tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29086094288517279722024-03-27T12:08:34.566-07:00OmphaloskepsisDimitrios Halikias' amateur ruminations on philosophy, politics, and history. "How small of all that human hearts endure, that part which laws or kings can cause or cure" - Samuel Johnson.
Contact me at dimitrios.halikias@gmail.com
Dimitrios Halikiashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14687167606022949419noreply@blogger.comBlogger88125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2908609428851727972.post-44963559955178554122022-12-11T17:05:00.003-08:002023-06-30T10:26:27.887-07:00Marx on Free Speech and CommerceIn the news these days is another case involving a Christian business that refuses to provide services for a same-sex wedding. The core issue in the case—<i>303 Creative vs. Elenis</i>—is <a href="https://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/303-creative-llc-v-elenis/">summarized </a>by <i>SCOTUSblog</i> as follows: “Whether applying a public-accommodation law to compel an artist to speak or stay silent violates the free speech clause of the First Amendment.”<br /><br />The arguments on both sides are familiar. The business owner is accused of discriminating against gay couples. She replies that she does not discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation, but refuses to participate in anything to do with gay marriage, which she opposes for moral and religious reasons. The state of Colorado insists that the owner is engaged in “status discrimination,” because she would refuse to sell the <i>identical </i>product to a couple just because the couple is gay. She replies that this is not the case, because the products in question would not be identical. She refuses to make a website for <i>anyone </i>that violates her core beliefs, and there is no way to produce a wedding website for the gay couple without implicitly endorsing gay marriage.<br /><br />The conflict here is framed as one between free speech and anti-discrimination. The website designer claims that requiring her to implicitly endorse gay marriage is an unconstitutional form of compelled speech. Colorado claims that this is not a free-speech matter, but an issue of illegally discriminating against gay people. <br /><br />I find this framing unhelpful—it seems obvious to me that we have a religious liberty issue here, not a free speech issue. We are, after all, talking about a wedding. It is bizarre to think that the best way to reason through such a case is by pretending that bakers and web designers are persecuted artists. But I understand that the Court’s prevailing religious liberty jurisprudence doesn’t protect the website designer in this matter, so she needs to appeal to free speech. <br /><br />Consequently, the debate turns on the question of whether a customized website counts as speech at all. I suppose this is a slightly better question than the version posed a few years ago—whether a custom-made cake counts as speech. But it still is a rather silly question. “Expressive” commercial activities are vaguely like speech, but not speech of the kind that we usually consider to be protected by the first amendment. <br /><br />Reading the coverage of the case, I was reminded of a <a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/Marx_On_freedom_of_the_Press.pdf">set of articles</a> Marx wrote in 1842, when he was just 24. Marx comments on an legislative debate over the freedom of the press. Full of youthful, rhetorical exuberance, the articles are quite entertaining, and they offer some insight into the young Marx’s political philosophy—in particular they show how interested Marx was in economic matters long before his putative turn to materialism. <br /><br />What reminded me of the articles was the connection between economic activity and free speech at issue in the court case. Colorado seems to say that because the website is a commercial product, it is not subject to the standard free speech protections. The designer replies that she cannot separate business activity and speech. <br /><br />Marx’s primary purpose in these articles is to lambast Prussian conservatives. But he is almost as scathing in his treatment of the liberals, who defend press freedom <i>as an extension</i> of the freedom to conduct private business. As he summarizes at one point: “we cannot overcome the dreary and uneasy impression produced by an assembly of representatives of the Rhine Province who wavered only between the deliberate obduracy of privilege and the natural impotence of a half-hearted liberalism.” <br /><br />The conservative case against press freedom rests on an assumption of man’s permanent intellectual immaturity. Because people are stupid, they will not know what to believe, and they will be led astray by what today we might term “fake news.” Marx replies—in classic Enlightenment form—that censorship will only guarantee the perpetuation of that stupidity:<br /><blockquote>in order to combat <i>freedom of the press</i>, the thesis of the <i>permanent immaturity</i> of the human race has to be defended. It is sheer tautology to assert that if absence of freedom is men's essence, freedom is contrary to his essence. Malicious sceptics could be daring enough not to take the speaker at his word. If the immaturity of the human race is the mystical ground for opposing freedom of the press, then the censorship at any rate is a highly reasonable means against the maturity of the human race. <br /><br />What undergoes development is imperfect. Development ends only with death. Hence it would be truly consistent to kill man in order to free him from this state of imperfection. That at least is what the speaker concludes in order to kill freedom of the press. In his view, true education consists in keeping a person wrapped up in a cradle throughout his life, for as soon as he learns to walk, he learns also to fall, and only by falling does he learn to walk. But if we all remain in swaddling-clothes, who is to wrap us in them? If we all remain in the cradle, who is to rock us? If we are all prisoners, who is to be prison warder?</blockquote>The conservative argument against press freedom rests on the claim that the “bad press”—which appeals to irresponsible and irrational passions—will always be more powerful than the “good press”—which deals in sobriety and rationality.<br /><br />Marx replies that this distinction (1) implies the eternal weakness of the good vis-à-vis the bad—the “impotence of the good” and the “omnipotence of the bad;” and (2) fails to recognize that the same moral vices afflict the free and the censored press:<br /><blockquote>Base frames of mind, personal intrigues, infamies, occur alike in the censored and the free press. Therefore the generic difference between them is not that they produce individual products of this or that kind; flowers grow also in swamps. We are concerned here with the essence, the inner character, which distinguishes the censored from the free press.</blockquote>The free press is essentially good, even when its products are vicious. The censored press is essentially bad, even when its products are virtuous: “A eunuch remains a bad human being even when he has a good voice. Nature remains good even when she produces monstrosities.”<br /><br />Throughout Marx articulates an extreme faith in the transformative power of freedom, and he makes a straightforward market-place of ideas argument:<br /><blockquote>Censorship does not abolish the struggle, it makes it one-sided, it converts an open struggle into a hidden one, it converts a struggle over principles into a struggle of principle without power against power without principle. The true censorship, based on the very essence of freedom of the press, is <i>criticism</i>. This is the tribunal which freedom of the press gives rise to of itself. Censorship is criticism as a monopoly of the government. But does not criticism lose its rational character if it is not open but secret, if it is not theoretical but practical, if it is not above parties but itself a party, if it operates not with the sharp knife of reason but with the blunt scissors of arbitrariness, if it only exersises criticism but will not submit to it, if it disavows itself during its realisation, and, finally, if it is so uncritical as to mistake an individual person for universal wisdom, peremptory orders for rational statements, ink spots for patches of sunlight, the crooked deletions of the censor for mathematical constructions, and crude force for decisive arguments?</blockquote>For what it’s worth, I’m not particularly impressed by such arguments. As I’ve mentioned before, I think the <a href="https://dhalikias.blogspot.com/2018/07/protagoras-and-marketplace-of-ideas.html">opening of the <i>Protagoras </i></a>provides a decisive counter argument. (Though I do think Mill offers some <a href="https://dhalikias.blogspot.com/2020/03/john-stuart-mill-on-tone-policing.html">stronger arguments</a> for free speech).<div><br /></div><div>In a striking aside, Marx insists on the necessity of law in constituting human freedom. It is a mistake to think of press freedom as the absence of legislation. It is, on the contrary, a positive expression of freedom. The perfectionism on display here strikes me as very different from standard American defenses of free speech:<div><blockquote>Laws are in no way repressive measures against freedom, any more than the law of gravity is a repressive measure against motion, because while, as the law of gravitation, it governs the eternal motions of the celestial bodies, as the law of falling it kills me if I violate it and want to dance in the air. Laws are rather the positive, clear, universal norms in which freedom has acquired an impersonal, theoretical existence independent of the arbitrariness of the individual. A statute-book is a people's bible of freedom.</blockquote>More interesting than the treatment of the defenders of censorship is Marx’s criticism of the liberal arguments in favor of free speech:<br /><blockquote>The mover of the motion desires that <i>freedom of the press</i> should not be excluded from the <i>general freedom to carry on a trade</i>, a state of things that still prevails, and by which the inner contradiction appears as a classical example of inconsistency.</blockquote>There is something obscene about this argument, though it makes sense coming from a representative of the bourgeoisie. Such liberals are only able to understand freedom by way of analogy to their drab, commercial lives. Defending free speech as a form of the freedom of trade is a bit like Rembrandt depicting the Madonna as a Dutch peasant woman.<br /><br />Such an account of free speech can never succeed:<br /><blockquote>To make freedom of the press a variety of freedom of trade is a defence that kills it before defending it, for do I not abolish the freedom of a particular character if I demand that it should be free in the manner of a different character? … is the press true to its character, does it act in accordance with the nobility of its nature, <i>is the press free</i> which degrades itself to the level of a <i>trade</i>?</blockquote>The freedom of speech has nothing at all to do with the freedom to conduct a trade. Indeed, the freedom of self-expression is close to the<i> exact opposite</i> of the degrading, instrumentalization characteristic of commercial activity:<br /><blockquote>The writer does not at all look on his work as a <i>means</i>. It is an <i>end in itself</i>; it is so little a means for him himself and for others that, if need be, he sacrifices <i>his </i>existence to <i>its </i>existence. …<i>The primary freedom of the press lies in not being a trade.</i> The writer who degrades the press into being a material means deserves as punishment for this internal unfreedom the external unfreedom of censorship, or rather his very existence is his punishment.</blockquote>What’s more, theorizing press freedom as a species of trade freedom allows for a noxious implication: The authorization of certain writers but not others. An official press (whose freedom is protected) and an unofficial press (whose freedom is denied). I gather this remains an issue in American jurisprudence—does something distinguish press freedom from free speech in general? <br /><br />Marx offers here a purplish reply, rejecting any attempt to distinguish between the official and unofficial press:<br /><blockquote>The press is the most general way by which individuals can communicate their intellectual being. It knows no respect for persons, but only respect for intelligence. Do you want ability for intellectual communication to be determined officially by special external signs? What I cannot be for others, I am not and cannot be for myself. If I am not allowed to be a spiritual force for others, then I have no right to be a spiritual force for myself; and do you want to give certain individuals the privilege of being spiritual forces? Just as everyone learns to read and write, so everyone must have the right to read and write.</blockquote>By framing the issue as one of trade, the liberals have allowed free speech to become a matter of “soulless bargaining and haggling,” not unlike debates over what kinds of business activities to regulate. The American legal debate over the imaginary line between purely commercial and properly expressive business activities strikes me as roughly comparable. <br /><br />Marx concludes by favorably quoting a speech from a member of the peasant estate:<br /><blockquote>If any nation is suitable for freedom of the press it is surely the calm, good-natured German nation, which stands more in need of being roused from its torpor than of the strait jacket of censorship. For it not to be allowed freely to communicate its thoughts and feelings to its fellow men very much resembles the North American system of solitary confinement for criminals, which when rigidly enforced often leads to madness. From one who is not permitted to find fault, praise also is valueless; in absence of expression it is like a Chinese picture in which shade is lacking. Let us not find ourselves put in the same company as this enervated nation!</blockquote> </div></div>Dimitrios Halikiashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14687167606022949419noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2908609428851727972.post-56535410390008654992022-03-15T14:18:00.012-07:002022-03-22T08:21:00.098-07:00Schmitt and Foucault on Political TheologyI have been struck in recent months by some similarities between Schmitt and Foucault. This post sketches one such similarity: The parallel stories they tell of the connection between theological and political developments from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. <br /><br /><u>Schmitt’s Method </u><br /><br />The third chapter of Schmitt’s <i>Political Theology</i> argues that changing ideas of political sovereignty in Western Europe are connecting to changing theological commitments. Following Max Weber, he sees an elective affinity connecting religious and political sensibilities—the claim is not necessarily that one of these is prior to the other, but that they both derive from certain master conceptual characteristics of particular epochs. He summarizes this methodological “sociology of legal concepts,” as follows:<br /><blockquote>It aims to discover the basic, radically systematic structure and to compare this conceptual structure with the conceptually represented social structure of a certain epoch. There is no question here of whether the idealities produced by radical conceptualizations are a reflex of sociological reality, or whether social reality is conceived of as the result of a particular kind of thinking and therefore also of acting. Rather this sociology of concepts is concerned with establishing proof of two spiritual but at the same time substantial identities. It is thus not a sociology of the concept of sovereignty when, for example, the monarchy of the seventeenth century is characterized as the real that is “mirrored” in the Cartesian concept of God. But it is a sociology of the concept of sovereignty when the historical-political status of the monarchy of that epoch is shown to correspond to the general state of consciousness that was characteristic of western Europeans at that time, and when the juristic construction of the historical-political reality can find a concept whose structure is in accord with the structure of metaphysical concepts. Monarchy thus becomes as self-evident in the consciousness of that period as democracy does in a later epoch (<i>Political Theology</i> 45-6).</blockquote>I am sympathetic to this broad approach because of its blobbish character. We need not determine the precise causal connections between material facts, economic attitudes, theological convictions, and political theories. There are more subtle if imprecise unifying themes that run through them all. But regardless, my point is not to think through the method here, just to lay it out. Schmitt goes on to outline the theologico-political similarities in distinct periods of modern European history. <br /><br /><u>Schmitt on Early Modernity </u><br /><br />The theology and political theory of the seventeenth century feature a sovereign authority who stands at the head of a rational order. The rationalism of a Descartes, for example, insists on the perfect rational structure of the universe produced by the perfect work of an omnipotent creator. Schmitt summarizes the Cartesian position (quoting from the <i>Discourse on Method</i>) as follows:<br /><blockquote>the works created by several masters are not as perfect as those created by one. “One sole architect” must construct a house and a town; the best constitutions are those that are the work of a sole wise legislator, they are “devised by only one”; and finally, a sole God governs the world. As Descrates once wrote to Mersenne, “It is God who established these laws in nature just as a king establishes laws in his kingdom (PT 47).</blockquote>Cartesian rationalism thus points to a single, omnipotent divine creator and likewise a single, omnipotent political sovereign. Crucially, however, both God and the Prince remain palpably present. The theological and political sovereign remain personal authorities, capable of intervening in the world. Hobbes, Schmitt argues, further develops the Cartesian picture, emphasizing the centrality of the personal sovereignty of the Leviathan.<div><br /><u>Schmitt on the Eighteenth Century </u><br /><br />Despite his rationalism, Descartes still understood God to intervene in the world through miracles. That possibility of special providence disappears in the eighteenth century. Descartes’ divine architect becomes the deists’ watchmaker God, a perfect engineer whose personal presence disappears from his creation. This theological revolution is tied to the new political commitment to constitutionalism, the rule of law not man:<br /><blockquote>The idea of the modern constitutional state triumphed together with deism, a theology and metaphysics that banished the miracle from the world. This theology and metaphysics rejected not only the transgression of the laws of nature through an exception brought about by direct intervention, as is found in the idea of a miracle, but also the sovereign’s direct intervention in a valid legal order” (<i>PT</i> 36).</blockquote>The disappearance of the miracle goes with the disappearance of the exception, what Schmitt takes to be the essence of political sovereignty. The Enlightenment takes the order of early-modern theology/politics, but evacuates it of personal authority. The universe and the state are machines that operate without subsequent intervention. Deism forgets the deity just as constitutionalism forgets the founder:<br /><blockquote>The sovereign, who in the deistic view of the world, even if conceived as residing outside the world, had remained the engineer of the great machine, has been radically pushed aside. The machine now runs by itself … The decisionistic and personalistic element in the concept of sovereignty was thus lost (<i>PT </i>48).</blockquote>Some further features of the Enlightenment should be noted. The first is the intensification of a scientific ethic that insists on regularity. Theologically, that ethic explains the rejection of miracles and God’s special providence. Politically, it explains the hostility to any form of personal discretion or authority. As Schmitt puts it, quoting a book by Hugo Krabbe: <br /><blockquote>The modern idea of the state, according to Krabbe, replaces personal force (of the king, of the authorities) with spiritual power. “We no longer live under the authority of persons, be they natural or artificial (legal) persons, but under the rule of laws, (spiritual) forces. This is the essence of the modern idea of the state (<i>PT</i> 22).</blockquote>We are left with law and legal form, but we have abandoned the authoritative, personal sources of that law. This, Schmitt suggests, is the crucial difference between Hobbes and Locke. The Hobbesian personal sovereign gives way to Lockean constitutionalism. <br /><br />A second important theme is the connection between the rationalism of the eighteenth century and the new emphasis on education. Both the constitutional separation of powers and omnipotent, tutelary despotism are products of the deist-rationalist ethic:<br /><blockquote>For the rationalism of the Enlightenment, man was by nature ignorant and rough, but educable. It was thus on pedagogic grounds that the ideal of a “legal despotism” was justified: Uneducated humanity is educated by a legislator (who, according to Rousseau’s <i>Social Contract</i>, was able “to change the nature of man”); or unruly nature could be conquered by Fichte’s “tyrant,” and the state became, as Fichte said with naïve brutality, an “educational factory” (<i>PT </i>56).</blockquote>(For what it’s worth, the alleged connection here between Rousseau’s legislator and Quesnay’s legal despotism strikes me as implausible given Rousseau’s contempt for the physiocrats. But that’s a separate point). <br /><br />Schmitt says more on this theme in his <i>Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy</i>. He argues there that the principles of eighteenth-century rationalism are just as connected to Publius’ program of constitutional balance as they are to Condorcet’s demand for rational despotism (maintained through education): <br /><blockquote>Condorcet’s absolute rationalism negates the division of powers and destroys both its inherent negotiation and moderation of state powers and the independence of the parties. To his radicalism, the complicated balancing of the American constitution appeared subtle and difficult, a concession to the peculiarities of that land, one of those systems “where one must enforce the laws an in consequence truth, reason and justice,” and where one must sacrifice “rational legislation” to the prejudices and stupidity of individual people. Such rationalism led to the elimination of balance and to a rational dictatorship. Both the American constitution and Condorcet identify law with truth; but the relative rationalism of the balance theory was limited to the legislative and logically limited again within parliament to a merely relative truth” (<i>Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy</i> 46).</blockquote>There’s something a slippery here, as Condorcet’s rationalist dictatorship sounds a bit more like the Cartesian sovereign. The contrast with Hobbes is more clear, though likewise the connection between Descartes and Hobbes weakens. For Hobbes the personal authority is prior to the “truth” or rationality of the laws, whereas Condorcet’s dictator is a servant of truth. But more should be said about that. <br /><br /><u>Schmitt on the Nineteenth Century </u><br /><br />This relatively clean taxonomy gets a good deal more complicated when we come to the nineteenth century. We see, for example, an abortive attempt of certain democratic peoples to invoke a new standard of democratic authority not unlike that of the old seventeenth picture of sovereignty. Schmitt quotes Tocqueville, for example, to observe that early America invoked a standard of democratic legitimacy in some ways reminiscent of Hobbesian personal sovereignty:<br /><blockquote>for some time the aftereffects of the [absolutist] idea of God remained recognizable. In America this manifested itself in the reasonable and pragmatic belief that the voice of the people is the voice of God—a belief that is at the foundation of Jefferson’s victory of 1801. Tocqueville in his account of American democracy observed that in democratic thought the people hover above the entire political life of the state, just as God does above the world, as the cause and the end of all things, as the point from which everything emanates and to which everything returns (<i>PT </i>48).</blockquote>Reactionaries and counterrevolutionaries similarly attempt to reconstruct a vision of political absolutism tied to an account of divine voluntarism. De Maistre, on Schmitt’s view, cares less about what the government does than he does about whether an absolute authority exists. Donoso Cortes goes so far as to adopt a Calvinist vision of human depravity and an existentialist contempt for human reason: “What Donoso Cortes had to say about the natural depravity and vileness of man was indeed more horrible than anything that had ever been alleged by an absolutist philosophy of the state in justifying authoritarian rule” (<i>PT </i>58). <br /><br />More prominently, Schmitt notes the continued persistence of deist constitutionalism in the legal theories of Kelsen and the like. Such thinkers continue the eighteenth century’s assault on sovereignty and authority by identifying the legal order itself with the state. This neo-Kantian constitutionalism features a redoubled commitment to scientific order, rejecting the category of personal command as precisely the kind of arbitrariness a system of laws cannot tolerate: “at the foundation of this identification of state and legal order rests a metaphysics that identifies the lawfulness of nature and normative lawfulness” (<i>PT </i>41). And again: “Democracy is the expression of a political relativism and a scientific orientation that are liberated from miracles and dogmas and based on human understanding and critical doubt” (<i>PT </i>42). <br /><br />Schmitt also sees the rise of immanent theology and politics as the other major development of the nineteenth century. Where the sovereign God of the seventeenth century and the deist God of the eighteenth were both transcendent divinities, standing above or outside the created order, the God of the nineteenth century is found in the world itself, perhaps even made identical with it:<br /><blockquote>Conceptions of transcendence will no longer be credible to most educated people, who will settle for either a more or less clear immanence-pantheism or a positivist indifference toward any metaphysics. Insofar as it retains the concept of God, the immanence philosophy, which found its greatest systematic architect in Hegel, draws God into the world and permits law and the state to emanate from the immanence of the objective (<i>PT</i> 50).</blockquote>The radical left-Hegelians and their offspring are the clearest representatives of this immanentizing tendency. Schmitt sees in their demand that man become God and kill any remnants of transcendent theology a ruthless yet serious challenge to the prevailing liberal order. Indeed, in some stirring (if somewhat confusing) passages toward the end of the book, Schmitt casts the conflict between these radicals and the reactionaries to be the key antithesis of modern times. Liberal constitutionalism with its endless discussion and parliamentarism is outmatched by these two extremes. <br /><br />Schmitt’s own positive view at the end of <i>PT </i>is not entirely clear. His master polemic against liberal constitutionalism remains powerful, and he clearly wishes to restore sovereignty and politics. Consider this famous passage, which connects well with his essay on “The Age of Neutralizations and Depoliticizations:”<br /><blockquote>Today nothing is more modern than the onslaught against the political. American financiers, industrial technicians, Marxist socialists, and anarchic-syndicalist revolutionaries unite in demanding that the biased rule of politics over unbiased economic management be done away with. There must no longer be political problems, only organizational-technical and economic-sociological tasks. The kind of economic-technical thinking today is no longer capable of perceiving a political idea. The modern state seems to have actually become what Max Weber envisioned: a huge industrial plant (<i>PT </i>65).</blockquote>But the form of this restored sense of the political should take is not obvious. He sympathizes with the counterrevolutionaries and their demand for a restoration of sovereignty. And he sympathizes too with their observation that the age of monarchy is over and that the only choices left are democracy or dictatorship. But he concludes on a slightly critical note concerning the illegitimate character of brute, decisionist dictatorship. Does that suggest a tepid defense of democracy—or a commissarial dictatorship within democracy? I think so, but I’m not sure. <br /><br /><u>Foucault’s Method <br /></u><br />Enough of Schmitt. Let’s turn to Foucault. The text I’m interested in here is <i>Security, Territory, Population</i>, which because of its lecture-format is remarkably clear and easy to follow. There is a lot going on in these lectures, including a very interesting distinction between law, discipline, and security as distinct techniques of power. The connection and disjunction between security and discipline is of particular interest, and I’m not sure I follow it entirely. There is also a wonderful account of how "counter-conduct" practices rebuke of settled forms of governmentality and regimented control before being themselves coopted and routinized. But again, my focus will be more narrow—Foucault’s political theology. It is difficult to draw out a clean set of categories even here. As a friend of mine put it, the trouble with interpreting Foucault is that nothing is ever stable, the categories are always moving under your feet. But I’ll do my best to artificially make them stand still. <br /><br />First on method. Foucault’s method in these lectures—which I will not attempt to say anything about—is an extension of his more general project of institutional and disciplinary analysis. This method begins as follows: <br /><blockquote>This kind of method entails going behind the institution and trying to discover in a wider and more overall perspective what we can broadly call a technology of power. In the same way, this analysis allows us to replace a genetic analysis through filiation with a genealogical analysis—genealogy should not be confused with genesis and filiation—which reconstructs a whole network of alliances, communications, and points of support. So, the first methodological principle is to move outside the institution and replace it with the overall point of view of the technology of power (<i>STP </i>117).</blockquote>Applied more specifically to the state, he summarizes his project in these lectures as follows:<br /><blockquote>Is it possible to place the modern state in a general technology of power that assured its mutations, development, and functioning? Can we talk of something like a “governmentality” that would be to the state what techniques of segregation were to psychiatry, what techniques of discipline were to the penal system, and what biopolitics was to medical institutions? (<i>STP</i> 120).</blockquote>I don’t aim to comment on this methodological program, for I’m not sure I understand it. But in the interest of symmetry I’ve included it.<br /><br /><u>Foucault on Christian Pastoral Political-Theology <br /></u><br />Unlike Schmitt, Foucault begins his political theology with Christianity and the political-theological image of the pastor. He argues that the image of the ruler as a shepherd is properly a contribution of Christianity, and spends more than a few pages explaining why the apparent invocation of the shepherd in Plato’s <i>Statesman </i>does not represent Plato’s real image of political rule. For Plato—and for the Greeks more generally, Foucault suggests—“the politician is a weaver,” a metaphor that emphasizes the political vocation’s focus on knitting together society:<br /><blockquote>What then is political action in the strict sense, the essence of the political, the politician, or rather the politician’s action? It will be to join together, as the weaver joins the warp and the weft. The politician will bind the elements together, the good elements formed by education; he will bind together the virtues in their different forms, which are distinct from and sometimes opposed to each other; he will weave and bind together different contrasting temperaments, such as, for example, spirited and moderate men; and he will weave them together thanks to the shuttle of a shared common opinion. So the royal art is not at all that of the shepherd, but the art of the weaver, which is an art that consists in bringing together these lives “in a community that rests on concord and friendship” (<i>STP </i>146, quoting <i>Statesman </i>311b).</blockquote>The Christian image of the pastorate is radically different, for it emphasizes not primarily the communitarian good of the whole, but each individual soul: “pastoral power is an individualizing power. That is to say, it is true that the shepherd directs the whole flock, but he can only really direct it insofar as not a single sheep escapes him” (<i>STP </i>128). <br /><br />The shepherd image, Foucault provocatively argues, is the origin of what he calls “governmentality,” which when rationalized becomes the foundation of the modern state (<i>STP </i>165). He discusses here patristic sources and monastic rules, which together point to the Christian celebration of obedience as a means of acquiring apatheia and self mastery. As he puts it: “The perfection of obedience consists in obeying an order, not because it is reasonable or because it entrusts you with an important task, but because it is absurd” (<i>STP </i>176). Proceeding through a discussion of spiritual direction, he concludes that the pastorate is an “absolutely new form of power” that relies on a comprehensive network of mutual servitude and individuation, the combination that he takes to yield the technique of the modern state (<i>STP </i>183-4). <br /><br />St. Thomas Aquinas’ <i>De Regno</i> is offered here as representative of the medieval Christian attitude toward political rule and sovereignty. Though importantly different from the animating spirit of the modern state, Thomas articulates an kind of political governmentality. As Foucault puts it, the crucial point here is that Thomas rejects any hard line between sovereignty and government. In outlining the governmental character of political rule, Thomas offers a series of analogies. The first is that the king must imitate God, for just as God governs nature, the king must govern the state. The second is an analogy to nature: the king must be the “vital force,” the animating principle of the political community. The third is our familiar pastoral and paternal image; the king must “procure the common good of the multitude in accordance with a method that can obtain for it heavenly blessedness” (<i>STP </i>232-3). These three analogies point to the sweeping role of political rule in organizing a huge array of social institutions and relationships.<br /><br /><u>Foucault on the “De-Governmentalization of the Cosmos” (<i>STP </i>236) <br /></u><br />In imitating God, the vital force, and the pastor, Thomas’ monarch governs with a conscious eye to the salvation of each. The pastoral prince is not bound by abstract rules or principles, he must deal with the particular demands of each individual. For Foucault (in a clearly Schmittian line of reasoning), the Thomistic model of politics requires signs and decisions that can be analogized to God’s miracles. As he puts it: “A pastoral government of nature was therefore a nature peopled by prodigies, marvels, and signs” (<i>STP </i>235). <br /><br />This political-theological vision is brought to an end with the scientific revolution. In an analysis that closely follows Schmitt’s, Foucault argues that the scientific revolution proved:<br /><blockquote>that ultimately God only rules the world through general, immutable, and universal laws, through simple and intelligible laws … What does it mean to say that God only rules through general, immutable, universal, simple, and intelligible laws? It means that God does not “govern” the world; he does not govern it in the pastoral sense. He reigns over the world in a sovereign manner through principles (<i>STP </i>235).</blockquote>Like Schmitt, the new vision of the ruler-God is not a sovereign who intervenes (through miracles/decision) to touch individual lives, but who reigns over his creation through the immutable regularities he builds into it. The pastoral God of “prodigies, miracles, and signs” disappears “precisely between 1580 and 1650” (<i>STP </i>236). <br /><br />With the fall of the old pastoral vision, we get the new pure theory of government. Machiavelli and the new tradition of reason of state insist on a merely political mode of rule, one that has been severed from the analogy to nature or the divine. Foucault goes so far as to term the new vision of politics “statolatry,” the good of the state becomes the sole criterion for proper rule (<i>STP </i>242). For that reason, the state becomes an object of “reflected practice,” a preeminent form of governmentality (<i>STP </i>247-8). <br /><br /><u>From Reason-of-State back to Nature <br /></u><br />Foucault goes on at great length about the consequences of the new purely political understanding of the state. He says much of interest here—including an aside on how the demystification of nature requires the dramatization of politics (<i>STP </i>266-7) and a discussion of the origins of balance-of-power thinking (<i>STP </i>296ff). But most important for our purposes is the discovery of the economy as the essential site of governmentality and regulation as the essential mechanism. The modern state brings with it an obsession with statistics, a need to know about the whole of society: population, economic facts, public health, etc. The fundamental aim of the new category of “police,” Foucault explains, is as follows: <br /><blockquote>what police thus embraces is basically an immense domain that we could say goes from living to more than just living. I mean by this that police must ensure that men live, and live in large numbers; it must ensure that they have the wherewithal to live and so do not die in excessive numbers. But at the same time it must also ensure that everything in their activity that may go beyond this pure and simple subsistence will in fact be produced, distributed, divided up, and put in circulation in such a way that the state really can draw its strength from it (<i>STP </i>326).