Herbert Croly Against Equal Opportunity

In 1967, John Schaar published, “Equality of Opportunity, and Beyond” in Volume 9 of Nomos. The article remains, by my lights, the best or at least most entertaining critique of left-liberal defenses of equal opportunity:

The present-day ‘radicals’’ who demand the fullest extension of the equal-opportunity principle to all groups within the society, and especially to Negroes and the lower classes, are really more conservative than the ‘conservatives’ who oppose them. No policy formula is better designed to fortify the dominant institutions, values, and ends of the American social order than the formula of equality of opportunity, for it offers everyone a fair and equal chance to find a place within that order. In principle, it excludes no man from the system if his abilities can be put to use within the system. We have here another example of the repeated tendency of American radicals to buttress the existing framework of an order even while they think they are undermining it … Before one subscribes to the equality-of-opportunity then, he should be certain that the dominant values, institutions and content of much of our recent serious literature and social thought---thought that escapes the confines of the conservative-radical framework—warn that we are well on the way toward building a culture our best men will not honor. The facile formula of equal opportunity quickens that trend. It opens more and more opportunities for more and more people to contribute more and more energies toward the realization of a mass, bureaucratic, technological, privatized, materialistic, bored, and thrill-seeking, consumption-oriented society—a society of well-fed, congenial, and sybaritic monkeys surrounded by gadgets and pleasure-toys (230-231).

Schaar draws on Michael Young’s influential critique of “meritocracy,” which remains a favorite punching bag for contemporary left-liberal political theorists. The core point is that it is irrelevant to insist on an equal opportunity to achieve success in a society if the core structure of that society remains hierarchical and corrupt.

I’m interested in a related (though distinct) left critique of equal opportunity developed by the greatest theorist of American progressivism, Herbert Croly. In both The Promise of American Life (1909) and Progressive Democracy (1914), Croly attacks American liberalism for its fixation with equal opportunity, a feature of America’s more general commitment to moral individualism.

Croly acknowledges that in a certain sense democracy must be committed to equal rights. A society “ceases to be a democracy, just as soon as any permanent privileges are conferred by its institutions or its laws; and this equality of right and absence of permanent privilege is the expression of a fundamental social interest” (Promise 222). At the same time, the obsession with individual equality leads to a tangle of unproductive contradictions. The most stark of those contradictions concerns the apparent belief in “equal opportunity” and repudiation of “equal outcome:”

The democratic principle requires an equal start in the race, while expecting at the same time an unequal finish. But Americans who talk in this way seem wholly blind to the fact that under a legal system which holds private property there may be equal rights, but there cannot possibly be any equal opportunities for exercising such rights. The chance which the individual has to compete with his fellows and take a prize in the race is vitally affected by material conditions over which he has no control (Promise 222).

That metaphor—the race—is of course ubiquitous in American debates over equal opportunity. It is given its most famous statement in LBJ’s 1965 Commencement Address at Howard University:

But freedom is not enough. You do not wipe away the scars of centuries by saying: Now you are free to go where you want, and do as you desire, and choose the leaders you please. You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, “you are free to compete with all the others,” and still justly believe that you have been completely fair. Thus it is not enough to just open the gates of opportunity. All our citizens must have the ability to walk through those gates.

That’s the same conclusion Rawls famously reaches by distinguishing between two forms of equal opportunity: “careers open to talent” and “fair equality of opportunity.” The race metaphor seems to imply that no strong line can be drawn between equal opportunity and equal outcomes. Every outcome is another opportunity, and so a true commitment to equal opportunity requires some form of equalizing conditions.

Notably, this is NOT the conclusion Croly draws. He does not take from the race metaphor the conclusion that a true commitment to democracy entails a commitment to REAL equal opportunity. He concludes, by contrast, that the fixation with “equal rights” is too individualistic and altogether unhelpful:

No formula whose effect on public opinion is not binding and healing and unifying has any substantial claim to consideration as the essential and formative democratic idea. Belief in the idea of equal rights does not bind, heal, and unify public opinion. Its effect rather is confusing, distracting, and at worst, integrating … The principle of equal rights encourages mutual suspicion and disloyalty. It tends to attribute individual and social ills, for which general moral, economic, and social causes are usually in large measure responsible, to individual wrong-doing; and in this way it arouses and intensifies that personal and class hatred, which never in any society lies far below the surface. Men who have grievances are inflamed into anger and resentment (Promise 227).

