Digressions&Impressions

On Callard on Taste, and Badness-promotion

We tend to think of aesthetic disputes as reflecting the least substantive differences between people—you like vanilla, I like chocolate, there’s no arguing over taste, let’s move on. But that point of view may be infected by the wishful thinking of backwards argumentation: given that there is no arguing over taste, those differences had better be unimportant. What if some of them are not?

Consider the fact that the most passionate friendships—those of youth—tend to coalesce around aesthetic passions: movies, music, comics, games. When you meet a stranger and you “click” with them, isn’t it very often because you liked the same book, or movie, or fell in love with the same city or language or artist? Consider real gift-giving, which involves pre-selecting the recipient, by contrast with the self-selection of “whoever might pass by and want it.” Meaningful, personalized gifts tend to succeed precisely when there is some shared aesthetic between the giver and recipient.

...It is striking that Socrates lumps together ethics and aesthetics as the two sources of strife.

The history of ethical thought is a record of the attempt to insert a wedge between those last two kinds of judgments. In both cases, we’ve worked to turn down the heat, but in the aesthetic case it’s by agreeing to disagree, whereas in the moral one it’s by way of the conceit that some kind of unified moral theory—be it Kantianism or Consequentialism—can serve as backdrop for adjudicating all disputes. We can just “weigh” the reasons and see who is “objectively” right and who is “objectively” wrong. In aesthetics we don’t need objectivity and in morality we can have it: strife solved.

I believe there is no scale that resolves all moral disagreements, and that it is not always possible to agree to disagree about the beautiful and the ugly. These claims are not unrelated to one another, or to the fact that the aesthetic and the moral are not as separate as we would like to believe.

I find guns ugly; the gun enthusiasts I know find them beautiful. I find meat delicious; many vegetarians I know have a distaste for it. Whether the ethics drives the aesthetics or vice versa, once they have fused it is to be expected that some of the recalcitrance of a person’s ethical “intuitions” will be due to the fact that they are also visceral aesthetic responses. We pick our friends as much by the contents of their playlists as the contents of their characters—perhaps because we see the contents of their playlists as a not insubstantial part of the contents of their characters.

It is, of course, ridiculous of me to hate the person who gave me that silly bowl, just as it is ridiculous of you to hate the bearded hipster, or the backwoods redneck, or the sleek businessman, or the unwashed hippie, or whichever “type” of person strikes you as having contemptibly bad taste. When political disputes fall along cultural and geographic lines, as they do in our country, it’s hard not to suspect that the divide is as much about aesthetics as about ethics.

The fact that at some fundamental level we remain on the same page—life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, etc.—is not necessarily cause for much optimism. When it is in the aesthetic dimension that people drift apart from one another, the rift between them is not very amenable to rational persuasion. We Americans have become multiple nations in taste.

An aesthetic divide between two human beings is not trivial; it obstructs their ethical relations. The earth-mother aesthetic encoded in the belly bowl ran counter to my vision of parenting a newborn, which involved no breastfeeding, no cloth-diapering, no co-sleeping. If I leave that bowl in the entryway, I am doing so with the hopes of establishing an ethical connection—benefaction—to someone solely on the grounds of a fundamental aesthetic divide. The person who picks up such a bowl is a “different kind of person” from me. I have no doubt that, were I to meet her, I’d find some common ground, but one thing that can’t serve as that common ground is the fact that my trash is her treasure. Or so I saw it.

Ben saw things more amicably. While granting to me the existence of aesthetic divides so profound as to occasion moral offense, he didn’t think the tackiness of the bowl qualified. He asked me to take a step back: surely I wouldn’t want to live in a world of monolithic aesthetic taste. The plurality of aesthetic points of view is a product of the genuine diversity between human beings, and the fact that they are free to judge for themselves what appeals to them. It should occasion respect, not contempt.

But there is a fine line between respecting others’ right to their bad taste, and opting to participate in it. Ben saw that participation from a bird’s eye-view, as autonomy-promotion: helping people enjoy whatever they might like. I saw it from the ground-up, in terms of badness-promotion. The question here is the degree to which peoples’ inability to see eye-to-eye is itself something they can see eye-to-eye about. Is there a way to adjudicate this disagreement between Ben and me? Or is it a difference in taste?--Agnes Callard "Do you want my garbage?"  @The Point. [HT Dailynous]

Agnes Callard is a distinctive and ambitious, fresh voice writing for a wider audience without pandering to the "many." Since there are few of these in the profession, this is very welcome. I use 'ambitious' because she is willing, as the post above suggests, to present herself as speaking to and on behalf of a much larger national 'we' even if, perhaps, especially when, she is being a contrarian. This latter feature was on display in one of her other pieces this past week, which appeared in the New York Times, and (alas) got lots more attention (see for example here).

I thought her NYT piece conflated the pure (politics free) form of philosophy with the institution of professional philosophy where (what I call) a species of philosophical politics is inevitable even as a means to improve philosophy (for, an example, recall this post on David Lewis). In it, she also stipulates (without argument) that philosophical teaching/influencing is about bringing other "people to believe only what they, by their own lights, can see to be justified."  

Now, one feature of professional philosophy I am attracted to emotionally is our freedom to criticize. And when I reflected on today's Digression the nuggets in the previous paragraph where going to be its fuel. But I have come to think that our professional practices overvalue criticism and discourage us to seek out the lovely and handsome in other philosophers.* And, in fact, the part of me that admires Callard is not her persuasiveness, rhetorical or argumentative, if any, but her ability to raise significant questions in a playful-serious way.+ And she does so in virtue of her clear willingness not to see certain alternatives. 

Take, for example, the gun case. This will illustrate both what I mean by a willingness not to see (in this case, it's my limitation), and something about her ruling out. I can find guns aesthetically pleasing objects. The aesthetic involved is one my eighteenth century teachers would call 'fit.' Often it is not solely fit; the beautiful guns draw on other aesthetic features (including speed, a certain kind of faux sexuality, and shininess, precision, etc.). I do so by taking a certain stance toward guns; the one that screens off the gruesomeness of the effects. There is nothing ennobling about hunting or killing people. But I think it's possible, genuinely possible, to admire guns and wish to see them banned. Quite clearly, if I allowed myself to see the gruesomeness of the effect(s), the aesthetic valence of guns might, gestalt-like, change as it clearly does for Callard. But it is not impossible that the gruesomeness would (if one has a Goth sensibility) enhance the aesthetic value. After all, sometimes a joke is funny because it is, in part, in bad taste (for more reflections on that issue see here).

It is possible that the last two sentences reflect, as I imagine Callard would say, a defect of character (in me).  And what I like about her public persona is this very puritanical strain in her [to be contrasted with the amicable], which can be grounded in her sensibility of disgust (read the full essay to grasp what I am talking about it) and then seeks to justify the actions that follow from this sensibility (without, I note, trying to come to grips with her disgust).** I tend to find such sensibility comical in one off situations, yet when others aim to live up to it consistently (and so exhibit integrity), admirable, too. I think we can be plastic about our evaluative criteria depending on extremely minor variations in context. (So, yes, one can value another's integrity, while being a situationist oneself.) 

Of course, she may think the flaw in position may not be of character at all. She may think I mistakenly keep distinct, aesthetic and ethic, that are simply intertwined. (But my appeal to the aesthetic quality of the gruesome is meant to illustrate that I do no such thing.)

Even so, my preference for Callard is not just aesthetic, it's also substantive. She is right to call attention to the significance of aesthetics in our lives, our friendships, and our politics. For example, one cannot understand the grip Trump has on his followers if one ignores aesthetics (recall here and here).++  

She is right that the unwillingness to discuss taste is no evidence for its lack of significance in our lives. But it is surprising she does not note that the silence on difference of taste functions like a taboo (recal and here). As she recognizes it clearly prevents social conflict. And since she grants that it is very possible that aesthetic matters themselves are foundational, these conflicts could not be adjudicated by any arbiter. 