</blockquote>Something odd is happening. The modern state rejected the pastoral model and gave up on the commitment to tend to the salvation of each soul. Yet it has produced an intensified mode of governmentality that demands totalizing knowledge of every feature of social life. In a sense, Foucault suggests, we see some continuity with the medieval Christian ethos. The point gets even stranger when it comes to nature. The original reason-of-state turn rejected the analogy to nature and the natural order. But the eighteenth century sees the rise of the physiocrats, who rely on a new fetishization of nature and naturalness. <br /><br />The “<i>politiques</i>,” the champions of reason of state, had rejected natural balance. The physiocrats restore that vision with a vengeance, and thereby inaugurate modern economics. Nevertheless, Foucault continues, there is a crucial difference between physiocratic and medieval understandings of nature:<br /><blockquote>naturalness re-appears with the <i>economistes</i>, but it is a different naturalness. It is the naturalness of those mechanisms that ensure that, when prices rise, if one allows this to happen, then they will stop rising by themselves. It is the naturalness that ensures that the population is attracted by high wages, until a certain point at which wages stabilize and as a result the population no longer increases. As you can see, this is not at all the same type of naturalness as that of the cosmos that framed and supported governmental reason of the Middle Ages or of the sixteenth century. It is a naturalness that is opposed precisely to the artificiality of politics, of <i>raison d'état</i> and police. It is opposed to it, but in quite specific and particular ways. It is not the naturalness of processes of nature itself, as the nature of the world, but processes of naturalness specific to relations between men, to what happens spontaneously when they cohabit, come together, exchange, work, and produce (<i>STP </i>349).</blockquote>If I understand this correctly, Foucault is arguing that the naturalness of the physiocrats is limited to a vision of the “naturalness” of the economic sphere and civil society, of the realm of human “spontaneous” exchange. The role of the state is merely to manage these social interactions so that the natural mechanisms of balance can take root. But the state can in no way understand itself as “natural” in the old medieval sense, which touched a far more comprehensive vision of human life. There is none of the old Thomistic analogy between the king and the “vital principle” of the state. <br /><br />Instead, we are left, as with Schmitt’s vision of liberal constitutionalism, with a state that aims at perfect self-regulation and equilibrium:<br /><blockquote>the new governmentality, which in the seventeenth century thought it could be entirely invested in an exhaustive and unitary project of police [cf. Schmitt’s Cartesian sovereign] now finds itself in a situation in which it has to refer to the economy as a domain of naturalness: it has to manage populations; it also has to organize a legal system of respect for freedoms; and finally it has to provide itself with an instrument of direct, but negative intervention, which is the police (<i>STP </i>354).</blockquote>So, in short, we have gone from the natural pastoral monarchy of the medievals to the artificial, anti-natural reason-of-state of Machiavelli to the naturalist balance of the market/civil society constrained by the artificial state. The new “natural” economic governmentality limits nature to the commerce of social life, which though self-correcting still requires artificial government support. While initially disavowing the pastoral demand to touch all aspects of social life, the modern state has reconstructed an equally if not more totalizing omnipotence over every significant feature of the modern world—population, health, and the economy. All this is maintained through a regime of regulation with an eye to balance.<br /> </div>Dimitrios Halikiashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14687167606022949419noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2908609428851727972.post-70841475829134205662022-03-05T17:00:00.008-08:002022-03-05T17:02:04.514-08:00Sismondi and Third-Way EconomicsI recently read some Simonde de Sismondi, previously known to me only from Marx’s vitriolic attacks. The <a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch03.htm">“Communist Manifesto,”</a> for example, praises Sismondi for his dissection of “the contradictions in the conditions of modern production,” but denounces Sismondi for representing a “petty-bourgeois socialism” that is unable and unwilling to go beyond demands for a rejuvenated form of patriarchal agriculture and guild manufacturing. <br /><br />What is particularly striking about Sismondi (whose main economic work was published in 1819) is the degree to which he articulates what has become the default “third-way” position of contemporary economics. In part vindicating, perhaps, Marx’s critique, Sismondi attempts to moralize capitalism, remaining tethered to its fundamental categories, while insisting on reforms to mitigate the more brutal effects of market competition. Third way economics—which has some crude affinity with neoliberalism, Clintonite liberalism, and Blairite New Labor—remains the standard economic position for most Western liberals and conservatives. In what follows I sketchily outline the similarities between Sismondi and the third way, while noting interesting points of difference. There’s nothing systematic here, it’s more a meandering through some interesting passages. <br /><br /><u>Similarities with Third Way Economics <br /></u><br />I see four chief areas of agreement between Sismondi and the prevailing consensus: (1) His commitment to a broadly Smithian approach to private property, the division of labor, and market competition; (2) His moralist critique of what we now call classical economics, centered on a demand to consider questions of distribution, not merely aggregate growth; (3) His defense of widespread private ownership and economic stability; and (4) His wariness of a welfare state and what has been called a culture of “dependency.” <br /><br />A fine summary of Sismondi’s economic philosophy is found in a biographical essay attached to an <a href="https://oll.libertyfund.org/title/sismondi-political-economy-and-the-philosophy-of-government">1847 translation of some of his writings.</a> The translator describes Sismondi’s objection to the doctrine of laissez faire as follows:<br /><blockquote>He affirms that the object of the political economist should be, to ascertain how the happiness and well-being of the whole community are affected by the creation and distribution of wealth, not abstractedly how wealth may be created and preserved; that the principles of political economy should be extended to embrace all subjects which relate to the social welfare of man, and that this ought to be considered as the end, to which the increase and security of wealth is but a means; that the purely economical mode of considering the means apart from the end, the calculating theories in which men are too often reckoned as figures, and considered as means of production, have led to a disregard of their value of men: also that the theories of political economy and the legislation founded on them tend to make the rich, richer, and the poor, poorer. Thus the amount of a nation’s wealth being taken as the test of its prosperity without regard to its distribution … M. de Sismondi contends that one of the main objects of political economy should be to regulate this very unequal distribution of wealth, which is not only frequently a source of injustice and a cause of misery to the lower classes, but which causes national insecurity … by continually adding to that dangerous though despised class who, at any time of difficulty or trouble, are ready to revenge their own sufferings by attacking property and institutions which have afforded to them neither advantage nor protection (<i>Political Economy and the Philosophy of Government </i>67-8).</blockquote>In a more recent translation of Sismondi’s <i><a href="https://www.routledge.com/New-Principles-of-Political-Economy/Grootings/p/book/9781138512597">New Principles of Political Economy</a></i>, an introductory essay by Richard Hyse confirms the similarity between this approach and the today’s prevailing economic common sense:<br /><blockquote>[His proposals] have become, 150 years later, the accepted institutions of democratic capitalism: wide distribution of share ownership in large corporations, unions and industry-wide bargaining, unemployment insurance, pensions and social security, and equalization of incomes by government-decreed minimum wages and the progressive income tax (<i>New Principles of Political Economy</i> xxxviii-xxxix).</blockquote>Let’s consider some more specific affinities: <br /><br /><u>1.1 Smith and private property <br /></u><br />The first chapter <i>New Principles</i> is an elaboration of an essay published in the (Smithian) Edinburgh Review on the history of economics. He concludes that essay and this chapter with a celebration of Smith’s genius and achievement. In particular, the labor theory of value remains the central discovery of modern political economy. Yet Sismondi continues:<br /><blockquote>After this profession of our deep admiration of this creative genius, of our keen gratitude for the enlightenment we owe to him alone, one will no doubt be astonished to learn that the practical results of the doctrine we take from him, appeared to us often diametrically opposed to those he drew from it, and that, by combining his very principles with the experience of a half century during which his theory was more or less put into practice, we believe we can show that it was necessary, in more than one instance, to draw from it quite different conclusions (<i>New Principles </i>52-3).</blockquote>Methodologically, Sismondi remains loyal to Smith’s historical (yet scientific) economics against the overly abstract theorizing of Ricardo et al. He writes, plausibly enough:<br /><blockquote>One would believe at first sight that in freeing the theory from all surrounding circumstances, one would make it clearer and easier to comprehend; the opposite has happened; the new English economists are extremely obscure and can only be understood with much effort, while our mind is loath to accept the abstractions they require of us (<i>New Principles </i>55).</blockquote>That indictment applies well, it seems to me, to fields beyond economics. But more importantly, he insists on defending the core Smithian insights concerning the role that private ownership of capital and the division of labor play in driving economic production. The early chapters of Book two on the “formation and progress of wealth” offer restrained praise for the role specialization and private capital ownership play in driving prosperity. Reversing Rousseau, he moreover celebrates the institution of private property rights for making possible unprecedented plenty:<br /><blockquote>“He who, after having enclosed a field, uttered the first This is mine, has summoned him who possesses no field, and who could not live if the fields of the first would not bring forth a surplus product. This is a fortunate usurpation, and society, for the benefit of all, does well to guarantee it” (<i>New Principles</i> 138).</blockquote>Private property rights, however, should not be understood as any kind of natural right. They are regulated by a principle of “public utility” not justice. <br /><br />Today we find an explosion of so-called “left Smithians” who want to reclaim the man from libertarian and doctrinaire free marketeers. Sismondi is helpful and harmful to that project. He, like them, finds something about the Smithian project that is capable of producing a more egalitarian capitalism. Yet unlike them, he sees Smith squarely as part of the laissez faire tradition. <br /><br /><u>1.2 Moralism and distribution<br /></u><br />This leads to our second point—Sismondi’s familiar, moralist critique of the market. While preserving the fundamentals of a market economy, Sismondi points us to the condition of those we would now call “left behind.” The preface to the second edition of <i>New Principles</i> details the shocking contradiction of modern England, which has managed to combine unprecedented economic wealth with unprecedented mass, proletarian misery. We must consider distribution, not merely production. He writes that the “double goal of the science of government” consists in (1) seeking “the means of securing to [men] the highest degree of felicity compatible with their nature,” while (2) “allowing the greatest possible number of individuals to partake in that felicity” (<i>New Principles </i>21). Radical egalitarians abandon the first demand, rejecting any form of inequality or distinction, caring only about the equal distribution of wealth and privilege. Classical liberals, on the other hand, call the market society “liberty, even though it is founded on the slavery of the lower classes” (<i>New Principles </i>22). <br /><br />Again, familiarly enough, Sismondi wants to temper competition-induced wealth with concerns for just distribution. He accepts neither the liberal nor the egalitarian extremes, both the size of the pie and the size of the slices, so to speak, are morally important. Here the gap with Marx—famously contemptuous of this kind of economic moralism—is obvious. <br /><br />Yet there are few critics of the market today who would go beyond Sismondi in this regard. Third-way consensus economics accepts growth and equality to be a permanent balancing act. All economic debate in modern Western societies becomes a form of haggling within Sismondian bounds.<br /><br /><u>1.3. Property owning democracy and job stability <br /></u><br />Another familiar refrain of third-way economics is that wealth inequality is not just morally objectionable, it is politically destabilizing. Sismondi repeats two consistent themes on this point. The first is that property ownership must be widely distributed so as to ensure the full moral development of the poor and to prevent political revolution. In an analysis that will be echoed by Tocqueville and others, he writes:<br /><blockquote>The strongest safeguard of an established order may lie in the existence of a numerous class of proprietors. However advantageous it may be for a society to safeguard property, it is an abstract idea difficult to grasp by those to whom it seems only to guarantee privation. When land ownership is taken from the cultivator, and the ownership of factories from workers, all those who create wealth, and who see it passing through their hands without end, are strangers to all its benefits. They form by far the most numerous part of the nation; they see themselves as the most useful part, and they feel disinherited. Constant envy stirs them up against the rich; one can hardly dare to discuss civil rights before them, because one must always be afraid they will go from this discussion to that of property rights, and that they will demand the distribution of possessions and land.<br /><br />A revolution in such a country is frightful; the whole order of society is subverted; power passes into the hands of the multitude which commands physical power, and this crowd, having suffered much, kept in ignorance by need, is hostile to all types of law, all degrees of distinction, all kinds of property. France experienced such a revolution at a time when the vast majority of the population was a stranger to ownership, and as a consequence to the blessings of civilization (<i>New Principles</i> 146).</blockquote>Large consolidated farms, for example, pay their workers next to nothing. Efficiency coincides with less employment and terrible compensation. Favoring Swiss and American homesteading models, he demands breaking up large farms and distributing the wealth to smaller producers:<br /><blockquote>in England the excessive consolidation of farms is often caused by the owner against the interest of the nation. England has increased its prosperity so much … that at first glance the drawbacks of its large estates are not obvious. After having admired the well-tended fields, one has to take account of the population which works them; it is less than half of what it would be in France on the same amount of land. In the eyes of some economists this is a gain, in mine it is a loss. But the smaller population is at the same time much poorer. The cottager is below the peasant of almost all the other countries of Europe in happiness, hope, and security; from which I conclude that the goal of wealth creation has been missed (<i>New Principles</i> 188).</blockquote>The logic of efficiency favors economic consolidation, but consequently produces “an abyss between extreme opulence and extreme poverty.” It destroys “that happy independence, that happy mediocrity, which was long the object of the wishes of the wise” (<i>Political Economy</i> 146). <br /><br />Similarly, Sismondi is wary of the precarious nature of employment under conditions of modern market competition. He writes with a twinge of feudal nostalgia, noting that modern industrial laborers are abandoned when they cease to be productive, where feudal dependents were cared for in sickness and old age:<br /><blockquote>In the entirely barbaric and inhumane society of feudal countries, of slaveholding countries, this basic principle of justice has not been ignored. Never has a lord dreamt to make his vassals, his serfs, his slaves a burden of the province in their misfortunes, their old age, and their sicknesses; he has strongly felt that it was up to him alone to provide for the needs of those who experienced them only for his own benefit (<i>New Principles</i> 579).</blockquote>The same logic applies to manufacturing. He insists in the final chapter of the book that large firms provide more substantial guarantees to their employees. Pensions and health coverage come to mind. He goes further, suggesting that large firms are less capable or willing to provide that kind of longterm support. Favoring more radical measures (like worker co-determination) he looks for means of aligning the interests of labor and capital. In a sense, such a program restores part of the holistic reciprocity the medieval guilds provided—thus giving some credence to Marx’s charge of Sismondi’s de facto reactionary economics. He doesn’t offer a specific plan here, but he summarizes the basic vision as follows:<br /><blockquote>I wish that the industry of the towns, as those of the land, be divided among a large number of independent businesses, and not brought together under a great single head who commands hundreds or thousands of workers; I wish that the ownership in manufactures be divided among a large number of average capitalists, and not concentrated in a single man, master over many millions; I wish that the industrious worker have before him the opportunity, almost the certainty, to be a partner to his master, in order that he will marry only when he will have a share in the business, instead of growing old, as he does today, without hope of advancement (<i>New Principles</i> 585).</blockquote>The point there about marriage and childrearing is important, and points to our next similarity <br /><br /><u>1.4. Welfare and dependency <br /></u><br />While concerned with the moral costs of economic brutalization, Sismondi is rather wary of public charity as the solution. He fears what today is often called the “culture of dependency” that accompanies direct, state support. The poor laws have not resolved the problem of pauperization, they have exacerbated it. The key target here is irresponsible childrearing. Like with conservative emphases on the “welfare queen” trope in the 90s, Sismondi is centrally concerned that the recipients of public charity will not be driven into productive work, but will instead have too many children. Those children are fated themselves to grow up in conditions of pauperization: “public charity can be considered as an encouragement society gives to a population it cannot sustain” (<i>New Principles</i> 549). <br /><br />Where welfare reform advocates demand work requirements, however, Sismondi again favors a more harmonious alignment of the interests of labor and capital. The solution is to abolish proletarian wage labor, and to turn the poor into part of a broader middle class of “property owners” (<i>New Principles</i> 550). Indeed, work requirements of the sort conservatives celebrate will only exacerbate the trend of pauperization: “the condition of men who must live by their labour, who can only work when capitalists employ them, and who, when they are idle, must become a burden on the community” (<i>Political Economy </i>149). Public charity and proletarian labor are two sides of the same coin. He concludes:<br /><blockquote>there will be no happiness for the working classes, there will be no real and lasting progress towards prosperity until a means will have been found to create a community of interest instead of opposition between the entrepreneur and all those he puts to work; until the workers in the fields will have been called to share in the harvests, and the factory workers in their output (<i>New Principles </i>551).</blockquote><u>Some Notable Differences with Third-Wayism<br /></u><br />So those are the quick similarities I find between Sismondi’s ethic and the consensus position of third-way economics. While there are quibbles within the consensus, most democratic capitalists today favor broad deference to the market, wish to constrain that market with an eye toward equitable distribution, want to promote broad property ownership, and are somewhat skeptical of welfare state measures that beget greater indigence. <br /><br />But there are some points of difference, at least in emphasis, as well. <br /><br /><u>2.1 Sismondi’s Radicalism <br /></u><br />The first is that Sismondi theorizes the contradictions of capitalism in far more radical terms than do most contemporary moralizing critics of the market. Indeed, as the helpful footnotes in New Principles are quick to point out, many of Marx’s most famous arguments come straight from Sismondi. Consider this passage, for example:<br /><blockquote>Let whatever is called progress in the arts, in manufactures, in agriculture, be examined, and it will be found that every discovery, every improvement, may be reduced to doing as much with less labour, or more with the same labour; all progress tends also to reduce the value and reward of labour, or the ease of those who live only to labour. <br /><br />The fundamental change which has taken place in society, amidst the universal struggle created by competition, is the introduction of the proletary among human conditions, the name of whom, borrowed from the Romans, is ancient, but whose existence is quite new. (<i>Political Economy</i> 144).</blockquote>We see here clearly the account of wages falling to subsistence levels and the emergence of a new proletariat class that will become the industrial reserve army. <br /><br />We see a discussion of the kind of mystification arising from the new M-C-M dynamics of the monetized market:<br /><blockquote>the circulating medium simplified all commercial transactions and complicated all the philosophical observations which have these transactions as their object. As much as this invention showed everyone clearly the goal to be pursued in every transaction, by that much it made the totality of these transactions intricate and unclear, and the general direction of commerce difficult to grasp (<i>New Politics</i> 113).</blockquote>We see also a sophisticated account of what today we call business cycles, a theory of the intrinsic proclivity of the market to produce crises of overconsumption and mass unemployment. (The topic of <i>New Politics </i>Book II chapter 6). <br /><br />Most significantly, Sismondi clearly develops the idea of “surplus labor,” which Marx picks up and ties to exploitation. Surplus labor consists in the gap between the wealth produced by the laborer and the wage he is paid (which covers only his subsistence). Consider the following passages:<br /><blockquote>The advantage of an employer of labor is often nothing more than the plunder of the worker he hired; he does not profit because his enterprise produced much more than its cost, but because he does not pay all the costs, because he does not grant to the worker sufficient compensation for his work (<i>New Principles</i> 83)</blockquote><blockquote>the labor that the worker will perform during the year, will always be worth more than the labor during the preceding year, with which he will maintain himself. Industry provides a constant increase in wealth as a consequence of this surplus value (<i>New Principles </i>92).</blockquote><blockquote>All of the annual product is consumed, partly by workers who, in exchanging it for their work, convert it into capital and reproduce it; and partly by capitalists who destroy it by giving their income in return. Moreover, one should never forget that labor power is incommensurable with wealth. Wages do not represent an absolute quantity of labor, but only a quantity of goods which ahs sufficed to maintain the workers of the previous year (<i>New Principles</i> 93).</blockquote>(The translator notes that Marx cited Sismondi more than anyone else in Capital, but curiously did not cite him on these points). <br /><br />So in all these respects, Sismondi goes beyond mere moralism about the plight of those left behind. He offers a far more sweeping and radical indictment of the contradictions built into capitalism than modern third-wayers are inclined to offer. Marx could learn something from Sismondi’s treatment of the market. I don’t think he could have learned much from Tony Blair’s. <br /><br /><u>2.2 Wariness of Innovation <br /></u><br />Another break with the third-way consensus is Sismondi’s producerist wariness of technological innovation and entrepreneurial progress. Everyone in the world today favors innovation. Perhaps the fruit of that innovation should be more widely spread, perhaps (with pharmaceuticals, for example) there should be constraints on prices that might tamp down a degree of innovation, and perhaps we were somewhat too cavalier in embracing automization. But on the whole, the strong presumption is in favor of disruptive creative destruction. <br /><br />Sismondi flips that presumption. Labor saving technology and more general forms of entrepreneurial innovation are expected to harm workers.<br /><blockquote>Each improvement introduced into industry, if it has not been the result of a new demand, and if it has not been followed by a greater consumption, has almost always produced the same effects—it has killed, far away, old producers no one saw, and which have disappeared unsung; it has enriched, besides the inventor, new producers who, because they did not know their victim, have regarded each new invention as a benefit to mankind (<i>New Principles</i> 265).</blockquote>We speak today of Kaldor-Hicks efficiency to justify the costs of dislocation. Of course, that's a rather brutal standard. A cash transfer is not the same thing as gainful employment, nor is mandated retraining particularly attractive. Regardless, those transfers and retraining investments never happen. But the modern third-wayist still presumptively favors disruptive innovation. For Sismondi, that stems from a bias in favor of consumption and an incapacity to properly value producers’ welfare and moral interests. He offers the following charming story in a footnote:<br /><blockquote>It is said that the Emperor Alexander, astonished to see, in England, that the entire population that surrounded him was wearing stockings, shoes and dress tolerably similar to that of a proper burgher, exclaimed in surprise: ‘Where are the poor? Are there no poor people in this country?’ However, more than one-half of these individuals, whom custom forced to spend a good deal for their clothing, had no other property than the wages they would receive that Saturday for the entire week; and more than a tenth of them were helped by their parish. There would be more independence and more happiness for the poor, to walk barefoot, or in wooden shoes, and owning a cottage, some fields, a garden and two cows, like the majority of the peasants on the Continent (<i>New Principles</i> 560).</blockquote>Sismondi is presumptively hostile to all advances in labor-saving technology:<br /><blockquote>if the manufacturer, without an increase in demand, and without an increase in capitals, merely converts a part of his circulating capital into machines and lays off a number of his workers proportional to the work he has done by his blind servants, and without extending his sales, only increases his profit becasue he produces what he sells at a lower price, the social loss will be certain whatever the advantage he finds there for his own account (<i>New Principles</i> 300).</blockquote>He develops this point too with an interesting aside on what will happen to the household with the development of new domestic labor-saving technology:<br /><blockquote>Why, it says, should the housewife spin, weave, and prepare all the linen of the family? All this work would be done infinitely cheaper at the manufactory … Why should she knead the bread? … Why should she make the pot boil? (<i>Political Economy </i>148)</blockquote>The future promises that “omnibus kitchens” will emerge to supply all the household’s food needs. Uber Eats! Sismondi warns that the abolition of these domestic duties will harm women, destroying the grounds of their independence and authority within the home. We should therefore oppose these changes because:<br /><blockquote>reciprocal cares and duties form and strengthen domestic ties; because the wife endears herself to the family of the poor man by the solicitude with which she provides for its first necessities ; because love is often in a labouring man only a brutal and transient passion ; but his affection for her who every day prepares for him the only enjoyment which he can obtain in the day, thus increases also every day. It is the wife who foresees, and who remembers, in the midst of that life passed so rapidly in labour, and physical wants; it is she who knows how to combine economy, neatness, and order, with abundance. It is in the happiness she gives that she finds strength to resist, if it is necessary, the imperious demands of drunkenness and gluttony. When the wife has nothing to do in the house but to produce children, can it be supposed that the sacred bond of marriage is not more broken, than by the lessons and the example of the most reprehensible immorality? (<i>Political Economy</i> 148-9).</blockquote>You definitely won’t hear that argument today. <br /><br />As Sismondi puts it in a rebuke of Ricardo and today’s prevailing consumptivist ethic: “Wealth is everywhere, men are absolutely nothing? What? … In truth, then there is nothing more to wish for than that the king, remaining alone on the island, by constantly turning a crank, might produce, through automata, all the output of England” (<i>New Principles</i> 563). <br /><br />Hopefully we are recovering a bit of this producerist instinct today, but it remains absent for the most part, it seems to me.<br /><br /><u>2.3 Population control <br /></u><br />Our final example is a break in emphasis with today’s third-wayism. I mentioned above the affinity with contemporary critics of the welfare state who warn of dependency and reckless procreation. Sismondi offered a somewhat more extreme discussion on that theme. He like many is terrified by the growth of an indigent population, and initially proposed laws to bar the poor from marrying. He dropped that argument in the second edition, but continued to insist that steps be taken to discourage the poor from marrying young and having many children. He doesn’t share Malthus’ pessimism on the matter, and claims that the right set of economic incentives will encourage the working class to delay marriage. Indeed, he argues that one of the chief failures of a mystifying market economy is that workers no longer can reasonably predict their future economic condition. That uncertainty is partly responsible for the growth in what he sees as a parasitic excess population: <br /><blockquote>the more property is taken from the poor, the more he will be in danger of miscalculating his income, and contributing to a population increase which will not in any way match the demand for labor, and will not find any subsistence (<i>New Principles</i> 520).</blockquote>Greater ownership within factory life, for example, will give the worker a clearer sense of his lifetime earnings schedule, inclining him to delay marriage until he has attained the necessary advancement in the firm (<i>New Principles</i> 573). <br /><br />Again, we don’t talk in this way today. Though the third-wayist enthusiasm for long-acting reversible contraception is perhaps not so different.<br /> Dimitrios Halikiashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14687167606022949419noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2908609428851727972.post-90961042535850517942021-02-03T06:52:00.004-08:002021-02-03T09:39:53.997-08:00Thoughts on Weber's 1895 "The Nation State and Economic Policy"<div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I recently had occasion to re-read Max Weber’s 1895 inaugural
lecture on “The Nation State and Economic Policy” (found in the <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/weber-political-writings/9E3059E0DE390B4541EF896954100A20">Cambridge edition of Weber's political writings</a>). The lecture is shockingly
relevant, so I thought I might write out its chief themes.<br /><span style="line-height: 107%;"><br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span><span style="font-family: inherit; line-height: 107%;">One striking feature of the lecture is that it summarizes—in under
thirty pages—the core themes that preoccupy the entirety of Weber’s corpus. The lecture proceeds in three sections: First, a discussion of a
particular cultural conflict between Protestant German and Catholic Polish agricultural
laborers in Prussia. There we see already an early form of Weber’s famous
analysis of the Protestant ethic, which in the concrete historical case
contrasts with the Polish workers’ mentality. Weber’s wariness of expanding
Polish migration leads to a proposal to shut down the borders and forcibly
repopulate the land with German workers. But more importantly, this leads to
the second part of the lecture: A broader treatment of the nature and pathology
of modern economic rationality. The German state is unable to act in the interest
of the great German nation because its intelligentsia have become enamored of
English-style economic thinking. Finally, Weber’s third part of the
lecture turns to the question of producing a proper ruling class that will be
capable of escaping the iron-cage of economistic rationality.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 107%;"><br /></span><span style="line-height: 107%;">In 28 pages we have Weber’s entire career: The germ of the <i><a href="https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/weber/protestant-ethic/index.htm">Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism</a></i>, a diagnosis and critique of anti-political,
economic, bureaucratic rationality, and an insistence on <i>responsible </i>rulers
who take seriously the task of “<a href="https://www2.southeastern.edu/Academics/Faculty/jbell/weber.pdf">politics as a vocation</a>.”</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 107%;"><br /></span><span style="line-height: 107%;">1. Catholic Poles v. Protestant Germans</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 107%;"><br /></span><span style="line-height: 107%;">Let’s start with section one, which spans the first twelve
pages of the essay. The key topic of interest for Weber is the divergent
mentalities Polish and German laborers bring to their work. He notices that
throughout West Prussia German workers appear to be substantially wealthier
than the Polish ones. How is that to be explained?</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span><span style="font-family: inherit; line-height: 107%;"><blockquote>The two nationalities have competed for centuries on the same
soil, and with essentially the same chances. What is it, then, that
distinguishes them? One is immediately tempted to believe that psychological
and physical racial characteristics make the two nationalities differ in their <i>ability
to adapt </i>to the varying economic and social conditions of existence. This
is indeed the explanation (5).</blockquote></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit; line-height: 107%;"><span>(To be clear, as Weber makes explicit in a footnote, he does
not mean to make an overly biological argument about the distinction between
the races. He distinguishes himself, in that regard, from the kind of
scientific racism common in his day. That said, the influence of racial
Darwinian themes in this analysis is </span>unmistakable<span>).</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 107%;"><br /></span><span style="line-height: 107%;">The key reason, Weber goes on, is a cultural difference
between the two groups. The Germans embody a spirit of freedom, they are
assertive and strive to be independent. It is for this reason that as soon as
they can, they move to the cities where they can live free of quasi-feudal agricultural
constraints:</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span><span style="font-family: inherit; line-height: 107%;"><blockquote>Amongst the estate complexes of his homeland the world of the
day-laborer contains only masters and servants, and his descendants will be
faced forever after only with the prospect of toiling away on someone else’s
land to the tolling of the estate bell. In this inarticulate, half-conscious
urge towards far off places there lies hidden an element of primitive idealism.
Anyone who cannot decipher this does not know the magic of <i>freedom</i> (8).</blockquote></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span><span style="font-family: inherit; line-height: 107%;">The Poles, on the other hand, appear content to live as
serfs. They lack the “self-assertiveness” of their German rivals, and as such
have accommodated themselves to a life of relatively impoverished servitude.
