Digressions&Impressions

On Adam Tooze, Ideology and Liberal Historiography

If Jamie Dimon quipped that to make sense of Dodd-Frank one needed the services of a lawyer and a psychiatrist, the same is no doubt true of the business of deciphering Donald Trump. But historians can contribute too.¹⁸ Trump offered to a bewildered present a throwback to an earlier era. Born in 1946, the same year as Bill Clinton, Trump would take office at seventy years of age, recycling a rancid version of the baby boomer narrative, which in the 1990s had still seemed fresh. Trump’s racial attitudes reflected the animosities of the era of civil rights, desegregation and New York in the 1970s. His boorish manners and sexism echoed the Manhattan party scene of the 1980s, when bond traders toasted one another as “big swinging dicks.” The sense of national crisis that drove his campaign was a reflux not so much of the recent past as of the first moment when modern Americans felt the world changing around them—the late 1970s and early 1980s. The trauma of defeat in Vietnam, America’s urban crisis and angry Japan bashing—thirty years on Trump was still harping on those fears, but now transposed onto new enemies: China, Islam and undocumented Latino immigrants.--Adam Tooze (2018) Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World, 569.

One of the non-trivial sub-texts of Tooze's argument is the complacency of the Democrats and even the whole 'political class' in the face of the rise (and eventual) triumph of Trump. I don't want to claim that Tooze always or even often treats his targets as complacent, but it is a recurring theme in the book.* Now, interestingly, on Tooze's presentation, the complacent uniformly believe not just in technocratic skill, but also that by and large the present system is unavoidable (interestingly this flattens any difference between "the determinism of Thatcher and Merkel,"  and that this system is in some world-historical sense progressive ('progress' is repeated frequently in the book).

Tooze is very critical of the political class. Even so, as Perry Anderson notes (83ff.) in his by now (justly) famous review essay, Tooze also admires the complacents's skill which consist in, in part, in managing, so it seems, the irrationality that democracies naturally generate without undoing the liberal status quo (free trade, markets, glocal integragration, etc.) My interest in mentioning this is not Anderson's who is engaged in a polemic from the Marxist left against Tooze's self-proclaimed left-liberalism (p. 21 Crashed; p. 53 in Anderson).+

In fact, I quote the passage at the top of the post  because it is a place where Tooze alerts the reader to his own intellectual perspective (qua historian). And the way I read him, Tooze treats Trump as a kind of expression of atavistic sentiments and outlooks (e.g., 'throwback;' 'recycling;' 'reflux.' etc.) That is to say, just like the complacents, Tooze embraces, despite his sense of contingency, a notion of progress (in his terms an arc of  history) in which some ideas are modern and modernizing and others are old-fashioned or outright primitive. (Because of his progressive Marxism, Anderson can't really object to Tooze's stance here.)

To be sure, Tooze is doing multiple things in the quoted passage: first he explains, briefly, where Trump's ideas come from given Trump's social milieu and personal trajectory.  Second, he is conveying the sense of bewilderment of an establishment of having to confront these ideas and the manner in which they are performed anew. Third, he himself is judging these ideas/performance ("boorish," etc.) I don't think any of these three features are objectionable, and Tooze is transparent about them.

But, fourth, because Tooze treats these ideas as atavistic, he can't quite explain their nature (or their appeal) qua historian (or engaged citizen). So, while throughout the book, Tooze understands the grounds of popular dissatisfaction would with the status quo (the complacents), we're now left with a mystery why the progressive left could rarely capitalize on this dissatisfaction. For, and again Anderson is good on this, why did not ordinary citizens embrace the progressive Keynesian solutions Tooze advocates at the ballot box?

And, in my view, part of the problem for Tooze -- and this emblematic for much liberal thought in the broad sense -- is that he views the fears and desires Trump represents so well as atavistic to be overcome rather than as permanent possibilities of the human condition.** Now the moment one says this one draws the suspicion one is willing to slide into a normative defense of Trump and author authoritarian tendencies. (I have learned that to cast even minimum doubt on the reality of say, moral progress of humanity, is to invite opprobrium.)

