Marx on True v. Vulgar Criticism

I like this passage from Marx's "Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Law:"

Hegel's chief error is to conceive the contradiction of appearances as unity in essence, in the idea, while in fact it has something more profound for its essence, namely, an essential contradiction ... Vulgar criticism falls into an opposite, dogmatic error. Thus it criticises the constitution, for example. It draws attention to the antagonism of the powers, etc. It finds contradictions everywhere. This is still dogmatic criticism which fights with its subject-matter in the same way in which formerly the dogma of the Holy Trinity, say, was demolished by the contradiction of one and three. True criticism, by contrast, shows the inner genesis of the Holy Trinity in the human brain. It describes the act of its birth. So the truly philosophical criticism of the present state constitution not only shows up contradictions as existing; it explains them, it comprehends their genesis, their necessity." 

So, Hegel's error is a belief that the modern state/republican constitution only appears to contain contradictions, when in fact its essence is a united idea. (That is itself a very confusing thought which I will not attempt to unpack here).

There are two ways of criticizing Hegel. There is vulgar criticism, which consists in attempting to point out logical contradictions in Hegel's philosophy. And then there is true criticism, which attempts to discover the absurd conditions that could give rise to such a contradictory belief in the first place. (cf. my previous post on this).

This is a nice statement of Marx's method. As he says in the "Theses on Feuerbach:"

Feuerbach starts out from the fact of religious self-alienation, of the duplication of the world into a religious world and a secular one. His work consists in resolving the religious world into its secular basis.

But that the secular basis detaches itself from itself and establishes itself as an independent realm in the clouds can only be explained by the cleavages and self-contradictions within this secular basis. The latter must, therefore, in itself be both understood in its contradiction and revolutionized in its practice. Thus, for instance, after the earthly family is discovered to be the secret of the holy family, the former must then itself be destroyed in theory and in practice. 

These two passages rely on similar examples. In the first quotation, Hegel still seems somewhat Feuerbachian. He is content to uncover the mental sources of our contradictory beliefs. Philosophy is a great act of unmasking. It reveals the sort of mental distortions necessary to produce religious projections.

The revolutionary Marx of the "Theses" goes further. Intellectual unmasking is not enough. The crucial task of philosophy is to revolutionize the material conditions themselves responsible for these contradictions in thought to emerge. It is not enough to go around lecturing religious people (Dawkins style) about how it is that they've come to believe such silly things. What is needed is a revolution in the material conditions that gave rise to those silly religious imaginations in the first place.

A third striking statement of Marx's method comes from his famous letter to Arnold Ruge. (The letter famous for Marx describing himself as engaged in the "ruthless criticism of the existing order"). As he constantly does, Marx criticizes socialists who purport to have discovered an ideal of justice, and who wish to reform society to fit their ideal:

Nothing prevents us, therefore, from lining our criticism with a criticism of politics, from taking sides in politics, i.e., from entering into real struggles and identifying ourselves with them. This does not mean that we shall confront the world with new doctrinaire principles and proclaim: Here is the truth, on your knees before it! It means we shall develop for the world new principles from the existing principles of the world. We shall not say: Abandon your struggles, they are mere folly; let us provide you with true campaign-slogans. Instead, we shall simply show the world why it is struggling, and consciousness of this is a thing it must acquire whether it wishes or not.

Again, we have here a Feuerbachian Marx. The goal is "self-clarification." By helping those engaged in revolutionary politics understand their existing, objective situation, the philosopher will contribute to the revolutionary struggle. This is different, Marx insists, from confronting the revolutionary class with some abstract, dogmatic theory of justice. The revolutionary consciousness will emerge from revolutionary politics itself.

And finally, consider this famous statement of the method from the Manifesto:

The theoretical conclusions of the Communists are in no way based on ideas or principles that have been invented, or discovered, by this or that would-be universal reformer. They merely express, in general terms, actual relations springing from an existing class struggle, from a historical movement going on under our very eyes. 

Marx on Feeling and Philosophy

Karl Marx's PhD dissertation begins from a puzzle: Democritus and Epicurus seem to defend very similar philosophies of nature. Indeed, eminent figures in the history of philosophy from Cicero to the patristics to Leibniz have all argued that Epicurus is basically guilty of plagiarizing Democritus. Yet despite appearing to adhere to the same atomistic philosophy, the two philosophers could not have been more different:

However, a curious and insoluble riddle remains. Two philosophers teach exactly the same science, in exactly the same way, but—how inconsistent!—they stand diametrically opposed in all that concerns truth, certainty, application of this science, and all that refers to the relationship between thought and reality in general.