They lack the German striving, the need for independence and freedom.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 107%;"><br /> </span><span style="line-height: 107%;">(Weber’s claim that the Catholic Poles simply have much lower
life expectations, and are accordingly happy to “eat grass,” mirrors the kind
of reasoning underlying early twentieth century American progressive/eugenic
arguments against immigration. As <a href="https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691169590/illiberal-reformers">Thomas Leonard</a> points out, these arguments were full
of assumptions about the Chinese laborer being content to live on rice alone in
a manner no self-respecting American would do).</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 107%;"><br /></span><span style="line-height: 107%;">Weber notes that, in a sense, the Catholic Poles are <i>winning!</i>
The Germans are emigrating out of West Prussia, and every year more Poles come
in. This, again, is because they are much more willing accommodate themselves
to the condition of low-paying, degrading labor than are their German
competitors. The Polish serfish laborers and their capitalist landowning
employers make a perfect pair.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 107%;"><br /> </span><span style="line-height: 107%;">All this strikes Weber as unacceptable. He demands
that Germany close its eastern border with Poland, confiscate agricultural
estates from the Pole-employing landowners, and repopulate the lands with
German colonists:</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><blockquote><span style="line-height: 107%;">From the standpoint of the nation, large-scale enterprises
which can only be preserved at the expense of the German race deserve to go
down to destruction. To leave them to their own devices means permitting
unviable colonies of starving Slavs to come into existence by way of the
gradual parceling-off of the estates (12).</span></blockquote><span style="line-height: 107%;">All this should strike modern ears as eerily familiar. Weber’s
position against (Catholic) Polish immigration is very much like the modern
immigration restrictionist’s position against (Catholic) Hispanic immigration. Think
how often we hear two lines in the American immigration debate: (1) Immigrants do
jobs Americans are simply unwilling to do; and (2) Immigrants lack the ethos or
cultural values that Americans possess. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"><br /></span></span><span style="line-height: 107%;">There’s a puzzle here: Weber and the contemporary
restrictionist are PROUD of a national culture that is unwilling to do servile
labor. That is what they take to be great about their nation. Yet at the same
time, it is precisely this pride that leads their co-nationals to refuse to
take up work they deem beneath them. Large capitalist firms step in and to
employ the foreigner laborer that <i>is </i>willing to do the work.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 107%;"><br /> </span><span style="line-height: 107%;">There is something tragic, then, about the Weberian
celebration of German freedom. It is that freedom that distinguishes the German
from the serf. But it is also that love of freedom that leads to economic and
cultural defeat. You might say that Weber believes the German state must force the German people to be free.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 107%;"><br /> </span><span style="line-height: 107%;"><span>2. Nationalism </span>Against<span> Economic Rationality</span></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 107%;"><br /></span><span style="line-height: 107%;">This leads to the second portion of Weber’s lecture—his critique
of economic rationality and defense of nationalism:<br /></span><span style="line-height: 107%;"><blockquote>It is not this practical question of Prussian agrarian policy
I want to discuss today. I would prefer to return to the fact that such a
question arises at all in all our minds, to the fact that we consider that the
German race should be protected in the east of the country, and that the state’s
economic policies <i>ought to </i>rise to the challenge of defending it. What
makes us feel we have a right to make this demand is the circumstance that our
state is a <i>nation state</i> (13).</blockquote></span><span style="line-height: 107%;">In the case of West Prussia, Weber thinks it is obvious that
the state must step in to enforce a pro-German national agricultural policy.
The market and the capitalist employers profit tremendously from the flow of
low wage-earning Polish immigrants, who appear to be content to take degrading
jobs. The interesting question for Weber is how it can be that this obvious
political prescription has become so obscured. His explanation: “the economy
way of looking at things” is to blame.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 107%;"><br /></span><span style="line-height: 107%;">Modern economic rationality has destroyed the traditional
recognition that economics must serve politics:</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 107%;"><blockquote>The science of political economy is a <i>political </i>science
It is a servant of politics, not the day-to-day politics of the persons who
happen to be ruling at any given time, but the enduring power-political
interests of the nation. For us the <i>nation state </i>is not something vague
which, as some believe, is elevated ever higher, the more its nature is
shrouded in mystical obscurity. Rather, it is the worldly organization of the
nation’s power. In this nation state the ultimate criterion for economic
policy, as for all others, is in our view ‘<i>reason of state</i>’ (16-7).</blockquote></span><span style="line-height: 107%;">The economistic mode of rationalism has no way of theorizing
the importance of the nation state. It has no grounds for making value
judgments of partiality for one’s own people. It thinks only in terms of wealth
production and distribution, it “consists in devising recipes for universal
happiness … adding to the ‘balance of pleasure’ in human existence” (14).</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 107%;"><br /></span><span style="line-height: 107%;">German politics must reject a disenchanted economic science
that aims at “breeding a soft, eudaemonistic outlook, in however spiritualized a
form, behind the illusion of independent ‘socio-political’ ideals” (27).</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 107%;"><br /></span><span style="line-height: 107%;">Indeed, this mode of thinking hasn’t just corrupted
economics, but <i>all </i>the academic disciplines. Weber attacks the rise of
social history at the expense of political/military history, the economization
of law, and the transformation of philosophy into physiology. I quote at
length:</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 107%;"><blockquote>In every sphere we find that the economic way of looking at things
is on the advance. Social policy has superseded politics at the forefront of
thinking, just as economic power-relations have replaced legal relations, and
cultural and economic history have ousted political history. In the outstanding
works of our colleagues in history we find that, where once they told us about
the warlike deeds of our ancestors, they expatiate today on the monstrous
notion of ‘matriarchy’, while relegating to a subordinate clause the victory
over the Huns on the Catalaunian Plain. … the economic way of looking at things
has penetrated into jurisprudence itself, so that even in its innermost sanctum,
the manuals of the Pandect Jurists, the spectre of economic thinking is
beginning to stir … we economists have ‘come into fashion.’ When a way of
looking at things breaks new ground so confidently, it is in danger of falling
prey to certain illusions and of overestimating the significance of its own
point of view … The broadening of the subject-matter of <i>philosophical </i>reflection—outwardly
evident in the very fact that nowadays we find many of the old Chairs of
Philosophy being given to outstanding physiologists (for example)—has led many
of us laymen to believe that the old questions about the nature of human
understanding are no longer the ultimate and central questions of philosophy (17-18).</blockquote></span><span style="line-height: 107%;">Much of that polemic could be reproduced verbatim today in
critiques of the disciplinary tyranny of economics within the academy. (Or in
more polemical attacks on the transformation of history and legal education).</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 107%;"><br /></span><span style="line-height: 107%;">But this transformation is, once again, most damaging when it
comes to politics. The German intelligentsia—gripped by economic
rationality—is unable to make the decisions necessary to secure the greatness of
the German people. The science of economics purports to be value-free, to speak
only of laws and structural tendencies, not to impose normative values. But as
everyone knows, that claim to neutrality is nonsensical. The new, subjective
economics does bring with it a chain of grotesque moral commitments:</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span><span style="line-height: 107%;"><blockquote>The criteria of value which political economists have naively
identified or given prominence to have alternated between the technical
economic problem of the production of goods and the problem of their
distribution (‘social justice’). Yet, again and again both these criteria have
been overshadowed by the recognition, in part unconscious, but nevertheless
all-dominating, that a science concerned with <i>human beings</i>—and that is
what political economy is—is concerned above all else with the <i>quality of
the human beings </i>reared under those economic and social conditions of
existence. … Even our highest, our ultimate ideals in this life change and pass
away. It cannot be our ambition to impose them on the future. But we <i>can </i>want
the future to recognize the character <i>of its own ancestors </i>in us.
Through our work and our nature we want to be the forerunners of that future
race (15).</blockquote></span><span style="line-height: 107%;">There are two parts to this argument, which modern readers
need not embrace in full. The first is the attack on economic rationality on
grounds that it occludes genuine moral considerations while imposing instead
ostensibly-non-moral criteria of efficiency, production, consumption, and
equality. The second is that economic policy ought to be guided by
considerations of national greatness and cultural excellence. </span></span>I certainly share the dislike with liberal, economistic rationality, while rejecting Weber's overly-enthusiastic anti-moralism (though I think there is a sensible way of reading Weber that separates him more fully from Nietzschean themes. A proper, moralized political theory should have no trouble building considerations of national partiality into a explicitly normative philosophical position).</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 107%;"><br /> </span><span style="line-height: 107%;">Still, what is undeniable here is a resonance with
contemporary complaints about the tyranny of economic reasoning at the expense
of genuinely political considerations. Weber does not mean to reject the use of
market institutions, but he does wish to reject the thought that markets serve
autonomous ends that cannot be directed by political control:</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 107%;"><blockquote>We do not mean, as some strange misunderstanding would have
it, ‘help from the state’ rather than ‘self-help’, state regulation of economic
life rather than the free play of economic forces. In using this slogan of ‘reason
of state’ we wish to present the demand that the economic and political
power-interests of our nation and their bearer, the German nation-state, should
have the final and decisive say in all questions of German economic policy,
including the questions of whether, and how far, the state should intervene in
economic life, or of whether and when it is better for it to free the economic
forces of the nation from their fetters and to tear down the barriers in the
way of their autonomous development (17).</blockquote></span><span style="line-height: 107%;">3. The Vocation of Political Rule</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 107%;"><br /></span><span style="line-height: 107%;">This leads to the third section of the lecture. How has it
has come to pass that economic rationality has taken such hold over the German
state, and how that rationality might be combated? His answer centers on the
failure of the ruling political class:<br /></span><span style="line-height: 107%;"><blockquote>We economic nationalists measure the classes who lead the
nation or aspire to do so with the one <i>political criterion </i>we regard as
sovereign. What concerns us is their <i>political maturity</i>, which is to say
their grasp of the nation’s enduring economic and political <i>power </i>interests
and their ability, in any given situation, to place these interests above all
other considerations (20-21).</blockquote> </span><span style="line-height: 107%;">A nation needs a political ruling class because the mass of
the people cannot be relied on to remember and commit to the existential
questions of national sovereignty or political rule. With the exception of
momentary war or crisis, the mass of the people are not interested in questions
of reason-of-state, but are preoccupied with more mundane questions of economic
wealth and inequality.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 107%;"><br /> </span><span style="line-height: 107%;">The trouble is that political leadership and economic dominance
traditionally go together. This was fine for Germany throughout the latter half
of the nineteenth century, as the economically dominant Junkers (and their
embodiment, Bismarck) brought the political instincts necessary for capable, national
rule. Yet today, in a world of industrial, globalized, capitalism, it is clear
that the time for Junker leadership has passed. The person of Bismarck again
typifies that obsolescence. Seeing him today is like seeing a ghost from a past
life. It is as if “a ghost had stepped down from a great era of the past and
was moving about among a new generation, and through a world that had become
alien to it” (23).</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 107%;"><br /></span><span style="line-height: 107%;">So if the Junkers are done, what is the new, leading
political class? The first candidate is the middle class. Yet Weber insists
that the bourgeoisie lacks “the maturity today to be the leading political
class of the nation” (23). This is clear in their failure to establish a German
empire, an obvious test of their capacity to govern with an eye toward national
greatness. Why is the bourgeoisie so politically incapable?</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 107%;"><blockquote>The reason is to be found in its unpolitical past, in the
fact that it was not possible to catch up on a century of missed political
education in a single decade, and in the fact that rule by a great man is not
always a means of educating the people politically. The vital question for the
political future of the German bourgeoisie is whether it is too <i>late </i>for
it to make up the lost ground. No <i>economic </i>factor can substitute for
such education (25).</blockquote></span><span style="line-height: 107%;">The proletariat is even less prepared to take up the work of
political leadership. The English and French working class are in better shape,
Weber claims, because of their history of organized struggle. But in Germany,
the proletariat falls into crude, moralistic philistinism. The working class can
only lead once it establishes an “aristocracy of labor” that can responsibly
govern the German nation. (Think here, of course, of the contrast between the “ethic
of conviction” and the “ethic of responsibility” made famous in “Politics as a
Vocation”).</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 107%;"><br /></span><span style="line-height: 107%;">The tragedy of modern Germany is that no class seems capable
of political leadership. The key task of political science and economics must
therefore be “political education.” It is not enough to address questions of
economic growth or wealth distribution. What is needed is a ruling class
attuned to the core demand of national greatness. As Weber concludes in his
stirring, tragic, German way:<br /></span><span style="line-height: 107%;"><blockquote>Even in the face of the enormous misery among the masses of
the nation which weighs so heavily on the sharpened social conscience of the
new generation, we have to confess sincerely that it is our awareness of our
responsibility <i>before history </i>that weighs even more heavily on us today.
It is not given to our generation to see whether the fight we are engaged in
will bear fruit, nor whether posterity will acknowledge <i>us as its
forefathers</i>. We shall not succeed in exorcising the curse that hangs over
us (that of being the belated offspring of a great, but past political epoch),
unless we discover how to become something different: the precursors of an even
greater epoch. Will that be our place in history? I do not know, and I will say
only this: youth has the right to stand up for itself and for its ideals. Yet
it is not years which make a man old. He is young as long as he is able to feel
the <i>great </i>passions nature has implanted in us. … it is not the burden of
thousands of years of glorious history that causes a great nation to grow old.
It will remain young as long as it has the capacity and the courage to keep
faith with itself and with the great instincts it has been given, and if its
leading strata are able to raise themselves into the hard, clear air in which
the sober work of German politics flourishes, an atmosphere which, however, is
also filled with the earnest grandeur of national sentiment (27-8).</blockquote><p>I have recently been increasingly struck by the degree to which this preoccupation with serious, political leadership dominates late nineteenth and early twentieth century thinking. I've blogged before about its various formulations in <a href="http://dhalikias.blogspot.com/2020/12/gramsci-on-historical-materialism.html">Gramsci</a> (<a href="http://dhalikias.blogspot.com/2020/12/gramsci-on-caesarism-and-napoleon-iii.html">and here</a>) (who cites and is clearly influenced by Weber's critique of economism) and <a href="http://dhalikias.blogspot.com/2020/10/frank-knight-on-self-destruction-of.html">Frank Knight</a> (an important Weber translator). There are also important resonances with Friedrich Meinecke's <a href="http://dhalikias.blogspot.com/2020/11/on-friedrich-meineckes-cosmopolitanism.html">conservative nationalism</a>.</p></span></span></div>
Dimitrios Halikiashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14687167606022949419noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2908609428851727972.post-31954377508470775582021-01-27T16:38:00.003-08:002021-01-27T16:38:36.918-08:00Lukacs and Tocqueville on Democratic v. Aristocratic HistoryThe central tension of Marxist history is summed up in a famous passage from the opening lines of the <i><a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ch01.htm">18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte</a></i>: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.” (I've blogged about <i>18th Brumaire </i><a href="http://dhalikias.blogspot.com/2020/11/reading-18th-brumaire-in-2020.html">here</a> and on Gramsci's reading <a href="http://dhalikias.blogspot.com/2020/12/gramsci-on-caesarism-and-napoleon-iii.html">here</a>).<br /><br />On the one hand, men make their own history. History is the product of human deeds, be they conscious or unconscious. The history of emerging class consciousness is a history of achieving ever more deliberate control over the shape of that history, a deliberate control that will only be fully transparent and voluntary in a society of revolutionary communism. On the other hand, the terms by which men make their history are dictated by inherited material conditions: “The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.” Thus Marxists famously claim that history is shaped by laws of evolutionary development.<div><br />Georg Lukacs insists that a proper understanding of Marxist history must incorporate these two dimensions—history is the product of human will constrained by structural tendencies bound up with the existing conditions of society.</div><div><br /> To take on board only one of these two dimensions—an omnipotent will OR eternal laws—is to think one-sidedly.</div><div><br /> Those who believe that history is determined by natural laws (like the overly scientific materialist Marxists) are prone to the dangers of passivity, while those who favor a purely Promethean vision of historical change make the mistake of Great Manism.</div><div><br />In “<a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/lukacs/works/history/lukacs3.htm">Class Consciousness</a>” he summarizes the two visions. First, against a vision of history as governed by immutable law:<br /><blockquote>In the first case it ceases to be possible to understand the origin of social institutions. The objects of history appear as the objects of immutable, eternal laws of nature. History becomes fossilized in a formalism incapable of comprehending that the real nature of socio-historical institutions is that they consist of relations between men. On the contrary, men become estranged from this, the true source of historical understanding and cut off from it by an unbridgeable gulf. As Marx points out, people fail to realise “that these definite social relations are just as much the products of men as linen, flax, etc” (49 in <a href="https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/history-and-class-consciousness">Livingstone</a>)</blockquote>So the problem with the law-based theory of history is that it reproduces a mistaken reification. It forgets that what we call “laws” are themselves human creations and are therefore ultimately subject to human control. By forgetting that fact, we transform something WE create into an ALIEN FORCE that constrains us. “Supply and demand” are not laws of the universe, but artifacts of unintentional human construction.</div><div><br /> Second, against a vision of history as the putty of omnipotent will:<br /><blockquote>In the second case, history is transformed into the irrational rule of blind forces which is embodied at best in the “spirit of the people” or in “great men.” It can therefore only be described pragmatically but it cannot be rationally understood. Its only possible organization would be aesthetic, as if it were a piece of art.</blockquote> Marx transcends these one-sided errors. He shows that history is both created and law-like, subject to the control of human will but characterized by certain structural tendencies.</div><div><br /> Lukacs makes this point again in his “<a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/lukacs/works/history/hcc05.htm">Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat</a>:”</div><div><blockquote>As a result of its incapacity to understand history, the contemplative attitude of the bourgeoisie became polarized into two extremes: on the one hand, there were the “great individuals” viewed as the autocratic makers of history, on the other hand, there were the “natural laws” of the historical environment. They both turn out to be equally impotent—whether they are separated or working together—when challenged to produce an interpretation of the present in all its radical novelty (158). </blockquote>Many socialists—even vulgar Marxists—are too quick to accept a vision of history as governed by natural laws. So doing, they fall into a destructive fatalism. It is critical, therefore, to distinguish “fact” and “tendency” (183). The proletariat, Lukacs argues, is the true revolutionary agent, and as such embodies the dialectical solution to the central problem of German idealism: overcoming the gap between subject and object, between agency and world.</div><div><br /> The proletariat consciously makes its own totalizing history, thus combining will and reason, the revolutionary power of the voluntarist agent and the objective reality of a rational order. Lukacs summarizes:</div><div><blockquote>The self-understanding of the proletariat is therefore simultaneously the objective understanding of the nature of society. When the proletariat furthers its own class-aims it simultaneously achieves the conscious realization of the—objective—aims of society, aims which would inevitably remain abstract possibilities and objective frontiers but for this conscious intervention (149).</blockquote>Very interesting.</div><div><br />What strikes me as also interesting is the similarity between Lukacs’ diagnosis of the two failed, one-sided visions of history, and the dichotomy Tocqueville offers between democratic and aristocratic history. Tocqueville writes in a chapter of Democracy in America titled “On Certain Tendencies Peculiar to Historians in Democratic Centuries:”</div><div><blockquote>Historians who write in aristocratic centuries generally attribute everything that happens to the will and humor of certain individuals, and they are likely to impute the most important revolutions to the merest of accidents. They shrewdly elucidate the smallest of causes and often fail to notice the greatest (569 in the <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/469599/democracy-in-america-the-arthur-goldhammer-translation-volume-two-by-alexis-de-tocqueville/#:~:text=Democracy%20in%20America%20is%20arguably,two%2Dvolume%20Paperback%20Classics%20edition.">Goldhammer translation</a>).</blockquote>This is a mistake akin to Lukacs’ one-sided bourgeois historian who imagines that great men and contingency drive history. Historians in democratic societies, Tocqueville continues, fall into the opposite extreme:<br /><blockquote>Most of them attribute almost no influence over the destiny of the species to the individual and no influence over the fate of the people to citizens. On the other hand, they ascribe great general causes to the most insignificant particular facts (569).</blockquote>Like Lukacs, Tocqueville criticizes this deterministic approach to history as yielding a pathetic, helpless passivity:<br /><blockquote>Thus historians who live in democratic times not only deny certain citizens the power to act on the fate of the people but also deny peoples themselves the ability to shape their own destiny, thereby making them subject to either inflexible providence or a sort of blind fatality. According to such historians, the destiny of every nation is irrevocably fixed by its position, origin, antecedents, and nature, and nothing it does can change that. They see each generation as firmly linked to the preceding one, and in this way they proceed backward in time, from era to era and necessary event to necessary event, all the way back to the origin of the world, forging a long, closely linked chain that encompasses and binds the entire human race (572).</blockquote>Tocqueville favors the aristocratic history at least as a corrective to democratic passivity: “The historians of Antiquity taught men how to command; today’s historians teach little but how to obey.” (Fair enough, but perhaps Tocqueville's famous proclamations of the "providential fact" of democracy make him a teacher of passivity).</div><div><br />Still, I see plenty of truth in the joint Lukacs-Tocqueville diagnosis. We today are slaves of forces the economists purport to understand: Supply and Demand, Bond Spreads, Gresham’s Law.</div><div><br /> On the one hand, shouldn’t we believe—with Marx and Lukacs and Tocqueville’s aristocratic historian—that these economic forces are simply inventions of human institutions? Shouldn’t that imply that we can change them should we so desire?</div><div><br /> (I distinctly remember failing to understand in 2008 how the entire global economy could collapse all at once. I recall asking my father, an economist “if everyone is bankrupt, can’t we just reset and start over?” I know that was a stupid question, but I'm not entirely sure why).</div><div><br /> Yet at the same time, OF COURSE these laws are real. Even if they aren’t fundamental facts of the universe, they are structural tendencies that OF COURSE constrain what we can and should do. </div><div><br /> Gramsci says something helpful about this. He writes about the problem of economic “laws:” how can we simultaneously recognize their existence AND their contingency? Gramsci writes:<br /><blockquote>Given these conditions in which classical economics was born, in order to be able to talk about a new science or a new conception of economic science (which is the same thing), it would be necessary to have demonstrated that new relations of forces, new conditions, new premises, have been establishing themselves, in other words, that a new market has been “determined” with a new “automatism” and phenomenism of its own, which present themselves as something “objective”, comparable to the automatism of natural phenomena. Classical economics has given rise to a “critique of political economy” but it does not seem to me that a new science or a new conception of the scientific problem has yet been possible. The “critique” of political economy starts from the concept of the historical character of the “determined market” and of its “automatism”, whereas pure economists conceive of these elements as “eternal” and “natural”; the critique analyses in a realistic way the relations of forces determining the market, it analyses in depth their contradictions, evaluates the possibilities of modification connected with appearance and strengthening of new elements and puts forward the “transitory” and “replaceable” nature of the science being criticized; it studies it as life but also as death and finds at its heart the elements that will dissolve it and supersede it without fail </blockquote><blockquote>...</blockquote><blockquote> It is from these considerations that one must start in order to establish what is meant by “regularity”, “law”, “automatism” in historical facts. It is not a question of “discovering” a metaphysical law of “determinism”, or even of establishing a “general” law of causality. It is a question of bringing out how in historical evolution relatively permanent forces are constituted which operate with a certain regularity and automatism. Even the law of large numbers, although very useful as a model of comparison, cannot be assumed as the “law” of historical events (412).</blockquote>(<a href="http://dhalikias.blogspot.com/2020/12/gramsci-on-historical-materialism.html">See here for more</a> on Gramsci’s views of historical materialism and the balance of agency and determinism). Lukacs and Gramsci hope to make sense of a Marxist theory of history that is simultaneously historicist and rational. That is the permanent problem of dialectical history.<br /> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
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</div><div>But I suppose the niggling fear for the communist (or any generally sane person) is that we have already reached the end of history, and that the structural regularities that govern bourgeois capitalism are, in fact, here to stay. Perhaps calling market forces mere products of reified consciousness will prove hopelessly utopian. Violently breaking things—a practice I oppose—may be the only way to find out. </div>Dimitrios Halikiashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14687167606022949419noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2908609428851727972.post-86182197149642003302020-12-18T14:14:00.004-08:002021-07-19T06:55:34.121-07:00Gramsci on Historical Materialism: Political not Metaphysical<div>(I owe the great title to my friend, James)</div><div><br /></div>A running theme through Antonio Gramsci’s <i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Selections-Prison-Notebooks-Antonio-Gramsci/dp/071780397X">Prison Notebooks</a></i> is a critique of historical materialism in its more vulgar or dogmatic varieties. This shouldn’t be surprising, as the fatalistic (perhaps fideistic) character of some Marxist-inflected philosophies of history are diametrically opposed to Gramsci’s belief in the need of organized, disciplined party leadership in directing the communist revolution. As he puts it in one of many similar passages, the party must serve as a Machiavellian Prince in both channeling popular feeling and forming the conditions for the people's spontaneous power to construct a new future. The Party-Prince does not merely passively represent the proletariat, it creates the new communist citizen:<div><blockquote>The modern Prince must be and cannot but be the proclaimer and organizer of an intellectual and moral reform, which also means creating the terrain for a subsequent development of the national-popular collective will towards the realization of a superior, total form of modern civilisation. (133)</blockquote>To that end, Gramsci attacks what he terms “historical economism,” a vulgarized version of true historical materialism. Historical economism relies on a superficial, egoistic interpretation of human motivation. It suggests that men only act on the basis of conscious economic interests, not passion or emotion.</div><div><br /> This view—which is wrongly attributed to Marxism—is synecdochally described by Gramsci as a “dirty-Jewish” philosophy. He borrows that term (“<i>schmutzig-jüdische</i>”) from Marx, who uses it to <a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/theses/theses.htm">critically describe Feuerbach’s</a> cynical view of practical motivation.</div><div><br />The dirty-Jewish approach to history is something like the <i>Cui Bono</i> approach—determine who profits in narrow economic terms, and you will determine who favors what policy: “It does not take economic class formations into account, with all their inherent relations, but is content to assume motives of mean and usurious self-interest.” (163)</div><div><br />This approach produces “comical” and “monstrous” mistakes of both sociological analysis and historical prediction. It fails to appreciate the complex relationship between economic class formation and ideological construction, and it correspondingly reproduces a version of the “What’s the Matter with Kansas” fallacy. Cultural hegemony—a program of social ideology construction and promulgation—is certainly tied to a material/structural foundation, but ideas are not merely epiphenomenal consequences of deeper material realities. The connection is more complicated given the role of elites, intellectuals, and contingencies in forming and filtering the consciousness of the people. (Gramsci offers as an example the <i>filioque </i>controversy. Surely it would be absurd to explain the rival Catholic/Orthodox theological positions in narrowly material terms. Though a friend informs me that Alexander Kazhdan has proposed such an explanation. He's observed that the more politically absolutist model of Byzantium had an elective affinity with the creedal faith in the clear supremacy of God the Father, whereas the more politically diffuse West favored a theological reflection of mutual interdependence). anyway, back to Gramsci:</div><div><blockquote>The ‘economist’ hypothesis asserts the existence of an immediate element of strength—i.e. the availability of a certain direct or indirect financial backing … and is satisfied with that. But it is not enough. In this case too, an analysis of the balance of forces—at all levels—can only culminate in the sphere of hegemony and ethico-political relations. (167)</blockquote>Beyond this form of “historical economism,” Gramsci targets a more prominent mistaken interpretation of Marx’s historical materialism. Influentially developed by Plekhanov and Bukharin, self-described orthodox Marxists take an almost metaphysical materialism as the basis of their philosophy of history. The <i>locus classicus</i> of Marx’s historical materialism comes in the 1859 <a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/preface.htm">“Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy.”</a> There Marx writes:<br /><blockquote>In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or – this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms – with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure. </blockquote><blockquote>In studying such transformations it is always necessary to distinguish between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophic – in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. Just as one does not judge an individual by what he thinks about himself, so one cannot judge such a period of transformation by its consciousness, but, on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained from the contradictions of material life, from the conflict existing between the social forces of production and the relations of production. No social order is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed, and new superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the framework of the old society. </blockquote><blockquote>Mankind thus inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve, since closer examination will always show that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution are already present or at least in the course of formation. In broad outline, the Asiatic, ancient, feudal and modern bourgeois modes of production may be designated as epochs marking progress in the economic development of society. The bourgeois mode of production is the last antagonistic form of the social process of production – antagonistic not in the sense of individual antagonism but of an antagonism that emanates from the individuals' social conditions of existence – but the productive forces developing within bourgeois society create also the material conditions for a solution of this antagonism. The prehistory of human society accordingly closes with this social formation.</blockquote> Gramsci complains that Bukharin and Plekhanov neglect and misinterpret this central statement of Marx’s materialist historical method. Their reformulation of Marx’s philosophy holds that “every fluctuation of politics and ideology can be presented and expounded as an immediate expression of the structure.” Such a view, Gramsci insists, “must be contested in theory as primitive infantilism, and combated in practice with the authentic testimony of Marx, the author of concrete political and historical works” (407). He cites the 18th Brumaire in particular as a model (I’ve blogged before about <a href="http://dhalikias.blogspot.com/2020/12/gramsci-on-caesarism-and-napoleon-iii.html">Gramsci’s response to that text</a>).</div><div><br /> Engels, Gramsci notes, has already written about the dangerous tendency to distort Marx’s macro-theory of history by finding in it a dogmatic, mechanical, deterministic monocausal explanation for everything:</div><div><blockquote>The reduction of the philosophy of praxis to a form of sociology has represented the crystallization of the degenerate tendency, already criticized by Engels, and which consists in reducing a conception of the world to a mechanical formula which gives the impression of holding the whole of history in the palm of its hand” (427-8).</blockquote><div>In <a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1890/letters/90_09_21.htm">these letters</a>, Engels argues that <i>in the final analysis </i>material forces can make sense of the broad shape of history, but that material forces will not explain every particular development. Only "in the last resort" that economic realities drive human behavior. Leszek Kolakowski, it should be said, was (reasonably) annoyed at this caveat. How can we ever determine if we are at "the last resort?" He raises a Popperian falsifiability challenge: </div><blockquote>the doctrine is so imprecise that no historical investigation and no imaginable facts can refute it. Given the variety of factors of all kinds, the 'relative independence of the superstructure', 'reciprocal influence', the role of tradition, secondary causes, and so forth, any fact whatever can be fitted into the schema. As Popper observes, the schema is in this sense irrefutable and constantly self-confirming, but at the same time it has no scientific value as a means of explaining anything in the actual course of history (<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Main-Currents-Marxism-Founders-Breakdown/dp/0393329437/ref=sr_1_1?crid=18438NA13ZGPN&dchild=1&keywords=kolakowski+main+currents+of+marxism&qid=1608328617&sprefix=kolakowski+main+%2Caps%2C157&sr=8-1">Kolakowski 301</a>).</blockquote><p>Kolakowski is careful to note the caveats that Marx and Engels provide. But he insists, nonetheless, that Marx's characteristically grand rhetoric is to blame for producing the vulgar, dogmatic interpretations that Gramsci criticizes. </p> Gramsci argues that dogmatists misread Marx for two reasons. The first is that they conflate Marx’s materialism (a historical method) with metaphysical doctrines of materialism. The second is that they read Marx as providing a scientific, positivist, sociological law of human history. It is of crucial importance that Marx’s materialism be understood as a polemical reaction against German idealism, and not as an embrace of the long materialist tradition in metaphysics. This is why, for example, Marx never uses the language of a “materialist dialectic,” but instead “calls it ‘rational’ as opposed to ‘mystical’” (456-7). Breaking with Hegel does not mean embracing Lucretius. </div><div><br />Marx’s true method is simultaneously rationalistic and historicist. It does not purport to have discovered master, eternal laws of history, but merely the regularities and scientific tendencies engendered by particular historical situations:</div><div><blockquote>It has been forgotten that in the case of a very common expression [historical materialism] one should put the accent on the first term—‘historical’—and not on the second, which is of metaphysical origin. The philosophy of praxis is absolute “historicism”, the absolute secularisation and earthliness of thought, an absolute humanism of history. (465)</blockquote>And elsewhere:<br /><blockquote>It is from these considerations that one must start in order to establish what is meant by ‘regularity’, ‘law’, ‘automatism’ in historical facts. It is not a question of ‘discovering’ a metaphysical law of ‘determinism’, or even of establishing a ‘general’ law of causality. It is a question of bringing out how in historical evolution relatively permanent forces are constituted which operate with a certain regularity and automatism. (412)</blockquote>Bukharin and Plekhanov transform Marxism into sociological, metaphysical materialism. They are doing “positivistic Aristotelianism … the historical dialectic is replaced by the law of causality and the search for regularity, normality, and uniformity” (437).