But  the fact that those whose business is not to be bewildered were, as Tooze correctly notes, "bewildered" by Trump's rise (and Brexit, etc.) shows that there is a defect in the self-conception of contemporary liberalism. That's different from suggesting that there is a defect in contemporary liberalism that causes the rise of Trump and other authoritarian tendencies (that may be true, too). Since I care about liberalism's survival I think this is a defect in our self-conception worth addressing. The moment one respects what is taken as atavistic as a permanent possibility, one might govern and campaign (and communicate, and theorize, etc.) in a different fashion. For, even recognizing a possibility as a possibility allows one to better prevent it from happening and not treat it as mystery. It is also a start of a better explanation of why it did happen.

That is to say, I think one of the problems in contemporary liberalism is the unstated assumption that certain forms of progress are permanent and that once achieved no back-sliding is genuinely possible. But an ideology that takes its own victories for granted (in being justified and secure), after the fact, really is an ideology.*** What I admire in liberalism is a willingness to learn from experience and self-correct; it strikes me this is a feature within liberalism we need to change, or, better yet, revert back to the wisdom of Judith Shklar and Karl Popper (here; here; here) and be willing to expect the worst.

 

Le Bon and the Road to Serfdom before Hayek, and Judith Butler

This progressive restriction of liberties shows itself in every country in a special shape which Herbert Spencer has not pointed out; it is that the passing of these innumerable series of legislative measures, all of them in a general way of a restrictive order, conduces necessarily to augment the number, the power, and the influence of the functionaries charged with their application.
These functionaries tend in this way to become the veritable masters of civilised countries. Their power is all the greater owing to the fact that, amidst the incessant transfer of authority, the administrative caste is alone in being untouched by these changes, is alone in possessing irresponsibility, impersonality, and perpetuity. There is no more oppressive despotism than that which presents itself under this triple form.
   This incessant creation of restrictive laws and regulations, surrounding the pettiest actions of existence with the most complicated formalities, inevitably has for its result the confining within narrower and narrower limits of the sphere in which the citizen may move freely. Victims of the delusion that equality and liberty are the better assured by the multiplication of laws, nations daily consent to put up with trammels increasingly burdensome. They do not accept this legislation with impunity. Accustomed to put up with every yoke, they soon end by desiring servitude, and lose all spontaneousness and energy. They are then no more than vain shadows, passive, unresisting and powerless automata.

    Arrived at this point, the individual is bound to seek outside himself the forces he no longer finds within him. The functions of governments necessarily increase in proportion as the indifference and helplessness of the citizens grow. They it is who must necessarily exhibit the initiative, enterprising, and guiding spirit in which private persons are lacking. It falls on them to undertake everything, direct everything, and take everything under their protection. The State becomes an all-powerful god. Still experience shows that the power of such gods was never either very durable or very strong.

    This progressive restriction of all liberties in the case of certain peoples, in spite of an outward licence that gives them the illusion that these liberties are still in their possession, seems at least as much a consequence of their old age as of any particular system. It constitutes one of the precursory symptoms of that decadent phase which up to now no civilisation has escaped. Judging by the lessons of the past, and by the symptoms that strike the attention on every side, several of our modern civilisations have reached that phase of extreme old age which precedes decadence.--Gustave Le Bon (1986 [1895] [Psychologie des Foules] The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, pp. 136-7 (translation of second edition published by Dover)

As regular readers know, I have an interest in the pre-history of the road to serfdom thesis (hereafter RTST), which I take to entail that once one democratically switches to an extensively planned economy ('collectivism" in the terminology of the 1930s-40s), the needs of planning and stability will ensure that a dictatorship will follow. For example, I have noted that (recall) in 1938, when reviewing Lippmann's The Good Society, Frank Knight attributes the thesis to Lippmann (which I think is a mistake), but Lippmann, in turn, is inspired by Von Mises (who does endorse a version of RTST and this is familiar to Knight).*

Because Knight think government by discussion is constitutive of democracy, and so permit all kinds of political u-turns, Knight rejects RTST. What Knight, who did not attend the Lippmann colloquium, misses, as Foucault shows, is that for some neo-liberals RTST is not a prediction about the future evolution of political economy, but from the perspective of the ORDOs who lived through the 1930s historical fact in Germany. So, as an analytical tool it has already proved its mettle in shaping liberal self-understanding. (I return to this below.)

I had always assumed that RTST as an analytical tool, was invented by liberals for liberal purposes, even a liberal art of government of the sort that eventually became associated, somewhat narrowly, with Hayek's cold war political economy. But that's wrong because while Le Bon is responding to liberal hegemony (and Spencer's political economy) he is by no means a liberal himself.