Or at least she invites us to consider that possibility. I am struck, amazed really, by the felt need of adjudication. If Ben and Agnes were in the situation in which a collective decision was necessary, then, indeed, adjudication would be required. But I don't see why one would have to force a decision, and not allow further discussion. 

What Callard does not seem to allow, perhaps cannot see, is that talking about differences in taste, to keep that conversation going despite one's differences (recall here and here) is itself, or can be, a joyful exercise. Adam Smith in presenting the exemplary nature of Hume's life, whose philosophical views he predicted would fail to persuade many, called this, with a nod to Addison and agreeing with Pope, a 'gaiety of temper.' It's an open question for me -- no really this is not an objection! -- if such a temper can facilitate Callard's wish to participate in badness-promotion. 

The road to serfdom before Hayek (Knight, Lippmann, and a note on Weber today)

The author insists earnestly and at length that a regime of collectivism will inevitably be a dictatorship, a tyranny over the whole cultural and personal life of man as well as over economic activity, however defined. The turning-point from liberalism as laisser faire to liberalism as collectivism, miscalled liberalism, is set at about 1870.

The current phase of the movement toward collectivism in the United States, as regards the structure and process of government, is the active development of pressure groups under the wing of the government itself, together with the displacement of the activities of legislature and courts by administrative organs and processes. The original liberal movement was, more than any other one thing, a struggle for an effective legal order. Our self-styled liberals of today are doing their utmost to get away from legality. Ostensibly they would have the administration operate under a general legislative grant of power. But it is obviously a short step to a condition in which the legislative mandate will be under the control of the administration of the day itself-and then a shorter, relatively immaterial step to the adjournment "without day" of all lawmaking by elected representatives as a superfluous formality or an impediment to action. This means the end of all popular control of government, all "responsibility." Only an omnipotent and irresponsible state can deal with or suppress the organized pressure groups-or all but one of them, which one would become the state. All this seems to the reviewer as clearly as it does to Mr. Lippmann not only historically inevitable but actually necessary if there is to be any political order at all in a country where the leading economic and (perhaps other) special interests have been taught to think that it is the business of government to fight their battles against "business" and have been organized, or encouraged or allowed to organize, to get "justice" for themselves, or their "rights" -or simply what they want. [p. 865]...

Perhaps even more "glaring" is the absence of any real argument on the question as to why a collectivist regime must be a despotism. Even in a book of this sort, intended for a wide audience, it is somewhat jarring to have it simply asserted as the proclamation of an "inexorable law" (or a plain dogma), not merely that collectivism means tyranny but apparently that it is impossible, or at least theoretically incompatible with social life above the level of savagery. We read: "The really inexorable law of modern society is the law of the industrial revolution, that nations must practise the division of labor in wide markets or sink into squalor and servitude." ...... And again, "There is no way of practising the division of labor, and of harvesting the fruits of it, except in a social order which preserves and strives to perfect the freedom of the market" (pp. 206 and 207).--Frank Knight  (1938) reviewing Walter Lippmann's The Good Society in the Journal of Political Economy. 867 [Ht Ross Emmett]

Frank Knight, who is now primarily known as author of Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit and the Godfather of Chicago economics, was also one of the first, prominent Weberians Stateside. (Among other things he published a translation of Weber's Wirtschaftsgeschichte (General Economic History)—as Ross Emmett (the greatest Knight scholar) taught me --,the first book by Weber to appear in English in 1927.) I return to Weber below.

Knight is clear that by 1938, by then then in the second FDR administration, the sense of the state of crisis in liberalism had not been abated. The idea of crisis frames the review; and as he puts it near the end of his review, "It is not too much to say that the history of modern democratic systems leaves the issue unsettled as to whether representative machinery of any kind, or government based in any way on popular discussion, can meet such a crisis and survive." (271) On the very page cited by Knight above (207), Lippmann himself speaks of "the debacle of nineteenth-century liberalism."  According to Lippmann (this is not in Knight), liberals started to loose the battle of ideas from 1848 onward, and subsequently to loose political battles, too.* It was not at all obvious, subsequent the first world war, the Russian revolution, and the great depression, that liberalism would survive the century. It is no surprise that much of the most arresting writing of the period is so illiberal in character. 

In the review, Knight treats liberalism as primarily characterized by three features: the rule of law (an "effective legal order"), representative democracy, and government by "popular discussion." Contemporary readers may suspect that "the rule of law" is primarily about property rights, but Lippmann is explicit that he thinks of something more expansive with an "effective legal order;" that is, it involves commitment to the idea that "individuals have equal and reciprocal rights and duties." (The Good Society, 267) In fact, Lippmann is extremely critical of late nineteenth century liberal jurisprudence which, disguising the role of power and utility in generating property rights, had turned property rights into a universal law (e.g Good Society, 258). I mention this because both Lippmann (and Knight) are notable among liberals of the crisis-ridden age for their continued adherence to democratic norms.** 

Knight's response to Lippmann's book is notable because he calls attention to (what we may call) the road to serfdom before Hayek thesis he attributes to Lippmann. I am not just making a joke. Hayek read The Good Society (he participated in a famous colloquium on the book in 1938 in Paris). And as scholars have noted he engaged with Lippmann's writings in the period prior to the Road to Serfdom (1944). Lippmann almost wrote the preface to the Road to Serfdom. And Hayek almost added a "postscript to The Road to Serfdom, written in 1948," in which Hayek noted that "although he had written the book chiefly on the basis of his knowledge of Britain and Germany, he was aware that American writers had made similar points about the situation in the United States, including ‘‘such well known books as Mr Walter Lippmann’s Good Society, which of course I knew and to which I ought to have acknowledged greater indebtedness.’’"+  

I take the 'road to serfdom thesis' to entail that once one switches to an extensively planned economy ('collectivism" in Knight's and Lippmann's terminology), the needs of planning and stability will ensure that a dictatorship will follow. I read Knight as attributing a version of this thesis to Lippmann. [There are passages that suggest Hayek may have flirted with the idea that even the welfare state would inevitably generate dictatorship (as Andrew Farrant and Edward McPhail argue), but for present purposes I remain agnostic on that more expansive version of thesis.]

What's striking about Knight's interpretation of Lippmann is that the road to serfdom is taken to be immanent in the New Deal policy of organizing interest/pressure groups. In Lippmann's book, however, pressure groups precede the New Deal by "sixty years."His main example of the role of pressure groups in what he calls "gradual collectivism" is the tariff of the Hawley-Smoot Bill in 1930. It is the case, however, that Lippmann claims that "the one certain thing is that in a democratic society the granting of some privileges must be followed by the granting of more privileges." (116) This suggests an open-ended process to ever more collectivism.

Even so, the thrust of Knight's review is peculiar because after thanking Mises and Hayek, Lippmann writes in his acknowledgments of his indebtedness to "John Maynard Keynes, who has done so much to demonstrate to the free peoples that the modern economy can be regulated without dictatorship." (viii) That is to say, from the start of his book Lippmann thinks democracies can find ways to prevent the road to serfdom. 