<br /> <br />One striking concession Gramsci makes is that this dogmatic, deterministic version of Marx’s historical materialism may have served an important role while the proletariat was politically immature. He weaves between theoretical discussions/exegeses of Marx and more immediately political treatments of tactics for seizing and wielding power.</div><div><br /> When the subaltern lacks power, it draws strength from a providentialist or deterministic theory of history. It can find some solace in believing that defeats (and outright oppression) today cannot last. The arc of justice is long, that sort of thing. But as the proletariat gains power, it needs to grasp a more explicitly activist sense of its role and agency in driving history:<br /><blockquote>When the ‘subaltern’ becomes directive and responsible for the economic activity of the masses, mechanicism at a certain point becomes an imminent danger and a revision must take place in modes of thinking because a change has taken place in the social mode of existence. The boundaries and the dominion of the “force of circumstance” become restricted. But why? Because, basically, if yesterday the subaltern element was a thing, today it is no longer a thing but an historical person, a protagonist; if yesterday it was not responsible, because “resisting” a will external to itself, now it feels itself to be responsible because it is no longer resisting but an agent, necessarily active and taking the initiative. (337)</blockquote>When the proletariat is politically mature and capable of seizing power, relying on a deterministic theory of history produces passivity and weakness. Fatalism ceases to be a source of solace and rejuvenation, and it becomes “nothing other than the clothing worn by real and active will when in a weak position” (337). The belief that “history is on our side,” when paired with a deterministic, pseudo-scientific theory of inevitability, saps the will of the proletariat:</div><div><blockquote>in the science and art of politics [scientific determinism] can have literally catastrophic results which do irreparable harm. Indeed in politics the assumption of the law of statistics as an essential law operating of necessity is not only a scientific error, but becomes a practical error in action. What is more it favours mental laziness and a superficiality in political programmes. It should be observed that political action tends precisely to rouse the masses from passivity, in other words to destroy the law of large numbers. So how can that law be considered a law of sociology? (429)</blockquote>Now that the proletariat has power within its grasp, it must move beyond the consolation of dogmatic, materialist history:<br /><blockquote>With regard to the historical role played by the fatalistic conception of the philosophy of praxis one might perhaps prepare its funeral oration, emphasizing its usefulness for a certain period of history, but precisely for this reason underlining the need to bury it with all due honours. (342)</blockquote>All this is consonant with Gramsci’s emphasis on leadership, planning, and organization and his critique of undue faith in spontaneity and inevitability. Thinkers like Rosa Luxemburg and George Sorel articulate an implicit fideism in history. Spontaneism as a political program stems from:<br /><blockquote>the iron conviction that there exist objective laws of historical development similar in kind to natural law, together with a belief in a predetermined teleology like that of a religion: since favourable conditions are inevitably going to appear, and since these, in a rather mysterious way, will bring about palingenetic events, it is evident that any deliberate initiative tending to predispose and plan these conditions is not only useless but even harmful (168).</blockquote>Gramsci, on the other hand, believes in the conjunction of historic tendencies and planned, political interventions. Marxist dialectical history offers a broad view of the direction of class struggle. It helps us to see the nature of the war, but it cannot tell us who will triumph in any given battle. Will, agency, and contingency make all the difference in the realm of real politics:<br /><blockquote>In reality one can ‘scientifically’ foresee only the struggle, but not the concrete moments of the struggle, which cannot but be the results of opposing forces in continuous movement, which are never reducible to fixed quantities since within them the quantity is continually becoming quality. In reality one can ‘foresee’ to the extent that one acts, to the extent that one applies a voluntary effort and therefore contributes concretely to creating the result ‘foreseen.’ Prediction reveals itself thus not as a scientific act of knowledge, but as the abstract expression of the effort made, the practical way of creating a collective will. (438)</blockquote>Economic crisis (the great hope of a Luxemburg or Sorel) will not itself produce historical change. It can merely create “a terrain more favourable to the dissemination of certain modes of thought” (184). The scientific theories of history are useful, in such moments, only insofar as they contribute to a powerful political will. Such analyses “acquire significance only if they serve to justify a particular practical activity, or initiative of will” (185).<br /> <br />Through all this, Gramsci echoes <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_as_a_Vocation">Weber’s famous call</a> for an “ethic of responsibility” as opposed to an “ethic of conviction.” Where Weber targets moralists unable to see the real demands of politics, Gramsci targets anti-moralist materialists who counsel passivity and overconfidence. That won’t do:<br /><blockquote>Mass ideological factors always lag behind mass economic phenomena … at certain moments, the automatic thrust due to the economic factor is slowed down, obstructed or even momentarily broken by traditional ideological elements—hence … there must be a conscious, planned struggle to ensure that the exigencies of the economic position of the masses, which may conflict with the traditional leadership’s policies, are understood. An appropriate political initiative is always necessary to liberate the economic thrust from the dead weight of traditional policies—i.e. to change the political direction of certain forces which have to be absorbed if a new homogeneous politico-economic historical bloc, without internal contradictions, is to be successfully formed (168).</blockquote><p>"Planned struggle" is always necessary. </p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
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</div>Dimitrios Halikiashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14687167606022949419noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2908609428851727972.post-48159906734130674252020-12-15T11:24:00.004-08:002020-12-15T11:24:32.764-08:00Gramsci on Retributive Punishment<p> Gramsci's <i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Selections-Prison-Notebooks-Antonio-Gramsci/dp/071780397X">Prison Notebooks</a> </i>defends a retributive theory of punishment:</p><blockquote><p>If every State tends to create and maintain a certain type of civilisation and of citizen (and hence of collective life and individual relations), and to eliminate certain customs and attitudes and to disseminate others, then the Law will be its instrument for this purpose (together with the school system, and other institutions and activities). ... The conception of law will have to be freed from every residue of transcendentalism and from every absolute; in practice, from every moralistic fanaticism. However, it seems to me that one cannot start from the point of view that the state does not "punish" (if this term is reduced to its human significance), but only struggles against social "dangerousness". In reality, the State must be conceived of as an "educator", in as much as it tends precisely to create a new type or level of civilisation. ... The Law is the repressive and negative aspect of the entire positive, civilising activity undertaken by the State. The "prize-giving" activities of individuals and groups, etc., must also be incorporated in the conception of the Law; praiseworthy and meritorious activity is rewarded, just as criminal actions are punished. (246-7)</p></blockquote><p>Gramsci's retributivism contrasts with the positivist criminology of Enrico Ferri, a sometime socialist who became a major supporter of Mussolini's fascist regime. Ferri, following a long enlightenment tradition, rejected retribution (and perhaps rehabilitation as well) as appropriate grounds for punishment, and he favored punishment merely as a form of social deterrence. This kind of positivist penal theory remains very much alive, in, for example, the work of Steve Levitt, who recently has proposed dramatically reducing incarceration and replacing it with <a href="https://risc.uchicago.edu/#work">constant GPS monitoring</a>. Such proposals make sense if one takes deterrence and public safety to be the only good reason for punishment. They make less sense if one cares about retributive justice and rehabilitation.</p><p>As Gramsci notes, punishment is one crucial part of holistic social education. He rejects liberal neutrality and insists on the ethical character of the state:</p><p></p><blockquote>Educative and formative role of the State. Its aim is always that of creating new and higher types of civilization; of adapting the ‘civilisation’ and the morality of the broadest popular masses to the necessities of the continuous development of the economic apparatus of production; hence of evolving even physically new types of humanity. (242)</blockquote><p>Every state, knowingly or not, is what Hegel termed an "ethical state":</p><blockquote><p>every State is ethical in as much as one of its most important functions is to raise the great mass of the population to a particular cultural and moral level, a level (or type) which corresponds to the needs of the productive forces for development, and hence to the interests of the ruling class. The school as a positive educative function, and the courts as a repressive and negative educative function, are the most important State activities in this sense. (258)</p></blockquote><p>So a liberal, capitalist society might not take itself to be actively "forming" citizens in some deep moral sense, but insofar as it is preparing workers for a capitalist economy, it is doing precisely that. Rawls too recognized this (somewhat obvious) fact:</p><blockquote><p>The social system shapes the wants and aspirations that its citizens come to have. It determines in part the sort of persons they want to be as well as the sort of persons they are. Thus an economic system is not only an institutional device for satisfying existing wants and needs but a way of creating and fashioning wants in the future. (<i>Theory of Justice </i>259)</p></blockquote><p></p><div>On Gramsci's particular view, this program of citizen formation is critical for producing (one might say "manufacturing") consent. Consent is not passively received by the State, but is instead a dynamic relationship between the rulers and ruled. Citizens give consent and the State actively forms the citizens to consent. This is what Gramsci terms "organic consent" as mediated by the totalitarian political party:</div><blockquote><div>This is precisely the function of law in the State and in society; through "law" the State renders the ruling group "homogeneous", and tends to create a social conformism which is useful to the ruling group's line of development. The general activity of law (which is wider than purely State and governmental activity and also includes the activity involved in directing civil society, in those zones which the technicians of law call legally neutral--i.e. in morality and in custom generally) serves to understand the ethical problem better, in a concrete sense. In practice, this problem is the correspondence "spontaneously and freely accepted" between the acts and the admissions of each individual, between the conduct of each individual and the ends which society sets itself as necessary--a correspondence which is coercive in the sphere of positive law technically understood, and is spontaneous and free (more strictly ethical) in those zones in which "coercion" is not a State affair but is effected by public opinion, moral climate, etc." (195-6)</div></blockquote><p></p><blockquote><p> </p></blockquote><p></p>Dimitrios Halikiashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14687167606022949419noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2908609428851727972.post-77019034415967471362020-12-08T11:59:00.004-08:002020-12-15T04:57:52.427-08:00Gramsci on Caesarism and Napoleon III (and Trump?)<p>Antonio Gramsci's <i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Selections-Prison-Notebooks-Antonio-Gramsci/dp/071780397X">Prison Notebooks</a> </i>have much to say about moments of crisis and Caesarism. Because I have a parochial mind, I cannot help but read these discussions (and especially <a href="http://dhalikias.blogspot.com/2020/11/reading-18th-brumaire-in-2020.html">the treatment of Napoleon III, <i>pace </i>Marx</a>) without thinking of Donald Trump and our present political moment.</p><p>He defines an "organic crisis" as the moment when:</p><blockquote><p>social classes become detached from their traditional parties. In other words, the traditional parties in that particular organisational form, with the particular men who constitute, represent, and lead then, are no longer recognised by their class (or fraction of a class) as its expression. When such crises occur, the immediate situation becomes delicate and dangerous, because the field is open for violent solutions, for the activities of unknown forces, represented by charismatic 'men of destiny.' (210)</p></blockquote><p>A political crisis is a moment of partisan breakdown. The parties imperfectly represent certain social classes or groups. They wield power both through the coercive force of state authority and through more subtle forms of cultural control (what Gramsci famously calls "hegemony"). This is a dynamic process by which parties both represent (passively) the demands of certain classes, while also forming (actively) the consciousness and ideology of those classes:</p><blockquote><p>if it is true that parties are only the nomenclature for classes, it is also true that parties are not simply a mechanical and passive expression of those classes, but react energetically upon them in order to develop, solidify, and universalise them. (227)</p></blockquote><p>In a crisis of authority, the represented classes no longer see themselves represented by their political parties. </p><p>Two things can happen when a crisis of this sort emerges. The first option--what Gramsci terms the "organic" option--is for a new political party to realign itself to more fully represent the interests of its old class or a new coalition of classes:</p><blockquote><p>The passage of the troops of many different parties under the banner of a single party, which better represents and resumes the needs of the entire class, is an organic and normal phenomenon, even if its rhythm is very swift ... It represents the fusion of an entire social class under a single leadership, which alone is held to be capable of solving an overriding problem of its existence and of fending off a mortal danger. (211)</p></blockquote><p>But parties are not always able to produce the necessary realignment to overcome a crisis: "they are not always capable of adapting themselves to new tasks and to new epochs, nor of evolving <i>pari passu </i>with the overall relations of force (and hence the relative position of their class) in the country in question, or in the international field" (211). </p><p>Parties become decadent and stultified. They fail to actively build an attractive vision of politics and to form party members as committed, ideological loyalists. Again, this is partly a passive failure of the parties--a failure to cultivate a program--and an active failure--an abandonment of core class interests.</p><p>When parties fail to resolve a crisis, a Caesarist, charismatic leader steps in. The model Gramsci has in mind here is Napoleon III. A Caesarist of his sort arose from a peculiar kind of partisan crisis:</p><blockquote><p>Caesarism can be said to express a situation in which the forces in conflict balance each other in a catastrophic manner; that is to say, they balance each other in such a way that a continuation of the conflict can only terminate in their reciprocal destruction. When the progressive force A struggles with the reactionary force B, not only may A defeat B or B defeat A, but it may happen that neither A nor B defeats the other--that they bleed each other mutually and then a third force C intervenes from outside, subjugating what is left of both A and B. (219)</p></blockquote><p>The Caesarist comes from outside of a stale, unresponsive, mutually destructive conflict between the parties of left and right. The classic means by which a Caesarist comes to power is by military coup, but Gramsci notes that new forms of legal usurpation are more likely to be common in the modern world of parliamentary government and capitalist economics:</p><blockquote><p>In the modern world, with its great economic-trade-union and party-political coalitions, the mechanism of the Caesarist phenomenon is very different from what it was up to the time of Napoleon III. In the period up to Napoleon III, the regular military forces or soldiers of the line were a decisive element in the advent of Caesarism, and this came about through quite precise <i>coups d'etat</i>, through military actions, etc. In the modern world trade-union and political forces, with the limitless means which may be at the disposal of small groups of citizens, complicate the problem. The functionaries of the parties and economic unions can be corrupted or terrorised, without any need for military action in the grand style--of the Caesar of 18 Brumaire type (220).</p></blockquote><p>So now the Caesarist moment can operate within the institutional structures of capitalist, parliamentary society. The Caesarist can emerge from within an established if discredited political party.</p><p>All this seems to be a reasonable description of the much-discussed "populist" moment across Western politics. Trump and Brexit are often taken to have emerged from a failure of political parties to represent their traditional social classes. A sense of elite betrayal (a collapse of Gramscian hegemony, you might say), led to explosive reactions and an opening for new political possibilities. The question was whether this crisis would be resolved by an old party reforming itself to more fully represent a new social coalition, or for a Caesarist "man of destiny" to emerge to fill the void.</p><p>(I should note also that Gramsci says the Caesarist need not be a single man, which may help me brute-force Brexit into this discussion).</p><p>Gramsci sees Caesarism as dangerous, and he would prefer it if a disciplined, organized, ideological party could emerge to fill the space opened up by a political crisis. But Caesarism is not always reactionary--in certain circumstances it can serve the interests of progressives:</p><blockquote><p>There can be both progressive and reactionary forms of Caesarism; the exact significance of each form can, in the last analysis, be reconstructed only through concrete history, and not by means of any sociological rule of thumb. Caesarism is progressive when its intervention helps the progressive force to triumph, albeit with its victory tempered by certain compromises and limitations. It is reactionary when its intervention helps the reactionary force to triumph--in this case too with certain compromises and limitations ... Caesar and Napoleon I are examples of progressive Caesarism. Napoleon III and Bismarck of reactionary Caesarism (219).</p></blockquote><p>The Caesarist is progressive when it transcends political stalemate to advance to a new, higher form of politics. Reactionary Caesarism holds back the forces of history and represents, ultimately, only a momentary disruption. The classic distinction here is between Napoleon I and III (the Uncle and the Nephew):</p><blockquote><p>The Caesarism of Caesar and Napoleon I was, so to speak, of a quantitative/qualitative character; in other words it represented the historical phase of passage from one type of State to another type--a passage in which the innovations were so numerous, and of such a nature, that they represented a complete revolution. The Caesarism of Napooleon III was merely, and in a limited fashion, quantitative; there was no passage from one type of State to another, but only 'evolution' of the same type along unbroken lines. (222)</p></blockquote><p>Most modern Caesarists, Gramsci insists, are like Napoleon III. They do not represent any real transcendence, but merely a momentary distraction from a stable, underlying stalemate.</p><p>Trump represents precisely this sort of momentary, historically insignificant Caesarism. Though <a href="https://americancompass.org/the-commons/a-multi-ethnic-working-class-conservatism/">Oren Cass and others on the intellectual right</a> hope to harness the possibilities revealed by Trump's political success--they aim to build a new working class, multiracial, patriotic, populist conservatism--there seems to me no indication that they are remotely serious or likely to succeed in their venture. In a Gramscian vein, we might say that they simply lack the organized, disciplined tool of a real party institution to direct spontaneous sentiments into real politics.</p><p>There will ultimately be nothing "epochal" about Trump. He will not have led to a reorganization of Republican party politics. Nor will he have successfully galvanized more ambitious progressive party politics. (Gramsci offers the Dreyfus affair as an example of a rightwing Caesarist moment having progressive historical implications for mobilizing and activating the political left). Instead, the stalemates and mediocrities of American political life will carry on basically unchanged. The Republican Party <i>might </i>favor giving parents 43 dollars a year in a new affordable family tax credit, but there is no question they will continue to focus on repealing Obamacare and cutting taxes as their overwhelming national priorities. Joe Biden's Democrats, for their part, will govern in a manner indistinguishable from Obama-Clinton-Blair (even if they occasionally use slightly more exciting rhetoric). From the point of view of history and Mars, nothing has changed in American politics.</p><p>I should add here that many intelligent people disagree with me. They think that we have a real opportunity for a new kind of politics. I think they are wrong. But Gramsci is helpful on this point. He points out that political prediction and political activity are not separable activities. After all, politics is distinct from the natural sciences because it turns, ultimately, on human will:</p><blockquote><p>it is absurd to think of a purely "objective" prediction. Anybody who makes a prediction has in fact a "programme" for whose victory he is working, and his prediction is precisely an element contributing to that victory. This does not mean that prediction need always be arbitrary and gratuitous, or simply tendentious. Indeed one might say that only to the extent to which the objective aspect of prediction is linked to a programme does it acquire its objectivity: 1. because strong passions are necessary to sharpen the intellect and help make intuition more penetrating; 2. because reality is a product of the application of human will to the society of things ... therefore if one excludes all voluntarist elements, or if it is only other people's wills whose intervention one reckons as an objective element in the general interplay of forces, one mutilates reality itself. (171)</p></blockquote><p>(I think that's a very interesting account of the connection between theory and practice. But back to the main point). </p><p>What would a real, world-historical crisis look like? Gramsci hoped that the crisis of parliamentary politics in his day would give rise (if properly organized and led by a responsible party) to a new communist epoch. </p><p>There's something generally quite striking about "crisis" theory. A philosophy of history which supposes that certain crisis will catapult society into a more advanced age always seems to me to retain a hint of deep pessimism. "We are living through the crises of late-stage capitalism. These contradictions are maturing. They cannot survive. The revolution is coming." Lurking behind that revolutionary optimism is niggling fear: "Maybe liberal, capitalist mediocrity actually is stable. Maybe this pathetic society will go on indefinitely."</p><p>Gramsci seems to me equivocal here. He thinks we will not go back to the old ossified ideologies, and he is hopeful that the spread of "materialism" (i.e. of communism) will finally take hold. But he is less than fully confident:</p><blockquote><p>That aspect of the modern crisis which is bemoaned as a "wave of materialism" is related to what is called the "crisis of authority." If the ruling class has lost its consensus, i.e. is no longer "leading" but only "dominant," exercising coercive force alone, this means precisely that the great masses have become detached from their traditional ideologies, and no longer believe what they used to believe previously, etc. The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear ... The problem is the following: can a rift between popular masses and ruling ideologies as serious as that which emerged after the war be "cured" by the simple exercise of force, preventing the new ideologies from imposing themselves? Will the interregnum, the crisis whose historically normal solution is blocked in this way, necessarily be resolved in favour of a restoration of the old? Given the character of the ideologies, this can be ruled out--yet not in the absolute sense. Meanwhile physical depression will lead in the long run to a widespread scepticism, and a new "arrangement" will be found--in which, for example, catholicism will even more become simply Jesuitism, etc.</p></blockquote><blockquote><p>From this too one may conclude that highly favourable conditions are being created for an unprecedented expansion of historical materialism. The very poverty which at first inevitably characterises historical materialism as a theory diffused widely among the masses will help it spread. The death of the old ideologies takes the form of scepticism with regard to all theories and general formulae; of application to the pure economic fact (earnings, etc.), and to a form of politics which is not simply realistic in fact (this was always the case) but which is cynical in its immediate manifestation </p></blockquote><blockquote>... But this reduction to economics and to politics means precisely a reduction of the highest superstructures to the level of those which adhere more closely to the structure itself--in other words, the possibility and necessity of creating a new culture. (276) </blockquote>Dimitrios Halikiashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14687167606022949419noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2908609428851727972.post-12879687424167930312020-12-06T12:23:00.003-08:002020-12-06T12:27:49.086-08:00Gramsci on Parties and Political Order<p> Antonio Gramsci writes in his<i> <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Selections-Prison-Notebooks-Antonio-Gramsci/dp/071780397X">Prison Notebooks</a></i>:</p><blockquote><p>all political parties (those of subordinates as well as ruling groups) also carry out a policing function--that is to say, the function of safeguarding a certain political and legal order. If this were conclusively demonstrated, the problem would have to be posed in other terms; it would have to bear, in other words, on means and the procedures by which such a function is carried out. Is its purpose one of repression or of dissemination; in other words, does it have a reactionary or a progressive character? Does the given party carry out its policing function in order to conserve an outward, extrinsic order which is a fetter on the vital forces of history; or does it carry it out in the sense of tending to raise the people to a new level of civilisation expressed programmatically in its political and legal order? (155)</p></blockquote><p>And elsewhere:</p><blockquote><p>Modern political technique became totally transformed after Forty-eight; after the expansion of parliamentarism and of the associative systems of union and party, and the growth in the formation of vast State and "private" bureaucracies (i.e. politico-private, belonging to parties and trade unions); and after the transformations which took place in the organisation of the forces of order in the wide sense--i.e. not only the public service designed for the repression of crime, but the totality of forces organised by the State and by private individuals to safeguard the political and economic domination of the ruling class. In this sense, entire "political" parties and other organisations--economic or otherwise--must be considered as organs of political order, of an investigational and preventive character" (220-1). </p></blockquote><p>American political commentary appears to be perpetually worked up over the state of the norms. Donald Trump's GOP is said to have destroyed important, unwritten rules that are fundamental for the preservation of a liberal, constitutional order. In response, conservative commentators retort that it was the democrats who first began the assault on norms (Bork etc.) and that the republicans are just playing catch up. </p><p>A certain sort of enthusiastic rightwinger says: "Of course we should smash the norms. These constitutional constraints serve to entrench a liberal reigning status quo that is antithetical to our substantive political and moral priorities." </p><p>A certain sort of enthusiastic leftwinger says: "Of course we should smash the norms. These constitutional constraints serve to entrench a <b>neo</b>liberal reigning status quo that is antithetical to our substantive political and moral priorities."</p><p>This leaves the familiar liberal remainder--progressives and conservatives who search constantly for a way of restoring of restoring the norms, of bringing back certain boundaries for modern politics. </p><p>(I have a friend who likes to imagine a convention of people named Norm, walking around with slogans like "Norms are Under Attack" and "Save the Norms!")</p><p>Gramsci comments on this phenomenon. Political parties do, indeed, play a critical role in stabilizing the prevailing legal order. Many communists of his generation thought that the very existence of a constitutional order is reactionary (Marx is famously hostile to the idea of a constitutional state. Think about his discussion in the <i><a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ch07.htm">18th Brumaire</a> </i>on how the autonomy of a bureaucratic "state machinery" represents a reactionary threat to the proletariat, or his famous quip from the "<a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm#007">Manifesto</a>" that "the executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie"). But Gramsci sees an important role for politics not merely as an epiphenomenon of deeper material forces, but as necessary for the organization and direction of spontaneous social movements.</p><p>Gramsci's observation here is that a settled state machinery is not intrinsically reactionary or progressive. Depending on the circumstances, an established political order can advance the cause of either rightwing or leftwing politics. The status quo is not static, it always brings with it ideological movement. This is why conservatives need not reflexively defend the prevailing order, nor should progressives always desire its abolition. Principled conservatives can favor destruction, and principled radicals, preservation.</p><p>He continues:</p><blockquote><p>In fact, a law finds a lawbreaker: 1. among the reactionary social elements whom it has dispossessed; 2. among the progressive elements whom it holds back; 3. among those elements which have not yet reached the level of civilisation which it can be seen as representing. The policing function of a party can hence be either progressive or regressive. It is progressive when it tends to keep the dispossessed reactionary forces within the bounds of legality, and to raise the backward masses to the level of the new legality. It is regressive when it tends to hold back the vital forces of history and to maintain a legality which has been superseded, which is anti-historical, which has become extrinsic. Besides, the way in which the party functions provides discriminating criteria. When the party is progressive it functions "democratically" (democratic centralism); when the party is regressive it functions "bureaucratically" (bureaucratic centralism). (155)</p></blockquote>Dimitrios Halikiashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14687167606022949419noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2908609428851727972.post-77173115159685050782020-12-03T08:18:00.003-08:002020-12-28T07:12:44.713-08:00Hobbes, Newman, Huck Finn, and the Failure of Conscience<p><span style="font-family: inherit;">Thomas Hobbes is famously skeptical of private judgment and individual moral conscience. From <i>Leviathan </i>chapter 29, "<a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3207/3207-h/3207-h.htm#link2H_4_0398">Those Things that Weaken a Commonwealth</a>:"</span></p><blockquote><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">I observe that the <i>Diseases </i>of a Common-wealth, that proceed from the poyon of seditious doctrines; whereof one is, <i>That every private man is Judge of Good and Evill actions</i>. This is true in the condition of meer Nature, where there are no Civiill Lawes; and also under Civill Government, in such cases as are not determined by the Law. But otherwise, it is manifest, that the measure of Good and Evill actions, is the Civill Law; and the Judge the Legislator, who is alwayes *the Representative* of the Common-wealth. From this false doctrine men are disposed to debate with themselves, and dispute the commands of the Common-wealth; and afterwards to obey or disobey them, as in their private judgments they shall think fit. Whereby the Common-wealth is distracted and <i>Weakened</i>.</span></p></blockquote><blockquote><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">Another doctrine repugnant to Civill Society, is, that <i>whatsoever a man does against his Conscience, is Sinne</i>, and it dependeth on the presumption of making himselfe judge of Good and Evill. For a mans Conscience, and his Judgment is the same thing; and as the Judgment, so also the Conscience may be erroneous. Therefore, though he that is subject to no Civill Law, sinneth in all he does against his Conscience, becasue he has no other rule to follow but his own reason; yet it is not so with him that lives in a Common-wealth; because the Law is the publique Conscience, by which he hath already undertaken to be guided. Otherwise in such diversity, as there is of private consciences, which are but private opinions, the Common-wealth must needs be distracted, and no man dare to obey the Soveraign Power, farther than it shall seem in his own eyes. </span></p></blockquote><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">Huck Finn typifies the failure of conscience to reliably track the truth, but even more so, perhaps, the dangers of substituting "publique Conscience" for private judgment. (Or rather, the practical difficulty of divorcing the two). His conscience condemns him for helping Jim escape to freedom. From chapter 16 of <i><a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/76/76-h/76-h.htm#c1">Huckleberry Finn</a> </i>(censoring the n-word):</span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;"></p><blockquote><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Jim said it made him all over trembly and feverish to be so close to freedom. Well, I can tell you it made me all over trembly and feverish, too, to hear him, because I begun to get it through my head that he <i>was</i> most free—and who was to blame for it? Why, <i>me</i>. I couldn’t get that out of my conscience, no how nor no way. It got to troubling me so I couldn’t rest; I couldn’t stay still in one place. It hadn’t ever come home to me before, what this thing was that I was doing. But now it did; and it stayed with me, and scorched me more and more. I tried to make out to myself that I warn’t to blame, because I didn’t run Jim off from his rightful owner; but it warn’t no use, conscience up and says, every time, “But you knowed he was running for his freedom, and you could a paddled ashore and told somebody.” That was so—I couldn’t get around that noway. That was where it pinched. Conscience says to me, “What had poor Miss Watson done to you that you could see her n***** go off right under your eyes and never say one single word? What did that poor old woman do to you that you could treat her so mean? Why, she tried to learn you your book, she tried to learn you your manners, she tried to be good to you every way she knowed how. <i>That’s</i> what she done.”</span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I got to feeling so mean and so miserable I most wished I was dead. I fidgeted up and down the raft, abusing myself to myself, and Jim was fidgeting up and down past me. We neither of us could keep still. Every time he danced around and says, “Dah’s Cairo!” it went through me like a shot, and I thought if it <i>was</i> Cairo I reckoned I would die of miserableness.</span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Jim talked out loud all the time while I was talking to myself. He was saying how the first thing he would do when he got to a free State he would go to saving up money and never spend a single cent, and when he got enough he would buy his wife, which was owned on a farm close to where Miss Watson lived; and then they would both work to buy the two children, and if their master wouldn’t sell them, they’d get an Ab’litionist to go and steal them.</span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">It most froze me to hear such talk. He wouldn’t ever dared to talk such talk in his life before. Just see what a difference it made in him the minute he judged he was about free. It was according to the old saying, “Give a n***** an inch and he’ll take an ell.” Thinks I, this is what comes of my not thinking. Here was this n*****, which I had as good as helped to run away, coming right out flat-footed and saying he would steal his children—children that belonged to a man I didn’t even know; a man that hadn’t ever done me no harm.</span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I was sorry to hear Jim say that, it was such a lowering of him. My conscience got to stirring me up hotter than ever, until at last I says to it, “Let up on me—it ain’t too late yet—I’ll paddle ashore at the first light and tell.”</span></p></blockquote><p>Huck Finn's conscience on this question comes back later (<a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/76/76-h/76-h.htm#c31">chapter 31</a>), after he tentatively decides to confess his role in helping Jim escape by writing a letter back to Jim's slave master:</p><blockquote><p><span style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;">I felt good and all washed clean of sin for the first time I had ever felt so in my life, and I knowed I could pray now. But I didn’t do it straight off, but laid the paper down and set there thinking—thinking how good it was all this happened so, and how near I come to being lost and going to hell. And went on thinking. And got to thinking over our trip down the river; and I see Jim before me all the time: in the day and in the night-time, sometimes moonlight, sometimes storms, and we a-floating along, talking and singing and laughing. But somehow I couldn’t seem to strike no places to harden me against him, but only the other kind. I’d see him standing my watch on top of his’n, ’stead of calling me, so I could go on sleeping; and see him how glad he was when I come back out of the fog; and when I come to him again in the swamp, up there where the feud was; and such-like times; and would always call me honey, and pet me and do everything he could think of for me, and how good he always was; and at last I struck the time I saved him by telling the men we had small-pox aboard, and he was so grateful, and said I was the best friend old Jim ever had in the world, and the</span><span style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;"> </span><i style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;">only</i><span style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;"> </span><span style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;">one he’s got now; and then I happened to look around and see that paper</span> </p></blockquote><blockquote><p><span style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;">It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a-trembling, because I’d got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself:</span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;">“All right, then, I’ll <i>go</i> to hell”—and tore it up.