We can discern in Le Bon a species, perhaps an ur-species, of RTST. In context Le Bon is interested in linking his analysis of crowds (recall especially juries and parliaments) with a natural even "inevitable" (137) cycle of rise and fall of civilizations. For Le Bon democratic assemblies inevitably create conditions under which they empower the administrative state's ""petty sovereigns." the term is (recall) Judith Butler's, (although I have noted that we find concern with their power in Adam Smith's criticism of Chinese and French centralized, government which empowers such petty sovereigns). And Butler would agree with how despotic such petty sovereigns are.** (Smith would, too, but thinks a corporate monopoly as sovereign is even worse.)

But what Le Bon notices is that the empowering of such administrative petty sovereigns can occur just as much from a democratic center as a more despotic center. This is not a bug, but a virtue of Le Bon's analysis. Because Le Bon rejects the primacy of the idea that institutions shape reality through incentives. Rather for him national culture (what he sometimes calls racial) shapes the function institutions. I hope to return to his important critique of the primacy of incentive-shaping-institutions-paradigm some other time.

While Le Bon is a critic of socialism, I think for him the RTST is a natural effect of any democratic even liberal ("equality and liberty ") parliamentary process. This is, in part, due to the fact that on his view parliaments are incapable of systematically beneficial outcomes guided by true technical expertise.+ Swayed by public opinion, demagogues, and venality, they become themselves like hypnotized automata (characteristic of crowds).+ But it is also due to the fact that in trying to facilitate social friction, their own legislation increases both the number and complexity of laws and simultaneously empowers a technocratic class that becomes unaccountable (and the only class not unfree).

We see here how the RTST is combined with the critique -- later embraced by both libertarians and theorists like Butler -- of the unfreedom of the administrative state which (and here there are republican roots) clothes itself in rule of law, but is excuse for arbitrary power. Strikingly for Le Bon, the rise of such fundamental unfreedom, is compatible with the more illusory sense of emancipation ("outward licence"). That is to say, Le Bon also anticipates the recent, gendered, conservative and neo-marxist criticism of the sexual revolution as a manifestation of neoliberal ideology. 

And because unlike Knight, Le Bon has no faith in the uptake of ideas critical of the fundamental commitments of an age, he has no hope (or interest) in warding off the civilizational collapse to come. Whatever Hayek may or may not have thought, for Le Bon the slippery slope has only one route, down.++

 