Marx outlines many of these oppositions. First, though both philosophers are materialists, Democritus is a skeptical materialist while Epicurus is a dogmatic materialist. On Marx's use of these categories, where Epicurus insisted that all we can know is that which we perceive, Democritus was torn between the apparent unreliability of our senses. As a matter of practice, Democritean materialism leads to an obsession with scientific exploration, while Epicurean materialism leads to a "contempt for positive science." Philosophy was never enough for Democritus. He traversed the entire world in search of better science. Epicurus, on the other hand, spent his life content in his garden, eating cheese and doing philosophy. 

Democritean materialism insisted that everything was pre-determined. With enough big data, we could predict every necessary chain of events. Epicurean materialism throws up its hands and bows before chance. Epicurus never had Democritus' obsession with the principle of sufficient reason. "There is no interest in investigating the real causes of events. All that matters is the tranquility of the explaining subject." 

This final difference--which Marx insists is tied directly to their philosophies, and not merely their personal dispositions--is most clearly seen in a comparison of their deaths: “while Democritus, despairing of acquiring knowledge, blinds himself, Epicurus, feeling the hour of death approaching, takes a warm bath, calls for pure wine, and recommends to his friends that they be faithful to philosophy.”

As Marx summarizes:

the two men are opposed to each other at every single step. The one is a sceptic, the other a dogmatist; the one considers the sensuous world as subjective semblance, the other as objective appearance. He who considers the sensuous world as subjective semblance applies himself to empirical natural science and to positive knowledge, and represents the unrest of observation, experimenting, learning everywhere, raging over the wide, wide world. The other, who considers the phenomenal world to be real, scorns empiricism; embodied in him are the serenity of thought satisfied in itself, the self-sufficiency that draws its knowledge ex principio interno. But the contradiction goes still farther. The sceptic and empiricist, who holds sensuous nature to be subjective semblance, considers it from the point of view of necessity and endeavors to explain and to understand the real existence of things. The philosopher and dogmatist, on the other hand, who considers appearance to be real, sees everywhere only chance, and his method of explanation tends rather to negate all objective reality of nature.

From all this, we see something interesting about how Marx recommends we read philosophy. His dissertation is a reaction against the insistence in his own day to reconstruct the precise, metaphysical content of philosophic arguments. This is a demand very much alive in the contemporary academy. Analytic philosophy--about which I have mixed feelings, though I am certainly grateful for my analytic professors for forcing me to discipline my thinking--takes clarity as its highest virtue. "What, exactly, is the view here?!" In a world of academic bullshit, that constant demand is refreshing and helpful. It is good to be forced to clearly spell out what it is that you mean. Marx would probably have benefited from Shelly Kagan as an editor.

Yet for Marx, philosophy is only half about spelling out the view. Just as important is the general feeling of a philosophical doctrine. In his words: "it is precisely the subjective form, the spiritual carrier of the philosophical systems, which has until now been almost entirely ignored in favour of their metaphysical characteristics.” Rather than obsess over the metaphysical particulars of one argument or another, we would do well to reflect on the overall mold-of-mind that produced a particular philosophic work. To boil down Democritus and Epicurus to a set of propositions would be to ignore the profound gap between their two philosophical worldviews.

In this, we find an important clue for reading Marx himself, especially his famously complicated--some say contradictory--views about the connection between theory and praxis. As Marx learned from Hegel, feeling can be the most important part of an argument. (To paraphrase Hegel, to know what you truly believe, think about what you would die for). What matters most isn't necessarily the ideas we hold in our heads, but our deep feelings about the world. The task of philosophy, on Marx's view, is to give fuller expression of that which we feel. 

In this connection, think about Marx's notorious prediction that capitalism will collapse under the weight of its own contradictions. By "contradiction," Marx did not mean syllogistic error. He did not mean that the intellectual apologists of the market economy would eventually meet some argument they were unable to answer. Greg Mankiw will always formulate a response. He meant that eventually, the universal proletariat would begin to feel the paradoxical failures of capitalism. And it was that feeling which would produce revolution. 

The sentimental side of Marx's philosophy is neglected by the (still too common) reading of Marx as a vulgar economic determinist. A utopian who thinks a full, scientific understanding of the economic base is all we need to understand society. I think of this as the Ben Shapiro interpretation of Marx ("facts don't care about your feelings").