In fact, the very pages in The Good Society that Knight cites and quotes also claim "the renascence of liberalism may be regarded as assured." And Lippmann thinks this is the case because he thinks (i) something like liberalism is the natural accompaniment of an economy with advanced division of labor (206); (ii) he thinks collectivism, "in practice" (that is peace-time) is impossible and leads to a decline in living standards, terror ("brutality" 2o6). In addition, (iii) he thinks the collectivist states become "prey" and risk "conquest." (207)

Somewhat striking, and ironically, Lippmann's confidence that collectivism in practice is impossible (ii) is grounded in the apparent retreats from communism by Lenin and Stalin (205-8). Knight clearly suspects (867), however, that Lippmann's confidence is influenced not just by these historical developments in Russia, but also, and primarily, by Mises' contributions to the socialist calculation debate ,which Lippmann had discussed earlier in the Good Society and had praised (94ff; in fact, Lipmann's accompanying footnote treats Hayek and Weber as fellow contributors to this argument. (It is the only mention of Weber  and one of two mentions of Hayek in text of the The Good Society.) 

Knight uses the occasion of the review to lampoon Mises's argument ("wishful thinking"). The core point of Knight is that Mises argument is entirely too abstract, and that science lacks the expertise to make any claims about what is possible or not in reality: "No one knows at all definitely what is politically possible....There is practically no science in terms of which any fairly certain prediction can be made as to how a government will operate under any given conditions." (868) While I do not want to imply that Hayek read the review, what is striking about Hayek's great breakthrough in the social calculation debate in "the use of knowledge in society" is to turn away from questions of possibility, and, instead, to turn the attention to the nature of the "a process by which knowledge is constantly communicated and acquired" (Hayek 1945: 530).  [We might say the debate went from metaphysics/modality to epistemology.]

Knight, by contrast, thinks there is no reason to be sure that collectivism is impossible. So, in this respect he is much more pessimistic than Lippmann. And he is confident that full blown collectivism must devolve into dictatorship (868-869). So, Knight clearly holds a point of no-return version of the road-to-serfdom. However, he does not think that point has been reached yet or that reaching that point is especially likely.

So, here's my hypothesis. The road to serfdom thesis was if not inspired by Lippmann, at least prompted, in part, by him. But Lippmann did not hold the thesis; it is articulated by Knight in his review of Lippmann and (mistakenly) ascribed to Lippmann. Knight, however, thinks there is nothing inevitable about the thesis because he thinks the future is still very much open. I cannot prove that Hayek read Knight's review of Lippmann. (Knight was later a somewhat ambivalent referee for The University of Chicago Press of Road to Serfdom.) But Knight articulated several major challenges to liberal self-reflection in his review of Lippmann. And some of Hayek's major contributions to the liberal self-imagine, for good and ill, can be fruitfully interpreted as responses to that review. 

This Digression is somewhat long. But even so, I promised a comment on Knight's Weberianism. It can be discerned in the following passage:

It might have been thought self-evident, if anything in the field of politics can be called such, that the first essential function and task of government is to preserve unthreatened its own monopoly of political power, and that this means prevention of the development of dangerous power groups outside itself.

Knight has turned Weber's "monopoly of legitimate violence/force" (in Politics as a Vocation) into a "monopoly of power." The substitution may be thought innocent given that one may reasonably hold that power equals possible violence. But in Knight's hand the state does not tolerate what we may call ([recall]) following Bagg) concentrated power. And so one of the tasks of the state is to prevent the growth of concentrated power and doing so without devolving in fascism.

Liberalism, Politics, and the Spirit of Mercantilism (Crisis of Liberalism: V)

The widely read, widely traveled, superlatively observant author of the Wealth of Nations need not be told so obvious a thing as that self-interest entered also political life....

Smith gave a larger role to emotion, prejudice, and ignorance in political life than he ever allowed in ordinary economic affairs. The mercantile policies directed to the improvement of the balance of trade with particular countries have their origin in “national prejudice and animosity” (I, 497 [441]). The legislation against corn traders is so perverse as to lead Smith to compare it to laws against witchcraft (11, 41 [ 5001 ) ; indeed, “the laws concerning corn may every where be compared to the laws concerning religion” (11, 48 [507]). In fact all unwise economic legislation from which no politically strong constituency drew benefits must be nonrational legislation....

In general, however, Smith’s attitude toward political behavior was not dissimilar to that of a parent toward a child: the child was often mistaken and sometimes perverse, but normally it would improve in conduct if properly instructed...

One may give--for generations of economists have given-advice lavishly without taking account of the political forces which confine and direct policy. In the absence of knowledge of these political forces, the advice must often be bad and usually be unpersuasive. Why tell the sovereign that free trade is desirable, if one has no method of disarming the merchants and manufacturers who have obtained the protectionist measures ? Why tell the French sovereign to abandon the taille and capitations and increase the vintiemes, when only a revolution could dislodge the tax-favored classes? Why believe that better turnpikes await only the appointments of a better class of commissioners (11, 248 [ 684-851 )? George J. Stigler (1971)  "Smith's Travels on the Ship of State" [HT Glory Liu]

This post is part of a larger series on the Crisis of Liberalism (recall here;  here; here; (see also here, here, here, and here).

Here's a useful, undoubtedly mythical narrative about the origins of liberalism: it arose as an ameliorative project in opposition to mercantilism in the seventeenth and eighteenth century. (Yes, there were other targets, including feudalism and certain species of theocracy.) Here mercantilism is understood as a theory of state capture by interested classes who use the state to promote their own economic interests either through so-called rents, conquest (imperialism), slavery, or the tax system (or all of them). In the Wealth of Nations, Smith calls the whole violent ideology against which he hones his fire, "the Mercantile Spirit." From that vantage point, liberalism is a reformist appeal to the interests of other classes as well as enlightened self-interests of the business classes.  The key conceptual move is to turn zero-sum logic into a win-win agenda that promotes, as a political program, a moral vision (the good society) that is all about the expansion of individual freedoms (note the plural). Depending on one's taste one may well come to privilege particular features of the liberal program (free trade, rule of law, individual choice, harm reduction, mutual respect, free press, free speech, elections, separation of powers, freedom of religion, etc.)

Notice that the mythical narrative presupposes the existence of states with non-trivial capacities and societies with complex division of labor and different perspectives on their interests. (This narrative is not identical to ones one finds circulating among some kinds of libertarians.) Notice, too, that what is commonly called capitalism is neutral between liberalism and mercantalism. So, for example, many (recall) of the ills that Marx (and Engels) diagnose in capitalism, are, from the vantage point of a liberal, really ills of mercantile variant thereof (e.g., "the executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.") This is one reason why, for example, social democracy (which borrows from liberalism and Marxism) is conceptually possible.

Now, one historical (stylized) fact is that the very success of liberalism can give rise to forces that make a worse form mercantilism possible. This is really the story of the first wave of liberalism during the 19th century and its collapse in World War I (recall). And this has generated throughout the development of liberalism other important intellectual and institutional innovations, including ideas about anti-trust (to prevent concentrated market power), the progressive tax rate (to prevent concentrated economic power), the promotion of meritocracy in government hiring, the development of international law, and, alongside many attempts at liberalizing the economy, the mobility of people (open borders, etc.), the development of many international institutions (so characteristic of the second wave of liberalism). 

Notice that the mythical narrative now reveals, which was also true at first, that sometimes liberalism entails strengthening the state institutions and their functioning, even attacking (to use a useful term coined by Samuel Bagg) concentrated powers in the private sector (or, as Gorden Arlen reminds me, 'sinister interests') and sometimes entailed strengthening the forces of civil society, including of businesses and religions. (Jacob T. Levy has nicely articulated a more sophisticated version of the tactical vacillation in (recall) his book Rationalism, Pluralism & Freedom.)

At any given time, the ameliorative, mitigating spirit of liberalism demands from us imperfect judgments about what the greatest/most urgent dangers are and what the right way to respond to them might be (see Peter Boettke on that very challenge today). At no point does liberalism expect to destroy the spirit of mercantilism because this would require a reform of human nature and (as anarchists urge) the total abolition of the political power of the state. 