</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;">It was awful thoughts and awful words, but they was said. And I let them stay said; and never thought no more about reforming. I shoved the whole thing out of my head, and said I would take up wickedness again, which was in my line, being brung up to it, and the other warn’t. And for a starter I would go to work and steal Jim out of slavery again; and if I could think up anything worse, I would do that, too; because as long as I was in, and in for good, I might as well go the whole hog.</p></blockquote><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">John Henry Newman's famously difficult account of conscience is also worth noting here. With Hobbes, Newman is skeptical of any reliance on "private judgment." Yet he also insists that conscience bears the mark of divine inspiration, and is therefore in some deep sense reliable. Conscience is, Newman claims, the "aboriginal vicar of Christ," and so fundamentally veridical. Fortunately, divine revelation and the promise of an infallible authority in matters of faith and morals mutes these philosophical troubles.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">From the <a href="http://www.newmanreader.org/works/anglicans/volume2/gladstone/section5.html" style="font-style: italic;">Letter to the Duke of Norfolk</a>:</span></p><blockquote><p style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">did the Pope speak against Conscience in the true sense of the word, he would commit a suicidal act. He would be cutting the ground from under his feet. His very mission is to proclaim the moral law, and to protect and strengthen that "Light which enlighteneth every man that cometh into the world." On the law of conscience and its sacredness are founded both his authority in theory and his power in fact. Whether this or that particular Pope in this bad world always kept this great truth in view in all he did, it is for history to tell. I am considering here the Papacy in its office and its duties, and in reference to those who acknowledge its claims. They are not bound by the Pope's personal character or private acts, but by his formal teaching. Thus viewing his position, we shall find that it is by the universal sense of right and wrong, the consciousness of transgression, the pangs of guilt, and the dread of retribution, as first principles deeply lodged in the hearts of men, it is thus and only thus, that he has gained his footing in the world and achieved his success. It is his claim to come from the Divine Lawgiver, in order to elicit, protect, and enforce those truths which the Lawgiver has sown in our very nature, it is this and this only that is the explanation of his length of life more than antediluvian. The championship of the Moral Law and of conscience is his <i>raison d'être</i>. The fact of his mission is the answer to the complaints of those who feel the insufficiency of the natural light; and the insufficiency of that light is the justification of his mission.</span></p><p style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">All sciences, except the science of Religion, have their certainty in themselves; as far as they are sciences, they consist of necessary conclusions from undeniable premises, or of phenomena manipulated into general truths by an irresistible induction. But the sense of right and wrong, which is the first element in religion, is so delicate, so fitful, so easily puzzled, obscured, perverted, so subtle in its argumentative methods, so impressible by education, so biassed by pride and passion, so unsteady in its course, that, in the struggle for existence amid the various exercises and triumphs of the human intellect, this sense is at once the highest of all teachers, yet the least luminous; and the Church, the Pope, the Hierarchy are, in the Divine purpose, the supply of an urgent demand. Natural Religion, certain as are its grounds and its doctrines as addressed to thoughtful, serious minds, needs, in order that it may speak to mankind with effect and subdue the world, to be sustained and completed by Revelation.</span></p></blockquote><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;"></p>Dimitrios Halikiashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14687167606022949419noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2908609428851727972.post-55881448025663669382020-12-03T07:54:00.000-08:002020-12-03T07:54:03.265-08:00Huck Finn as Democratic Freedom<p><a href="http://dhalikias.blogspot.com/2018/12/two-visions-or-two-assessments-of.html"> cf. Plato v. Marx on democratic freedom.</a></p><p>From chapter 6 of <i><a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/74/74-h/74-h.htm#c6">The Adventures of Tom Sawyer</a></i>:</p><blockquote>Huckleberry came and went, at his own free will. He slept on doorsteps in fine weather and in empty hogsheads in wet; he did not have to go to school or to church, or call any being master or obey anybody; he could go fishing or swimming when and where he chose, and stay as long as it suited him; nobody forbade him to fight; he could sit up as late as he pleased; he was always the first boy that went barefoot in the spring and the last to resume leather in the fall; he never had to wash, nor put on clean clothes; he could swear wonderfully. In a word, everything that goes to make life precious that boy had. So thought every harassed, hampered, respectable boy in St. Petersburg.</blockquote><p>And again from <i><a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/76/76-h/76-h.htm#c1">Huckleberry Finn</a></i>:</p><blockquote>It was kind of lazy and jolly, laying off comfortable all day, smoking and fishing, and no books nor study. Two months or more run along, and my clothes got to be all rags and dirt, and I didn’t see how I’d ever got to like it so well at the widow’s, where you had to wash, and eat on a plate, and comb up, and go to bed and get up regular, and be forever bothering over a book, and have old Miss Watson pecking at you all the time. I didn’t want to go back no more. I had stopped cussing, because the widow didn’t like it; but now I took to it again because pap hadn’t no objections. It was pretty good times up in the woods there, take it all around. </blockquote>Dimitrios Halikiashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14687167606022949419noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2908609428851727972.post-45344755185039057052020-12-01T15:27:00.002-08:002020-12-01T15:30:09.399-08:00Gramsci on Liberal EducationAntonio Gramsci is surprisingly defensive of traditional, liberal education in his <i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Selections-Prison-Notebooks-Antonio-Gramsci/dp/071780397X">Prison Notebooks</a></i>. In his day, as in our own, there was growing pressure to reject classical education, and to focus instead on practical, vocational training. That tendency, Gramsci notes, comes from the demand for ever greater professional specialization (and therefore specialized training) to meet the needs of the modern, industrial economy. <div><br /></div><div>What Gramsci proposes is basically what we have today--a system of universal public education that encompasses humanistic/liberal arts subjects before specialization and vocational training. Such an education regime aims "to create the fundamental values of 'humanism,' the intellectual self-discipline and moral independence which are necessary for subsequent specialization" (32).</div><div><br /></div><div>Gramsci offers two arguments. First, he defends traditional liberal education from the charge that it is too airy or abstract or irrelevant. He takes up the defense of Greek and Latin, perhaps the most obvious candidates for removal in a progressive reform of education:</div><blockquote><div>In the old school the grammatical study of Latin and Greek, together with the study of their respective literatures and political histories, was an educational principle--for the humanistic ideal, symbolised by Athens and Rome, was diffused throughout society, and was an essential element of national life and culture. Even the mechanical character of the study of grammar was enlivened by this cultural perspective. Individual facts were not learnt for an immediate practical or professional end. The end seem disinterested, because the real interest was the interior development of personality, the formation of character by means of the absorption and assimilation of the whole cultural past of modern European civilisation. Pupils did not learn Latin and Greek in order to speak them, to become waiters, interpreters or commercial letter-writers. They learnt them in order to know at first hand the civilisation of Greece and of Rome--a civilisation that was a necessary precondition of our modern civilisation: in other words, they learnt them in order to be themselves and know themselves consciously (37).</div></blockquote><p>That's a familiar, conservative defense of the study of Western Civilization. This is our heritage, and by studying it we learn who we are and where we came from. Blah blah. Very familiar. </p><p>He goes on to defend the rigidity required of traditional ("mechanical") modes of education. The goal is not primarily to instill creativity in the pupil (though elsewhere Gramsci does favorably cite that aim), but instead to produce habits of diligence and discipline:</p><blockquote><p>In education one is dealing with children in whom one has to inculcate certain habits of diligence, precision, poise (even physical poise), ability to concentrate on specific subjects, which cannot be acquired without the mechanical repetition of disciplined and methodical acts. Would a scholar at the age of forty be able to sit for sixteen hours on end at his work-table if he had not, as a child, compulsorily, through mechanical coercion, acquired the appropriate psycho-physical habits? If one wishes to produce great scholars, one still has to start at this point and apply pressure throughout the educational system in order to succeed in creating those thousands or hundreds or even only dozens of scholars of the highest quality which are necessary to every civilisation (37).</p></blockquote><p>(I don't know many scholars today who work for sixteen hours straight. Probably because they didn't learn Greek and Latin at age 6).</p><p>He then turns to defend specifically Latin and Greek grammar instruction. It is an <i>advantage </i>that these are dead language. That means they are learned by careful parsing and by swinging between minute grammatic detail and grand cultural myths:</p><blockquote><p>Latin is learnt (or rather studied) by analysing it down to its smallest parts ... The language is dead, it is analysed as an inert object, as a corpse on the dissecting table, but it continually comes to life again in examples and in stories. Could one study Italian in the same way? Impossible. No living language could be studied like Latin: it would be and <i>would seem</i> absurd<i>. </i>... [Latin] has been studied in order to accustom children to studying in a specific manner, and to analysing an historical body which can be treated as a corpse which returns continually to life; in order to accustom them to reason, to think abstractly and schematically while remaining able to plunge back from abstraction into real and immediate life, to see in each fact or datum what is general and what is particular, to distinguish the concept from the specific instance (38).</p></blockquote><p>This education, Gramsci continues, is especially important for Marxists. It is an education in historicism, it forces students to consider historical ruptures and to appreciate the contingency of human nature. The key insight of Marx's "philosophy of praxis," Gramsci says, is that "there is no abstract 'human nature', fixed and immutable ... but that human nature is the totality of historically determined social relations, hence an historical fact which can, within certain limits, be ascertained with the methods of philology and criticism" (133).</p><p>Studying the canon allows the student to experience the transformation of human consciousness through time. That historicizing instinct is critical to acquire the capacity to imagine just how different the future might be. There is no better way to undermine a tendency to reify/naturalize the present than to understand the past.</p><blockquote><p>[the student] has plunged into history and acquired a historicising understanding of the world and of life, which becomes a second--nearly spontaneous--nature, since it is not inculcated pedantically with an openly educational intention. ... Above all a profound 'synthetic', philosophical experience was gained, of an actual historical development (39).</p></blockquote><p>For that reason, Gramsci suggests, the study of Latin and Greek would need to be replaced by some subject that could similarly (1) demand diligent study to form good work habits, (2) teach students to both master specific details while building abstract conceptual understanding, and (3) form a historicizing mindset that could allow students to see beyond their present moment.</p><p>That's Gramsci's first argument--a defense of traditional humanistic education. He then makes his second argument: a critique of vocational instruction. </p><p>The paradox Gramsci observes is that even though self-described progressives favor vocational education, such an education would produce an enormously hierarchical society:</p><blockquote><p>The most paradoxical aspect of it all is that this new type of school appears and is advocated as being democratic, while in fact it is destined not merely to crystallise them in Chinese complexities (40).</p></blockquote><p>To upset that hierarchy:</p><blockquote><p> one needs, instead of multiplying and grading different types of vocational school, to create a single type of formative school (primary-secondary) which would take the child up to the threshold of his choice of job, forming him during this time as a person capable of thinking, studying, and ruling--or controlling those who rule. The multiplication of types of vocational school thus tends to perpetuate traditional social differences; but since, within these differences, it tends to encourage internal diversification, it gives the impression of being democratic in tendency. The labourer can become a skilled worker, for instance, the peasant a surveyor or a petty agronomist. But democracy, by definition, cannot mean merely that an unskilled worker can become skilled. It must mean that every 'citizen' can 'govern' and that society places him, even if only abstractly, in a general condition to achieve this" (40).</p></blockquote><p>Vocational education appears to be democratic in its rejection of traditional, aristocratic, liberal education. But it in fact tends to produce "juridically fixed and crystallised estates rather than moving towards the transcendence of class divisions" (41).</p><p>So universal liberal education is the true democratic education, vocational training a means of ensuring social hierarchy. (Someone like Simone Weil would <a href="http://dhalikias.blogspot.com/2020/07/simone-weil-on-equality.html">probably disagree</a>. She'd argue that it is possible, perhaps only possible, to genuinely respect human equality if we learn to respect persons' equal dignity across social ranks. But her view has some difficulties too. This is an old problem for people worried about equality and meritocracy and equal opportunity etc.)</p><p>Tied to all this is Gramsci's fear that professional specialization (spurred on by educational specialization) undermines traditional forms of political leadership. The working class, if it is to take the lead in shaping a future culture and politics, needs that kind of leadership, and therefore it needs holistic, liberal education. </p><p>Here's Gramsci on the conflict between genuine leadership and technocratic specialization:</p><blockquote><p>The question is thus raised of modifying the training of technical-political personnel, completing their culture in accordance with new necessities, and of creating specialised functionaries of a new kind, who as a body will complement deliberative activity. The traditional type of political 'leader', prepared only for formal-juridical activities, is becoming anachronistic and represents a danger for the life of the [technocratic] state: the leader must have that minimum of general technical culture which will permit him, if not to 'create' autonomously the correct solution, at least to know how to adjudicate between the solutions put forward by the experts, and hence to choose the correct one from the 'synthetic' viewpoint of political technique" (28).</p></blockquote>Dimitrios Halikiashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14687167606022949419noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2908609428851727972.post-78450120772989962972020-11-09T05:14:00.004-08:002020-11-09T05:37:47.046-08:00On Friedrich Meinecke's Cosmopolitanism and the National State<p><span style="font-family: inherit;">A few months ago, some friends and I read Friedrich Meinecke's wonderful <i><a href="https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691647883/cosmopolitanism-and-the-national-state">Cosmopolitanism and the National State</a></i>, originally published in 1907. The work is an intellectual history of German nationalism, running from the reaction to the French Revolution through Bismarck and German unification. The first half is of particular note, as it traces rival strands of nationalism (liberal and conservatism) through such figures as Wilhelm von Humboldt, Novalis, Friedrich Schlegel, Johann Gotlieb Fichte, Adam M<span style="background-color: white; color: #202122;">üller, and Karl Ludwig von Haller. The treatment of each thinker is sensitive, if not comprehensive. And on the whole the book serves as a wonderful guide to German theories of national identity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. </span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">Meinecke himself is a great German nationalist, as his later, more famous works make clear. I want to flag here a few themes I found striking from this book. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">First, the role of the French Revolution in creating nationalism.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">According to a common, Whiggish view of things, Western civilization has evolved (relatively linearly) from the more particularistic and tribal to the more universalistic and cosmopolitan. Of course, as with most Whiggish interpretations, that narrative isn't just simplistic, it's totally wrong. For Meinecke, it is clear that the eighteenth century is the century of individualism and cosmopolitanism. The nineteenth century, the century of nationalism.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">The key event that sparks the transition from cosmopolitanism to nationalism is the French Revolution: "the French were the first to experience the desire for nationhood" (12). That much is clear if we think about the great trio of Revolutionary demands: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. Fraternity, in particular, stands out as a nationalist ideal. Not just a demand for universal brotherhood, the French Revolution was a call for the <i>French People </i>to exercise their <i>sovereign right as a people </i>to govern themselves. Thus, Meinecke claims, the French Revolution unleashed a liberal form of nationalism, a sense of the people's identity and destiny. Liberal nationalism is, ultimately, a commitment to self-determination and popular sovereignty.</span></p><p>Meinecke goes further, not simply periodizing an age of cosmopolitan individualism and an age of nationalism. He claims that it is "no coincidence" that an era dedicated to cultivating individual, moral personality should naturally give rise to appeals to natural character and greatness. He writes of this as a period of personal development, transitioning from a passive, vegetative state to an autonomous, moral strength:</p><blockquote><p>The nation drank the blood of free personalities, as it were, to attain personality itself. It is of no consequence here that this modern individualism was divided in itself. Its one branch, deriving from natural law and democratically oriented, sought to achieve equal rights for all, while its other branch, aristocraticlaly oriented in an intellectual sense, sought to achieve the liberation and elevation of the best minds. Democratic individualism could use the idea of the nation to fight all violations of social equality, and the same idea enabled aristocratic individualism to empathize with the masses, perceiving the forces lying dormant in them and embracing an ideal image of the people, if not the people themselves. Whether or not individualism actually achieved all its goals was not as important as the fact that everything the free and creative personality did served the nation by making its total life richer and more individual (15).</p></blockquote><p>The striving for individual self-improvement and development ultimately gives rise to a sense of national destiny and a demand for national greatness: "If the full consciousness of a great national community is once awakened and raised to an intense longing for national realization, then this longing is like a flood that pours itself into everything it can fill and is not satisfied until everything is nationalized that is at all capable of nationalization" (14).</p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">The French Revolution's ideal of liberal nationalism lives on, Meinecke claims, in the thought of such thinkers as Ernest Renan (see my <a href="http://dhalikias.blogspot.com/2020/05/ernest-renans-liberal-nationalism.html">earlier post</a>), and clearly we see its legacy in the great liberal nationalism of Woodrow Wilson.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">This leads to the second theme of note: The contrast between liberal and romantic nationalism.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">The kind of liberal nationalism embodied by the French Revolution is fundamentally focused on democratic self-government, popular sovereignty, and institutional autonomy. It is a form of <i>political nationalism</i>. The conservative reaction to the French Revolution produces a turn away from the political state, and toward the <i>cultural nation</i>. According to the revolutionary ideal, to be a part of the <i>demos </i>just means to be an active citizen engaged in the work of crafting a common life. But German conservatives reacting against Jacobinism grew increasingly disillusioned with the cheap, shallow, mechanistic vision of national life entailed by procedural appeals to popular sovereignty.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">That wasn't just a consequence of reaction. For much of the second half of the eighteenth century, German theorists (most notably Herder) had attempted to vindicate organic, cultural personality. To be German was not simply to be a part of some institutional regime, but to belong to the German <i>volk</i>. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">The problem with liberal nationalism is that "the nation was not much more here than a subdivision of humanity, a frame built out of abstract principles and without individual substance" (30). The popular plebiscite, in Renan's famous suggestion, was the ultimate institutional expression of liberal nationalism. But that brute, political, institutional vision has nothing to do with the true bonds of national identity. Paraphrasing Ranke (one of the figures he most favors), Meinecke writes: </span></p><p></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;">The subjective element seems to be completely extinguished here, the element of the conscious will that usually has an important role elsewhere in the rise in the rise of modern national consciousness. The principle is not: Whoever wants to be a nation is a nation. It is just the opposite: A nation simply <i>is</i>, whether the individuals of which it is composed want to belong to that nation or not. A nation is not based on self-determination but on pre-determination (205).</span></blockquote><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">Liberal nationalism is tied to subjective understandings (institutionally expressed through the plebiscite) of the community as a political people. But it has nothing to say about a deeper <i>identity </i>of the cultural nation. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">Edmund Burke articulated an influential version of this charge in his polemic against the French Revolution. At least as he was interpreted by romantic conservatives like Adam M<span style="background-color: white; color: #202122;">üller and Friedrich Gentz, Burke:</span></span></p><p></p><blockquote><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #202122; font-family: inherit;">struck the first decisive blow against conceptions of the state that the eighteenth century had formed on the basis of natural law and added elements to all speculation about the state that are permanently relevant. He taught us deeper respect and understanding for the irrational components of the life of the state, for the power of tradition, customs, instinct, and impulsive feelings (101).</span></span></blockquote><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">The French path to national self-identity ran through the French Revolution and therefore the demands of liberal, democratic self-government. For France, the political nation came first. For Germany, on the other hand, a sense of nationalism emerged not from a history of political autonomy, but from a sense of a distinctive cultural patrimony and heritage. This sense of cultural Germanness would only become a full, political nationalism once united with the historic experience of the Prussian state:</span></p><p><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"></span></span></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;">The
peculiar situation in Germany was that the only usable foundations for a modern
state were not available in the German nation but in the Prussian state.
However, this state alone could not supply the intellectual forces that it
needed for its nationalization but had to take them from the wide spectrum of
the German cultural nation (33).</span></blockquote><p></p><p></p><span style="font-family: inherit;"></span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">Our third theme is Meinecke's critique of an excessively romantic, cultural vision of German identity.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">Figures like Herder, Humboldt, Novalis, and Schlegel celebrate the German cultural nation. In its more eighteenth century variety (Humboldt), the German spirit represents the highest form of human achievement and individualism. The German intellectuals have discovered a romantic humanism that drives not just German national greatness, but the cause of humanity. Gradually, however, this vision grows more particularistic. Meinecke traces the increasing emphasis on German cultural personality as an end in itself. The German spirit is not merely the vanguard of the human spirit, but a valuable, distinctive person, a "macroanthropos." </span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">Romanticism is notoriously difficult to define, but a key strand that Meinecke insists on is "the idea that the universe contains in itself an endless profusion of individualities and that its unity is not loosened or shattered by this but is instead strengthened by it, so that the universe is in itself an individual and a personality" (50).</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">Novalis and Schlegel (in addition to Schiller) are the key figures in this tradition. But Meinecke ultimately finds their emphasis on personality and culture excessively anti-political. While the nation is not merely a set of institutional forms, it also is more concrete (and powerful) than a vague, mysterious sense of spiritual identity. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">One symptom of romantic nationalism's unserious naivet<span face="Roboto, arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; font-size: small;">é</span> is its tendency to idealize the culturally particularistic if anti-political social character of medieval Christendom. Novalis' 1799 essay on "<a href="https://www.starcenter.com/Novalis--Christendom.pdf">Christianity or Europe</a>" is of particular note. His love of the Middle Ages is simultaneously a love of particularity and universality. Schlegel's "<a href="https://www-cambridge-org.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/core/books/early-political-writings-of-the-german-romantics/essay-on-the-concept-of-republicanism-occasioned-by-the-kantian-tract-perpetual-peace/34E3ADB5A46913D6C67B0CBA62967BFD">Essay on the Concept of Republicanism</a>" runs further, defending not merely a universal catholic state standing above and uniting a politically fractured Christendom, but a world state governed by the postulates of reason. His romanticism ultimately makes him more cosmopolitan than Kant!</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">For Schlegel, the Holy Alliance is the most plausible means of re-establishing an ideal of Christendom, one that acts in a powerful, united way while preserving cultural diversity and particularity.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">Catholicism, Meinecke insists, is largely to blame for the unseriousness of this romantic, feudal nostalgia. For while Schlegel and Novalis consistently condemn the flatness of absolutist, French Revolutionary cosmopolitan rationality, they turn to their own version of an equally dangerous universalism:</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"></span></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;">The
cosmopolitan Enlightenment had already had an ethical and—<i>cum grano salis</i>—religious
substance. Romantic universalism, too, was ethical and highly religious. The
ethos was fundamentally different in some respects, but Enlightenment and
Romantic thinkers had a common enemy in what they thought was the unethical
state of the <i>ancient regime</i> but what was in reality the power state in
general (70).</span></blockquote><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">In associating Catholic moral universalism with liberal cosmopolitanism, Meinecke follows Carl Schmitt, whose <i><a href="https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/political-romanticism">Political Romanticism</a> </i>is often cited. Universalisms of any sort are dangerously anti-political. They invoke an airy realm of reason, while inclining toward social and cultural forms of particularism divested of real political power. The romantics, humanists, and Catholics are ultimately too anti-statist. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">One extreme version of this anti-statist commitment to Catholic moral universalism and radical particularism is the great reactionary Karl Ludwig von Haller. Haller is intensely critical of the modern state, which he credits to Hobbes and Rousseau. Modern liberal nationalism posits some kind of popular sovereignty as the ultimate basis of authority and legitimate power. But that is nonsense, Haller insists. It ignores the reality of rulers and ruled. Haller wishes to restore a medieval sense of direct, interpersonal hierarchy. He wants to do away with <i>any </i>public law conceptions of right, and to replace them all with direct claims of private law. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">There is no such thing as a liberal demos capable of self-government, just as there is no such thing as a conservative, romantic cultural <i>macroanthropos </i>personality. According to Haller:</span></p><blockquote><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">A prince's people are a scattered swarm of men, an aggregate of dependent or voluntarily subservient people with infinitely varied obligations; they have nothing in common except their common master, and among themselves they do not constitute a whole, a community (quoted on 166).</span></p></blockquote><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">Like Novalis, Haller turns to the Catholic church as the great, universal institution that can stand above neo-feudal social institutions. It is the great check on <i>Leviathan</i>, on political absolutism:</span></p><blockquote><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">But the church offered more than a cosmopolitan antidote to the cosmopolitan poison of the principles of 1789. Its universal authority and power, extending beyond nations and states, were also an effective barrier against the most dangerous enemy of the modern state and the modern nation. [Haller's] keen understanding of power and his protest against its uncontrolled development came together here once again. The patrimonial state had been destroyed by an expanding desire for power. New intellectual structures had been created that passed beyond that state and over the heads of individual rulers. First came the absolutistic power state, both permeated with the desire for inner coherence and clear separation from the outside world. In this way, the situation Haller complained of had arisen: 'The borders of states and nations are more sharply drawn than ever. Every nation wants to be alone in the world, so to speak. Everyone is isolated, cut off, separated from everyone else.' But this had not been the case when the church had had more significance. 'Were not the states within the church, so to speak, just as it was within them? ... Did it not, in a spiritual sense, cause the border between states and nations to disappear?' He thought that the church itself could once again take up its previous office of settling quarrels of the worldly potentates by its friendly and disinterested arbitration. He saw the church serving as a means of calming the waves of modern state and national life (168).</span></p></blockquote><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">Haller rejects nationalism of all sorts. He embraces, instead, the "patrimonial state." Personal, aristocratic power produces humanity. Delegated or fictitious collective power becomes despotic. The church must stand above as a means of balancing patriotism and cosmopolitanism.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">We see here how a decisive rejection of liberal nationalism can lead to perverse forms of anti-statism, on Meinecke's view. It is no accident that the Romantics and Catholics turned to theories of global federation or a new Christendom as an alternative to the French Revolutionary vision of nationalism built on popular sovereignty. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">We can now reach our fourth theme: What does Meinecke favor?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">The work traces the emergence of German, romantic, cultural ideas of nationhood as a reaction against the legal, democratic, popular-sovereignty idea of nationalism produced by the French Revolution. Meinecke welcomes that critique, but disparages the anti-statism, political naivete that comes out of neo-feudal, Catholic alternatives to liberal nationalism. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">What he favors instead, is what he terms the "conservative idea of the national state" (180). While Haller's views took an extreme anti-political turn, he nevertheless built a remarkable circle of conservatives around him that Meinecke takes to have been far more sober about the realities of political power. Their main organ was the <i>Berliner Politisches Wochenblatt</i>, which defined itself in opposition to the liberalism of the French Revolution. While sharing Haller's hostility to mechanistic, absolutist, political centralization, the circle began to embrace the national state as the most acceptable form of political unity. Their anti-revolutionary pluralism began to tie together with a more cultural, nationalistic vision of the organic, German state, championed by Savigny and others. As Meinecke puts it:</span></p><blockquote><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">It is characteristic of this conservative idea of the national state that it rejects the consolidation of the cultural nation on principle, but that it regards the cultural nation as the fertile native soil in which varied political structures grow, both large and small but all showing genuine traces of the German spirit. We can take cognizance of the cultural nation only by the blossoms it bears in colorful profusion. The cultural nation itself, vitally productive, remains hidden in dark and impenetrable depths (181-2).</span></p></blockquote><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">And he continues:</span></p><blockquote><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">Not until this point had a concept of the state been available that could oppose the ideals of the liberal and democratic national state with meaningful national values. Political Romanticism could now play off the idea of the national spirit against that of popular sovereignty. Against the defined, autonomous personality of the nation it could set the imaginative concept of a total German nationality, which remained undefined and impersonal but which was still richly and mysteriously productive. ... The liberal idea of the nation state based its claim on the due rights and the will of the living nation; the conservative national idea based its claim on the national life of the past. Both ideas drew part of their strength from the great individualistic tendencies of the times, but the difference between them was that the one form of individualism was democratic and rationalistic, the other aristocratic and historicizing. The one valued the individual as the basic unit in society, state, and nation. The other valued the quality of individuality itself in the multitudinous forms of social, political, and national life. The one demanded equal rights for all in state and national life. The other assigned individuals particular functions within the state and nation according to the sphere of life in which they found themselves. The one saw the individual limited by the national will, which he in turn helped to form. The other saw the limits set by what the nation's previous generation had created. The one appealed to the consciously sovereign and controlling reason of the individual and of the whole society. The other traced the unconsciously functioning rationality of history back to the sovereign control of God. Both represented the vital interests of particular social classes; but both tried to elevate these interests tot he level of a universal ideal. The religious universalism of political Romanticism took its stand against the rationalistic universalism of the liberal concept of the state (183-4).</span></p></blockquote><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">This turn away from cultural personality and toward a more definitive picture of the national state represents major progress, Meinecke thinks. Still, he fears that the extreme particularism, historicism, and culturalism of this conservative nationalism can still be insufficiently <i>political</i>. It contained "the seeds of a political quietism and relativism that could lame the head and hand for battle or action" (186).</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">Meinecke writes in the very beginning of the work that a nation state requires two things: Unity and Vitality: We demand "a unity replete with life and energy, not just a harmonic chord as such but the richest possible harmonic chord" (17).</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">The liberal national state secured unity. Its political centralization and absolutism create extraordinary, unified power, as the French Revolution made clear. But it retains a moral emptiness, a spiritual desiccation. The German cultural nation has spontaneity and vitality, it speaks not simply through institutions and centralized political forms, but through a cultural heritage. </span></p><p></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;">Yet the cultural nation lacks power, even despite the theoretical improvements made by the Haller circle: the source of political error lay here ... in the belief that the political unity of the German nation could be created without giving the nation the firm contours of an autonomous state personality. We see here once more the important practical consequences of the fact that the German nation first felt and created her unity primarily as a spiritual unity, and we must also note again that it was a unity shaped by universalistic ideas and that recourse to such ideas diminished awareness of the realities of power (191).</span></blockquote><p></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">The great synthesis, Meinecke argues, comes from Prussian domination of the German cultural community. From Prussia, Germany acquired a tradition of bureaucratized, statist power, but one that could be tempered by a German spiritual inheritance and thus distinguished from the democratizing tendencies of the French. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">Ranke and Bismarck are the crucial theorists Meinecke embraces, here. Before them, even conservative nationalism remained too romantic:</span></p><blockquote><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">Romanticism summoned up the spirits of the past against the despised rational and cosmopolitan spirit of the eighteenth century, but because Romanticism itself was still rooted in that spirit, it retrieved something related to it from the past. Thus the ancient idea of a universal community of Christian states was revived, and the political aspect of Romanticism became cosmopolitanism with a religious-ethical character (229).