Croly rejects any political philosophy that aims at explicating, expounding, and realizing a true vision of equal rights. The problem with all such individualistic liberalisms is that they undermine the possibility of establishing a constructive democratic politics in service of collective purposes. When we are preoccupied with the correct balance and calculus of individual entitlements, we are unable to think coherently about the genuine national interest. Indeed, the entire race metaphor is a kind of fraud that perpetuates an illusion of impersonality and impartiality. Rather than be impartial, the democratic state must be willing to rig the game of society to serve the true social interest:

It is in the position of the bank at Monte Carlo, which does not pretend to play fair, but which frankly promulgates rules advantageous to itself. Considering the percentage in its favor and the length of its purse, it cannot possibly lose. It is not really gambling; and it does not propose to take any unnecessary risks. Neither can a state, democratic or otherwise, which believes in its own purpose. While preserving at times an appearance of impartiality so that its citizens may enjoy for a while a sense of the reality of their private game, it must on the whole make rules in its own interests. It must help those men to win who are most capable of using their winnings for the benefit of society (Promise 236-7).

Croly makes the same point in Progressive Democracy. He offers the race metaphor to mock the philosophical contortions of liberal theorists attempting to discover the true meaning or requirements of equal opportunity:

American democrats have usually hugged the illusion that equality of right would automatically bring with it equality in the exercise of rights. When the result of the exercise of presumably equal rights has been gross inequality of benefit, they seek constantly to repair the damage by abolishing or attenuating rights which seem to be fruitful of inequalities. They argued at first that, inasmuch as the whole field started from the same line, the whole field had had an equal chance to win. When it was found that the fleetest runners were always winning, the privilege of starting with them from the same line seemed to be a poor consolation for constant defeat. The natural inference followed. If the great object of the running was the prize of victory, and if all deserved an equal opportunity of winning the race, the only fair race was the handicap. Instead of starting equally and finishing unequally, they should start unequally in order that they might finish equally (PD 114).

These are endless, unproductive, stupid debates. They derive from a foolish fetishization of “equal rights." A progressive, constructive democracy will not waste time agonizing about whether a given distribution of opportunities or outcomes is fair or just. It will focus instead on whether the social structure as a whole serves the public interest. The correct emphasis is social contribution not individual entitlement:

Society is undoubtedly interested in affording everybody an opportunity to win prizes in the race; but it is still more interested in arranging for a fast race, a real contest and an inspiring victory. If for the present a large part of the spoils must belong to the victors, it is the more necessary to insist that the victors shall be worthy of the spoils (PD 115).

This abstract critique of liberal rights-talk and individualism is meant to articulate Croly’s repudiation of Woodrow Wilson’s New Freedom agenda, which derives ultimately from a Jeffersonian ideal of individual self-sufficiency. Wilson and his closest advisor, Louis Brandeis, favor trust-busting, for example, as a means of distributing an equal opportunity for individuals to build their own businesses and establish a degree of economic independence. They attack big business in order to give the little guy a fair shot. For Croly, that vision of antitrust policy remains trapped within a conservative ideology of liberal individualism. The goal for progressives should not be “true equality” or “true opportunity.” The goal is the construction of a society that serves the national interest. That might mean some form of antitrust. But it might also mean the embrace of corporate consolidation if the trusts can be induced to serve the common good. As he puts it in The Promise of American Life:

The concentrated leadership, the partial control, the thorough organization thereby effected [by the monopolies] was not necessarily a bad thing. It was in some respects a decidedly good thing, because leadership of any kind has certain intrinsic advantages. The trusts have certainly succeeded in reducing the amount of waste which was necessitated by the earlier condition of wholly unregulated competition. The competitive methods of nature have been, and still are, within limits indispensable; but the whole effort civilization has been to reduce the area within which they are desirably effective; and it is entirely possible that in the end the American system of industrial organization will constitute a genuine advance in industrial economy. Large corporations, which can afford the best machinery, which control abundant capital, and which can plan with scrupulous economy all the details of producing and selling an important product or service, are actually able to reduce the cost of production to a minimum; and in the cases of certain American corporations certain results have actually been achieved. The new organization of American industry has created an economic mechanism which is capable of being wonderfully and indefinitely serviceable to the American people (Promise 142).