Boccaccio's Typology of Plague Responses

Completely coincidentally, I happened to be part of a Decameron reading group as the Coronavirus pandemic hit. We have managed to continue the reading group on Zoom (not in a country estate) as we continue to work through the book.

The book is set in the midst of the Florentine Black Death of 1348. In a marvelous introduction, Boccaccio describes the effect of the plague on life in the city. I was especially struck by this passage, which applies just as well to the range of Coronavirus reactions today:

Some people were of the opinion that living moderately and being abstemious would really help them resist the disease. They, therefore, formed themselves into companies and lived in isolation from everyone else. Having come together, they shut themselves up inside houses where no one was sick and they had ample means to live well, so that, while avoiding overindulgence, they still enjoyed the most delicate foods and the best wines in moderation. They would not speak with anyone from outside, nor did they want to hear any news about the dead and the dying, and instead, they passed their time playing music and enjoying whatever other amusements they could devise.  

Others, holding the contrary opinion, maintained that the surest medicine for such an evil disease was to drink heavily, enjoy life's pleasures, and go about singing and having fun, satisfying their appetites by any means available, while laughing at everything and turning whatever happened into a joke. Moreover, they practiced what they preached to the best of their ability, for they went from one tavern to another, drinking to excess both day and night. They did their drinking more freely in private homes, however, provided that they found something there to enjoy or that held out the promise of pleasure. ... And yet, while these people behaved like wild animals, they always took great care to avoid any contact at all with the sick. 

In the midst of so much affliction and misery in our city, the respect for the reverend authority of the laws, both divine and human, had declined just about to the vanishing point, for, like everyone else, their officers and executors, who were not dead or sick themselves, had so few personnel that they could not fulfill their duties. Thus, people felt free to behave however they liked. 

There were many others who took a middle course between the two already mentioned, neither restricting their diet so much as the first, nor letting themselves go in drinking and other forms of dissipation as much as the second, but doing just enough to satisfy their appetites. Instead of shutting themselves up, they went about, some carrying flowers in their hands, others with sweet-smelling herbs, and yet others with various kinds of spices. They would repeatedly hold these things up to their noses, for they thought the best course was to fortify the brain with such odors against the stinking air that seemed to be saturated with the stench of dead bodies and disease and medicine. Others, choosing what may have been the safer alternative, cruelly maintained that no medicine was better or more effective against the plague than flight.

All these reactions are on display today. Although it's worth noting that the abstemious group in Florence still permitted themselves to drink and wisely closed themselves off from news of the plague. The extreme shut-ins today have, regrettably, chosen to closely follow hourly pandemic updates, and to share their findings with great exuberance online.

Most amusing, however, is Boccaccio's flat assessment of the success rates of the various strategies:

Of the people holding these varied opinions, not all of them died, but, by the same token, not all of them survived. On the contrary, many proponents of each view got sick here, there, and everywhere.

Boccaccio's probably right about that. Then again, he didn't know about "flattening the curve." Such progress we have made!

John Stuart Mill on Tone Policing

I had forgotten this argument from the final few pages of JS Mill's famous chapter, "Of the Liberty of Thought and Discussion" in On Liberty. Mill raises the question of offensive speech. He puts to himself an objection: "the free expression of all opinions should be permitted, on condition that the manner be temperate, and do not pass the bounds of fair discussion."

This particular objection deals with speech that offends in its tone/style/presentation, rather than in its content. Mill deals with that other species of offensive speech at length earlier in the chapter.

Mill says a number of things in response to the objection from intemperate tone. He notes, predictably, the impossibility of clearly setting what the "bounds of fair discussion" might be. He adds further that speech that offends often does so because it touches the truth in an uncomfortable manner.

But then he makes the following, more interesting point:

"With regard to what is commonly meant by intemperate discussion, namely invective, sarcasm, personality, and the like, the denunciation of these weapons would deserve more sympathy if it were ever proposed to interdict them equally to both sides; but it is only desired to restrain the employment of them against the prevailing opinion: against the unprevailing they may not only be used without general disapproval, but will be likely to obtain for him who uses them the praise of honest zeal and righteous indignation. Yet whatever mischief arises from their use, is greatest when they are employed against the comparatively defenceless; and whatever unfair advantage can be derived by any opinion from this mode of asserting it, accrues almost exclusively to received opinions." 