Le Bon vs Condorcet

If the individuals of a crowd confined themselves to putting in common the ordinary qualities of which each of them has his share, there would merely result the striking of an average, and not, as we have said is actually the case, the creation of new characteristics. How is it that these new characteristics are created? This is what we are now to investigate.
    Different causes determine the appearance of these characteristics peculiar to crowds, and not possessed by isolated individuals. The first is that the individual forming part of a crowd acquires, solely from numerical considerations, a sentiment of invincible power which allows him to yield to instincts which, had he been alone, he would perforce have kept under restraint. He will be the less disposed to check himself from the consideration that, a crowd being anonymous, and in consequence irresponsible, the sentiment of responsibility which always controls individuals disappears entirely.
   The second cause, which is contagion, also intervenes to determine the manifestation in crowds of their special characteristics, and at the same time the trend they are to take. Contagion is a phenomenon of which it is easy to establish the presence, but that it is not easy to explain. It must be classed among those phenomena of a hypnotic order, which we shall shortly study. In a crowd every sentiment and act is contagious, and contagious to such a degree that an individual readily sacrifices his personal interest to the collective interest. This is an aptitude very contrary to his nature, and of which a man is scarcely capable, except when he makes part of a crowd.
   A third cause, and by far the most important, determines in the individuals of a crowd special characteristics which are quite contrary at times to those presented by the isolated individual. I allude to that suggestibility of which, moreover, the contagion mentioned above is neither more nor less than an effect.
   To understand this phenomenon it is necessary to bear in mind certain recent physiological discoveries. We know to-day that by various processes an individual may be brought into such a condition that, having entirely lost his conscious personality, he obeys all the suggestions of the operator who has deprived him of it, and commits acts in utter contradiction with his character and habits. The most careful observations seem to prove that an individual immersed for some length of time in a crowd in action soon finds himself—either in consequence of the magnetic influence given out by the crowd, or from some other cause of which we are ignorant—in a special state, which much resembles the state of fascination in which the hypnotised individual finds himself in the hands of the hypnotiser. The activity of the brain being paralysed in the case of the hypnotised subject, the latter becomes the slave of all the unconscious activities of his spinal cord, which the hypnotiser directs at will. The conscious personality has entirely vanished; will and discernment are lost. All feelings and thoughts are bent in the direction determined by the hypnotiser.
   Such also is approximately the state of the individual forming part of a psychological crowd. He is no longer conscious of his acts. In his case, as in the case of the hypnotised subject, at the same time that certain faculties are destroyed, others may be brought to a high degree of exaltation. Under the influence of a suggestion, he will undertake the accomplishment of certain acts with irresistible impetuosity. This impetuosity is the more irresistible in the case of crowds than in that of the hypnotised subject, from the fact that, the suggestion being the same for all the individuals of the crowd, it gains in strength by reciprocity.
The individualities in the crowd who might possess a personality sufficiently strong to resist the suggestion are too few in number to struggle against the current. At the utmost, they may be able to attempt a diversion by means of different suggestions. It is in this way, for instance, that a happy expression, an image opportunely evoked, have occasionally deterred crowds from the most bloodthirsty acts.
   We see, then, that the disappearance of the conscious personality, the predominance of the unconscious personality, the turning of feelings and ideas in an identical direction by means of suggestion and contagion, the tendency to immediately transform the suggested ideas into acts; these, we see, are the principal characteristics of the individual forming part of a crowd. He is no longer himself, but has become an automaton who has ceased to be guided by his will.
   Moreover, by the mere fact that he forms part of an organised crowd, a man descends several rungs in the ladder of civilisation. Isolated, he may be a cultivated individual; in a crowd, he is a barbarian—that is, a creature acting by instinct. He possesses the spontaneity, the violence, the ferocity, and also the enthusiasm and heroism of primitive beings, whom he further tends to resemble by the facility with which he allows himself to be impressed by words and images—which would be entirely without action on each of the isolated individuals composing the crowd—and to be induced to commit acts contrary to his most obvious interests and his best-known habits. An individual in a crowd is a grain of sand amid other grains of sand, which the wind stirs up at will.
   It is for these reasons that juries are seen to deliver verdicts of which each individual juror would disapprove, that parliamentary assemblies adopt laws and measures of which each of their members would disapprove in his own person.--Gustave Le Bon (1986 [1895] [Psychologie des Foules] The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, pp. 6-8 (translation of second edition published by Dover)

The (1785) Condorcet Jury theorem tells us that with modest assumptions, the rule of more is better and, thereby, vindicates democracy from the verdict of history by all the learned. A century later, near the end of his book, Le Bon  admits that "the parliamentary system represents the ideal of all modern civilised peoples. The system is the expression of the idea, psychologically erroneous, but generally admitted, that a large gathering of men is much more capable than a small number of coming to a wise and independent decision on a given subject." (123) While the official theme of Le Bon's book is to offer an explanation of the functioning of crowds qua crowds, there are two sub-themes in his argument: first, how come the psychologically erroneous idea persists as a civilizational dogma (that is, Le Bon gives us a theory of the rise and fall of civilizations and institutions)?; second, why does the Jury Theorem fail so often in practice, despite the fact that it should function as a self-fulling prophecy given that people widely expect it to succeed?+ Lurking in the second sub-theme is an account of why institutions fail in different places despite the pull of incentives, and why demagogues may succeed.

Le Bon is no friend of democracy. But in this book he has little interest in offering a replacement for democracy because he accepts Tocqueville's claim that in an era of equality men have "an almost limitless confidence in the judgments of the public." In fact, he quite clearly argues that limiting the franchise to a meritocratic sub-set (a la Mill or Brennan) won't improve matters. Because for him once in a crowd, even widely diverging people behave similarly and lose a lot of the characteristics that give them their individuality.* In a crowd "men always tend to the same [low] level.....with regard to social problems... mean are substantially, equally ignorant."

Before I confront the announced subject of this post, I need to be clear about some of his population assumptions. Le Bon works with a contrast between barbarism and civilization. And once in a crowd otherwise civilized people are likely to become barbaric. Despite Le Bon's racism, all kinds of people can become civilized. (Throughout the book, he treats Islam as one of the great civilizations.) Le Bon also works with a racial theory. And it does important work for him because for him races have deep-seated commitments that help explain how people qua people respond differently to stimuli and incentives.