</span></p></blockquote><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">What Bismarck understood, however, was that "the only sound foundation for a major state ... is political egoism and not Romanticism. It is not worthy of a great state to fight for a cause that does not touch on its own interests" (225).</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">Ranke, Meinecke suggests, may be the most insightful theorist of this need to synthesize political power with cultural personality. His essay, "<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Politisches-Gespr%C3%A4ch-Leopold-von-Ranke/dp/3428120442">Politishces Gespräch</a>" flips the primacy of culture over politics that characterizes earlier conservatives: </span></p><p></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;">We no longer feel the strength of the nation forming the state, but rather the strength of the state forming the nation, the 'moral energy' at work in the state and emanating from it. The 'particular state' becomes the 'spiritual fatherland' of the individual; and the 'spirit of communal life' that accompanies us to the end of this discussion is a political national spirit, more limited but also clearer, better defined, and more personal in character than that 'mysterious power' we left behind in the profound depths. For the state, to be imbued with nationality is to be imbued with moral strength. ... Everything is drawn together, then, in the idea of the individuality of the great states, an individuality that emanates from their own unique and spontaneous life (211).</span></blockquote><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">One is inclined to think that Meinecke is some kind of right-Hegelian, favoring a balance of the universal with the particular that ends up defending a powerful state. There's truth in that, I think. But he's a right-Hegelian of a decidedly historicist bent. He praises Hegel for seeing the importance of state power--a major improvement over romantic, culturalist conservatives. Hegel understands, also, "the national principle historically in that the intellectual legacy of the entire past of a nation constitutes a living force together with the nation's present and future demands" (199).</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">But Hegel's universalistic philosophy obscures his empirical, historical insight. He misses the value of particularity itself, and sees the nation in service of the whole: "Hegel's view led inevitably to depriving all historical individualities of their proper rights and making them mere unconscious instruments and functionaries of the world spirit" (201).</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">That disregard for the value of particularity in itself is what repelled Ranke, and what makes Hegel, ultimately, an enemy of deep conservatism. </span></p><p></p><p></p>Dimitrios Halikiashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14687167606022949419noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2908609428851727972.post-40549944671024395632020-11-02T13:02:00.004-08:002020-11-02T13:02:54.892-08:00Reading the 18th Brumaire in 2020<p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> The <i><a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/index.htm">18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte</a></i> opens with one of the most famous lines in Marx's corpus:</span></p><blockquote><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">Hegel remarks somewhere that all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. Caussidiere for Danton, Louis Blanc for Robespierre, the Montagne of 1848 to 1851 for the Montagne of 1793 to 1795, the Nephew for the Uncle. </span></p></blockquote><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">As was noted four years ago, election day 2016 also happened to fall on the 18th Brumaire. So one naturally wonders what Marx might have said about history's third repetition: Not tragedy or farce, but reality tv? </span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">The parallels, it seems to me, between Napoleon III and Donald Trump, are fairly striking. They both articulate a politics of national greatness, they both deploy (rhetorically) an attack on bourgeois economics, they both emerge out of a heightened conflict between executive power and parliamentary cretinism, and they both build their popular support on some vague kind of intense, populist fervor. Not to mention, of course, their common thorough buffoonery. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">Making this kind of comparison is precisely the sort of thing Marx warns us against doing in the next few sentences:</span></p><blockquote><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. And just when they seem engaged in revolutionising themselves and things, in creating something that has never yet existed, precisely in such periods of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from the names, battle-cries and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this time-honoured disguise and this borrowed language. Thus Luther donned the mask of the Apostle Paul, the revolution of 1789 to 1814 draped itself alternately as the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire, and the revolution of 1848 knew nothing better to do than to parody, now 1789, now the revolutionary tradition of 1793 to 1795. In like manner a beginner who has learnt a new language always translates it back into his mother tongue, but he has assimilated the spirit of the new language and can freely express himself in it only when he finds his way in it without recalling the old and forgets his native tongue in the use of the new.</span></p></blockquote><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">This is a complaint about the inability of revolutions themselves to see themselves as genuinely radically new, and their consequent need to appeal to some more familiar past. The same thing might be said about political commentators. Unable to theorize things freshly or recognize novelty, we insist on assessing the present through historic analogies. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">There are better and worse versions of historical analogy. It seems to me that politics today bears no resemblance whatsoever to Weimar Germany, yet that remains the ubiquitous descriptor in the popular (and even more academic) press. A cottage industry of "we now live under fascism" has proved enormously financially successful. There are, it must be said, more sensible versions of making that particular comparison, as my friend the Rock of the Sea, the Tamer of Horses, Aaron Sibarium has <a href="https://www.americanpurpose.com/articles/weimarization-american-republic/">recently attempted</a>.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">Still, I think the Weimar comparisons are strained at best. Perhaps Napoleon III is better! Probably not. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">A few parallels to our time immediately jump out from Marx's <i>18th Brumaire</i>. Consider, for example, our tortured self-examination of the nature and purpose and character of implicit norms in modern political life. Read that alongside Marx's blistering account of parliamentary dithering and especially of the pathetic attempt to impeach then President Louis Bonaparte.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">Striking too is the famous description of Bonaparte's base of support--the alliance of small-holding peasants and the <i>lumpenproletariat</i>. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">The core supporters from the <i>lumpenproletariat</i> are described as follows:</span></p><blockquote><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">Alongside decayed <i>roues </i>with dubious means of subsistence and of dubious origin, alongside ruined and adventurous offshoots of the bourgeoisie, were vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds, escaped galley slaves, rogues, mountebanks, <i>lazzaroni</i>, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, <i>maquereaus</i>, brothel keepers, porters, <i>literati</i>, organ-grinders, rag-pickers, knife grinders, tinkers, beggars--in short, the whole indefinite, disintegrated mass, thrown hither and thither, which the French term <i>la boheme</i>.</span></p></blockquote><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">I can see strained but not very effective comparisons to Trump's base of support. More similar is the description of Bonaparte's deployment of these fanatical supporters as members of his "Society of December 10." Tens of thousands would throng together to celebrate Bonaparte and call for a coup. What's striking isn't just the character of their support, but the way Bonaparte comes to fall for his own illusion of popular support:</span></p><blockquote><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">At a moment when the bourgeoisie itself played the most complete comedy, but in the most serious manner in the world, without infringing any of the pedantic conditions of French dramatic etiquette, and was itself half deceived, half convinced of the solemnity of its own performance of state, the adventurer, who took the comedy as plain comedy, was bound to win. Only when he has eliminated his solemn opponent, when he himself now takes his imperial role seriously and under the Napoleonic mask imagines he is the real Napoleon, doe she become the victim of his own conception of the world, the serious buffoon who no longer takes world history for a comedy but his comedy for world history.</span></p></blockquote><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">I think some kind of description along those lines makes sense of Trump and his rallies. The solemn buffoonery and the combination of comedy and severity make him difficult to characterize as any straightforwardly fascist figure. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">Parallels can be drawn also to the description of the small-holding peasants (whom Marx disparages as a "sack of potatoes") who form the other pillar of Bonaparte's political support. Today we emphasize the opioid epidemic, the decline of social capital, the collapse of working class communities, etc. for producing a spirit of social isolation and bitterness that fuels Trump. Similar features explain why the small peasants are unable to form radical class consciousness, and continue to long to be ruled by a strongman like Bonaparte. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"></span></p><blockquote><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">The small-holding peasants form a vast mass, the members of which live in <span style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;">The small-holding peasants form an enormous mass whose members live in similar conditions but without entering into manifold relations with each other. Their mode of production isolates them from one another instead of bringing them into mutual intercourse. The isolation is furthered by France’s poor means of communication and the poverty of the peasants. Their field of production, the small holding, permits no division of labor in its cultivation, no application of science, and therefore no multifariousness of development, no diversity of talent, no wealth of social relationships. Each individual peasant family is almost self-sufficient, directly produces most of its consumer needs, and thus acquires its means of life more through an exchange with nature than in intercourse with society. A small holding, the peasant and his family; beside it another small holding, another peasant and another family. A few score of these constitute a village, and a few score villages constitute a department. Thus the great mass of the French nation is formed by the simple addition of homologous magnitudes, much as potatoes in a sack form a sack of potatoes. Insofar as millions of families live under conditions of existence that separate their mode of life, their interests, and their culture from those of the other classes, and put them in hostile opposition to the latter, they form a class. Insofar as there is merely a local interconnection among these small-holding peasants, and the identity of their interests forms no community, no national bond, and no political organization among them, they do not constitute a class. They are therefore incapable of asserting their class interest in their own name, whether through a parliament or a convention. They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented. Their representative must at the same time appear as their master, as an authority over them, an unlimited governmental power which protects them from the other classes and sends them rain and sunshine from above. The political influence of the small-holding peasants, therefore, finds its final expression in the executive power which subordinates society to itself.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;">Historical tradition gave rise to the French peasants’ belief in the miracle that a man named Napoleon would bring all glory back to them. And there turned up an individual who claims to be that man because he bears the name Napoleon, in consequence of the Code Napoleon, which decrees: “Inquiry into paternity is forbidden.” After a twenty-year vagabondage and a series of grotesque adventures the legend is consummated, and the man becomes Emperor of the French. The fixed idea of the nephew was realized because it coincided with the fixed idea of the most numerous class of the French people.</span> </span></p></blockquote><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">Similar too is the rhetoric of order and stability. Marx's cheekily observes that <i>The Economist </i>praises Bonaparte as a source of preserving national tranquility just a week before he launched his coup. Today, of course, the press takes Trump as the major source of national chaos and disorder. But clearly Trump has tried to present himself as the choice for those who want to preserve order. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">What I take to be most similar is Marx's explanation of how the bourgeoisie (and the church) came to reconcile themselves to the idea of voting for a man like Bonaparte:</span></p><blockquote><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;">When the Puritans of the Council of Constance</span><span style="background-color: white; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;"> complained of the dissolute lives of the popes and wailed about the necessity for moral reform, Cardinal Pierre d’Ailly thundered at them: “Only the devil in person can still save the Catholic Church, and you ask for angels.” Similarly, after the coup d’état the French bourgeoisie cried out: Only the Chief of the Society of December 10 can still save bourgeois society! Only theft can still save property; only perjury, religion; bastardy, the family; disorder, order!</span></span></p></blockquote><p><br /></p>Dimitrios Halikiashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14687167606022949419noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2908609428851727972.post-19635356661016807982020-10-18T07:11:00.002-07:002020-10-18T10:05:38.911-07:00Leszek Kolakowski on Method<p>Derek Parfit famously described two rival approaches to the history of philosophy as a contrast between grave-robbers and archaeologists. Grave robbers want to rediscover ideas from the past to be deployed in contemporary battles. Archaeologists are more skeptical about the continuity of ideas. They sometimes view ideas as social constructions from different historical periods, altogether irrelevant for our own times. They warn that the grave-robber mentality ironically leads to undermining the significance of the past, discouraging us from taking old ideas seriously by inducing us to crudely assimilate them into our own vision of the world.</p><p>Grave robbers include <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Persecution-Art-Writing-Leo-Strauss/dp/0226777111">Straussian approaches</a> to discovering submerged, esoteric meaning in the history of philosophy, as well as <a href="https://www-cambridge-org.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/core/books/british-moralists-and-the-internal-ought/121E32D263612DA5C8E7A1257028DB4B">analytic philosophical attempts</a> to extract full, persuasive arguments from the past. Archaeologists include those derided by Strauss as "<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Natural-History-Walgreen-Foundation-Lectures/dp/0226776948">historicists</a>" who insist that history is always a mere struggle for power, and that ideas are epiphenomenal consequences of particular historical struggles. </p><p>There is truth in both positions. It is obvious to me (against the <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/2504188">young Skinner</a>), that there are indeed "perennial questions" in philosophy, and that we can profitably think through those questions by studying the best arguments across time. It is also clear, however, that a cheap, cynical deployment of the past as "anticipating" the present can lead to gross distortions of what old debates actually consisted in. It can lead us to naturalize our own parochial prejudices. </p><p>The difficulty with the history of ideas is that for it to be useful, it must be simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar. It must speak to our present concerns, but it must do so in a way that is interestingly different from the ways in which we are already inclined to think.</p><p>Leszek Kolakowski notes as much in the opening of his extraordinary <i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Main-Currents-Marxism-Founders-Breakdown/dp/0393329437">Main Currents of Marxism</a></i>:</p><blockquote><p>In general the history of philosophy is subject to two principles that limit each other. On the one hand, the questions of basic interest to each philosopher must be regarded as aspects of the same curiosity of the human mind in the face of the unaltering conditions with which life confronts it; on the other hand, it behoves us to bring to light the historical uniqueness of every intellectual trend or observable fact and relate it as closely as possible to the epoch that gave birth to the philosopher in question and that he himself has helped to form. It is difficult to observe both these rules at once, since, although we know they are bound to limit each other, we do not know precisely in what manner and are therefore thrown back on fallible intuition. The two principles are thus far from being so reliable or unequivocal as the method of setting up a scientific experiment or identifying documents, but they are none the less useful as guidelines and as a means of avoiding two extreme forms of historical nihilism. One is based on the systematic reduction of every philosophical effort to a set of eternally repeated questions, thus ignoring the panorama of the cultural evolution of mankind and, in general, disparaging that evolution. The second form of nihilism consists in that we are satisfied with grasping the specific quality of every phenomenon or cultural epoch, on the premiss, expressed or implied, that the only factor of importance is that which constitutes the uniqueness of a particular historical complex, every detail of which--although it may be indisputably a repetition of former ideas--acquires a new meaning in its relationship to that complex and is no longer significant in any other way. This hermeneutic assumption clearly leads to a historical nihilism of its own, since by insisting on the exclusive relationship of every detail to a synchronic whole (whether the whole be an individual mind or an entire cultural epoch) it rules out all continuity of interpretation, obliging us to treat the mind or the epoch as one of a series of closed, monadic entities. It lays down in advance that there is no possibility of communication among such entities and no language capable of describing them collectively: every concept takes on a different meaning according to the complex to which it is applied, and the construction of superior or non-historical categories is ruled out as contrary to the basic principle of investigation.</p></blockquote>Dimitrios Halikiashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14687167606022949419noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2908609428851727972.post-10941586421607855322020-10-09T05:02:00.002-07:002020-10-09T05:09:28.952-07:00Isaiah Berlin on the Relevance of the Nineteenth Century<p> From Isaiah Berlin's prologue to <i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Political-Ideas-Romantic-Age-Influence/dp/069112695X">Political Ideas in the Romantic Age</a></i>:</p><blockquote><p>Fascists and Communists, imperialists and totalitarians, liberal republicans and constitutional monarchists too, to this day, speak the language not merely of Burke but of Hegel; social scientists of all brands, planners and technocrats, New Dealers and social and economic historians use, without knowing it, the notions and terminology of Saint-Simon virtually unaltered. And it is not only the traditional irrationalists and the enemies of democracy and the disciples of Charles Maurras who inhabit a violent world brought into being, almost single-handed, by Joseph de Maistre. Nor should it cause as much surprise as perhaps it might to find so much of modern anti-intellectualism and existentialism (particularly of the atheistical type), and much of the 'emotive' ethics, not merely in Kierkegaard or Nietzsche or Bergson, but in the writings of Fichte, and in forgotten treatises by Schelling.</p></blockquote><blockquote><p>This is not merely a question of tracing sources and attributing responsibilities. Few activities are more dangerous to the cause of historical truth than the attempt to find a fully grown oak in the acorn, or the attempt to stigmatise (or praise) thinkers living in and speaking to a society remote from us for the transformation, and often degradation, which their ideas have often undergone at the hands of demagogues and popular movements which have taken what they needed from such doctrines and put them to their own cruder uses, and have as often as not totally perverted, or at best violently oversimplified, the original vision of a great man whose name they place upon their banners. But during the years of which I speak, the issues debated were literally identical with those which stir individuals and nations in our own time (2).</p></blockquote><p>And a few pages later, an interesting aside on method:</p><blockquote><p>It is a platitude to say that each age has its own problems, its own imagery and symbolism and ways of feeling and speaking. It is a lesser platitude to add that political philosophy derives its intelligibility solely from the understanding of such change, and that its perennial principles, or what seem to be such, depend on the relative stability and unchanging characteristics of human beings in their social aspect. If the supersession of eighteenth-century doctrine, which evaluated everything unhistorically, by a more historical or evolutionary point of view has any value, it should teach us that each political philosophy responds to the needs of its own times and is fully intelligible only in terms of all the relevant factors of its age, and intelligible to us only to the degree to which (and it is a far larger one than some modern relativists wish to persuade us that it is) we have experience in common with previous generations. But to the extent to which it is so, it is idle to expect progress in this enterprise; the confusions and problems and agonies of each age are what they are, and attempts at solutions and answers and nostrums can be judged properly only in terms of them (12). </p></blockquote>Dimitrios Halikiashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14687167606022949419noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2908609428851727972.post-360405257116144092020-10-08T15:08:00.004-07:002020-11-06T05:08:45.705-08:00Frank Knight on the Self-Destruction of Liberalism<p><span style="font-family: inherit;">I recently had occasion to read Frank Knight’s wonderful 1934 essay,
“Economic Theory and Nationalism,” first presented at the annual American Economic Association meetings, and published in a collection of Knight's essays titled <i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Competition-Foundations-Education-Classics-Economics/dp/1560009551">The Ethics of Competition</a></i>. The essay is wide-ranging, provocative, and surprising. The
sort of thing that is unimaginable coming out of today’s academy, let alone an economics
department.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Knight is considered one of the chief intellectual
influences behind the Chicago School—a reputation bolstered by the editors of this
essay collection: Milton Friedman, Homer Jones, George Stigler, and Allen
Wallis. But Knight did not just shape a generation of militant free-marketeers.
His work—and this essay in particular—had an impact on the greatest Anglophone left-liberal thinker of the twentieth century, John Rawls. Indeed, core Rawlsian arguments and themes can be found scattered
throughout the essay. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;">One line of thinking made famous by Rawls and characteristic of "luck-egalitarian" theorists is the claim that both material and genetic endowments are arbitrary from a moral
point of view. Knight makes a version of this argument, though not in service of the redistributive implications that Rawls et al. took it to have: “no defensible clear distinction can be drawn from the point of
view of either ideal ethics or practical politics between external wealth and
personal powers as a source of income” (Knight 313). Knight moreover buries a version of
Rawls’ difference principle in a footnote. He writes there that the main
challenges of a liberal society are: <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;"></span></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;">to prevent continued concentration of power in the hands of
individuals or organizations; to assure to all a really equal start, or at
least one as fair as possible, through an ‘equitable’ sharing of the material
and cultural inheritance; to arrange such ‘handicaps’ as would give everyone a ‘chance’;
and to provide the best distribution of prizes for making the contest
interesting to participants and spectators. In this view of social life as a
contest, enforced equalization would be absurd; a game is not bad or unfair
because some win and others lose, but on the contrary its interest and value
depend in part on the fact (303-4).</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;"><o:p></o:p></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Rawls more fully democratizes this principle. He argues that these inequalities should be distributed not simply to keep participants
invested in the <b>game </b>of liberal politics/market economics, but in service of the maximal benefit of the worst-off. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;">But the pattern is the same: Inequalities, be they from natural or social origins, are presumptively unjust. They can only be justified if they serve some larger social good. For Rawls, that good is the benefit of the worst off. For Knight, that good is buy-in into the system. If anything, I take Knight's more capacious view of</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"> human motivation to be richer than the
narrowed egalitarian character of Rawls’ mechanistic maximin mantra.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;">(The first chapter of Katrina Forrester’s <a href="https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691163086/in-the-shadow-of-justice">new book</a>
emphasizes Rawls’ debt to this essay in formulating his difference principle)</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The language of the “game” of politics recurs throughout
the essay. Knight's master argument is that liberal politics
and market economics tend toward self-destruction. Liberalism of the nineteenth century—which Knight celebrates and fears has disappeared—was at its heart a
commitment to individual freedom: <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;"></span></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;">The political ideal of the age was negative,
individualistic. Its ideal was individual liberty; i.e. there should be no
ideal of individual life enforced by society. It looked toward making society a
mutual aid organization of a mechanical sort, by which each individual would
achieve maximum efficiency in using his own means to his own ends. In the main,
this ideal still stands, though it is visibly crumbling, in America and other
countries which have not yet repudiated democracy outright for a dictatorial
regime (286).</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;"><o:p></o:p></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;">In an interesting restatement of <a href="https://www.historians.org/about-aha-and-membership/aha-history-and-archives/historical-archives/the-significance-of-the-frontier-in-american-history">Turner’s famous thesis</a>, Knight
suggests that the liberal ethic was only stable in the age of the open frontier.
For Knight, humans are characterized by an insatiable desire to exert power over
one another. The possibility of moving West and building an independent life
for oneself allowed man to psychologically transpose his natural love of
domination into an urge to build for oneself. (The draw of the frontier and the
empire perhaps had a little more to do with the desire to exert power over men than Knight acknowledges).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;">With the closing of the frontier, however, Knight warns that
we are returning to the pre-liberal world: <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;"></span></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;">Getting ahead in the world would come again to mean, as it
had before, a more direct struggle with other people, than with nature, and a
struggle for power over other people, which is overwhelmingly the human
meaning, immediate or ultimate, of power over nature itself (290-291). </span></blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;"><o:p></o:p></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Here we return to Knight’s emphasis on the “game”
metaphor for society. Liberal politics and market economics are like games.
They only succeed if the participants play by the rules. But in both cases, it
is exceptionally difficult to construct rules powerful enough to compel
obedience. Why should the losers accept the terms? And why should the winners
make it possible that they might lose in the future?<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;">This is clear in the tendency of market
economies to dissolve into monopolization. Why would a temporarily dominant
firm submit to market rules that may end up elevating a new, rival market-titan
tomorrow? All the incentives point the way of changing the rules of the game once you’ve
won:<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;"></span></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;">interest in winning and the interest in the game tend to
run into conflict; too much interest in winning first spoils a game and then
breaks it up altogether, converting it into a quarrel, or beyond this into a
fight. Unless people are more interested in having the game go on than they are
in winning it, no game is possible. … The ‘natural’ tendency is for a game to
deteriorate, if the participants follow their primitive impulses without
conscious exercise of moral restraint. No game is possible unless the players
have the attitudes and interests to which the term ‘sportsmanship’ is understood
to refer (302).</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;"><o:p></o:p></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;">This is commonly understood with the market, Knight suggests.
But the problem is just as acute in liberal democratic politics: “democracy is
competitive politics, somewhat as free enterprise is competitive economics, …
and it shows the same weaknesses as the latter. In ideal theory, neither is
competitive in the psychological sense” (295).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;">(As an aside, Knight suggests that Adam Smith overlooked
the role of the passions in driving human behavior. Here he echoes (or anticipates, rather) themes from Albert Hirschman's classic <i>The Passions and the Interests. </i>But both Knight and Hirschman neglect Smith’s discussion of the
role the <i>libido dominandi </i>plays in sustaining feudal and slave societies. Smith too was acutely aware of man's love of domination, and the mechanics of moral motivation underlying capitalism are not that different from those underlying feudalism and slavery. On this point, see Daniel
Luban’s <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/modern-intellectual-history/article/adam-smith-on-vanity-domination-and-history/73944C8EA609B8EFB9957465C5AF6703">terrific article</a> on Smith and vanity. See also my <a href="http://dhalikias.blogspot.com/2020/04/rousseau-and-smith-on-trinkets-and.html">earlier blog post on Smith/Rousseau on vanity and trinkets</a>).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Liberal economics and democratic politics have the same
weakness. They cannot sustain themselves. The raw love of power makes them incapable of being self-sustaining. Their weakness: <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;"></span></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;">lies in the natural, cumulative tendency toward inequality
in status, through the use of power to get more power. The main error on the
political side, in the theory of liberalism as expounded by the advocates of political
cures for economic ills, is that competitive politics is not better than
economics in this regard, but definitely worse (296).</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;"><o:p></o:p></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I’m reminded here of a comment G.K. Chesterton made in his
introduction to an <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=3mlCAQAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false">edition of Thomas Carlyle’s <i>Past and Present</i></a>:<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;"></span></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;">[Carlyle] is already the first prophet of the Socialists
and the great voice against the social wrong. He has, indeed, almost all the
qualities of the Socialists, their strenuousness, their steady protest, their
single eye, also something of their Puritanism and their unconscious but
instinctive dislike of democracy. Carlyle was the first who called in political
inequality to remedy economic inequality, but he will not be the last.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;"><o:p></o:p></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;">It is easy enough for socialists and other economic critics of capitalism to notice the market’s internal tendency toward monopolization and inequality. The
natural response, Carlyle and his followers suggest, is to combat economic
inequality with political inequality.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The mistake of this approach, Knight insists, is that
political inequality is even more liable to the dangers of monopolization and
domination. Social reformers insist that the state will somehow be immune to
these dangers so long as they remain democratic. Knight thinks this is
ridiculous. He mocks idealists like John Dewey for naively insisting
on the psychological stability of democracy. As he repeats over and over again,
there is no reason to think that a free democratic people won’t ultimately opt
for dictatorship. The political events of Knight's day seem to suggest this is the most
likely course of action. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The democratic politician—not the captain of industry—has the greatest
chance of exploiting our psychological weaknesses:<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;"></span></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;">Neither abstract reasoning nor the evidence of experience
affords ground for belief that, given the moral drive toward such values as the
dominant motive in society, democratic political processes could fail to
distribute them even more unequally still than does competitive business (308-9).</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;"><o:p></o:p></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;">At least there is something objective about the material
wealth produced by competitive firms. To be electorally successful requires no such
objective achievement. It requires only the capacity to captivate an audience: “it
goes without saying that competence to persuade is only accidentally and
improbably associated with competence to counsel and to lead” (305). Democracy
rewards those who can get elected. But there is little reason to believe the skill
of winning an election has anything to do with the skill of governing well. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;">As Plato has Socrates put it in the <i>Gorgias</i>: “evidently
oratory produces the persuasion that comes from being convinced, and not the
persuasion that comes from teaching, concerning what’s just and unjust” (454e).
For Socrates, such oratory is of no value at all if it teaches injustice. The orator
wins by playing to the crowd. Socrates continues: “If you say anything in
the Assembly and the Athenian <i>demos </i>denies it, you shift your ground and
say what they want to hear” (481e).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Knight says the same. To be successful in a
democracy you must balance flattery with manipulation. This whole exercise is
about as rational as having the patients choose the doctor.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;">(There’s force to this point. Then again, far better for the
patient to choose the doctor than for the doctor to choose the patient).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Democracy, Knight continues, is just “government by
discussion.” And there is nothing more psychologically unstable than discussion. Another
crucial aspect of that instability is human pride. It is difficult for us
to part with our view, even after we should have been convinced of its errancy.
Knight notes that it is rare to see professional academics model this form of
intellectual humility. I recall being told once that the leading scientific critics of the big bang theory were never convinced. They went to their grave believing in a steady-state account of the universe. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;">How could we expect more from mass democracy? </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Democracy is government by discussion, and there is little as reliably truth-agnostic as discussion. As he remarks in a wonderful paragraph:</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"></span></span></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;">It
[dictatorship] will perhaps be most democratic in its policy of suppressing
freedom of discussion. In fact, ‘discussion’ needs little formal suppression.
There is little evidence that any large mass of people ever wanted to discuss
or attend to discussion, of serious issues, involving real intellectual effort.
Real discussion is rare even among professional intellectuals, and their
‘argumentation’ commonly illustrates the tendency of a contest to deteriorate.
Debate, and the preaching of unorthodox views, which are very different from
discussion, may or may not be popular, depending on the aesthetic character of
the performance. The successful dictator will have to provide suitable
entertainment along these lines without permitting anything really dangerous.
It is of course, a delicate problem to stage verbal gladiatorial combats and
supply the craving to be shocked without running some risk of arousing
loyalties competing menacingly with loyalty to a particular leader or party (323)</span></blockquote><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;">And again: “Once a man’s mind is liberated and set thinking, he becomes
an inveterate ‘theorizer’ and is as partial to his own ideas as he is to his
own children, or to any individual interest whatever” (355).<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The metaphor above of "verbal gladiatorial combats" reminds me of Hobbes' wonderful complaint about democratic deliberation</span><span style="font-family: inherit;">s in </span><i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Hobbes-Citizen-Cambridge-History-Political/dp/0521437806">De Cive</a></i>:</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-right: 0.5in;"><span style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"></span></span></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;">perhaps someone will say that the <i>popular state </i>is preferable to <i>Monarchy</i>, because in that state, in which of course everyone manages public business, everyone has been given leave to publicly display his prudence knowledge and eloquence in deliberations about matters of the greatest difficulty and importance; and because the love of praise is innate in human anture, this is the most attractive of all things to all those who surpass others in such talents or seem to themselves to do so; but in <i>Monarchy </i>that road to winning praise and rank is blocked for most of the citizens. What is a disadvantage, if this is not? I will tell you. To see
the proposal of a man whom we despise preferred to our own; to see our wisdom
ignored before our eyes; to incur certain enmity in an uncertain struggle for
empty glory; to hate and be hated because of differences of opinion (which
cannot be avoided, whether we win or lose); to reveal our plans and wishes when
there is no need to and to get nothing by it; to neglect our public affairs.