What liberalism then also requires is a theory of how politics operates (which can constrain the judgment). As Stigler notes, the very idea of state capture presupposes that people are self-interested and know what they are doing when they influence or have power.  One may say then that the diagnostic use of public choice economics is co-extensive with the history of liberalism. (Of course, public choice insights were known to critics of democracy and liberal ideas before liberalism was invented.) This was obscured a bit in the long period when utilitarianism was dominant because it often presupposed philanthropic legislators.  Alongside his paper on Smith, in 1971 Stigler published a piece on the nature of rent-seeking, "The Theory of Economic Regulation" on the demand and supply of regulation that itself became  wildly influential (this morning it had over 12,000 citations). For those who wish to amuse themselves, they can compare Stigler's  two brief essays (the Smith one and the one on rents) and note that they include the same kind of examples and the same rhetoric against the mistakes of economists.

Now, sometimes liberalism is tempted -- and this Stigler diagnoses -- by two other theories of politics (which are opposed even if the same side of the coin because they tend to black-box politics): one suggests that in politics unreason rules. I think one finds this attitude in some Hayekians, but, as Stigler notes correctly, one can find traces of it going back to Smith (even if I think Stigler misreads some of his own examples). On this view, politics is simply unpredictable and corrosive to any rational ideals (or both)--it often is accompanied by the idea to keep one's distance from politics and reduction of state power. The other [black-box theory] is one that implies that good normative ideas are automatically implemented [by benevolent and truth apt legislators] and then executed by a rule following bureaucracy. As Stigler notes nobody would assent to holding such a theory explicitly, but a lot of policy advice assumes it in practice. 

As an aside, part of the inside-baseball joke of the closing line of the quoted passage by Stigler is not just that economists are volunteering themselves as a particular class of (rent-seeking) job-seekers, the impartial and truth-apt commissioner, who is not to be found in his models, but that Smith -- the apostle of free trade -- himself ended up as a high customs commissioner to the British Crown.

Short of revolution (which liberals tend to abhor), Stigler advocates a different (fourth) understanding of policy. It requires not just the diagnostic features of  public choice, but also knowledge of "the political forces which confine and direct policy." This requires knowledge of the sort that empirical political science and sociology can supply. So, from this perspective, any policy advice must include a constituency or coalition that can promote the policy effectively (and have a grasp of the ways bureaucracies may react to them). Recent political philosophy can treat these as belonging to a certain class of feasibility constraints. Obviously, the promise is that this may increase the chances of uptake; it also makes all policy proposals much more status-quo friendly. Sometimes the concession to feasibility makes liberalism appear as a handmaiden to conservatism even if the path is honorable. 

What Stigler refuses to countenance, and I think here he underestimates Smith, is that morality itself can be mobilized.+ In addition, alongside most readers of Smith, he misses the role systematic theory has in shaping long-term policy. 

Let me wrap up. When liberal solutions to the problem of mercantile spirit (rent-seeking, state violence, etc.) themselves generate worse problems than the one they were aiming to solve then liberalism runs the risk of collapsing and becomes unattractive if not unpersuasive to the young. As regular readers know I think we have reached such a stage in the wake of the great financial crisis. The very survival of the financial system was taken to require great handouts to the rich and powerful. Few believe, when listening to self-described libertarian billionaires plotting interplanetary escape, that capitalism can solve the environmental/climate challenges ahead. It is no wonder that the spirit of mercantilism with its embrace of national state sponsored violence against immigrants and trade barriers with its fondness for grand building projects (etc.), has grown so bold since. But since that is the very ground of the existence of liberalism this is no reason for despair; it's our permanent challenge. 

On Brexit, Popular Sovereignty, and Party Democracy

The metaphor of the body politic can be an attractive one to think about political community, especially when the body is on the verge of collapse and you have a name for the disease: Brexit. The UK has been branded “the sick man of Europe” and needs a good cure before it is too late. What better suggestion than the idea of a national unity government, united only by the noble purpose of extending Article 50 to avert no deal?

The idea of a government of national unity to prevent a no-deal Brexit is a destructive contradiction.

First, there is a contradiction in its appeal to the nation. A government of national unity identifies the whole nation with the part opposed to a no-deal Brexit. It not only ignores the will of the other part of the nation, inclined to leave the EU, and indeed leave by 31 October, but denies its claim to be part of the nation, even in name. 

Second, there is a contradiction in the promise of unity. A national unity government would sharpen divisions, not only in the nation as a whole but in its parts. A cross-party government formed and dissolved with the sole purpose of fixing Brexit by extending Article 50 (assuming a further extension is any kind of fix) can avoid taking responsibility for the consequences of its very consequential decisions. 

By its temporary nature, by its concentration of executive discretion, by its absence of a wider programmatic commitment, it lacks the democratic credentials to chart a process of future reconciliation. It prevents citizens from linking their grievances on Brexit to wider political issues, and to engage with the deeper question of what kind of society they all want to share.

Not only does the solution sharpen divisions in the nation, it sharpens them in its political parties. In parliamentary democracies, these are the primary agents that help citizens distinguish their political views, the principles they subscribe to, and the selection of policies that reflect their commitments. 

A government of national unity is the work of all but the responsibility of none. Such is the hope of course...

These were extreme circumstances. Only in the fantasies of the most ardent Leavers can Brexit be compared to a world war. Nor can it be compared to the Great Depression, though some Remainers have tried. Still, the fact that parties are systematically punished for their participation in governments of national unity is not the result of unfortunate historical accident. It is the logical expression of a very basic democratic tension, one where in consequential political moments, politicians that owe their power to the people they represent, turn crucial political decisions into matters for professionals.

The price of cross-party unity is the depoliticisation of those very political problems that move people to associate with parties in the first place; these problems classified as accidents that must be averted rather than as products of human will.

This leads to the third contradiction in the idea of a Brexit-stopping national unity government: the government part of the formulation. A government is an agent that uses executive power to make decisions in the name of the people. Its actions are supposed to be rooted in an organic web of democratic processes and institutions that enable the people’s will to be articulated in an intelligible way. 

This is why parties have conference debates and decisions, leadership campaigns, electoral manifestos. This is why they are chosen to represent citizens, and how they are held accountable for their performance in government, and in opposition. This is why popular sovereignty is the soul of the body politic.

A government of national unity led by backbenchers rather than the current leader of the opposition would not only suspend party democracy in the present, it would destroy confidence in it for the future. Just like the denial of authority to the 17 million or so citizens who voted Brexit, the denial of dignity to the half-million Labour members represented by Corbyn reveals the enduring inability of pro-Remain elites to comprehend, let alone relate to, opinions they oppose. 

Both are treated as some kind of disease from which we will be cured, provided the right treatment is found. Both display the same thoughtlessness vis-a-vis the process that led to these decisions, and the likely consequences of further ignoring their rationale. This is the way not to solve Brexit but to dig the sick man’s grave.--Lea Ypi  "A national unity government to block no-deal Brexit? It would do nothing more than dig the nation’s grave" in the Independent, August 10, 2019. [HT Chris Brooke]

Lea Ypi (one of the most important political theorist's today) is correct in stating that a government dedicated to postpone indefinitely, and so prevent, a no-deal Brexit would not be accurately named as a 'government of national unity.'  Ypi is surely right that names matter and I agree with her that bad consequences would follow from not merely misnaming the key features of a government, but deceptively so. But Ypi's own arguments themselves seem to me to run together a defense of popular sovereignty with a defense of the party system (as a means of expressing that popular sovereignty). More important, her argument is [a] almost entirely based on a fidelity to the present party system (and -- this is irrelevant to the rest of the argument -- perhaps, [b] a preference for the present leader of the opposition), while missing that this very party system got the UK into its present trouble and is, arguably, in the midst of a dramatic transformation (recall how I am indebted to Stephen Davies on this). In addition, [c] while Ypi is very clear about the down-side risks emanating from a national unity government, she is, however, silent about the downside risks that Brexit represents to the present party system. My interest today is primarily in starting a conversation about this latter risk. 