I actually think that what Le Bon calls a 'race,' is (for students) better translated by 'nation.' For, while Le Bon is undoubtedly casually racist (and sexist) in our modern sense (and clearly admires Anglo-Saxons over his own Latins), his race theory turns out to be primarily sociological: that is, a race is constituted by shared history, shared dogmatic commitments, and shared practices (including language). So, Le Bon's 'race' is not far removed from Renan's 'nation.' And crucially the biological stock of a race is never pure according to Le Bon. (This is because for him barbarism, which is always prior to civilization, is always a period of mixing.) And somewhat surprisingly -- given his reactionary mindset -- when explaining crowds no race escapes being barbaric in the crowd.

The brilliance of Condorcet's proof resides, in part, in the fact that (a) he assumes very modest voter competence. All that is needed (recall) is better than chance odds for getting things right. Let's call this average intelligence. Unlike modern students of Condorcet, who recognize that the conditions of (b) independence and (c) lack of communication, may often be violated, Le Bon thinks this (a) is the weak part of Condorcet's proof. For  while Le Bon accepts Condorcet's assumption that in a crowd we are (d) sincere, Le Bon thinks that once we become part of a crowd (and for him juries are also crowds) in our sincerity our competence reduces below such average. We become as it were for him hypnotized automatons. 

To be sure, Le bon thinks that in a crowd we stop acting independently in large part because through the mechanism of contagious sympathy, we end up being suggestible by the same influences. Group diversity, which might give a crowd intellectual strength, evaporates for Le Bon and we become homogeneous, hypnotized automatons in a crowd.  And while the Stoic sage is homogeneous with other Stoic sage in his philosophical virtue, crowds act like one in pursuit of one idol or another.

One may well wonder if the shared feeling of invincibility is really the triggering cause of crowd-like phenomena, and to what degree hypnosis is really the best physiological explanation and explanatory analogy for crowd behavior. I am here not to defend Le Bon. But I do note it is no objection to Le Bon's theory that some crowds get it right or produced fine political outcomes. Le Bon explicitly admits that crowds may well be heroic or help found great civilizations (etc.). If you are fond of great strikes or mass protests, Le Bon is happy to admit that these shape history.

Rather the key point is that friends of Condorcet's jury theorem assume methodological individualism: that being within a jury/crowd baseline competence is not reduced or at least not so reduced as to fall under average. And Le Bon points out this commitment (a) needs to be earned if, as is not wholly implausible, cognitive characteristics are changed when in large company (subject to polarization, group loyalty, sense of justice, etc.).

One way to put this is that in practice, the assumptions of independence and lack of communication secure the modest competence the Jury Theorem relies on. Le Bon's point is recognized by many procedural interventions/norms that prevent a group of deciding individuals to act as crowds.** That is to say, deliberative democrats are, in a way, Le Bon's true heirs. 

 

 

 