In short, critics of "intemperate speech" have no credibility, because they only attack these tools when they come from the defenders of unpopular opinions. The majority is free to mock, ridicule, and satirize the minority. But when the minority deploys the same tools, they are scolded for intemperance or a lack of charity.

That observation rings true to me. "Trolling" is an abusive form of speech when it is deployed to target mainstream views. But it is a righteous form of mockery when it is deployed against dangerous ideas--i.e., non-dominant perspectives.

Mill continues by spelling out the unfairness that results from this dishonest use of tone policing:

"In general, opinions contrary to those commonly received can only obtain a hearing by studied moderation of language, and the most cautious avoidance of unnecessary offence, from which they hardly ever deviate even in a slight degree without losing ground: while unmeasured vituperation employed on the side of the prevailing opinion, really does deter people from professing contrary opinions, and from listening to those who profess them." 

That too comports with my experience. When disagreeing with the conventional wisdom, an extraordinary degree of caution, precision, and moderation is required. You must begin by granting the kernel of truth--however minuscule--there might be in the mainstream view you oppose. You must distance yourself from those who share your views but articulate them in a relatively inartful manner. (Note, none of these caveats are required for defenders of the dominant view). You begin with apologies and dull precision, the other side begins with mockery and hyperbolic condemnation. You are fated to lose the debate.

Necessary Capitalist Deceptions

A professor recently brought to my attention this wonderful passage from Keynes' A Tract on Monetary Reform':

No man of spirit will consent to remain poor if he believes his betters to have gained their goods by lucky gambling. To convert the business man into the profiteer is to strike a blow at capitalism, because it destroys the psychological equilibrium which permits the perpetuance of unequal rewards. The economic doctrine of normal profits, vaguely apprehended by every one, is a necessary condition for the justification of capitalism. The business man is only tolerable so long as his gains can be held to bear some relation to what, roughly and in some sense, his activities have contributed to society. (25-26).

This came up in the context of a classmate's presentation of a wonderful working paper of his. He is thinking through the connection between economic theories of value (labor and capital's respective contributions to production) and normative theories of distributive justice (the degree to which prevailing distributions of income are just).

His paper looked at this question through Marx's discussion of commodity fetishism and classical economics. The great question that emerged from his paper was what *kind* of connection we should expect to find between theories of how wealth is created and theories of who deserves what share of that wealth.

Keynes' point in this passage is that (1) we will only tolerate inequalities of wealth IF we believe that those inequalities in some sense are understood to be just. And (2) we understand gains to be just if they are connected to someone's contribution to society.

This makes sense as a general sociological explanation for the persistent toleration of the material inequality generated by market systems. It is also the position defended explicitly by Greg Mankiw in his "Defending the One Percent" and his earlier "Spreading the Wealth Around." There, Mankiw argues that we should accept the extraordinary wealth of the 1% not just because the economic system that generates this inequality is beneficial to the rest of society, but because the rich deserve their tremendous wealth in virtue of their tremendous contributions.

We deserve what we contribute, and the rich contributed a lot more. Here's Mankiw in "Spreading the Wealth:"

Let me propose the following principle: People should get what they deserve. A person who  contributes more to society deserves a higher income that reflects those greater contributions. Society permits him that higher income not just to incentivize him, as it does according to utilitarian theory, but because that income is rightfully his. This perspective is, I believe, what Robert Nozick, Milton Friedman, and other classically liberal writers have in mind. We might call it the Just Deserts Theory.

Though Mankiw *claims* he is channeling the tradition of Nozick, Friedman, and other classical liberal philosophers, he is actually repudiating their central arguments for capitalism.

Friedman, I believe but haven't confirmed, resists the language of "moral desert," and prefers to speak instead just in terms of the consequentialist benefits of the market economy.

Nozick, as Mankiw acknowledges in the paper, explicitly rejects any "patterned theory of justice" according to which people are paid what they deserve. For Nozick, justice does not inhere in broad patterns of social distribution, EVEN a pattern on which people are paid precisely what they contribute. Justice inheres MERELY in the free, contractual agreements that individual agents reach.