Before I get to that the core of my concern, I need to do some set-up. The government of national unity that is being considered would be more truthfully named 'a care-taker government to prevent a no-deal Brexit.' (Alas, I can't dream up an acronym for that.) Caretaker governments with a single mandate are not common in the UK, but they occur not entirely infrequently in other parliamentary democracies. Generally, the care-taker is tasked to organize an election, but sometimes it is tasked with something more policy-oriented (and then it can be named a provisional government).

In the present UK circumstances such a provisional government is only being muted because (i) the inherited party system fails to represent the true political divisions in society, and (ii) the elected, present British parliament has a clear majority against a so-called no-deal Brexit despite (ii*) the presence of a government that seems willing to let it happen (if certain of its demands are not met by the EU). The fact of (ii)+(ii*) is evidence of (i). Now, the Brexit referendum was both the triggering cause and, perhaps, representation and symbol of (i). Another important bit of evidence for (i) is that that Cameron called the referendum to settle a debate occurring then primarily within the Conservatives. The effect of the referendum has been to split the other natural governing party of Britain.

It is notable that Ypi's noble defense of party democracy fails to mention the referendum entirely. She thereby elides the problem that her presentation of party democracy represents a mediated form of popular sovereignty that competes with the referendum that is, if one takes popular sovereignty seriously, a more direct expression of it. In addition, it is notable that she tacitly denies the once popular idea that in the UK context, it is parliament that is supposed to be sovereign (at least since 1689 or so).  That parliament is sovereign was even presupposed in the referendum, which was supposed to be advisory (or consultative). I claim she tacitly denies this because she seems to refuse to allow that a majority of the elected MPs could legitimately overrule the will of the (membership of) party-machines. The only reason (it's not an argument) she gives for this is by linking the workings of party democracy to popular sovereignty.+ 

So much for set up. I agree with Ypi that there are very serious downside risks with pursuing a government of national unity that would not represent even a semblance of such unity. Let's grant her that. She is, however, a bit cagey about the consequences of letting the current parties and, in particular, their present leaderships play out Brexit. She herself is no Lexiter (at least was not as recently as November 2018); her socialism is resolutely trans-national and (for all its flaws) pro-European. So, her opposition to a national unity government is both principled (not grounded in her preferences) and with a clear eye on its downside risks. While I am no social democrat, I respect such a stance immensely.

I agree with Ypi that in present circumstances there are very serious risks to the future character of democracy if Brexit is postponed or even prevented. She is right that existing "grievances" may well be nourished such as to undermine faith in democracy. But I think Ypi falsely assumes that the present party-system, or some suitably similar one, will exist post-Brexit and that such a party system will be capable of harnessing grievances to better ends than the one that gave rise to the referendum.++ She also tacitly assumes that that parliamentary democracy post-Brexit will be especially liberal or social democratic in character.

But such hopes rest, I think, on a rather complacent understanding of what happens in democracies that suffer major economic shocks (which no-deal Brexit will generate), partition (which is likely given the radical opposing views of the Scottish and English electorates on European identity), and not to mention (and I really wish otherwise), sectarian violence (which is not impossible once a border separates Northern Ireland and Irish Republic again).+++ In a low growth, low trust environments, the more likely effect will be (an) electorate(s) that will put its faith in authoritarian leaders who in the name of popular sovereignty nourish grievances and with few checks and balances to constrain them. That's the real danger of Brexit in the name of popular sovereignty.

 

When you have no time edit (a volume or special issue).

[This post was invited by Helen de Cruz on behalf of The Philosophers' Cocoon, where it runs simultaneously here.] 

Once you have received tenure or (in Europe) a permanent position, the time available for research often goes down drastically. You will be expected to take on more leadership, mentoring, and service positions in the department and university. With job security you are more like to start a family. The challenge is that parenthood, even when joyful, can make constant demands on your time. In a discipline like philosophy (and most of the humanities and social sciences), where ‘research’ primarily presupposes having continuous, uninterrupted stretches of time to think, read, and write, you find that this simply evaporates in the period you are most eager to develop your ambitious projects into a (second) book, an ambitious grant, etc.

Being a good parent, partner, colleague, director of graduate studies, teacher, and researcher is demanding in the best of times; it feels nigh impossible when you are also sleep deprived because one of your kids has night cramps and your spouse is on rotation at the hospital. It becomes really difficult to maintain good cheer when the subject of ‘research’ comes up. Even when you can ignore office email on intersessional holidays, these offer little respite because this is now key ‘family-time.’

The problem can be masked, for a while, because you are finishing projects, including working on revise and resubmits. But at some point, you realize that your backlog has disappeared and is showing up in print. What to do? There are, of course, lots of time-management strategies (worth discussing), including spending less time on twitter and blogs; but the problem is without solution. There are periods in one’s life where research in the sense of having continuous, uninterrupted stretches of time to think, read, and write is simply impossible.

Not accepting this fact is a recipe for frustration, self-loathing, and worse. One of the most frustrating features of trying to do research when stretched for time, is that each time you start up the project you make no advance at all. When I am in the pure research and initial drafting of a paper stage, I need a bit of time – thirty to ninety minutes -- to orient myself to the problem each time I fire up my laptop. My kid used to have a 42-45 minute sleep cycle. He would awake just as I was reaching the possibility of a new ‘start-of-research-flow’ moment.

My slogan is: when you have the least amount of time for research that’s the best moment to do editorial work for a special issue or an edited volume. (Okay, that won’t go viral.) For, while editing presupposes considerable skills, such editing work has three key features that speaks in its favor for time-stretched-academics: (i) it can be cut up in lots of discrete units; and (ii) the work done is, when properly structured, generally cumulative. While one should take care in wording emails that nudge authors (and referees), the time needed is relatively brief (and repetitive, cut and paste does most of the work) compared to getting oneself up to speed at where one was, say, in embedding a partial grounding relation inside different kinds of action-guiding modal landscapes.

Moreover, editing other people’s work (iii) allows one to stay abreast of developments in one’s field precisely when one often has least time to attend conferences or (ahh) read journals. Yes, editing can be drudgery. There is nothing thrilling about reading a peer’s not quite polished paper for the third time. Sometimes the academic life simply is no more than work.

But editing is the plumbing of the discipline. You help maintain standards and you are a key-sounding board that can help guide other people’s advances. I don’t want to suggest one is shaping the field by editing a special issue; but it is not an impossible outcome.

Yes, there are other tasks that await the time-stretched-academic’s attention. You could referee more. But the time-stretched-academic is most likely to be the unpleasant referee #2. Moreover, refereeing does not solve the problem of a collapse of the appearance of research productivity noted above; it worsens it. That is to say, when you have the least amount of time for research that’s the best moment to do editorial work for a special issue or an edited volume and to decline invitations to referee.

Two final comments. First, editing a volume or special issue can be a lot of work, some of it quite unexpected. I don’t just mean that dealing with other people’s missed deadlines is quite frustrating; but also you need to navigate the demands of publishers and journals. Second, editing also generates the problem it is meant to tackle: you do need to take time to think through the pitch to the editors and prospective authors. More important, editorial guidance or the email in which you ask for major cuts (etc.) may require a quiet moment so you can compose yourself, and take a deep breath, just as you need to run to a meeting. Don’t press send in a hurry.*

 

On a Million Page-views

I started these Digressions in January 2014 (trying to cross Jonathan Swift with Foucault). Since then I have written 1208 posts of various length. I missed the chance to mark the thousandth post last year, so I will mark the millionth page-view, which D&I passed sometime during the last 24 hrs. That sounds more than it is; de facto each post averages a bit over 800 page-views (which has been remarkably constant over the years) so that is a useful proxy for the core (niche) readership of this blog.  