These, I say are disadvantages [of democratic deliberation]. But to lose the
opportunity to pit your wits against another man, however enjoyable such
contests may be to clever debaters, is not such a disadvantage for them, unless
we shall say that it is a disadvantage for brave men to be forbidden to fight,
for the simple reason that they enjoy it (X.9).</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;"><o:p></o:p></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;">And regarding this dangerous connection between reason, opinion, and vanity, see Publius in <a href="https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed10.asp">Federalist 10</a>:</span></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;">As long as the reason of man continues fallible, and he is at liberty to exercise it, different opinions will be formed. As long as the connection subsists between his reason and his self-love, his opinions and his passions will have a reciprocal influence on each other; and the former will be objects to which the latter will attach themselves.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;">That is the crucial danger: The dominance of self-love over reason. </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">This is why we are witnessing the collapse of democracy: “Fascist-nationalism,
then, seems to be clearly indicated as the next stage in the political
evolution of the liberal democracies” (319).</span><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Voters react against the moral emptiness of democracy, which
has revealed itself to be little more than sloganeering:<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;"></span></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;">The individual reacts from the notion of reaching validity
by general discussion—which he has seen degenerate into a contest in ‘selling’—to
a faith in ‘strong’ individual <i>leadership</i>, which also represents a
reaction from moral and intellectual equalitarianism to hero worship (322). </span></blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;"><o:p></o:p></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;">(Cf. here my <a href="http://dhalikias.blogspot.com/2018/07/protagoras-and-marketplace-of-ideas.html">earlier blogpost on the <i>Protagoras</i></a>).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;">It has been a hope of political theorists for some time now that refining or elevating or promoting deliberation will somehow save or improve democracy. But for Knight and Hobbes, deliberation is the central reason why democracy is naturally self-destructive. (On
this topic, see Bryan Garsten’s <a href="https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674032293">wonderful defense of rhetoric</a>, which deals with
Hobbesian, Rousseauian, and Kantian critiques of rhetoric that rhyme with Knight’s).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;">What then is to be done? Knight’s prognosis is bleak. He
warns that modern social scientific methods align with ever-firmer domination,
with a new “technique of control” (341). (Another aside: I find it striking that
Knight sounds at various points in this essay alternatively Hayekian and Foucauldian). <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Knight warns us against embracing social scientific
technocracy as a means of preserving liberal society. If technocracy can
succeed, it will do so by monotonizing human behavior with a new, terrible form
of tyranny. The power to predict social behavior is the power to control it.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;">So Knight leaves us with two conclusions.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;">First, we must be dispositionally conservative. We must do
our best to preserve the rules of the game, because we must know that when we try
to change the rules, we will almost always make things worse:<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;"></span></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;">One of the evils which has resulted from
carrying the natural science conceptions over into the field of social discussion
is the common delusion that by the happy discovery of some formula, it may be
possible to change the character and constitution of society in a way comparable
to the modern development of technology through science. … Political society is
a game which must go on under rules, or very quickly collapse into a war of
each against all (347-8). </span></blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;"><o:p></o:p></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;">And later: “The notion that the general mass of mankind,
taken on the scale of a modern national state, can quickly and reliably think out
and apply important constitutional changes, is tragic nonsense” (350).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The second solution is to create a new aristocracy. We need
an impartial leadership class (like the idealized clerical class of the Middle
Ages) that can protect the realm of freedom while renouncing political ambition.
Technocratic social science alone promises a cure worse than the disease. What we
need instead is for science to provide “intellectual-moral leadership alongside
the moral-religious” (359). The emphasis on the "moral-religious" is key. The appeal of dictatorship has proved decisively that we naturally long for leaders who appeal to our passions and emotions. Deadened, ratio<span>nalist scientism will not cut it. Who wants to be ruled by Dr. Fauci?</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><blockquote><span>Leadership on a religious-emotional basis is an indefinitely more natural, an easier, and less costly system of order than any other. The weakness of such a system is its excessive strength, its tendency toward rigidity. If freedom is to be maintained, the rate of change must be limited</span>—with perhaps some provision for <i>temporary </i>recourse to authoritarian rule in times of crisis (352).</blockquote></span></div>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Here Knight sounds like Coleridge or the early JS Mill. The
Mill of the “<a href="https://oll.libertyfund.org/pages/mill-s-spirit-of-the-age">Spirit of the Age</a>” insists on finding a new leadership class that
can guide modern liberal society. He argues there that modern society is in an “age
of transition,” and can only return to a natural state once “the opinions and
feelings of the people are, with their voluntary acquiescence, formed <i>for </i>them,
by the most cultivated minds which the intelligence and morality of the times call
into existence.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span>Knight and the young Mill agree: Liberal democracies require
a liberal aristocracy. My own suspicion is that such an aristocracy will be impossible to find and even harder to civilize and control.</span><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;">There's lots of other interesting stuff in this essay. In particular, Knight offers an impressive account of the philosophy of social science and of the various approaches to interpreting/predicting social behavior. Much of that goes over my head, unfortunately. But it's worth emphasizing that it's there.</span></p>Dimitrios Halikiashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14687167606022949419noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2908609428851727972.post-36778741044627064502020-07-30T09:03:00.002-07:002020-07-30T09:39:11.335-07:00Simone Weil on Nationalism and RootednessSimone Weil's <i>The Need for Roots </i>contains some complicated and occasionally contradictory thoughts on nationalism. (Like the similarly complicated thoughts on <a href="http://dhalikias.blogspot.com/2020/07/simone-weil-on-equality.html">equality</a>). Early in the book, in her section canvassing the fundamental "needs of the soul," she emphasizes the need for "honor" that goes beyond ordinary, interpersonal respect. The key feature of honor is that it ties people to great traditions of the past: "This need is fully satisfied where each of the social organisms to which a human being belongs allows him to share in a noble tradition enshrined in its past history and given public acknowledgment" (19).<br />
<br />
We need to have heroes--socially recognized heroes--with whom we identify. She aptly notes the difficulty of this need when combined with the pressures of cultural assimilation and immigration:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Had France been conquered by the English in the fifteenth century, Joan of Arc would be well and truly forgotten, even to a greate xtent by us. We now talk about her to the Annamites and the Arabs; but they know very well that here in France we don't allow their heroes and saints to be talked about; therefore the state in which we keep them is an affront to their honour (20). </blockquote>
The need for honor connects to the master topic of her book, the need for "rootedness." She defines rootedness as "participation in the life of a community which preserves in living shape certain particular treasures of the past and certain particular expectations for the future" (43).<br />
<br />
One thinks here immediately of Burke's famous reworking of social contractarianism:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="background-color: white; color: #000020;">Society is indeed a contract.... but the state ought not to be considered as nothing better than a partnership agreement in a trade of pepper and coffee, calico or tobacco, or some other such low concern, to be taken up for a little temporary interest, and to be dissolved by the fancy of the parties. It is to be looked on with other reverence; because it is not a partnership in things subservient only to the gross animal existence of a temporary and perishable nature. It is a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue, and in all perfection. As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.</span> </blockquote>
The "rootedness" our souls require entails a recognition of the connection between our lives and the treasures of the past and future. The rootlessness of the modern world is in large part a consequence of violent conquest and even more damning capitalist economic dislocation. On this latter point:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Money destroys man roots wherever it is able to penetrate, by turning desire for gain into the sole motive. It easily manages to outweigh all other motives, because the effort it demands of the mind is so very much less. Nothing is <i>so </i>clear <i>and so </i>simple as a row of figures. (44).</blockquote>
A friend of mine flagged this passage to me. He noted that this broad point--the complaint about a rising "cash nexus" society in which we only relate to one another via self-interested contract--is well known. What's striking about Weil's version is her focus on the <i>mechanism</i>. A rich, rooted social life is complicated, characterized by competing, overlapping sources and sorts of authority. It is much easier to wipe that all away and think only in terms of cash contract. Adam Smith might think something similar--this is why he is so keen on the aesthetic appeal of an orderly, simple system. I'm reminded too of Chesterton's definition of the <a href="https://www3.nd.edu/~afreddos/courses/439/orthodoxy2-3.htm">madman</a>: "The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason."<br />
<br />
Weil's next section is about the rootlessness brought about by the modern economy. Much of her discussion is persuasive, broadly in the vein of a utopian socialist/distributist communitarian criticism of modern industrial capitalism.<br />
<br />
My main interest here, however, is in Weil's section on the nation as a source of rootedness. She begins that discussion by noting that the State is effectively the only institution we have left that connects us to the past and future (99). Neither the family nor the village nor the professional guild can do that anymore.<br />
<br />
This is where things get confusing. Weil is ferociously critical of the modern French state. Forged out of the brutal conquests of early modernity and the revolution of 1789, modern France's claim to unity comes out of a violent rejection of the past. Democratic popular sovereignty in modern times has become the essence of French patriotism. (The only alternative to that is a LARPy legitimism that ignores France's present and its future). Consequently, modern France is unlovable. The French "hunger for something to love which is made of flesh and blood" (114).<br />
<br />
The political Right clings to nationalism, but has turned it into a kind of idolatry. Weil associates this idolatrous nationalism with the legacy of Rome: "The Romans really were an atheistic and idolatrous people; not idolatrous with regard to images made of stone or bronze, but idolatrous with regard to themselves. It is this idolatry of self which they have bequeathed to us in the form of patriotism" (140).<br />
<br />
The political Left rejects nationalism and turns instead to a cosmopolitan justice. This too is a mistake. It entails an abandonment of the past, which is essential for rootedness: "Loss of the past, whether it be collectively or individually, is the supreme human tragedy, and we have thrown ours away just like a child picking off the petals of a rose" (119).<br />
<br />
(As Weil wryly notes, it's not really possible to reject nationalism. The cosmopolitan left has really just turned the Soviet Union into the locus of its national pride).<br />
<br />
So Weil wants us to reinvent patriotism. Unpatriotic citizens are contemptible and infantile. They are like children always making demands and always refusing to obey (154). A healthy patriotism cannot be held with unmixed pride, for that way leads to neo-Roman, pagan, fascism. Nor can patriotism just be dedication to a set of principles, for that is too bloodless to satisfy the need for rootedness.<br />
<br />
Weil's solution for all this is a Christian patriotism (as opposed to the Roman patriotism):<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
One can either love France for the glory which would seem to ensure for her a prolonged existence in time and space; or else one can love her as something which, being earthly, can be destroyed, and is all the more precious on that account (170).</blockquote>
We cannot ignore past sins (as the neo-Romans do). Nor can we tell noble lies to deceive ourselves about what we have done. But dwelling on past crimes should not destroy our sense of patriotism. On the contrary, in a strange sense we must love our country all the more <i>because of </i>its faults. This is the key difference between the Roman patriotism of glory and the Christian patriotism of compassion:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Let no one imagine either that a love of this [compassionate] nature would run the risk of ignoring or rejecting what there is of pure and genuine grandeur in the past history of France, or in the country's present hopes and ideals. Quite the opposite. Compassion is all the more tender, all the more poignant, the more good one is able to discern in the being who forms the object of it, and predisposes one to discern the good. When a Christian represents to himself Christ on the Cross, his compassion is not diminished by the thought of the latter's perfection, nor the other way about. But, on the other hand, such a love can keep its eyes open on injustices, cruelties, mistakes, falsehoods, crimes and scandals contained in the country's past, its present and in its ambitions in general, quite openly and fearlessly, and without being thereby diminished; the love being only rendered thereby more painful. Where compassion is concerned, crime itself provides a reason, not for withdrawing oneself, but for approaching, not with the object of sharing the guilt, but the shame. Mankind's crimes don't diminish Christ's compassion. Thus compassion keeps both eyes open on both the good and the bad and finds in each sufficient reasons for loving. It is the only love on this earth which is true and righteous (171).</blockquote>
Importantly, this patriotism of compassion is more STABLE than the Roman patriotism of glory. For glory can only hold a people together in times of war and crisis. It collapses in times of peace as "people cannot feel themselves at home in a patriotism founded upon pride and pomp-and-glory" (174).<br />
<br />
But the patriotism of compassion begins from the flaws and fragility of the state. Teaching people to love the state that way produces a more enduring patriotism:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
if their country is presented to them as something beautiful and precious, but which is, in the first place, imperfect, and secondly, very frail and liable to suffer misfortune, and which it is necessary to cherish and preserve, they will rightly feel themselves to be more closely identified with it than will other classes of society (175).</blockquote>
This is how we must reimagine the sanctity of the state. The state is not an idol to be blindly obeyed. The state is sacred in a different sense, and sacred enough to command legitimately that we sometimes make the ultimate sacrifice (162). Another familial metaphor:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
We must obey the State, however it happens to be, rather like loving children left by their parents, gone abroad, in the charge of some mediocre governess, but who obey her nevertheless out of love for their parents" (177).</blockquote>
(The difference here between the parents and the governess, tracks a difference Weil deploys throughout between the nation and the political state).<br />
<br />
The state is not sacred as an idol--holy in itself. Rather, it is sacred as a "vital medium" (160), as serving a sacred purpose, as something through which holy and good things emerge (180).<br />
<br />
This does not entail an absolute duty to obey the state. We have a duty to obey the mediocre governess, but not the abusive one. Weil is appropriately fuzzy on the boundaries of this duty:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
It is certainly not an unlimited obligation, but its only valid limit is a revolt on the part of conscience. No criterion can be offered indicating exactly what this limit is; it is even impossible for each of us to prescribe one for himself once and for all: when you feel you can't obey any longer, you just have to disobey. But there is at least one necessary condition, although insufficient of itself, making it possible to disobey without being guilty of crime; this is to be urged forward by so imperious an obligation that one is constrained to scorn all risks of whatever kind. If one feels inclined to disobey, but one is dissuaded by the excessive danger involved, that is altogether unpardonable, whether it be because one contemplated an act of disobedience, or else because one failed to carry it out, as the case may be. Besides whenever one isn't strictly obliged to disobey, one is under the strict obligation to obey. A country cannot possess liberty unless it is recognized that disobedience towards the authorities, every time it doesn't proceed from an overriding sense of duty, is more dishonourable than theft. That means to say that public order ought to be regarded as more sacred than private property (177).</blockquote>
A stark choice, without much room for prudence. You are either under a strict duty to obey or a strict duty to disobey. Woe to him whose conscience demands disobedience, but whose fear keeps him in line.<br />
<br />
<br />Dimitrios Halikiashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14687167606022949419noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2908609428851727972.post-59084880531504325302020-07-10T12:59:00.001-07:002020-07-14T04:11:03.995-07:00Simone Weil on Equality One of the fundamental human needs Simone Weil identifies in <i><a href="https://antilogicalism.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/need-roots.pdf">The Need for Roots</a></i> is equality. As she puts it:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Equality is a vital need of the human soul. It consists in a recognition, at once public, general, effective and genuinely expressed in institutions and customs, that the same amount of respect and consideration is due to every human being because this respect is due to the human being as such and is not a matter of degree.</blockquote>
In other words--all human persons <i>qua </i>human persons deserve to be treated with respect, that respect is not contingent on social rank, and that respect must be manifested through public recognition. All seems straightforward enough.<br />
<br />
Weil goes on to distinguish her understanding of equality from the leading liberal account: Equality of opportunity, or meritocracy. The problem with meritocracy is not that it is impossible to deliver as an ideal. The problem is the moral perversity of the ideal itself! A true meritocratic society would distribute social rewards as a function of moral desert or effort or talent. But this implies that those at the bottom deserve their social inferiority, or at the very least are social inferiors in virtue of their incompetence:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
For a man who occupies an inferior position and suffers from it to know that his position is a result of his incapacity and that everybody is aware of the fact is not any consolation, but an additional motive of bitterness. </blockquote>
Weil's basic critique of meritocracy is quite familiar. It was probably given its best statement in John Schaar's <a href="http://dhalikias.blogspot.com/2016/10/john-schaar-on-equal-opportunity.html">phenomenal critique</a> of the equality of opportunity, and the theme is found in the Michael Young book that gave us the word. But the worry is much older than that! It runs through <a href="https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674240940">Augustinian critiques</a> of moral desert. Consider this example from the neo-Augustinian <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=LW9vW-hDGSkC&pg=PA95&lpg=PA95&dq=%22what+is+true+of+royalty%22+nicole&source=bl&ots=-10jfUIL81&sig=ACfU3U1zeGnoV-xRYrFH77x0Lfks8769mQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwj2lqzYscPqAhUxhHIEHX-kAEEQ6AEwAHoECAMQAQ#v=onepage&q&f=false">Pierre Nicole</a>, who notes that IF we justify social inequality on the basis of moral desert, we are going to produce immense social discontent:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
If one became Great only by desert, the height of the great would be a continual noise in our ears, that they were prefer'd to the prejudice of others, whom we fancy more deserving than they ... But thus joyning Greatness with Birth, the pride of inferiours is allaid, and Greatness itself becomes a far less eye-sore. There is no shame to give place to another, when one may say, 'Tis his Birth I yield to. This reason convinces the mind without wounding it with spight or jealousie. ... Another advantage that accrues from this establishment is, That Princes may be had without pride, and Grandees found that are humble. For it gives no occasion of pride to continue in the rank where God's Providence has plac'd us, provided we use it to the ends he prescribes.</blockquote>
The second problem with equality of opportunity as an ideal is that it destroys social stability. The meritocratic utopia is a permanently churning society, with rich falling and poor rising constantly. What many liberals take as an ideal strikes Weil as a <i>reductio</i>: "that sort of equality, if allowed full play by itself, can make social life fluid to the point of decomposing it."<br />
<br />
I think this egalitarian vision of a radically dynamic society--which struck <a href="http://dhalikias.blogspot.com/2018/12/two-visions-or-two-assessments-of.html">Plato and perhaps Marx</a> as the definition of democratic freedom--is distinctively American. Of particular importance is its insistence not simply on upward social mobility, but on the mathematically necessary <i>downward mobility</i>. (My old boss Richard Reeves' <a href="https://www.brookings.edu/book/dream-hoarders/">hobbyhorse</a>).<br />
<br />
Here's one <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=ZyhJAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA102&lpg=PA102&dq=%22the+rich+man+of+this+year,+may+be+poor+the+next%22&source=bl&ots=LeIgOZC73-&sig=ACfU3U2xoW--PTMbEWCy4KRx3KrG-y1-dw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiN9qmptMPqAhXvknIEHcLgBk8Q6AEwAHoECAQQAQ#v=onepage&q&f=false">example</a> from Jacksonian America:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Money and property, we know, among us, are constantly changing hands. A man has only to work on, and wait patiently, and with industry and enterprise, he is sure to get both. The wheel of American fortune is perpetually and steadily turning, and those at bottom today, will be moving up tomorrow, and will ere long be at the top. The rich man of this year, may be poor the next, and the wealthy family of this generation, is likely to dissipate its fortune in the next. Scarcely ever does it remain in the same line to the third generation. ... All property, among us, tends to the hands of those who work and wait for it. They are as sure to get it, as the sun is to rise and set.</blockquote>
And another <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=kJ9XAAAAcAAJ&pg=PA221&lpg=PA221&dq=And+to+speak+of+a+clan+of+men+thus+constituted+as+an+aristocracy+is+as+sound+and+sensible+philosophy+as+to+point+to+the+insects+of+summer+as+emblems+of+eternity.&source=bl&ots=7D-BZws3Wt&sig=ACfU3U3_ajkrWoF1yX_M9izLn-DwH2276A&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwix7czZtMPqAhUmlHIEHX5ZBiAQ6AEwAHoECAoQAQ#v=onepage&q=And%20to%20speak%20of%20a%20clan%20of%20men%20thus%20constituted%20as%20an%20aristocracy%20is%20as%20sound%20and%20sensible%20philosophy%20as%20to%20point%20to%20the%20insects%20of%20summer%20as%20emblems%20of%20eternity.&f=false">example</a>:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
A very important and striking feature in our political and social system, which indeed is the result of our institutions and laws, is, that there is no aristocracy amongst us--not even an aristocracy of wealth. An aristocracy cannot exist without peculiar and exclusive privileges and rights, recognized, sanctioned, and upheld by law. There cannot be, in this country, even a confederacy or combination among the rich men to acquire peculiar privileges. They have none to defend. ... They are not like the hereditary nobles of Europe, whose names are enrolled in a heraldic college, set apart from the rest of mankind, designated by titles, marked by badges of honor, bound together by intermarriages, by a commuity of interests and of feelings, a distinct order in the state; nothing of all this, and they are as mutable besides as the motes that float in the summer air. Death is every busily at work in dismembering all overgrown fortunes.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
... If a line could be drawn between the two classes, at any given moment, and then five years pass away, I doubt whether the smaller portion could be recognized as the same. Hundreds on hundreds would be found to have changed places. And to speak of a clan of men thus constituted as an aristocracy, is as sound and sensible a philosophy as to point to the insects of summer as the emblems of eternity. </blockquote>
There's a nice contrast between the American meritocratic faith and Nicole's argument for the superiority of hereditary aristocracy.<br />
<br />
But anyway--Simone Weil rejects the ideal of equality of opportunity. She offers two positive suggestions for manifesting the genuine need for equal respect. The first is that punishments ought to be given out in proportion to rank:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
an employer who is incapable or guilty of an offence against his workmen ought to be made to suffer far more, both in the spirit and in the flesh, than a workman who is incapable or guilty of an offense against his employer. ... the exercise of important public functions should carry with it serious personal risks.</blockquote>
This seems eminently sensible to me.<br />
<br />
Weil's next suggestion is less plausible. She argues that much of the difficulty in inequality comes from inequalities of <i>degree</i>. If we can force ourselves to understand social differences not as ranked inequalities along some scale, but simply as fundamental differences, then perhaps we might be able to experience social differentiation without inequality. Separate but equal, in other words:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Equality is all the greater in proportion as human conditions are regarded as being, not more nor less than one another, but simply as other. Let us look on the professions of miner and minister simply as two different vocations, like those of poet and mathematician. And let the material hardships attaching to the miner's condition be counted in honour of those who undergo them. </blockquote>
There is certainly something true here. Weil is right to insist that a modern capitalist economy in which money forms the only social bond makes it impossible to think in terms of differences of kind, but always in terms of differences in monetary rank. But her proposal strikes me as wildly psychologically naive. It will not do to tell ourselves that these differences just represent different social roles, but not ranks of inequality. I think that's clear with Weil's next example:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
In wartime, if an army is filled with the right spirit, a soldier is proud and happy to be under fire instead of at headquarters; a general is proud and happy to think that the sucessful outcome of the battle depends on his forethought; and at the same time the soldier admires the general and the general the soldier. Such a balance constitutes an equality.</blockquote>
Yes, there might be some important way of LEGITIMIZING the obvious inequality between general and soldier. Perhaps a reciprocal appreciation of the distinctive role each plays might contribute to a fuller sense of the web of mutual dependence in which we find ourselves. Perhaps too that appreciation might render legitimate and even positively valuable the reality of social inequality. But it's too much to suggest that we have done away with inequality as such. The soldier is obviously inferior to the general.<br />
<br />
Weil makes this same mistake in her brief discussion of the human soul's need for hierarchy. She says obedience and a "certain devotion towards superiors" are necessary. Weil loves obedience. Later in the book she claims that the soldier whose bravery comes from an internal constitution or the pursuit of glory "is very inferior in human quality to that of the soldier who obeys the orders of his superiors." Only direct revelation from God is more praiseworthy than following orders.<br />
<br />
Yet she insists that this obedience is a devotion to the superior as a SYMBOL of the transcendent chain of being. I don't think the human mind is capable of such abstractions. We obey our superiors as HUMAN BEINGS, either in virtue of their office or their person (usually some combination of the two). With some philosophic distance we might recognize that the master I obey is not naturally superior to me, but that seems besides the point. Authority is not simply a symbolic nod to the structure of the universe, it is an ineradicable social reality.<br />
<br />Dimitrios Halikiashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14687167606022949419noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2908609428851727972.post-9115044299780686622020-06-17T04:30:00.000-07:002020-06-17T04:30:51.299-07:00Berlin on Rousseau: The Philosopher of the Lower-Middle ClassIsaiah Berlin has probably one of the best readings of Rousseau (as in most philosophically exciting AND most in line with the authentic spirit of that lunatic great). From "The Idea of Freedom," included in his <i>Political Ideas in the Romantic Age </i>(emphasis mine):<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
This outlook and these opinions in their abraded, inflamed and morbid condition took the form - as so often both before and after him - of a violent, piously philistine attack on all that is refined, distinguished and unique in society, against that which could be considered in some sense withdrawn, esoteric, the product of exceptional elaboration or unique endowments, not immediately intelligible to the casual observer. Rousseau's furious onslaughts upon the aristocracy, upon refinement in the arts or in life, upon disinterested scientific enquiry, upon the lives and characters of all but the most immediate purveyors of objects useful to the average man - all this is not so much the cry for justice or understanding on the part of the representative of the insulted and injured helots, as something far more familiar and less respectworthy: <b>the perennial distrust of moral or intellectual independence and freedom on the port of those spurious representatives of the middle class who found their voice in Rousseau, and who became progressively more influential in the nineteenth century - the believers in a solid, somewhat narrow, morally respectable, semi-egalitarian, privilege-hating, individualistic ideal, with its respect for work, success and the domestic virtues, its sentimental materialism and intolerance of differences - in short the great middle class of the nineteenth century</b>, which becomes the enemy and the butt of all the <i>révolt</i><i>é </i>writers of that period, and which has survived so much more powerfully in America than in Europe today. Rousseau, so far from being the protagonist of the artist or the sans-culotte or the preacher of moral freedom,<b> turns out to be an early and indeed premature champion of the lower middle class - the common man of our century - against not merely the aristocracy or the masses, but the uppers sections of the middle class, with its artistic and intellectual aims and demands and ideals, which prosperous peasants and industrious artisans </b>- the 'common' men - obscurely feel to be a menace to their own more conventional, more deeply traditional, more rigidly set moral and intellectual values and decencies,<b> with their solid protective crust of prejudice, superstition and faith in the sound, the kindly and the commonplace, concealing beneath a solid surface an elaborate network of social sensibilities and snobberies, passionately clung to, and a jealous consciousness of precise status and position in a profoundly hierarchical society</b>. Rousseau is a poor, or rather deliberately self-blinded, sociologist, who threw dust in the eyes of many generations by representing as a rustic idyll or Spartan simplicity - the immemorial wisdom of the land - what is, in fact, an expression of that small-town bourgeois and class-conscious outlook, admittedly in an abnormal and diseased condition, which made him peculiarly aware of the vices and errors of the last days of a collapsing feudal order, and peculiarly blind to the deficiencies of that social outlook and those ideas which his own fiery genius did so much to enthrone in their place. <b>In short, he was a militant lowbrow and the patron saint of the enemies of intellectuals, long-haired professors, avant-garde writers and the intelligentsia - the advanced thinkers - everywhere.</b></blockquote>
Of course this is all said with an Oxford sneer. But nevertheless, I think Berlin has captured much of the spirit of Rousseau. He's a great critic of luxuriating intellectual elites and a ruthless defender of entrenched popular prejudice. Does this make him a champion of the <i>lumpenproletariat</i>? Of the Trump voter? Dimitrios Halikiashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14687167606022949419noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2908609428851727972.post-32102243472065466182020-06-16T08:36:00.000-07:002020-06-16T08:36:04.746-07:00James Kent on Alexander HamiltonSome interesting remarks from James Kent's "<a href="https://archive.org/details/memoirsandlette00kentgoog/page/n296/mode/2up">Memories of Alexander Hamilton</a>."<br />
<br />
What first struck Kent was Hamilton's "masterly" efforts "to reanimate the powers of the Confederation, and to infuse life, vigor, and credit into that languishing system" (283). This is all clear from Hamilton's early efforts beginning in 1782 to centralize the fiscal state of the nascent Confederation and to raise revenue for the national government. Hamilton was just 25 years old at the time:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
it will abundantly appear, in the subsequent history of his life, that his zeal for the establishment of a national government, competent to preserve us from insult abroad and dissensions at home, and equally well fitted to uphold credit, to preserve liberty, and to cherish our resources, kept increasing; and that his views grew more and more enlarged and comprehensive as we approached the crisis of our destiny ... he did more with his pen and tongue than any other man, not only in reference to the origin and adoption of the Federal Constitution, but also to create and establish public credit, and defend the government and its measures, under the wise and eventful administration of Washington" (288).</blockquote>
Kent is effusive on Hamilton's talent as a lawyer (though he notes the competence of American lawyers at that time was nothing inspirational). When he was arguing before the Supreme Court of NY, Hamilton was just 27.<br />
<br />
On Hamilton's role in the constitutional convention, Kent writes that Hamilton's "avowed object was to make the experiment of a great federative republic, moving in the largest sphere and resting entirely on a possible basis, as complete, satisfactory, and decisive as possible" (299). It is clear that in Kent's judgment, Hamilton was <i>the indispensable </i>figure in the crafting and ratification of the constitution. Particularly notable, I think, is the praise of Hamilton's oratorical skill in dominating the ratifying debates in New York state.<br />
<br />
I think the most interesting discussion is of Hamilton's role as Treasury Secretary.<br />
<br />
Summarizing the report on manufactures:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
He contended that the encouragement of manufactures tended to create a more extensive, certain, and permanent home market for the surplus produce of land, and that it was necessary, in self-defense, to meet and counteract the restrictive system of the commercial nations of Europe. IT was admitted, however, that if the liberal system of Adam Smith had been generally adopted, it would have carried forward nations, with accelerated motion, in the career of prosperity and greatness. The English critics spoke at the time of his report as a strong and able plea on the side of manufactures, and said that the subjects of trade, finance, and internal policy were not often discussed with so much precision of thought and perspicuity of language (314-5).</blockquote>
Kent also brings to my attention Hamilton's pseudonymous pamphlets in favor of neutrality written under the names "<a href="https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Hamilton/01-15-02-0120">No Jacobin</a>" and "<a href="https://oll.libertyfund.org/pages/1793-pacificus-hamilton-no-1-pamphlet">Pacificus</a>." Kent thinks especially highly of Hamilton's "<a href="https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/hamilton-the-works-of-alexander-hamilton-federal-edition-vol-5#lf0249-05_head_046">Camillus</a>" pamphlets defending the Jay treaty. Kent predicts these will be long read, but I'd never heard of them.<br />
<br />
By 1798, Hamilton's stance of neutrality had turned somewhat more bellicose, as he demanded a far firmer military response to potential French aggression.<br />
<br />
Kent also quotes Washington's praise of Hamilton, which I hadn't seen before:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
He declared Hamilton to be his 'principal and most confidential aid; that his acknowledged abilities and integrity had placed him on high ground and made him a conspicuous character in the United States and even in Europe; that he had the laudable ambition which prompts a man to excel in whatever he takes in hand; that he was enterprising, quick in his perceptions, and that his judgment was intuitively great.' (320)</blockquote>
After his tenure in government, Hamilton returned to the law, where many of his most important cases dealt with libel and defamation:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
While he regarded the liberty of the press as essential to the preservation of free government, he considered that a press wholly unchecked, with a right to publish anything at pleasure, regardless of truth or decency, would be, in the hands of unprincipled men, a terrible engine of mischief, and would be liable to be diverted to the most seditious and wicked purposes, and for the gratification of private malice or revenge. Such a free press would destroy public and private confidence, and would overawe and corrupt the impartial administration of justice. (325) </blockquote>
Kent also recounts a dinner he had with Hamilton in April, 1804, where Hamilton expressed disappointment that he had not fully developed a systematic account of jurisprudence built "upon the principles of Lord Bacon's inductive philosophy. His object was to see what safe and salutary conclusions might be drawn from an historical examination of the effects of the various institutions heretofore existing" (328).<br />
<br />