Hayek is probably the most extreme case in this respect. Hayek argues vehemently against any theory of justice that connects income with moral desert. Contra Mankiw, Hayek is insistent that there is no such thing as "value to society." Articulating the classic subjectivist position, he writes in The Mirage of Social Justice:

though the conception of a 'value to society' is sometimes carelessly used even by economists, there is strictly no such thing and the expression implies the same sort of anthropomorphism or personification of society as the term 'social justice'. Services can have value only to particular people (or an organization), and any particular service will have very different values for different members of the same society. To regard them differently is to treat society not as a spontaneous order but as an organization whose members are all made to serve a single hierarchy of ends. This would necessarily be a totalitarian system in which personal freedom would be absent. (75-76)

On Hayek's view, there is no such thing as an objective contribution of value to society. Consequently, it is absurd to suppose that people are being paid "justly" only if they are being paid as a function of their contribution. A few pages earlier, he writes:

It has been argued persuasively [by Keynes in the above quotation, for example] that people will tolerate major inequalities of the material positions only if they believe that the different individuals get on the whole what they deserve, that they did in fact support the market order only because (and so long as) they thought that the differences of remuneration corresponded roughly to differences of merit, and that in consequence the maintenance of a free society presupposes the belief that some sort of 'social justice' is being done. The market order, however, does not in fact owe its origin to such beliefs, nor was originally justified in this manner. (73)

So we have a puzzle. It's common sense enough to believe that capitalist material inequality can only be tolerated if we believe that the inequality somehow maps on to a sense of moral desert. Keynes makes this prediction. Mankiw insists that the wealth inequality we see ACTUALLY DOES map onto moral deservingness based on contributions to society.

And yet the most sophisticated defenders of capitalism--Nozick and Hayek--explicitly REJECT this position. They reject any defense of capitalism which argues that people are paid what they deserve. Nozick focuses instead on free, individual agreement. Hayek focuses on non-moral rewards for subjectively valued success.

So the puzzle, crudely put, is that capitalism can only function if most people believe in something that capitalism's best defenders reject. The theorists of capitalism hate moralizing economic outcomes. The sociology of capitalism requires precisely that.

I'll end with a very different picture of the noble lie capitalism requires to sustain itself. In TMS IV.I, Adam Smith gives his famous story of the "poor man's son," a striving, bourgeois citizen who devotes himself to bettering his material condition. His whole life is motivated by a desire to attain the apparent happiness afforded by the luxurious, beautiful lifestyles of the rich. He is motivated to gain wealth because he believes wealth will make him happy. It is only after he attains that wealth that he realizes he has squandered his life in the pursuit of trinkets and baubles, while ignoring the true sources of personal fulfillment.

A false picture of happiness inspired his thrift and industry. And yet, Smith continues:

It is well that nature imposes upon us in this manner. It is this deception which rouses and keeps in continual motion the industry of mankind. It is this which first prompted them to cultivate the ground, to build houses, to found cities and commonwealths, and to invent and improve all the sciences and arts, which ennoble and embellish human life; which have entirely changed the whole face of the globe, have turned the rude forests of nature into agreeable and fertile plains, and made the trackless and barren ocean a new fund of subsistence, and the great high road of communication to the different nations of the earth. (TMS IV.I.10)

Smith continues with his only explicit use of the phrase "invisible hand" in TMS, arguing that the same aesthetic deception doesn't just inspire the poor man to work hard, but leads the rich man to squander his wealth on useless trinkets and baubles. Conspicuous consumption leads him to (foolishly) redistribute his own wealth to the poor. A very different kind of "trickle down" economics than is typically associated with Smith.

So the Keynesian deception that motivates an acceptance of capitalism: A false belief that inequality is deserved because it tracks contributions to society.

The Smithian deception that motivates participation in capitalism : A false belief that the trinkets and baubles wealth will buy you are the sources of genuine happiness.

Adam Smith's Disciplinary Capitalism

I typically cringe at the language of "disciplinarity" in contemporary political theory (at least, in political theory tinged with Foucault). Usually, the jargon seems at best unnecessary, and at worst deliberately obfuscatory.

Very broadly, "disciplinarity" is meant to pick out the new way that modern societies wield social power and control over their subjects. Unlike traditional explicitly hierarchical regimes, the modern, liberal world is committed to an ideal of open, transparent, egalitarian government. Gone is the traditional relationship of "ruler-ruled." In its place have arisen "disciplinary" institutions that bend souls rather than break them.

At least, that's my understanding of Foucault passages like the following:

The disciplines show, first, according to artificially clear and decanted systems, the manner in which systems of objective finality and systems of communication and power can be welded together. They also display different models of articulation, sometimes giving preeminence to power relations and obedience (as in those disciplines of a monastic or penitential type), sometimes to finalize activities (as in the disciplines of workshops or hospitals), sometimes to relationships of communication (as in the disciplines of apprenticeship), sometimes also to a saturation of the three types of relationship (as perhaps in military discipline, where a plethora of signs indicates, to the point of redundancy, tightly knit power relations calculated with care to produce a certain number of technical effects). 