By now I find blogging so therapeutic that I probably would keep it going if I were a lonely tree in Locke's forest. But your interest, my dear reader, is gratifying--not just to my vanity, but also for my sense of intellectual comradery. While I am a bit sad that substantive discussion of the blog has migrated to facebook, it is a joy to receive your critical responses and your elaborations as well as to be welcomed into many unexpected and, sometimes long-delayed, stimulating conversations.--Thank you!

(Tomorrow regular programming will resume.)

 

 

On Rare Phoenixes in Philosophy (Seneca, Socrates, and Spinoza)

For one of the first class ["good men" [vir bonus]]] perhaps springs into existence, like the phoenix, only once in five hundred years. And it is not surprising, either, that greatness develops only at long intervals; Fortune often brings into being commonplace powers, which are born to please the crowd [turbam]; but she holds up for our approval that which is extraordinary by the very fact that she makes it rare. [eximia vero ipsa raritate commendat]

2. This man, however, of whom you spoke, is still far from the state which he professes to have reached. And if he knew what it meant to be "a good man," he would not yet believe himself such; perhaps he would even despair of his ability to become good. "But," you say, "he thinks ill of evil men." Well, so do evil men themselves; and there is no worse penalty for vice than the fact that it is dissatisfied with itself and all its fellows. 3. "But he hates those who make an ungoverned use of great power suddenly acquired." I retort that he will do the same thing as soon as he acquires the same powers. Seneca, Letter 42. Translated by Richard Mott Gummere (with minor changes)

The truly good are so rare we may as well call them flukes of nature. Allowing that Socrates associates philosophers with those of the first class, Socrates also seems to have thought that absent breeding, this the case (see the αὐτόματοι  Republic 520b). But Seneca seems more adamant about the cyclical rarity of then. I mention Socrates because Seneca may well be tempt the reader to think he is slyly comparing himself to Socrates; he was, after all, born about 480 years after Socrates. 

Much of the letter repeats Seneca's lessons about how a high price in the marketplace, and mass approval, are worthless or  involve commodities and states of affairs that make us worse off. A key new claim (also with a Socratic provenance) is that bad people actually (secretly) have, despite appearances to the contrary, a low estimate of themselves [At male existimat de malis.]* The etymology of existimat ( ex- +‎ aestimō) reminds us that esteem and estimate (in the sense of judging) are very closely tied together. 

It is not entirely clear if Seneca thinks low self-esteem is a cause of their bad behavior or if this is, due to the workings of conscience (as Butler and Adam Smith would argue), the effect of bad behavior, or  (more likely) both. But the striking fact is that the interaction of low self-esteem with bad behavior creates a miserable psychic condition in virtue of succeeding at one's projects.** 

I have always have found the underlying psychological idea plausible enough, despite the suspicion this is the kind of thing we powerless may invent to haunt the powerful. What makes Senca's claim plausible is that his lines may well be autobiographical (he was insanely rich and not free of misdeeds). Yet, sometimes one encounters the obscenely rich and wicked who seem to lack all sense of shame. 

Be that as it may, on this view to do bad is to get caught in a vicious cycle of self-contempt. In the ledger Seneca likes to invoke, one is, were double-entry book-keeping already invented, then in the loss column.

It turns out that in this sense -- of psychic health or proper positive self-estimation -- only a fraction [quoto cuique] -- are not in the loss column. By the structure of his letter, Seneca tempts us to see in these self-contained few with nothing lost [nihil perdidit] the rare exemplars that arise every half-millennia or so. The role of these exemplar(s) is to help structure the emendation or spiritual exercises he offers, but it is de facto unattainable. 

Since I have been brief, let me add one further thought. Another way to understand the the nature of the phoenix image is in terms of the periodic rebirth of philosophy. This is in some sense the eternal recurrence of the same. Although we can expect differences because while the identity of the phoenix remains the same, the context in which she grows does not.

With that in mind, I looked anew at the last line(s) of Spinoza's Ethics: But all things excellent are as difficult as they are rare. [Sed omnia praeclara tam difficilia, quam rara sunt]. This evoke Seneca with one notable difference. Spinoza leaves no doubt that despite the difficulty, one can with a proper regimen turn oneself into one of the (mentally) blessed. And if you fail, try again and harder.

On Defeating Demagogues

There are two surreal features about this year's Democratic primary: first, it seems self-consciously modeled on the 2015/16 Republican primary  that nominated Donald Trump: a multiplicity of candidates debating each other on TV. The main point of this exercise is to maximize profit(s) for TV stations and, secondarily, for Democrats to own the so-called news-cycle. What the Democrats lack is a candidate that understands how to generate huge ratings. (Compare this year's ratings, while better than 2016s, with the Republicans in 2016.)* Second, the Democratic contenders, with the notable exception of Marianne Williamson, all seem to assume that a professional politician with well-honed ordinary political skill can defeat President Trump.

I understand the desire for the restoration of 'normalcy.'** Moreover, it's not as if there aren't grounds to think that a disciplined political campaign could defeat Trump. While I was relatively early (recall) in seeing in Trump a serious political demagogue, I cannot deny that the President has also been an extraordinarily lucky politician, benefiting from decades of attacks on Hillary Clinton (who, it is often forgotten, was too ill to campaign at a crucial junction), from James Comey's lack of judgment, from rule changes by Republicans, to winning the electoral college with a minority of the votes cast, and with a host of other well known concurring causes. But luck can run out: a worsening economy, freely chosen conflicts with China and Iran that may escalate in unpredictable ways, dangerous developments in Kashmir and Hong Kong that may simply give a sense that the President is not a safe pair of (ahh) hands in times of crisis.

Yet, there has been no sign of weakening of President Trump's core political skill set: the ability to dominate and shape the news-cycle and ratings. He is a demagogue in the standard sense: he exploits fears and prejudices and he lies routinely to gain and keep power. As I have emphasized his zero-sum (recall) outlook gives his political tactics an overall coherence (recall) that one may miss if one focuses on the contradictions in what he says. In office, he violates even minimal democratic norms routinely and he uses the threat of violence strategically to keep power. This last point deserves some commentary.

There have been lots of commentators who compare Trump to fascism or Nazism. While I understand the rhetorical force of the comparison,I have resisted this because in practice, these ideologies relied on paramilitary street violence and assassinations organized from the top down. (And Trump has also been noticeably uninterested in starting wars so far.) Moreover, even with the levers of state power, and the dreadful treatment of immigrants and refugees, the President has, despite the very clear dangers emanating from  (recall Jacob T. Levy) the cruelty, arbitrary powers, and militarization of the border police, stopped well short of imposing martial law, taking control of the media, imprisoning opponents, and abolishing competitive elections. 

But President Trump's rhetoric has incited a kind of statistical violence.+ By this I mean that he names (purported) general threats and some radicalized white supremacist take violent action against some instance of the (purported) threat. This mode of operation lowers trust, increases polarization, and spreads fear. These are the ingredients in which other democratic norms can be eroded and in which demagoguery thrives. While it may put a clear ceiling on the President's popularity, it shapes a renewed path to electoral victory.

If one looks at the long history of US demagogues (e.g., Benjamin Ryan Tillman [a white supremacist who did use paramilitary forces], Huey Long, Joseph McCarthy) one notices that they are rarely defeated at the ballot box (James Vardaman being an interesting exception). Their core voters tend to stick with them. I invite readers to call attention to scholarship that has explored how to defeat a demagogue (without limiting the franchise); I couldn't find any. 

