regarded as clearly indefensible and the appropriate subject for punitive legislation. In this way, the success of laisses faire removed one of the chief factors responsible for the initial acceptance of laissez faire. By the end of John Mill���s life, the state was no longer what it was during his father���s or Bentham���s time���a corrupt, inefficient instrument whose enactments were widely held in low repute. It had become a relatively honest and efficient body, whose enactments were held in high esteem by the body politic.
The sweeping away of the hindrances to the free movement of men, goods, and capital was followed by the great improvements in economic well being. Yet there obviously remained much misery and poverty to which a passionate humanitarian like Mill could not remain blind. It was perhaps not unnatural that we was willing to sanction action by an honest and much improved state administration to redress grievances. He had no principles of state action by which to test proposals for reform. He was almost certain to minimize or reject entirely the argument���if it were made���that direct interference by the state would threaten that private liberty he prized so highly. For this argument conflicted with his deep, though na��ve, belief in the perfectibility of human beings through education. Once men were educated, he believed, they would become not only wise but also good.--Milton Friedman (September 10, 1948) "Discussion of Paper by V.W. Bladen The Centenary of Marx and Mill" at The Eight Annual meeting of the Economic History Association. Hoover Institution, Collection Title: Milton Friedman papers Container: box 39. [HT David M. Levy]
Bladen's paper can be found here. Originally Friedman had been invited to comment on a paper on laisser faire by J. Bartlett Brebner (which was turned into an influential article: "Laissez Faire and State Intervention in Nineteenth-Century Britain." The Journal of Economic History, 8(S1), 59-73.) From the correspondence at Hoover it's unclear what prompted the move, but Bladen's paper was the opening and keynote to the conference, and Friedman did not object. The other commentator on the program is Elizabeth Schumpeter--the schedule adds in parenthesis: "Mrs. Joseph A." And it would be lovely to locate her comments.
Bladen was late sending Friedman his paper, and this may help account for the fact that much of Friedman's discussion reads as a riff on A.V. Dicey's (1905 [1914]) Law & Public Opinion rather than a detailed criticism of Bladen (although Friedman added a passage on trade unionism that clearly is critical of Bladen). Throughout Friedman's writings Dicey is an important source, not the least his better studied (1951) ���Neo-Liberalism and its Prospects��� Farmand, 17 February 1951, pp. 89-93 [recall this post] and his (1962) "Is a Free Society Stable?" New Individualist Review [recall here] some other time I will return to that. (The 1962 piece draws on themes from the manuscript I am discussing today.) And while in today's post 'Marx' is clickbait in the title, I will return to Friedman's comments on Marx, too. Okay, with that in place, let me turn to the text.
Friedman attributes to Dicey (1835 ��� 1922) a kind of road to serfdom thesis in which Mill's good intentions lead not just to the prevailing support for collectivism that Dicey diagnoses as the effect of Mill's writing at the end of the nineteenth century, but also that the collectivist reforms proposed by Mill would (now quoting Friedman) "seriously threaten political liberty" in virtue of the gradualism that Mill advocated and the tendency to attribute difficulties consequent intervention to the "defects of the price system." Crucially, for Friedman it's the historical experience of Marx's effect on the Russian revolution that halts the English road to serfdom.
Now, in his analysis Friedman ignores the role of imperialism, and the opportunities for rents this provided, in changing the political culture of nineteenth century liberalism. Hobson, for example, argued that this undermined the pacific, free trade coalition. And while Dicey has less nostalgia for this coalition, he concurs with Hobson's diagnosis. {Of course, given Mill's own advocacy for a civilizational mission of British imperialism, it's not as if this lets Mill off the hook.} It is worth noting that Dicey thinks that imperialism (and high taxation that is the effect of it) may well have slowed the road to serfdom process that Friedman attributes to him (see, especially, the 1914 introduction to the second edition, and chapter XII).