What is to be understood by the disciplining of societies in Europe since the eighteenth century is not, of course, that the individuals who are part of them become more and more obedient, nor that they set about assembling in barracks, schools, or prisons; rather, that an increasingly better invigilated process of adjustment has been sought after-more and more rational and economic-between productive activities, resources of communication, and the play of power relations. 

(The insights found in such passages are probably better expressed by Tocqueville and Weber. And there without any Cohenite "bullshit.")

Though I hate the language, unfortunately, I can think of no better description than "disciplinary capitalism" for Adam Smith's defense of price-gouging in times of scarcity.

Libertarian or classical-liberal defenses of price gouging are well known. In short: Driving up the price of a scarce resource seems morally icky, but it is actually a socially beneficial means of encouraging suppliers to bring the needed-resource to the deprived area. What a fantastic convergence of private interest (the interest of the seller in making as much money as possible) and the common good (the benefit following from the inflow of the needed resource)!

That, so far as I understand it, is the standard classical-liberal position. (John Locke's Venditio may be the earliest articulation of this core logic. Michael Munger has an interesting post on that here).

So one would expect Adam Smith to say something like that. Yet here's his own explanation (from WN) of the benefit of price-gouging in a time of famine:

[the merchant] is likely to sell all his corn for the highest price, and with the greatest profit; and his knowledge of the state of the crop, and of his daily, weekly, and monthly sales, enable him to judge, with more or less accuracy, how far they really are supplied in this manner. Without intending the interest of the people, he is necessarily led, by a regard to his own interest, to treat them, even in years of scarcity, pretty much in the same manner as the prudent master of a vessel is sometimes obliged to treat his crew. When he foresees that provisions are likely to run short, he puts them upon short allowance. Though from excess of caution he should sometimes do this without any real necessity, yet all the inconveniencies which his crew can thereby suffer are inconsiderable, in comparison of the danger, misery, and ruin, to which they might sometimes be exposed by a less provident conduct.

In other words, the benefit of price gouging is NOT that the price signal will draw in further grain merchants. The benefit is that the high price will force consumers to more frugally consume! This is not a story of market equilibration, but of character reformation! Free-trade capitalism disciplines people by teaching them prudence. What happens to the imprudent family that can't afford the sky-high price of grain? Well, they better learn!

Smith says something similar about the benefits of free trade in alcohol. It is true (as the moralists claim) that liberalizing this trade will lead to cheaper booze, which will, in turn, increase drunkenness in the short term. Yet Smith claims the experience of drunkenness will somehow discipline the people! Having experienced the harmful effects of excessive liquor consumption, the people will learn the virtue of sobriety. Also WN:

Were the duties upon foreign wines, and the excises upon malt, beer, and ale, to be taken away all at once, it might, in the same manner, occasion in Great Britain a pretty general and temporary drunkenness among the middling and inferior ranks of people, which would probably be soon followed by a permanent and almost universal sobriety. At present drunkenness is by no means the vice of people of fashion, or of those who can easily afford the most expensive liquors. A gentleman drunk with ale, has scarce ever been seen among us.

Humean Utility: Good Enough

A professor of mine is fond of this striking passage from Appendix III of David Hume's Enquiries: 

All the laws of nature, which regulate property, as well as all civil laws, are general, and regard alone some essential circumstances of the case, without taking into consideration the characters, situations, and connexions of the person concerned, or any particular consequences which may result from the determination of these laws in any particular case which offers. They deprive, without scruple, a beneficent man of all his possessions, if acquired by mistake, without a good title; in order to bestow them on a selfish miser, who has already heaped up immense stores of superfluous riches. Public utility requires that property should be regulated by general inflexible rules; and though such rules are adopted as best serve the same end of public utility, it is impossible for them to prevent all particular hardships, or make beneficial consequences result from every individual case. It is sufficient, if the whole plan or scheme be necessary to the support of civil society, and if the balance of good, in the main, do thereby preponderate much above that of evil. Even the general laws of the universe, though planned by infinite wisdom, cannot exclude all evil or inconvenience in every particular operation. (emphasis added)

The puzzle: Why do we honor the laws of property when they appear to take from the poor, beneficent man and give to the wealthy miser? 