For Croly, if your commitment to “individual rights” or “equal opportunity” leads you to repudiate the most innovative and efficient institutions in American society, it is time to revise your point of departure.

Edward Gibbon's Smithian Defense of Luxury

I wrote a post some time ago contrasting Adam Smith and Jean Jacques Rousseau on the utility of luxury consumption. Smith famously argues that the purchasing of vain trinkets is a crucial means by which the feudal aristocracy sacrifices the basis of its political power. The libido dominandi was once expressed through hierarchical mastery. The miracle of a commercial society is that this same drive can now be satisfied through conspicuous consumption. Here is the famous passage from book three of the Wealth of Nations:

For a pair of diamond buckles perhaps, or for something as frivolous and useless, they exchanged the maintenance, or what is the same thing, the price of the maintenance of a thousand men for a year, and with it the whole weight and authority which it could give them. ... for the gratification of the most childish, the meanest and the most sordid of all vanities, they gradually bartered their whole power and authority.

In the Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith famously celebrates this process of sublimation as a means of establishing a more equitable distribution of material subsistence: 

[The rich] are led by an invisible hand to make nearly the same distribution of the necessaries of life, which would have been made, had the earth been divided into equal portions among all its inhabitants, and thus without intending it, without knowing it, advance the interest of the society, and afford means to the multiplication of the species.

So Smith makes two arguments here in favor of luxury consumption: (1) Politically, by purchasing ever-more expensive frivolities, the feudal aristocracy sacrifices the material basis of its authority; (2) Economically, by pursuing luxury, the feudal aristocracy produces a de facto redistribution of wealth. (I've written a couple academic articles reconstructing this Smithian reasoning at greater length).

As I point out in that older post, Rousseau offers a similar descriptive analysis, though he curiously praises the older expression of vanity--political mastery and war--as more noble than vain, luxury consumption.

At any event, Edward Gibbon comments on the same phenomenon in a brief aside in Volume I of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (published, incidentally, in 1776, the same year as The Wealth of Nations). He rebukes moralist critics of luxury and celebrates commerce for one of Smith's reasons:

Under the Roman empire, the labour of a industrious and ingenious people was variously but incessantly employed, in the service of the rich. In their dress, their table, their houses, their furniture, the favourites of fortune united every refinement of conveniency, of elegance, and of splendour; whatever could sooth their pride, or gratify their sensuality. Such refinements, under the odious name of luxury, have been severely arraigned by the moralists of every age; and it might perhaps be more conducive to the virtue, as well as happiness, of mankind, if all possessed the necessaries and none the superfluities, of life. But in the present imperfect condition of society, luxury, though it may proceed from vice or folly, seems to be the only means that can correct the unequal distribution of property. The diligent mechanic, and the skilful artist, who have obtained no share in the division of the earth, receive a voluntary tax from the possessors of land; and the latter are prompted, by a sense of interest, to improve those estates, with whose produce they may purchase additional pleasures.

So Gibbon and Smith agree on the trickle-down type benefits of luxury consumption, but we don't find in Gibbon the same political analysis of the collapse of traditional landed political authority.

Thomas Hobbes on Counsel vs. Command

Thomas Hobbes' A Dialogue between a Philosopher and a Student of the Common Laws of England lays out the basis of Hobbes' famous positivist philosophy of law. The dialogue opens with the claim of a lawyer in the tradition of Edward Coke that the genius of the common law consists in its discovery of an "artificial perfection of reason, gotten by long study, observation, and experience, and not of every man's natural reason" (4). The collective wisdom of English judges across time can discover a more complete vision of equity and justice than anything an individual jurist is capable of.