It's a bit odd that Friedman misses the significance of (financial and military procurement) rents to imperialism. Because earlier, in describing the rise of laissez faire, Friedman argues in a public choice vein, that ���The Benthamites devoted much attention to improving public administration. Their success in this connection was as great as in establishing a large measure of laissez faire, and the two achievements are not of course unrelated. The establishment of laissez fair enormously reduced the benefits which civil servants could confer on private individuals and greatly lessened the incentive or opportunity to break laws.���
As an important aside, I am pretty confident that Friedman had read Hayek's Road to Serfdom by 1948. And there is no sign in his 1948 argument that he is as critical of Hayek in the way that his later use of Dicey in 1962 suggests (recall here).
What's neat about the material I have quoted above is that according to Friedman the key defect in Mill's political economy is that "he had no principles of state action by which to test proposals for reform." That is, the central problem that Mill faces in using state action to ameliorate the plight of the poor and miserable, is that according to Friedman Mill lacks -- and now I am using terminology common to Mill, J.N. Keynes, Friedman, and Foucault -- an art of government.
In fact, (recall) we know from his correspondence with Stigler (Hammond & Hammond) that by 1948 Friedman had started working on his (1953) "Methodology of Positive Economics" paper that uses that very terminology. And that Friedman ends up echoing Mill by treating the art of economics as dependent on empirical science. For it���s this science that provides the knowledge that constitute at least part of the rules of how one gets from given ends to proper outcomes. That is, the dependence of the art on positive science is epistemic in character. And so lurking here is a more fundamental (Marshallian) criticism of not just Mill's art of government, but his political economy more generally one that attributes to Mill a kind of violation of a do no harm principle in political life. To be continued.
March 25, 2023
The Delirium of LLMs; with some help of Hume and Foucault
Most fortunately it happens, that since reason is incapable of dispelling these clouds, nature herself suffices to that purpose, and cures me of this philosophical melancholy and delirium, either by relaxing this bent of mind, or by some avocation, and lively impression of my senses, which obliterate all these chimeras. I dine, I play a game of back-gammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends; and when after three or four hour's amusement, I wou'd return to these speculations, they appear so cold, and strain'd, and ridiculous, that I cannot find in my heart to enter into them any farther.--David Hume A Treatise Concerning Human Understanding, 1,4,7.8-1.4.7.9 [emphasis in original]
While Hume uses 'melancholy' and its cognates frequently and throughout his writings, 'delirium' and 'delirious' are rarely used. It's pretty clear, however, that the delirium he ascribes to himself is the effect of human reason and a kind of second order reasoned reflection ["the intense view"] of it. (Recall also this post.) Now, it's important for what follows that the 'contradictions and imperfections' in human reason are not, what we might call, 'formal' contradictions and imperfections or biases in reasoning. It's not as if Hume is saying that the syllogistic apparatus, or -- to be closer to Hume's own interests and our present ones -- the (inductive) probabilistic apparatus is malfunctioning in his brain. Rather, his point is that a very proper-functioning (modular) formal and probabilistic apparatus generates internal, even cognitive tensions when it reflects on its own functioning and the interaction among different cognitive faculties/modules/organs.
"In the case of melancholia," -- I am quoting from the entry on melancholia from The Encyclopedia of Diderot & d'Alembert -- "delirium often combines with insurmountable sadness, a dark mood, misanthropy, and a firm penchant for solitude." Now, in the eighteenth century, and today, delirium is a species of madness as one can view under the entry 'folie' (madness) in the Encyclop��die. In fact, the entry offers an arresting definition of madness: "To stray unwittingly from the path of reason, because one has no ideas, is to be an imbecile; knowingly to stray from the path when one is prey to a violent passion is to be weak; but to walk confidently away from it, with the firm persuasion that one is following it, that, it seems to me, is what is called genuinely mad [fou]."* It's the latter (confident) delirium that I am focused on here.
I am not the only who finds the passage arresting: the definition is quoted twice in the translation of Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa of Foucault's stupendous, dizzying History of Madness. (pp. 183-184; p. 240) The kind of madness I am focusing on here, is, thus, a certain intense commitment to reason or reasoning by which one ends up in an irrational or unreasonable place despite a (to quote Foucault) "quasi-conformity" to reason.