The answer: Because law forces us to deal abstractly and formally with matters of property. We cannot take into account the relative deservingness of the parties. We must enforce "general inflexible rules" because they ultimately best serve the "public utility."

This is a familiarly Humean thought. Hume is, after all, the great theorist of rules, norms, and conventions. Good rules need not return the just outcome in every particular instance, what matters is that they promote utility taken on the whole. 

In that sense, Hume is broadly read as anticipating "rule consequentialist" improvements on utilitarianism. 

But that interpretation misses a key detail of this passage. Consequentialism, even of the rule-sort, is interested in maximization. But Hume's point here is not that these inflexible property rules will maximize public utility in the long run. His point is that these rules are good enough. The reason to enforce these rules is because in the long run they promote substantially more good than harm. 

The obvious reply is: Well what if we can develop a system of property that does better than the current laws in the long run?

Importantly, Hume doesn't go down that path. Indeed, the calculating, maximizing instinct characteristic of utilitarianism is broadly absent in the Humean system. 

Hume's focus on rules/laws that get us good enough is key to understanding Hume's conservatism. For Hume, it is a miracle that anything works at all. The laws of property are to be defended not because they are perfect, and not because they are utility maximizing, but because they do a good enough job of staving off the dysfunction characteristic of feudal and primitive societies. 

The right question for politics is not: How do we maximize utility. It is rather: How is it that anything functions at all? The instinct of asking how to best maximize any desirable output would probably appear to Hume the path of madness. 

In "Of the Original Contract," Hume makes the anti-revolutionary character of this "it's-good-enough-conservatism" clear: 

Did one generation of men go off the stage at once, and another succeed, as is the case with silk-worms and butterflies, the new race, if they had sense enough to choose their government, which surely is never the case with men, might voluntarily, and by general consent, establish their own form of civil polity, without any regard to the laws or precedents, which prevailed among their ancestors. But as human society is in perpetual flux, one man every hour going out of the world, another coming into it, it is necessary, in order to preserve stability in government, that the new brood should conform themselves to the established constitution, and nearly follow the path which their fathers, treading in the footsteps of theirs, had marked out to them. Some innovations must necessarily have place in every human institution, and it is happy where the enlightened genius of the age give these a direction to the side of reason, liberty, and justice: but violent innovations no individual is entitled to make: they are even dangerous to be attempted by the legislature: more ill than good is ever to be expected from them: and if history affords examples to the contrary, they are not to be drawn into precedent, and are only to be regarded as proofs, that the science of politics affords few rules, which will not admit of some exception, and which may not sometimes be controuled by fortune and accident. The violent innovations in the reign of Henry VIII. proceeded from an imperious monarch, seconded by the appearance of legislative authority: Those in the reign of Charles I. were derived from faction and fanaticism; and both of them have proved happy in the issue: But even the former were long the source of many disorders, and still more dangers; and if the measures of allegiance were to be taken from the latter, a total anarchy must have place in human society, and a final period at once be put to every government.

Do Great Ideas Sink or Float?

It is commonplace to praise great ideas for having stood "the test of time." Implicit in that thought is that if an idea keeps kicking around, then it must capture some deep truth, a truth that allows it to resurface again and again in wildly different historical moments.

Francis Bacon thinks the opposite. On his view, the persistence of an idea is likely a symptom of its superficiality. It floats along the waters of time precisely because of its frivolity. Serious ideas are heavy and thus difficult to understand. So they sink down with time, rather than float along with the current.

From The Great Instauration:

"Now as far as the people are concerned, the doctrines that most flourish are either contentious and pugnacious, or bland and empty, such, that is, as either ensnare assent or win it by flattery. And therefore the greatest minds in every age have doubtless felt their force; while being men of uncommon capacity and understanding they have nonetheless, with an eye to their popular reputation, submitted to the judgement of time and of the multitude; and as a result, any more exalted reflections that may have gleamed forth were straightaway buffeted and extinguished by the winds of popular opinion. The result has been that Time, like a river, has brought down to us the light and inflated while it has sunk the weighty and solid." (Preface)

The pre-Socratics were better than Plato and Aristotle. They "did not open schools, so far as we know, but applied themselves to the search for truth more quietly, austerely and without fuss, making no great show or parade about their work. They did their work better, in my opinion, only their teachings have been obscured over the passage of time by those shallower men who pay more attention and regard to the grasp and wishes of common people. Time, like a river, brings down to us what is lighter and more puffed up, and lets the heavier, solid matters sink." (I.71)