Hobbes' philosopher makes two replies. First, while granting that the law requires much study, he denies the metaphysical coherence of "artificial reason." There is no such thing, there is only the "natural reason" of the judges. But more fundamentally, he insists that the implicit claim of a connection between reason and law manifests a complete non sequitur: "it is not wisdom, but authority that makes law" (5). Law is simply the command of the sovereign. As Hobbes explains some pages later:

Statutes are not philosophy, as is the common-law, and other disputable arts, but are commands or prohibitions, which ought to be obeyed, because assented to by submission made to the Conqueror here in England, and to whosoever had the sovereign power in other commonwealths (24). 

He offers a clean definition of law: "a law is the command of him or them that have sovereign power, given to those that be his or their subjects, declaring publicly and plainly what every of them may do, and what they must forbear to do." (26) 

What then does Hobbes mean by command? We get the clearest statement in chapter 14 of De Cive through Hobbes' distinction between counsel (advice) and command (law):

They confuse law with advice when they think that it is the monarch's duty not only to listen to advisors but also to obey them ... The distinction between advice and law is to be sought in the difference between advice and command. ADVICE is an instruction or precept in which the reason for following it is drawn from the matter itself. But a COMMAND is an instruction in which the reason for following it is drawn from the will of the instructor. For one can properly say: This is what I want, this is my order, if will stands for reason. But since laws are obeyed not for their content, but because of the will of the instructor, law is not advice but command, and it is defined thus: LAW is a command of that person (whether man or council) whose instruction is the reason for obedience. (153-4 in Tuck edition)

As I say, a very clear statement. A command is an instruction that we follow because it is the will of the sovereign. We take the will of the commander to be our reason for obedience. If we choose to follow a piece of advice, by contrast, we do so because of the sound reason of the content of the advice. The reason to obey a command is content-independent. The reason to follow advice is content-dependent. 

Interestingly, however, Hobbes appears to offer a somewhat different account in chapter 25 of Leviathan. There he provides the following definitions of counsel and command:

COMMAND is, where a man saith, Doe this, or Doe not this, without expecting other reason than the Will of him that says it. From this it followeth manifestly, that he that Commandeth, pretendeth thereby his own Benefit: For the reason of his Command is his own Will onely, and the proper object of every mans Will, is some Good to himselfe. 

COUNSELL, is where a main saith Doe, or Doe not this, and deduceth his reasons from the benefit that arriveth by it to him to whom he saith it. And from this it is evident, that he that giveth Counsell, pretendeth onely (whatsoever he intendeth) the good of him, to whom he giveth it. (176 in Tuck edition)

This is not incompatible with the definition given in De Cive. Indeed, Hobbes notes here that the one receiving a command expects no reason for obedience beyond the will of the commander. So again, the ground of our reason to obey a command consists simply in our reason to obey the sovereign will. 

Still, these definitions are interestingly different in emphasis. The key contrast Hobbes highlights in Leviathan concerns the implicit beneficiary of counsel vs. command. Command aims only at the good of the commander, whereas counsel aims ostensibly at the good of the commanded. Curiously, Hobbes goes on to suggest that this difference in benefit is the source of practical obligation. The reason we are not obligated by counsel is that rejecting the counsel only harms us: "he cannot be obliged to do as he is Counselled, because the hurt of not following it, is his own" (177). Counsels are thus optional because they only concern us. Commands, by contrast, appear to be obligatory because refusing a command harms the commander. 

So is this a further explanation for why we have decisive reason to obey the sovereign will? Our duty to obey a command derives from our duty not to harm the sovereign? It would appear so. 

Hobbes goes on to clarify that a counsel becomes a command if we covenant to form a sovereign and therefore to obey the commands. But strictly speaking for Hobbes, once we have so covenanted we are the sovereign. So now it is in fact our command. This, I take it, is the upshot of the famous treatment of representation in chapter 16 of Leviathan. Once we alienate our will and reason to the sovereign, the distinction between the interest of sovereign and subject dissolves. Sovereign command is binding because it actually expresses our will and therefore embodies our interest.

Hobbes goes on to claim that scripture confirms his conceptual distinction between counsel and command. He draws on (and in some ways subverts) the traditional Christian distinction between the obligatory precepts of the law and the supererogatory counsels of perfection. He tells us that we are duty bound to obey the Decalogue because it is a command. The reason for our obedience consists simply in the fact that we are obliged to obey the will of God, our sovereign. But curiously, Hobbes does NOT say that refusal to obey the Decalogue somehow harms God. Does that then contradict the definition? 