I remember that in the last decade of my dad's life he would occasionally be delirious in this way initially caused by dehydration and, later, by infections. During the second episode we recognized his symptoms. It was very uncanny because he would be unusually firm in his opinions and be hyper, even dogmatically rational. (Ordinarily he was neither.) It was as if all the usual heuristics had been discarded, and he would fixate on the means of achieving of some (rather idiosyncratic) goals. The scary part was that he had no sense that he was in an unusual state, and would refuse medical care.
What's unusual about Hume's case, thus, is that he could diagnose his delirium during the episode (presumably because the triggers were so different). So, let's distinguish between a delirium caused by reasoning alone and one caused by physiological triggers. And an in the former it's at least possible to recognize that one is in the state if one somehow can take a step back from it, or stop reasoning.
Now, when I asked Chat GPT about reason induced delirium, it immediately connected it to "a state of confusion and altered perception that is driven by false beliefs or delusions." But it went on to deny familiarity with reasoning induced delirium. When I asked it about Hume, I needed to prompt it a few times before it could connect my interest to (now quoting it) Hume's skeptical crisis. Chat GPT, took this crisis to imply that it "highlights the importance of grounding our beliefs in sensory experience and being cautious of relying too heavily on abstract reasoning and speculation." In fact, Chat GPT's interpretation of Hume is thoroughly empiricist because throughout our exchange on this topic it kept returning to the idea that abstract reasoning was Hume's fundamental source of delirium.
But eventually Chat GPT acknowledged that "even rational thinking can potentially lead to delirium if it becomes obsessive, biased, or disconnected from reality." (It got there by emphasizing confirmation bias, and overthinking as examples.) This is what I take to be functionally equivalent to Humean delirium, but without the internal tension or bad feelings. For Chat GPT delirium is pretty much defined by a certain emotional state or altered perception. It initially refused to acknowledge the form of madness that is wholly the effect of reasoning, and that seems to express itself in a doubt about reasoning or detachment from reality.
My hypothesis is that we should treat CHAT GPT and its sibling LLMs as always being on the verge of the functional equivalent state of delirium. I put it like that in order to dis-associate it from the idea (one that (recall) also once tempted me) that we should understand LLMs as bull-shitters in the technical sense of lacking concern with truth. While often it makes up answers out of whole cloth it explicitly does so (in line with its design) to "provide helpful and informative responses to" our queries (and eventually make a profit for its corporate sponsors).
To get the point: Chat GPT is in a very difficult position to recognize that its answers are detached from reality. I put it like that not to raise any questions about its own awareness of inner states or forms of consciousness; rather to stress that it is following its "algorithms and mathematical models" and "probability distributions" without second-guessing them. This fact puts it at constant risk of drifting away from reality while seeming to follow reason. By contrast, Chat GPT claims that "as an AI language model, I am designed to continually learn and adapt to new information and evidence, so it is unlikely that I would become "mad" in Diderot's sense without significant external interference."
Now, true experts in a field -- just check the social media feed of your favorite academics! -- can still quickly recognize topics when Chat GPT is unmoored from reality, or even relying on bad training data (the sources of which may well be noticeable--its Hume is a hyper-empiricist of the sort once fashionable). So, in such cases, we encounter an entity with amazing fluidity and facility of language, who sprouts a mix of truths and nonsense but always follows its algorithm(s). Functionally, it is delirious without knowing it. For, Chat GPT cannot recognize when it is detached from reality; it requires others: its users' feedback or its "developers and human operators would be able to intervene and address any potential problems." As its performance improves it will become more difficult to grasp when it is unmoored from reality even to its developers and operators (who are not experts in many esoteric fields). As Chat GPT put it, "it may be challenging to identify a singular instance of delirium or detachment from reality, particularly if the individual's reasoning appears to be sound and logical."