Philosophy was corrupted after it became dominated by Plato and Aristotle. Things were fine until the fall of Rome, when Aristotelian and Platonic philosophy became dominant (I imagine he's blaming the Church for that): "It was only in still later times, with the flooding of the barbarians into the Roman Empires and the virtual shipwreck of human learning, that the philosophies of Aristotle and Plato, like light and insubstantial flotsam, survived the waves of time." (I.77)

Locke on Intellectual Inheritance and Progress

From the fascinating fourteenth chapter of John Locke's The Reasonableness of Christianity:

When Truths are once known to us, though by Tradition, we are apt to be favourable to our own Parts; and ascribe to our own Understandings the Discovery of what, in reality, we borrowed from others; Or, at least, finding we can prove what at first we learnt from others, we are forward to conclude it an obvious Truth, which, if we had sought, we could not have missed. Nothing seems hard to our Understandings, that is once known; And because what we see we see with our own Eyes, we are apt to over-look or forget the help we had from others, who shewed it us, and first made us see it, as if we were not at all beholden to them for those truths, which they opened the way and lead us into. For Knowledge being only of Truths that are perceived to be so, we are partial enough to our own Faculties to conclude that they of their own strength would have attained those Discoveries without any assistance from others. Knowledge is light in the mind, which we see and perceive: And whilst it is certain that they be our own eyes that see and perceive it, who shall perswade us that ours were not made and given us to find truth as well as theirs who had no other advantage but the luck to be before us? Thus the whole stock of Human Knowledge is claimed by every one, as his private Possession, as soon as he (profiting by others Discoveries) has got it into his own mind; And so it is: But not properly by his own single Industry, nor of his own Acquisition. He studies, 'tis true, and takes pains to make a progress in what others have delivered; But their pains were of another sort, who first brought those Truths to light, which he afterwards derives from them. He that Travels the Roads now, applauds his own strength and legs, that have carried him so far in such a scantling of time; And ascribes all to his own Vigor, little considering how much he owes to their pains, who cleared the Woods, drained the Bogs, built the Bridges, and made the Ways passable; without which he might have toiled much with little progress. 

A wonderful little passage.

 

John Locke and the Janitorial Theory of Philosophy

From the wonderful "Epistle to the Readers" in Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding:

The commonwealth of learning is not at this time without master-builders, whose mighty designs in advancing the sciences, will leave lasting monuments to the admiration of posterity; but every one must not hope to be a Boyle, or a Sydenham; and in an age that produces such masters, as the great — Huygenius, and the incomparable Mr. Newton, with some others of that strain; it is ambition enough to be employed as an under-labourer in clearing the ground a little, and removing some of the rubbish that lies in the way to knowledge; which certainly had been very much more advanced in the world, if the endeavours of ingenious and industrious men had not been much cumbered with the learned but frivolous use of uncouth, affected, or unintelligible terms, introduced into the sciences, and there made an art of, to that degree, that philosophy, which is nothing but the true knowledge of things, was thought unfit, or uncapable to be brought into well-bred company, and polite conversation. Vague and insignificant forms of speech, and abuse of language, have so long passed for mysteries of science; and hard and misapplied words, with little or no meaning, have, by prescription, such a right to be mistaken for deep learning, and height of speculation, that it will not be easy to persuade, either those who speak, or those who hear them, that they are but the covers of ignorance, and hindrance of true knowledge. To break in upon the sanctuary of vanity and ignorance, will be, I suppose, some service to human understanding: though so few are apt to think they deceive or are deceived in the use of words; or that the language of the sect they are of, has any faults in it which ought to be examined or corrected; that I hope I shall be pardoned, if I have in the third book dwelt long on this subject, and endeavoured to make it so plain, that neither the inveterateness of the mischief, nor the prevalence of the fashion, shall be any excuse for those, who will not take care about the meaning of their own words, and will not suffer the significancy of their expressions to be inquired into.

I take this to be a great statement of the ambition of modern philosophy. Locke apparently lowers the sights: Philosophers cannot hope to be "master builders" of human knowledge in the way the great scientists can be. The philosopher's task is merely to clear the ground of intellectual debris. But that janitorial project (clarifying some terms, making some distinctions) is soon revealed to be transformative in its own right. The goal is to do away with the prejudices and superstitions that clutter human thought. Without such a clearing, we are incapable of exercising reason or persuasion.

Sheldon Wolin has a nice reading of this section in chapter nine, part II of Politics and Vision (expanded edition).