Let me return to the Democrats. As I indicated above, I have been surprised by the Democrats' decision to organize their primary by emulating the Republicans without recruiting the kind of candidates (celebrities, other demagogues) that can exploit the process and set the agenda to full advantage. The unwillingness to abandon politicians professionalized during the last few decades, is a sign, I fear, the opposition still believes the political terrain is familiar.++ I hope I am wrong in thinking this is a disastrous mistake. 

 

On Being Inside Leibniz's Mill (on Remainder, Smith and Kramnick)

Remainder’s way turns out to be an extreme form of dialectical materialism-it’s a book about a man who builds in order to feel. A few days after the fake homeless epiphany, at a party, while in the host’s bathroom, the Enactor sees a crack in the plaster in the wall. It reminds him of another crack, in the wall of “his” apartment in a very specific six-story building he has yet no memory of ever living in or seeing. In this building many people lived doing many things-cooking liver, playing the piano, fixing a bike. And there were cats on the roof! It all comes back to him, though it was never there in the first place. And now Remainder really begins, in the mission to rebuild this building, to place reenactors in it reenacting those actions he wants them to enact (cooking liver, playing the piano, fixing a bike), doing them over and over till it feels real, while he, in his apartment, fluidly closes and reopens a fridge door, just like De Niro....To facilitate his reenactment, the Reenactor hires Nazrul Ram Vyas, an Indian “from a high-caste family” who works as a facilitator for a company dedicated to personal inauthenticity: Time Control UK. It takes people’s lives and manages them for them. Nazrul is no more a character (in realism’s sense of the word) than I am a chair, but he is the most exquisite facilitator, and it is through him that every detail of the reenactment is processed. He thinks of everything. In place of the pleasure of the rich adjective we have an imagined world in which logistical details and logical consequences are pursued with care and precision: if you were to rebuild an entire house and fill it with people reenacting actions you have chosen for them, this is exactly how it would play out. Every detail is attended to except the one we’ve come to think of as the only one that matters in a novel: how it feels. The Reenactor in Remainder only ever has one feeling-the tingling-which occurs whenever his reenactments are going particularly well. The feeling is addictive; the enactments escalate, in a fascinating direction.--Zadie Smith in "Two Directions for the Novel," in Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays, pp. 86 (First published in 2008 in NYRB as "Two Paths for the Novel"). 

After (recall) I wrote about Tom McCarthy's Satin Island the distinguished literature scholar, Jonathan Kramnick, mentioned to me he thought McCarthy's Remainder one of the most important novels of this our comparatively new century (having almost passed a fifth of its projected years, it's still fresh). Chapter six of Kramnick's collection of essays, Paper Minds, taught me that he, in turn, was echoing the judgment of "Zadie Smith, in an influential essay in the New York Review of Books, [touted Remainder] as both the most significant novel of its decade and the direction Anglophone fiction should follow into the new millennium." (130) As it happens, I was familiar with Smith's essay, but somehow had remembered mainly the devastating criticism of Joseph O'Neill's Netherland, which has discouraged me from reading the book (life is short!), and the subtle use of a poem by Szymborska.

In re-reading Smith's essay I was reminded of her comic description of the International Necronautical Society (INS). In its manifesto, the INS assumes, with the logicians of old, the necessity of death and commits itself to reinventing death in rigorous ways. In the new logic, if we can make it (recall this post on Regina Rini), death will be a violent possibility.

But somehow, I had completely forgotten that Smith treated the seven year path (and presumably many rejections of) Remainder to publication as exemplary of "our ailing literary culture." (71) This culture represents unhealty times. In healthy days literature has multiple, possible futures. This (in 2008) is now denied. The opposition between Netherland and Remainder is a form of prophecy in order to re-open paths (and also recall the American metafiction -- "Barth, Barthelme, Pynchon, Gaddis, David Foster Wallace" [I would add Fran Ross's Oreo]-- now languishing in a safe corner of literary history (73)). Since that very literature culture has rewarded Smith greatly, one cannot help avoid sensing some ambivalence (she uses "violence") in these remarks.

As Smith's description reveals, Remainder presents a character, a reenactor, who is very much a part inside Leibniz's Mill argument:

[W]e must confess that perception, and what depends upon it, is inexplicable in terms of mechanical reasons, that is through shapes, size, and motions. If we imagine a machine whose structure makes it think, sense, and have perceptions, we could conceive it enlarged, keeping the same proportions, so that we could enter into it, as one enters a mill. Assuming that, when inspecting its interior, we will find only parts that push one another, and we will never find anything to explain a perception. 

But the novel suggests that Leibniz is inviting us to look in the wrong place. Perception is co-constituted by the body moving in space, the body's interaction with its umwelt, and repetition with (to echo Deleuze) occasional variation. Kramnick expertly connects Remainder to recent developments in enactive philosophy of mind (although understates the significance of repetition). Strikingly, the only feeling that occurs inside the reenactor, occurs when a pattern is recognized as, and thereby projected, as having occurred before. This constitutes a reenaction as going well.

The reenactor is a person who suffered an accident. His experience of recovering motor-control, which the able bodied ordinarily take for granted, reveals that the only person with truly fluid movement is a fake (De Niro's screen character). There is no what it's like of that. Once our behavior is (now quoting Kramnick) "slowed down and made unfamiliar, the experience in each does not layer on top of the [body-]motion. It is, rather, identical to it." (135) This claim is made visible (I almost wrote felt) by a kind of stripping away, that is, abstraction.

Both Smith and Kramnick note that Remainder's aesthetic is fully (ahh, I almost wrote self-conscious) present in the art. I quote Kramnick's description before I close with a comment: 

“In school, when I was maybe twelve, I had to do art,” the reenactor begins one chapter; “I wasn’t any good at it, but it was part of the syllabus” (90). What follows is a revealing meditation on the making of art as its own type of perceptual activity. “For a few weeks we were taught sculpture. We were given these big blocks of stone, a chisel, and a mallet, and we had to turn the blocks into something recognizable—a human figure or a building. The teacher had an effective way of making us understand what we were doing. The finished statue, he explained, was already there in front of us—right in the block that we were chiseling away at” (91). The art object is already there, only requiring a certain kind of physical motion—the lifting of one’s arm and hammering—for it to come into its own. The action is a deliberately plain shucking away of what is not art; thus, the reenactor can “not be any good at it” while also standing as the form-giving example in McCarthy’s ordinary sentence. “‘Your task isn’t to create the sculpture,’ he said; ‘it’s to strip all the other stuff away, get rid of it. The surplus matter.’ ” The reenactor takes this as a lesson on how to create his building (“chiseling away at surplus matter” will “scare my building out” [96]), and we are in turn supposed to take both as an account of how to see form as a kind of matter, the novel as a thing in the world rather than the world’s representation. Creative engagement merely strips away the surplus matter of what is neither experience nor art. (137)

One part of the (serious) joke here is that the teacher echoes (with a non-trivial difference) Vasari's definition of the nature of sculpture:* "Sculpture is an art which by removing all that is superfluous from the material and reduces it to that form designed in the artist's mind." Of course, the joke is that the traditional artist and his design has been removed from the (perhaps mis-remembered) teaching; there is now -- as Leibniz feared -- only motion and rough pattern recognition.

That would have been the best end to this long digression. But the other or same part of the joke is, of course, that one encounters the reenactor and his teacher through the words of McCarthy and (ahh) one's imaginary participation with these...and just then one recognizes the looming regress.