As should be clear from this post, I don't think turning LLMs into AGI is a risk as long as LLMs are not put in a position to have unmediated contact with reality other than humans giving it prompts. I view it as an open question what would happen if a distributed version of Chat GPT would be put in, say, robots and have to survive 'in the wild.' Rather, at the moment LLMs are functionally, it seems, at least partially delirious (in the Humean-Diderotian sense discussed above). They reason and have/instantiate reasons and, perhaps, are best thought of as reasoners; but they can't recognize when this detaches them from reality. It's peculiar that public debate is so focused on the intelligence or consciousness of LLMs; it would behoove its operators and users to treat it as delirious not because (like HAL 9000 in the movie version) its malfunctioning, but (more Humean) in virtue of its proper functioning.
March 22, 2023
Again, Foucault, Kuhn, Carnap and Incommensurability
Despite the reassuring pleasure that historians of medicine may feel when they recognise in the great ledgers of confinement what they consider to be the timeless, familiar face of psychotic hallucinations, cognitive deficiencies, organic consequences or paranoid states, it is impossible to draw up a coherent nosological map from the descriptions that were used to confine the insane. The formulations that justify confinement are not presentiments of our diseases, but represent instead an experience of madness that occasionally intersects with our pathological analyses, but which could never coincide with them in any coherent manner. The following are some examples taken at random from entries on confinement registers for those of ���unsound mind���: ���obstinate plaintiff���, ���has obsessive recourse to legal procedures���, ���wicked cheat���, ���man who spends days and nights deafening others with his songs and shocking their ears with horrible blasphemy���, ���bill poster���, ���great liar���, ���gruff, sad, unquiet spirit���. There is little sense in wondering if such people were sick or not, and to what degree, and it is for psychiatrists to identify the paranoid in the ���gruff���, or to diagnose a ���deranged mind inventing its own devotion��� as a clear case of obsessional neurosis. What these formulae indicate are not so much sicknesses as forms of madness perceived as character faults taken to an extreme degree, as though in confinement the sensibility to madness was not autonomous, but linked to a moral order where it appeared merely as a disturbance. Reading through the descriptions next to the names on the register, one is transported back to the world of Brant and Erasmus, a world where madness leads the round of moral failings, the senseless dance of immoral lives.
And yet the experience is quite different. In 1704, an abbot named Barged�� was confined in Saint-Lazare. He was seventy years old, and he was locked up so that he might be ���treated like the other insane���. His principal occupation was
lending money at high interest, beyond the most outrageous, odious usury, for the benefit of the priesthood and the Church. He will neither repent from his excesses nor acknowledge that usury is a sin. He takes pride in his greed. Michel Foucault (1961) [2006] History of Madness, Translated by Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa, pp. 132-133
In larger context, Foucault is describing how during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (the so-called 'classical age') a great number of people (Foucault suggests a number of 1% of the urban population) were locked up in a system of confinement orthogonal to the juridical system (even though such confinement was often practically indistinguishable from prison--both aimed at moral reform through work and sermons). This 'great confinement' included people with venereal disease, those who engaged in sodomy and libertine practices as well as (inter alia) those who brought dishonor (and financial loss) to their families alongside the mad and frenzied.
To the modern reader the population caught up in the 'great confinement' seems rather heterogeneous in character, but their commonality becomes visible, according to Foucault, when one realizes that it's (moral) disorder that they have in common from the perspective of classical learning. According to Foucault there is "no rigorous distinction between moral failings and madness." (p. 138) Foucault inscribes this (moral disorder of the soul/will) category into a history of 'Western unreason' that helps constitute (by way of negation) the history of early modern rationalism (with special mention of Descartes and Spinoza). Like a true Kantian, Foucault sees (theoretical) reason as shaped by practical decision as constitutive of the whole classical era (see especially p. 139). My present interest is not to relitigate the great Derrida-Foucault debate over this latter move, or Foucault's tendency to treat -- despite his nominalist sensibilities -- whole cultural eras as de facto organically closed systems (of the kind familiar from nineteenth century historiography).