Hobbes does say, however, that the counsels of perfection--the counsel to sell all one has, for example--are not obligatory "because the reason for which we are to do so is drawn from our own benefit; which is this, that we shall have Treasure in heaven" (178-9). So again, because instructions of this kind only benefit us, we are free to repudiate them. Even an apparent command like "Repent, and be Baptized in the name of Jesus," Hobbes claims, is merely an act of optional counsel. Again, this is because "the reason why we should do so, tendeth not to any benefit of God Almighty" (179). 

This is a bit confusing. Presumably our refusal to obey the Decalogue does not harm God either. So why should the Decalogue be binding? 

I suppose the more general confusion here is that in Leviathan Hobbes appears to be offering a reason for why the will of the sovereign is a decisive source of practical obligation. He suggests that our duty to obey sovereign command derives from our duty not to harm the sovereign. Yet the scriptural example does not obviously provide good reason to see a connection between obeying the sovereign's will and benefiting the sovereign. 

Eulogy for Dimitrios Halikias (1925 - 2020)

Last week marked the fifth anniversary of the death of my grandfather and namesake, Dimitrios Halikias. He was pre-deceased by my grandmother, Amalia Halikias, by two weeks. Below is a translation of the eulogy that was delivered at my grandfather's funeral by Lucas Papademos, who briefly served as the Prime Minister of Greece from 2011 to 2012.

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Dimitrios Halikias was a unique personality of economic science and policy, who offered multiple, valuable services to the Bank of Greece and to Greece.

He was born in the village of Apidia in Laconia in 1925. Even as a young boy he stood out for his work ethic and studiousness, which characterized his later career. He was a self-made scholar, civil servant, and central banker, who occupied the highest positions in the public sector and the Bank of Greece, and he contributed substantively to the development of economic policy and the implementation of monetary policy during critical periods for the Greek economy.

He did his university studies at the School of Economic and Commercial Sciences (ASOEE, today the Athens Economic University), and his graduate studies at Cambridge University in England, in the field of economic development.

During his long professional career, he served in numerous public positions, especially related to monetary policy and the banking system. He served as Director, Chief Economist, and Secretary General of the Ministry of Coordination (today the Ministry of Economy). In 1957, at the invitation of Xenophon Zolotas, he moved to the Bank of Greece and served in the Bank’s Economic Research Department. After the restoration of democracy in 1974, he assumed the position of Chief Economist at the Bank of Greece and remained in this position until he was appointed Deputy Governor in 1981. He served as Governor of the Bank of Greece for eight years, from 1984 to 1992.

During his tenure, he implemented a substantive liberalization of the Greek banking system, which contributed to its more effective functioning in providing support to the Greek economy. Dimitrios Halikias played a decisive role in the design and implementation of an appropriate monetary policy – or optimal monetary policy as he himself characterized it – for the stabilization of the economy during difficult periods of high inflation, on the order of 20 percent, and large budget deficits.

I had the good fortune and privilege to work with him when he was Governor of the Bank of Greece, and I occupied, during this period, the position of Chief Economist of the Bank. I admired his deep knowledge of the Greek economy and the monetary and credit system, his organizational and management skills, his decisiveness in designing and implementing the optimal monetary policy without being influenced by political pressures, his good judgment, his kindness, and his integrity of character; and, in parallel with the exercise of his duties as Governor, his ability to advise the government on monetary policy issues and in finding the time to author scholarly studies on the Greek and European economy.

And indeed, he has authored numerous and important studies, both during his tenure at the Bank of Greece and later as visiting fellow at Oxford University: studies on the problems but also the prospects of the Greek economy, on issues of monetary policy and banking supervision, as well as on the country’s transition toward the European Monetary Union.

Personally, and also on behalf of the Bank of Greece colleagues, I want to express our respect, affection, and gratitude for what he offered to the Bank and to Greece. Our dear Dimitri, you will remain immortal in our memory.

Lucas Papademos

Delivered on February 28, 2020