And here's quite a remark! "I have very little doubt that if General Hamilton had lived twenty years longer, he would have rivalled Socrates, or Bacon, or any other of the sages of ancient or modern times" (328).Dimitrios Halikiashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14687167606022949419noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2908609428851727972.post-44636508914021784432020-06-06T07:33:00.003-07:002020-06-06T07:33:50.857-07:00Orwell on the National AnthemGeorge Orwell's complex if deep sense of nationalism is well known. (Even if his <a href="https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/notes-on-nationalism/">distinction</a> between patriotism and nationalism is less than convincing).<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Here are the final paragraphs of "<a href="https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/my-country-right-or-left/">My Country Right or Left</a>." Perhaps of some relevance in understanding the boiled rabbits of our day: </div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
If I had to defend my reasons for supporting the war, I believe I could do so. There is no real alternative between resisting Hitler and surrendering to him, and from a Socialist point of view I should say that it is better to resist; in any case I can see no argument for surrender that does not make nonsense of the Republican resistance in Spain, the Chinese resistance to Japan, etc. etc. But I don’t pretend that that is the emotional basis of my actions. What I knew in my dream that night was that the long drilling in patriotism which the middle classes go through had done its work, and that once England was in a serious jam it would be impossible for me to sabotage. But let no one mistake the meaning of this. Patriotism has nothing to do with conservatism. It is devotion to something that is changing but is felt to be mystically the same, like the devotion of the ex-White Bolshevik to Russia. To be loyal both to Chamberlain’s England and to the England of tomorrow might seem an impossibility, if one did not know it to be an everyday phenomenon. Only revolution can save England, that has been obvious for years, but now the revolution has started, and it may proceed quite quickly if only we can keep Hitler out. Within two years, maybe a year, if only we can hang on, we shall see changes that will surprise the idiots who have no foresight. I dare say the London gutters will have to run with blood. All right, let them, if it is necessary. But when the red militias are billeted in the Ritz I shall still feel that the England I was taught to love so long ago for such different reasons is somehow persisting. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
I grew up in an atmosphere tinged with militarism, and afterwards I spent five boring years within the sound of bugles. To this day it gives me a faint feeling of sacrilege not to stand to attention during ‘God save the King’. That is childish, of course, but I would sooner have had that kind of upbringing than be like the left-wing intellectuals who are so ‘enlightened’ that they cannot understand the most ordinary emotions. It is exactly the people whose hearts have never leapt at the sight of a Union Jack who will flinch from revolution when the moment comes. Let anyone compare the poem John Cornford wrote not long before he was killed (<a href="http://allpoetry.com/poem/8602099-Full_moon_at_Tierz_before_the_storming_of_Huesca.-by-Rupert_John_Cornford">‘Before the Storming of Huesca’</a>) with Sir Henry Newbolt’s <a href="http://www.wargames.co.uk/poems/lampada.htm">‘There’s a breathless hush in the Close tonight’</a>. Put aside the technical differences, which are merely a matter of period, and it will be seen that the emotional content of the two poems is almost exactly the same. The young Communist who died heroically in the International Brigade was public school to the core. He had changed his allegiance but not his emotions. What does that prove? Merely the possibility of building a Socialist on the bones of a Blimp, the power of one kind of loyalty to transmute itself into another, the spiritual need for patriotism and the military virtues, for which, however little the boiled rabbits of the Left may like them, no substitute has yet been found.</blockquote>
Dimitrios Halikiashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14687167606022949419noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2908609428851727972.post-15821407247123102972020-05-30T09:37:00.003-07:002020-05-30T09:51:04.693-07:00Ernest Renan's Liberal NationalismI recently had occasion to read Ernest Renan's famous 1882 lecture, "<a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7312/rena17430">What is a Nation?</a>" I'm told that this is something of a canonical text in the history of liberal nationalism, and reading through it makes sense why. The lecture is beautiful, learned, and forceful. Renan's commitment to some kind of liberalism resonates all the way through, and his warnings of the terror that accompany illiberal nationalism read prophetic at times.<br />
<br />
I take it this lecture is most famous for three points: (1) The rejection of any "metaphysical" nationalism founded on race, language, and religion (as well as economic interest, military necessity, and geography); (2) The insistence that nations must forget their origins and construct a new shared memory; and (3) The claim that nations depend on popular consent, and so can easily be redrawn or deconstructed.<br />
<br />
Those three central claims make it easy to see a continuity between Renan's liberal nationalism and, for example, Habermas' "constitutional patriotism." Such views contain a clear hostility to tying political citizenship to any pre-political identity (race, religion, language), and hope instead for a national identity built on some other kind of shared beliefs. Liberal nationalism is always a contingent nationalism. The "homeland" only exists insofar as people continue to consciously will it into existence. Why should it be anything more!<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
We have driven metaphysical and theological abstractions out of politics. What remains after that? Man, his desires, his needs. Secession, you will say to me, and, in the long run, the disintegration of nations will be the consequence of a system that places these old organisms at the mercy of oft scarcely enlightened wills. It is clear that, in such a field, no principle must be taken to extremes. Truths of this order are only applicable as a whole and in a very general fashion. Human wills change; but what does not, here below? Nations are not something eternal. They had their beginnings, they will end. A European confederation will probably replace them. But such is not the law of the century in which we are living. At the present time, the existence of nations is a good thing, a necessity, even. Their existence is the guarantee of liberty, which would be lost if the world had only one law and one master. </blockquote>
I think it's notable that Renan begins with the objection from secession (if the nation is just a matter of will, won't you have lots of secession?), he grants that voluntary exit is always a possibility, but he suggests finally that history well tend toward a "European confederation" rather than micro-states.<br />
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The question of referenda and national determination is present throughout the lecture. Renan makes it explicit in one famous passage: "A nation's existence is (if you will pardon the metaphor) an everyday plebiscite, just as an individual's existence is a perpetual affirmation of life."<br />
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It's tempting to read that line literally, and perhaps that's how it should be read. Perhaps Renan is arguing that provinces should just periodically hold plebiscites to determine to what nation they belong. That's probably what Renan favored in the case of Alsace! But I think that reading misses the second half of the quotation: <i>"a perpetual affirmation of life</i>." This is clearly a consent theory, but not necessarily a crudely majoritarian one. At least, I don't think that my daily decision to continue living just arises from a quick balance of the pros and cons. The will to remain a people emanates from somewhere deeper than can perhaps be captured by a momentary opinion poll or plebiscite.<br />
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In rejecting essentialist conceptions of the nation, Renan impressively goes through each candidate (race, religion, language, etc) to argue that none can provide a satisfactory account of what constitutes a nation. Still, if I may be pedantic, I think what he's doing here is introducing a difference between the efficient and formal cause of the nation. The form of the nation is not tied to any of these essential characteristics, but that doesn't mean the efficient cause of a national identity is always unrelated to such essentialism. This is why Renan emphasizes that we must forget the true origins of our national identity!<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The act of forgetting, I would even say, historical error, is an essential factor in the creation of a nation, which is why progress in historical studies often constitutes a danger for nationality. Indeed, historical enquiry brings back to light the deeds of violence that took place at the origin of all political formations, even of those whose consequences have been the most beneficial. Unity is always achieved brutally"</blockquote>
(Recall Burke on this point: "There is a secret veil to be drawn over the beginnings of all governments. They had their origin, as the beginning of all such things have had, in some matters that had as good be covered by obscurity. Time in the origin of most governments has thrown this mysterious veil over them. Prudence and discretion make it necessary to throw something of that veil over a business in which otherwise the fortune, the genius, the talents and military virtue of this Nation never shone more conspicuously." Hastings impeachment speech <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=P3o9AAAAcAAJ&pg=PA328&lpg=PA328&dq=There+is+a+sacred+veil+to+be+thrown+over+the+beginning+of+all+government.&source=bl&ots=5AGMA56vPk&sig=ACfU3U3ejCaR0owrvKU8FsdjEOR1J3OfIw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwj1rMD9_tvpAhX3mHIEHYl2BMQQ6AEwAHoECAcQAQ#v=onepage&q=There%20is%20a%20sacred%20veil%20to%20be%20thrown%20over%20the%20beginning%20of%20all%20government.&f=false">2/16/1788</a>).<br />
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So part of what it is to have a national identity is a requirement that we forget the vicious efficient cause of our nation. Yet essential for having a nation is having a new sense of shared historic memory. Here's a famous passage from the lecture:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
A nation is a soul, a spiritual principle. Two things that, in truth, are but one constitute this soul, this spiritual principle. One is in the past, the other in the present. One is the possession in common of a rich legacy of memories; the other is present consent, the desire to live together, the will to perpetuate the value of the heritage that one has received in an undivided form. </blockquote>
The reason these two things--historic memory and present consent--are really just one thing is because "A heroic past, great glory ... this is the capital stock upon which one bases a national idea."<br />
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And what kind of memories in particular are required? Memories of historic sacrifice! Those are the only memories that lead us to will to perform new glorious deeds in the future.<br />
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All this is certainly, I think, a kind of liberal nationalism. But what's so interesting about it to me is how much more <i>demanding </i>it is than contemporary liberal nationalisms! What liberal nationalists today would dare suggest that the nation is a "spiritual principle," or that the essence of national identity is a willingness to sacrifice oneself for others?<br />
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Sometimes, I think, language not so different from the "spiritual principle" is deployed by some of the more ambitious democratic theorists, who seek to conceive of democratic life as truly a collective venture. I have some sympathies for thinking that way. And some liberal nationalists might also be inclined to write in the language of sacrifice. For <a href="https://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/0198293569.001.0001/acprof-9780198293569">David Miller</a>, I believe, the language of sacrifice makes an occasional appearance. But "sacrifice" has been thoroughly sanitized! No longer is it meant to evoke heroic <i>literal death for the nation</i>, but rather a willingness to pay higher taxes to support the poor. When most contemporary liberal philosophers speak of sacrifice, they really just mean reciprocity. But I don't think that fits the language of glory Renan insists on using.<br />
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If anything, the closest instantiation of Renanian liberal nationalism I can think of is Lincoln! The political theology of the Gettysburg Address is designed specifically to construct a new shared historic memory to ground the American national identity. The (not so political) theology of the Second Inaugural is doing something a bit different: dwelling on shared sin and divinely ordained punishment, not historic sacrificial glory. The Lyceum Address also seems relevant, as there Lincoln laments the disappearance of a shared historic memory of the founding. But there too, Lincoln thinks it is impossible to hold on to a memory of a founding, for it will be inevitably levelled by the "silent artillery of time." Still, the youthful Lincoln's solution of constitutional reverence (even if lacking in some historical rigor) fits well with Renan's account of common sacrifice creating a shared will to construct a glorious future together.Dimitrios Halikiashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14687167606022949419noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2908609428851727972.post-11727833866578294622020-05-30T04:47:00.000-07:002020-05-30T04:47:01.943-07:00Jacob Viner on Providence and the Invisible Hand<span style="font-family: inherit;">I recently read Jacob Viner's <i><a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/The_role_of_providence_in_the_social_ord.html?id=3VUnAQAAIAAJ">The Role of Providence in the Social Order</a></i>. The obligatory first thing to say about this work is how unimaginable it would be today to see anything like this historic erudition in a contemporary economist. That's just part of the larger tragic story of the discipline of economics <a href="http://dhalikias.blogspot.com/2018/08/on-history-of-economic-thought.html">abandoning</a> its own intellectual history.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Viner wishes to bring out the connection between the founding ideas of modern economics and a long tradition of Christian providence. Frankly, as intellectual history, the lectures are a bit unsatisfactory. They lack the depth of <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Theology-Scientific-Imagination-Seventeenth-Century/dp/0691024251">Funkenstein's book</a> on the topic (<a href="http://dhalikias.blogspot.com/2020/05/funkenstein-on-indeterminacy-and-law.html">see here</a>), and they lack the philosophical elegance of Hirschman's <i><a href="https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691160252/the-passions-and-the-interests">The Passions and the Interests</a></i>.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">The book is extremely sketchy in its grand portrayal of Christian natural theology, but that's not really its main target, so perhaps Viner can be forgiven. (I think the lectures would have been better if he just began with Newton and Leibniz. Viner is much more interesting on how they played with watchmaker metaphors of divine causation than he is on Augustine). </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">The core thesis is that providentialism underwrites fundamental </span>tenets<span style="font-family: inherit;"> of the modern economic worldview. The first is that a new conception of providence justifies the hitherto universally scorned practice of global commerce:</span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">(1) providence favors trade between peoples as a means of promoting the universal brotherhood of man; (2) to give economic incentives to peoples to trade with each other providence has given to their respective territories different products. (32)</span></blockquote>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">According to an ancient and venerable tradition, nothing breeds more vice than commerce. Merchants travelling to distant lands bring back threatening foreign vices. The luxury goods themselves sold by the merchants are sources of great moral corruption. And the impulse to conquer the world with trade represents the height of human hubris--just think of Ulysses' wanderlust that lands him in Dante's inferno. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">This ancient view began to be inverted in late antiquity through the influence of a Stoic pagan, Libanius, on his Christian students (St. Basil and St. John Chrysostom). The new view that emerges is that God has deliberately distributed resources in different countries so as to induce global commerce and human fraternity. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Viner cites a wonderful example of this argument being made in 1894 as part of a Congressman's argument in favor of free trade. Unfortunately with a quick google I couldn't find the full cite:</span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">God could have made this world, if He had wanted to, with exactly the same climate and soil all over it, so that each nation would have been entirely independent of any other nation. But He didn't do that. He made this world so that every nation in it has got to depend for something upon some other nations. He did that to promote kinship among the different people. Let us drop this unnatural business. There is no end to the ingenuity of man. You can fix up a scheme, if you want, for raising oranges in Maine, but a barrel of those oranges would make William Waldorf Astor's pocketbook sick. . . . You can raise polar bears on the Equator if you spend money enough, but it would take a king's ransom to do it. </span></blockquote>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">The providential defense of global trade was also somewhat cynically tied to interpretations of the Genesis account of the Tower of Babel. The common reading of that story--God's condemnation of cosmopolitan hubris--was used by some as a patriotic critique of the universalist tendencies of global trade, but by others as evidence for that God sought to promote global trade by dividing up the world into different nations. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">One final intriguing point here is that the entirety of Hechsher-Ohlin trade theory can be found in these providential arguments! Thomas Hutchinson, of all people, is credited with a deeply prescient account of H-O international trade equilibrium.</span><br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Hutchinson: "The great creator of the universe in infinite wisdom has so formed the earth that different parts of it, from the soil, climate, &c. are adapted to different produce, and he so orders and disposes the genius, temper, numbers and other circumstances relative to the inhabitants as to render some employments peculiarly proper for one country, and others for another, and by this provision a mutual intercourse is kept up between the different parts of the globe" (52-3).</blockquote>
</blockquote>
The second contribution of providence theory to modern economics is the theodicy-based defense of economic inequality. A long tradition of British philosophy reacted against Hobbes' challenge that natural self-interest led to anarchy, and needed to be held in check by a powerful sovereign. The sentimental school--led by Shaftesbury and later Hutcheson--argued that disinterested benevolence is a far more powerful motivation than Hobbes accepted. The selfish school--led by theological utilitarians like John Gay and William Paley--reject any innate moral sense, but argued that an enlightened pursuit of self-interest will lead us to act in an ethical manner. The most blunt version of this self-interest comes not from some neo-Platonic account of the harmony of the soul, but from the explicit threat of eternal condemnation for vicious conduct. (Eighteenth century Anglican theology debates sound extremely crude on Viner's presentation).<br />
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Adam Smith's account of moral sentimentalism from <i>TMS </i>comes out of this tradition. For Smith, our reason is fallible, but God has fortunately planted in us natural sentiments that incline us to benefit our family, friends, neighbors, and countrymen. This is what leads Viner to conclude: "Smith's system of thought, including his economics, is not intelligible if one disregards the role he assigns in it to the teleological elements, to the 'invisible hand'" (82).<br />
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Viner finishes with some broader reflections on how the modern economic apology for inequality flows from these theodicy accounts. Since Aristotle it had been argued that communal ownership of property was deeply inefficient. A new line of argument (the one Viner claims was very rarely advanced) was that economic inequality mirrored the transcendent hierarchical order of creation. Another neo-Stoic line of argument was that inequality of wealth will not lead to the inequality of happiness, but indeed if anything the poor should be happier than the wealthy! (You can think here of Smith's parable of the poor man's son).<br />
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With that--and with some charming if boilerplate comments on how intellectual history teaches economists to be humble--Viner concludes. The lectures raise some interesting issues, and the discussion in particular of the providential tendency of trade to produce human fraternity is illuminating. But the canvassing of views on inequality is quick and somewhat superficial, and Viner doesn't do much to advance beyond my guess of what the common-sense understanding of this history already was.Dimitrios Halikiashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14687167606022949419noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2908609428851727972.post-55977251604893964742020-05-17T13:44:00.000-07:002020-05-17T13:44:17.582-07:00Funkenstein on Indeterminacy and Law<span style="font-family: inherit;">I recently read Amos Funkenstein's chapter on divine providence and the invisible hand in his massive <i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Theology-Scientific-Imagination-Seventeenth-Century/dp/0691024251">Theology and the Scientific Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century</a></i>. Funkenstein has plenty of interesting things to say--though I must confess I don't quite follow the arc of the chapter as a whole. It reads more as a series of episodic looks into distinct though connected accounts of providence and the philosophy history from late antiquity to Vico, with suggestive nods to Smith and Marx. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">One section I found especially interesting, however, was Funkenstein's treatment of the place for indeterminacy in law. Funkenstein begins this section with a discussion of Christian and Jewish attempts to deploy a principle of accommodation to understand the role of sacrifice in the Old Testament. The suggestion through all this is that modern accounts of historical progress (from Grotius/Smith's stadial theories of history, to Kantian providentialism) come out of exegetical debates over apparently inconvenient Old Testament descriptions of God and the Jewish law. The broad interpretive principle was that the "bible speaks the language of man," and that these passages must be understood as communicating to the primitive Jewish people in a way they could understand. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Ritual sacrifice is a particularly striking example. Augustine follows a long Jewish tradition in concluding that religious sacrifice was appropriate in a particular time given the prejudices and sensibilities of the Israelites. Today, however, modern Christians have reached a stage of development that allows them to more fully understand and worship God without reliance on such religious practices. For Augustine, the crucial break was of course the incarnation, while Jewish commentators relied on a historic narrative of religious monotheistic maturation. Here's Augustine in one of his <a href="https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/1102138.htm">letters</a> (see p. 223 of Funkenstein):</span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">The divine institution of sacrifice was suitable in the former dispensation, but is not suitable now. For the change suitable to the present age has been enjoined by God, who knows infinitely better than man what is fitting for every age, and who is, whether He give or add, abolish or curtail, increase or diminish, the unchangeable Governor as He is the unchangeable Creator of mutable things, ordering all events in His providence until the beauty of the completed course of time, the component parts of which are the dispensations adapted to each successive age, shall be finished, like the grand melody of some ineffably wise master of song, and those pass into the eternal immediate contemplation of God who here, though it is a time of faith, not of sight, are acceptably worshipping Him.</span></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">They are mistaken, moreover, who think that God appoints these ordinances for His own advantage or pleasure; and no wonder that, being thus mistaken, they are perplexed, as if it was from a changing mood that He ordered one thing to be offered to Him in a former age, and something else now. But this is not the case. God enjoins nothing for His own advantage, but for the benefit of those to whom the injunction is given. Therefore He is truly Lord, for He does not need His servants, but His servants stand in need of Him. In those same Old Testament Scriptures, and in the age in which sacrifices were still being offered that are now abrogated, it is said: <i>I said to the Lord, You are my God, for You do not need my good things.</i> Wherefore God did not stand in need of those sacrifices, nor does He ever need anything; but there are certain acts, symbolic of these divine gifts, whereby the soul receives either present grace or eternal glory, in the celebration and practice of which, pious exercises, serviceable not to God but to ourselves, are performed.</span></blockquote>
Ritual sacrifice has to be understood as a legal practice appropriate to a particular historic time and place. The development of appropriate religious practices is just a part of the great beauty (notice the aesthetic language) of God's providential plan for history.<br />
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Funkenstein turns to Maimonides, who further develops this philosophy of history. Maimonides emphasizes that every law is BOTH a commandment of reason and obedience. This means that the commandments of the Old Testament no longer observed by modern Jews were not instituted simply to teach obedience, but were built around a core rational principle.<br />
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This interpretive approach--that we can and should identify the underlying reason for even obsolete religious laws--combines with Maimonides' philosophy of science. (Here I don't entirely follow Funkenstein). On Maimonides' view all natural laws must contain some degree of contingency. This principle is Maimonides' way of explaining features of the dietary/ceremonial law that always had a rational purpose, but no longer bind practicing Jews. I'll quote Funkenstein at length:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
What do we really look for when we ask for the reason of a commandment? Must a rationale for a specific law cover every part and detail of that law? In a preliminary answer, Maimonides draws a strict analogy between laws of nature and social laws. In the second part of the Guide, Maimonides developed one of the most original philosophies of science in the Middle Ages. There he proved that not only are laws of nature (the ordering structures of nature) in themselves contingent upon God's will; but that each of them must include, by definition, a residue of contingency, an element of indeterminacy. No law of nature is completely determining, and no natural phenomenon completely determined, not even in God's mind. To illustrate the matter, allow me to invent an example. Assume that tables should all be made out of wood; assume that the kind of wood most suitable for tables is mahogany, and that the best mahogany can be found only in a remote forest in Indonesia. A carpenter who wishes to make a perfect table has good reasons to choose mahogany and to travel all the way to the said forest. But there and then he will ultimately be confronted with two or more equally reasonable possibilities. Should he choose the tree to his right or to his left? He must choose one, and both are equally suitable. The purpose can never determine the material actualization in all respects, down to the last particular; a "thoroughgoing determination" is ruled out by the very material structure of our world. In the very same way, there may (indeed must) be a purpose to the universe, but it does not govern all particulars. The purpose of the universe may require the circular orbit of the celestial bodies. But it does not account necessarily for the different velocities or colors of the planets (Funkenstein p 229).</blockquote>
So if I understand correctly, for Maimonides a law as a whole has a clear rational purposes (a rational final cause, I suppose), but that purpose need not explain every detail of the law. (What I find tricky about this is that Funkenstein contrasts Maimonides' position to that of Sa'adia, who argued that many divine commandments were simply irrational in their content, but existed merely for the ultimate purpose of inculcating obedience to God. Maimonides' rejects the strong claim that any of these laws themselves were irrational, but that there is simply a degree of free, contingent choice built into the nature of law itself. I see the difference, but it's worth thinking it through).<br />
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This Maimonidean philosophy of science (and therefore philosophy of law) is an extension, Funkenstein argues, of a principle always found in Aristotelian metaphysics. It also interestingly maps onto post-Newtonian physics: "In a sense, Maimonides' principle of indeterminacy is closer to modern than to classical physics: modern physics likewise assumes a principle of indeterminacy not as a limit to our knowledge, but as an objective indeterminacy within nature itself." Miracles and special providence, on this view, are not violations of the natural law, but free occurrences within the reservoir of contingency preserved by the nature of laws.<br />
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If it is true that indeterminacy is built into the nature of laws themselves, then we must reject Paley-style divine watchmaker arguments. (Newton and Paley always go together). If the universe was indeed governed by perfectly necessary laws that necessarily explained every single event, then there would be no reason for a creator God! The very fact that there is indeterminacy built into the nature of things is evidence that the order of the universe does not derive from the nature of matter itself, but from an imposition by the Creator. (Funkestein says this argument draws from Kalam, and is repeated by Kant).<br />
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This, ultimately, is Maimonides' explanation for the rational purpose of sacrifices that are no longer required. The final cause of these sacrifices is perfectly intelligible even today. But the particular matter of the sacrifices was always less important. Again, here's Funkenstein quoting Maimonides:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
We may be able to explain, in view of their purpose, why sacrifices should have been instituted in the first place; "but the fact that one sacrifice is a lamb and another a ram; and the fact that their number is determined-to this one can give no reason at all, and whoever tries to assign a rationale enters a protracted madness." Rather than looking for an always determining principle for each law, we should look for a contingent rationale. Maimonides found such a contingent rationale in the concrete historical circumstances under which these laws were given to the nascent Israel. (Funkenstein 231)</blockquote>
Unsurprisingly, the contingent rationale for the particular sacrifices demanded of ancient Israel was tied to their particular historical situation. The relative closeness to polytheistic sacrificial rituals was a deliberate pedagogic method to wean the Jewish people away from such idol worship.<br />
<br />
This is all very interesting philosophy of science and intellectual history (Funkenstein goes on to sketch the various reactions to this Maimonidean hermeneutic principle, focusing on those who condemned Maimonides for relativizing the truths of the bible). But the major upshot for my more parochial interests is the connection between these debates and later conceptions of the nature of positive law.<br />
<br />
Thomas Aquinas, for example, partly embraces Maimonides' method, both as a matter of interpreting the <a href="https://www.newadvent.org/summa/2098.htm">Old Law</a>, as well as a method of understanding the distinction between general precepts of reason derived from the <a href="https://www.newadvent.org/summa/2091.htm#article2">natural law</a>, and the particular instantiations/institutions of <a href="https://www.newadvent.org/summa/2091.htm#article3">positive law</a> and <a href="https://www.newadvent.org/summa/2091.htm#article4">divine law</a>.<br />
<br />
The ceremonial and judicial precepts of the Old Law were not rationally necessary in their particular content, but rather in their general purpose. The nature of law permitted a space for contingency with an eye toward guiding the Jewish people in their particular situation. (This is not so, of course, for the moral law precepts of the Old Testament, which are perfectly rational in themselves, and which are accordingly always binding).<br />
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As it relates to the distinction between natural and positive law, this indeterminacy in the essence of law proves quite useful to Aquinas. It allows him to make sense of the institution of private property, for example. Private property derives from the <a href="https://www.newadvent.org/summa/3066.htm#article1">natural law</a> itself--it is natural for man to own property. But against a <a href="https://www.constitution.org/jl/2ndtr05.htm">Lockean </a>natural-law theory of property, this natural-law precept remains thoroughly under-specified. It is natural that man have some form of private property for the sake of their own private development, but more importantly for the sake of the common good. (Also, if theft is a violation of the natural law, it seems necessary that some kind of ownership is required by the natural law).<br />
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Two important implications fall out of this account of the natural-law right to property. First, because the natural right to property is ultimately oriented towards the common good, whenever any positive-law right to property runs contrary to the common good, it ceases to obtain. This is the reasoning behind Aquinas' famous argument that theft for the sake of survival is, <a href="https://www.newadvent.org/summa/3066.htm#article7">strictly speaking</a>, not theft at all: "It is not theft, properly speaking, to take secretly and use another's property in a case of extreme need: because that which he takes for the support of his life becomes his own property by reason of that need."<br />
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And second, this account allows for <i>extensive discretion </i>in the positive-law imposition of private property rights. Here's Aquinas on the <a href="https://www.newadvent.org/summa/2095.htm#article2">general principle</a>:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
But it must be noted that something may be derived from the natural law in two ways: first, as a conclusion from premises, secondly, by way of determination of certain generalities. The first way is like to that by which, in sciences, demonstrated conclusions are drawn from the principles: while the second mode is likened to that whereby, in the arts, general forms are particularized as to details: thus the craftsman needs to determine the general form of a house to some particular shape. Some things are therefore derived from the general principles of the natural law, by way of conclusions; e.g. that "one must not kill" may be derived as a conclusion from the principle that "one should do harm to no man": while some are derived therefrom by way of determination; e.g. the law of nature has it that the evil-doer should be punished; but that he be punished in this or that way, is a determination of the law of nature.</blockquote>
The particular determination of the form private property should take is left to the free discretion of sovereign authorities. (Notice the similarity in this metaphor of the craftsman and the house with Funkenstein's example of the table. I'm fairly confident the craftsman/house metaphor comes from Aristotle, but I'm not sure).<br />
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Anyway, this is a long way of noticing something interesting about law for Aquinas and Maimonides: The essential room for free discretion. This is an echo, in part, of the ancient principle that law is always second best, precisely because free discretionary judgment will always be necessary. Consider, for example, the Eleatic Visitor in Plato's <i>Statesman</i>:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Now in a certain sense it is clear that the art of the legislator belongs to that of the king; but the best thing is not that the laws should prevail, but rather the kingly man who possesses wisdom ... [This is because] law could never accurately embrace what is best and most just for all at the same time, and so prescribe what is best. For the dissimilarities between human beings and their actions, and the fact that practically nothing in humana ffairs ever remains stable, prevent any sort of expertise whatsoever from making any simple decision in any sphere that covers all cases and will last for all time. (294a-b in the C.J. Rowe translation).</blockquote>
Something similar is true of Aristotle's discussion of the relationship between law and convention in his treatment of justice in the <i>Nicomachean Ethics</i>. (Is justice like money, different from society to society, or is justice like smoke, which no matter where you are flows upward from fire in the same way?)<br />
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Also worth noting here that there's a kind of double application of this principle of indeterminacy-in-law for Aquinas: (1) There is discretion in establishing human laws to instantiate requirements of the natural law; and (2) There is discretion in the application of the human law in the interest of promoting the common good. This second caveat derives from the fact that positive laws exist for generalities, not particulars, but that particular circumstances may derive a departure from the strict letter of the law. The <a href="https://www.newadvent.org/summa/2096.htm#article6">famous example</a>:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
For instance, suppose that in a besieged city it be an established law that the gates of the city are to be kept closed, this is good for public welfare as a general rule: but, it were to happen that the enemy are in pursuit of certain citizens, who are defenders of the city, it would be a great loss to the city, if the gates were not opened to them: and so in that case the gates ought to be opened, contrary to the letter of the law, in order to maintain the common weal, which the lawgiver had in view.</blockquote>
It's striking just how different all this is from the characteristically modern view of the rule-of-law (as opposed to the rule-of-men). We've already seen how Aquinas' natural-law right to property is radically unspecified compared to Locke's. The former view reserves extensive discretion to the political authorities in instituting property rights in accord with the common good. Locke, on the other hand, believes that the natural-right to private property establishes what Nozick called "<a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nozick-political/#MorRigSidCon">side constraints</a>" on authority.<br />
<br />
A similar difference can be found with Hume. Unlike Locke and Aquinas, Hume thought property rights derived from convention/construction, not nature. Yet despite their artificial character, laws of justice are extraordinarily inflexible! (See my <a href="http://dhalikias.blogspot.com/2020/01/humean-utility-good-enough.html">earlier post</a> on this).Dimitrios Halikiashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14687167606022949419noreply@blogger.com2