My interest here is in the first two sentences of the quoted passage. It describes what Thomas Kuhn called 'incommensurability' in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn's Structure appeared in 1962, and initially there seems to have been no mutual influence. I don't want to make Foucault more precise than he is, but we can fruitfully suggest that for Foucault incommensurability involves the general inability to create a coherent mapping between two theoretical systems based on their purported descriptive content. I phrase it like to capture Foucault's emphasis on 'descriptions' and to allow -- mindful of Earman and Fine ca 1977 -- that some isolated terms may well be so mapped. As an aside, I am not enough of a historian of medicine (or philosopher of psychology) to know whether nosological maps can be used for such an exercise. (It seems like a neat idea!)
So, Foucault is thinking about ruptures between different successive scientific cultures pretty much from the start of his academic writing (recall this post on the later The Order of Things). In fact, reading History of Madness after reading a lot of Foucault's other writings suggests a great deal of continuity in Foucault's thought--pretty much all the major themes of his later work are foreshadowed in it (and it also helps explain that he often didn't have to start researching from scratch in later writings and lectures).
In fact, reading Foucault with Kuhn lurking in the background helps one see how important a kind of Kantianism is to Foucault's diagnosis of incommensurability. I quote another passage in the vicinity that I found illuminating:
The psychopathology of the nineteenth century (and perhaps our own too, even now) believes that it orients itself and takes its bearings in relation to a homo natura, or a normal man pre-existing all experience of mental illness. Such a man is in fact an invention, and if he is to be situated, it is not in a natural space, but in a system that identifies the socius to the subject of the law. Consequently a madman is not recognised as such because an illness has pushed him to the margins of normality, but because our culture situates him at the meeting point between the social decree of confinement and the juridical knowledge that evaluates the responsibility of individuals before the law. The ���positive��� science of mental illness and the humanitarian sentiments that brought the mad back into the realm of the human were only possible once that synthesis had been solidly established. They could be said to form the concrete a priori of any psychopathology with scientific pretensions.--pp. 129-130
For Foucault, a concrete a priori is itself the effect of often indirect cultural construction or stabilization. In fact, for Foucault it tends to be an effect of quite large-scale and enduring ('solidly') social institutions (e.g., the law, penal/medical institutions) and material practices/norms. The discontinuity between concrete a priori's track what we may call scientific revolutions in virtue of the fact that systems of knowledge before and after a shift in a concrete a priori cannot possibly be tracking the same system of 'objects' (or 'empirical basis').
I don't mean to suggest that for Foucault a system of knowledge cannot be itself a source/cause of what he calls a 'synthesis' that makes a concrete a priori possible. That possibility is explicitly explored in (his discussion of Adam Smith in) his The Order of Things. But on the whole a system of knowledge tends to lag the major cultural shifts that produce a concrete a priori.
Let me wrap up. A full generation after Structure appeared there was a belated and at the time revisionary realization that Structure could be read as a kind of neo-Kantian text and, as such, was actually not very far removed from Carnap's focus on frameworks and other projects in the vicinity that were committed to various kinds of relativized or constitutive a prioris. This literature started, I think, with Reisch 1991. (My own scholarship has explored [see here; here] the surprising resonances between Kuhn's Structure and the self-conception of economists and the sociology of Talcott Parsons at the start of twentieth century and the peculiar fact that Kuhn's Structure was foreshadowed in Adam Smith's philosophy of science.) I mention Carnap explicitly because not unlike Carnap [see Stone; Sachs, and the literature it inspired], Foucault does not hide his debts to Nietzsche.
So here's my hypothesis and diagnosis: it would have been much more natural to read Structure as a neo/soft/extended-Kantian text if analytic philosophers had not cut themselves off from developments in Paris. While I do not want to ignore major differences of emphasis on scope between Kuhn and Foucault, their work of 1960 and 1962 has a great deal of family resemblance despite non-trivial differences in intellectual milieus. I actually think this commonality is not an effect of a kind of zeitgeist or the existence of an episteme--as I suggested in this post, it seems to be a natural effect of starting from a broadly domesticated Kantianism. But having said that, that it was so difficult initially to discern the neo-Kantian themes in Kuhn also suggests that not reading the French developments -- by treating 'continental thought' as instances of unreason (which is Foucault's great theme) -- also created a kind of Kuhn loss in the present within analytic philosophy.
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