And so I close with gratitude to Kramnick with Swift:

• But art no longer can prevail,
• When the materials all are gone;
• The best mechanic hand must fail,
• Where nothing's left to work upon.
• Matter, as wise logicians say,
• Cannot without a form subsist;
• And form, say I, as well as they,
• Must fail if matter brings no grist.

Adam Smith (and Judith Butler) on Petty Sovereigns and State Capacity

China seems to have been long stationary, and had probably long ago acquired that full complement of riches which is consistent with the nature of its laws and institutions. But this complement may be much inferior to what, with other laws and institutions, the nature of its soil, climate, and situation might admit of. A country which neglects or despises foreign commerce, and which admits the vessels of foreign nations into one or two of its ports only, cannot transact the same quantity of business which it might do with different laws and institutions. In a country too, where, though the rich or the owners of large capitals enjoy a good deal of security, the poor or the owners of small capitals enjoy scarce any, but are liable, under the pretence of justice, to be pillaged and plundered at any time by the inferior mandarins, the quantity of stock employed in all the different branches of business transacted within it can never be equal to what the nature and extent of that business might admit. In every different branch, the oppression of the poor must establish the monopoly of the rich, who, by engrossing the whole trade to themselves, will be able to make very large profits. Twelve per cent accordingly is said to be the common interest of money in China, and the ordinary profits of stock must be sufficient to afford this large interest.--Adam Smith (1776) Wealth of Nations, 1.9.15 [emphasis added]

In a very important article (here), Ryan Hanley looks at what Smith has to say about China (and Tartary). As Hanley shows Smith comments on the political economy of China and, simultaneously, holding a complex, concave mirror to European eyes. The quoted passage above was once famous in debates over to what degree (according to Smith) there is a limit to economic growth as such or whether (as the second quoted sentence suggests) any such limit would be context (institutions/norms) dependent. Smith clearly suggests that allowing more foreign exchange would kick-start Chinese growth.

As an aside, it is also notable that in a stationary state, interests rates are so in China. According to Smith's theory of interest rates, these should (all things being equal) be low in a country with negligible economic growth. (For Smith, high interest rates tend (again other things being equal) to reflect many economic opportunities.)

Of course, ceteribus is not paribus, and this gets me to the main points of today's digression; according to Smith, Chinese political economy is oligarchic in character: with formal and informal laws favoring the rich. As the emphasized passage reveals, Smith notes two features: (i) property rights are protected unevenly (and biased toward the rich); (ii) in practice, this is due to the fact that for the non-rich experience of the state bureaucracy consists of encounters with what Judith Butler fruitfully calls 'petty sovereign.' I quote a key passage (which plays an important role in the research of my colleague Marieke de Goede): 

Petty sovereigns abound, reigning in the midst of bureaucratic army institutions mobilized by aims and tactics of power they do not inaugurate or fully control. And yet such figures are delegated with the power to render unilateral decisions, accountable to no law and without any legitimate authority.--Judith Butler (2004) Precarious Life, p. 56 

As I said above, Smith's remarks on China are fruitfully read as simultaneously comments on the European situation. Hume had (recall) famously argued (against the republican ideology) in his essay, "Of Civil Liverty:" "that civilized monarchies, what was formerly said in praise of republics alone, that they are a government of Laws, not of Men. They are found susceptible of order, method, and constancy, to a surprizing degree. Property is there secure; industry encouraged; the arts flourish; and the prince lives secure among his subjects, like a father among his children." Yet, in the next paragraph Hume went on to note an important exception to this claim:

The greatest abuses, which arise in France, the most perfect model of pure monarchy, proceed not from the number or weight of the taxes, beyond what are to be met with in free countries; but from the expensive, unequal, arbitrary, and intricate method of levying them, by which the industry of the poor, especially of the peasants and farmers, is, in a great measure, discouraged, and agriculture rendered a beggarly and slavish employment. 

In particular, the French crown sold taxing-rights to private individuals, who paid the tax and then levied the tax (and surplus) from the population. (Nobles and Clergy also had separate rights to tax those under their jurisdiction.) This system generated oppression and prevented economic growth.

Hume goes on to argue that such policies also hurt those hurt the rich landowners (the nobility) because agriculture is greatly discouraged and so their landholdings and rents are lower than they would be. It is a bit of shame that Hume, who sounds like a modern economist here, fails to explore the possibility that the nobility actually prefers high inequality, which is a source of their political influence, and more power over more wealth to themselves if this entails that other people also grow wealthy and so a loss of their power/status. 

Let me return to Smith. The political structure that allows bureaucratic petty sovereigns maintains a situation in which the property rights of the rich are better protected than the poor. (Presumably the rich have better access to upper reaches of the bureaucracy to get redress against any abuses.) It is creepy how this anticipates the core insight of Katharina Pistor's model about the unequal protection/enforcement of debt contracts. Smith cleverly models the consequence of this as an economic monopoly; because of the insecurity of property rights of the poor, their already bad position to compete economically is discouraged even more. [To return to a point from before, the high interest rates reflect, in part, the risks associated with uneven enforcement of property rights.] Stagnation entails "low wages for the labor" of the poor.

In addition, the trade barriers, prevent competition from abroad. The politically created economic monopoly now has the power to ensure that the status quo reproduces itself; hence China's stability and stagnation. I am pretty sure, Smith's model of treating such barriers as creating monopolies inspired (recall) a nice argument in Grouchy's Letters.

As Hanley shows, Smith [who grants that the sources are imperfect] explains the underlying cause of the Chinese state affairs by the perverse incentives created by its tax system. The reason why China grew wealthy is, according to Smith, due to the willingness of Chinese “executive power [that] charges itself both with the reparation of the high roads, and with the maintenance of the navigable canals” (WN V.i.d.17) and that “the sovereigns of China” have been historically “extremely attentive to the making and maintaining of good roads and navigable canals, in order to increase, as much as possible, both the quantity and value of every part of the produce of the land, by procuring to every part of it the most extensive market which their own dominions could afford” (WN V.ii.d.5). [quoted Hanley p. 373].

The central government's public works policy is not explained by Smith with reference to concern for public welfare, or to Mencius' philosophy, but (as Hanley notes) to the nature of the tax system: "the revenue of the sovereign arises almost altogether from a land tax or land rent, which rises or falls with the rise and fall of the annual produce of the land. The great interest of the sovereign, therefore, his revenue, is in such countries necessarily and immediately connected with the cultivation of the land, with the greatness of its produce, and with the value of its produce." Smith goes on to make clear (and this echoes the Humean point above) that the Chinese example shows that modern European states are quite capable of managing extensive public works that, indirectly, promote their own tax-income. ("in some parts of Asia this department of the public police is very properly managed by the executive power, there is not the least probability that, during the present state of things, it could be tolerably managed by that power in any part of Europe.") Smith's role as a theorist of state capacity seems to me under-theorized (and made invisible by the contemporary focus on biopolitics).*

Now Smith's Humean point is that state capacity can misfire when incentives are not properly lined up. For, he writes about Chinese tax-collection (in a manner echoing Hume's point about France) that "a public revenue which was paid in kind would suffer so much from the mismanagement of the collectors that a very small part of what was levied upon the people would ever arrive at the treasury of the prince. Some part of the public revenue of China, however, is said to be paid in this manner. The mandarins and other tax-gatherers will, no doubt, find their advantage in continuing the practice of a payment which is so much more liable to abuse than any payment in money." 

Here the absence of money as a means to pay taxes facilitates abuse.* Against the recent literature by proponents of modern monetary theory, where (with reference to an example early in Wealth of Nations) Smith is often caricatured as promoting a theory of money that is focused entirely as a unit of exchange, Smith is quite aware of money's functional role in taxation. Smith is clear that money makes standardization in taxation possible and the effect of this is to reduce the room for the arbitrary power of petty sovereigns.