21 February 1979: Foucault on Rougier and the Spirit of Adaptation (XXI)

The [Lippmann] colloquium was introduced and organized by someone you know, Louis Rougier, one of the rare and very good post-war French epistemologists who is especially known in history for having been the intermediary between Pétain and Churchill in the summer of 1940. So Louis Rougier is the organizer of the Walter Lippmann colloquium in the summer of 1939, in May or June I think. He introduces the whole of the colloquium and the different contributions, and I think his introduction is quite remarkable with regard to the general principles of this neo-liberalism. This is what he says concerning, precisely, the legal problem: “The liberal regime is not just the result of a spontaneous natural order as the many authors of the Natural codes declared in the eighteenth century; it is also the result of a legal order that presupposes juridical intervention by the state. Economic life takes place [in fact]* within a juridical framework which fixes the regime of property, contracts, patents, bankruptcy, the status of professional associations and commercial societies, the currency, and banking, none of which are given by nature, like the laws of economic equilibrium, but are contingent creations of legislation. There is then no reason to suppose that the current, historically existing legal institutions are definitively and permanently the best suited for safeguarding the freedom of transactions. The question of the legal framework best suited to the supplest, most efficient, and fair operation of the market has been neglected by classical economists and deserves to be the object of an International Center of Studies for the Renewal of Liberalism. To be liberal, therefore, is not at all to be conservative, in the sense of the maintenance of de facto privileges resulting from past legislation. On the contrary, it is to be essentially progressive in the sense of a constant adaptation of the legal order to scientific discoveries, to the progress of economic organization and technique, to changes in the structure of society, and to the requirements of contemporary consciousness. Being liberal is not like the ‘Manchester’ attitude, allowing vehicles to circulate in any direction, according to whim, with the consequence of endless congestion and accidents; and it is not that of the ‘planners,’ fixing the hours of use and routes to be followed for every vehicle: it means imposing a Highway Code, while accepting that at a time of faster means of transport this code will not necessarily be the same as in the time of stagecoaches. Today we understand better than the great classics what a truly liberal economy consists in. It is an economy subject to a double arbitration: the spontaneous arbitration of consumers, who decide between the goods and services they are offered on the market according to their preferences through the plebiscite of prices, and [, on the other hand,] the common arbitration of the state ensuring the freedom, honesty, and efficiency of the market†.
   This text contains a number of elements. Straightaway we can put aside some propositions that would clearly be unacceptable to the ordoliberals; everything concerning the natural character of the mechanisms of competition. When Rougier says that the liberal regime is not only the result of a natural order but also the result of a legal order, the ordoliberals would obviously say: “Not true, the natural order, what is understood by the natural order, what the classical economists or, at any rate, those of the eighteenth century understood by a natural order, is nothing other than the effect of a particular legal order.” So we can leave these elements at the turning point of classical liberalism and neoliberalism, or of this form of neo-liberalism, and move on to the more important elements in this text, those specific to neo-liberalism.
   First of all, I think we should note that for Rougier, as for the ordoliberals moreover, the juridical is clearly not part of the superstructure. That is to say, they do not conceive of the juridical as being in a relation of pure and simple expression or instrumentality to the economy. The economy does not purely and simply determine a juridical order that would both serve it and be constrained by it. The juridical gives form to the economic, and the economic would not be what it is without the juridical. What does this mean? I think we can identify three levels of meaning. First, a theoretical meaning. You can see that the theoretical meaning, I am embarrassed to point it out, is that instead of distinguishing between an economic belonging to the infrastructure and a juridical-political belonging to the superstructure, we should in reality speak of an economic-juridical order. In this, Rougier, and then the ordoliberals, place themselves strictly in line with Max Weber’s important perspective. That is to say, like Max Weber, they situate themselves from the outset at the level of the relations of production rather than at the level of the forces of production. At that level they grasp in one hand, as it were, both history and economics, both law and the economy strictly speaking, and, placing themselves in this way at the level of the relations of production they do not consider the economic to be a set of processes to which a legal system is added which is more or less adapted or more or less obsolete in relation to these processes. In actual fact, the economic must be considered as a set of regulated activities from the very beginning: it is a set of regulated activities with rules of completely different levels, forms, origins, dates, and chronologies; rules which may comprise a social habitus, a religious prescription, an ethics, a corporate regulation, and also a law. In any case, the economic is not a mechanical or natural process that one can separate out, except by abstraction a posteriori, by means of a formalizing abstraction. The economic can only ever be considered as a set of activities, which necessarily means regulated activities. It is this economic-juridical ensemble, this regulated set of activities that Eucken calls—in a perspective which is more phenomenological than Weberian—the “system.” What is the system? It is a complex whole including economic processes the specifically economic analysis of which is a matter for pure theory and a formalization which may take the form of the formalization of mechanisms of competition, for example, but these economic processes only really exist, in history, insofar as an institutional framework and positive rules have provided them with their conditions of possibility. This is what this common analysis, this combined analysis of the relations of production means historically. Michel Foucault, 21 February 1979,  translated by Graham Burchell, Lecture 7, The Birth of Biopolitics, 161-163

In Lecture 7, Foucault confronts the elephant in the room (recall; and here), Louis Rougier, who, perhaps, single-handedly discredited both liberal philosophy and analytic philosophy in France for a generation (or more) of the intellectually and morally sensitive young not just by his association with Petain in 1940, but also in his post-WWII  defense of Pétain and other far-right commitments(etc.). Strikingly, Foucault has no interest in using this history to discredit Rougier (or the commitments).* In fact, he explicitly praises Rougier's epistemology. And here he is interested in using Rougier's introduction to set up discussion, later in the lecture, of the neo-liberal responses to marxism, weber, and schumpeterianism. 

In reading Foucault's response to Rougier, I have a sense that Foucault (who seems to have read everything) has not read Lippmann's Good Society. Because I take Rougier's introduction as a perfect summary of the significance of Lippmann's book. The re-invention of liberalism as a progressive project by embracing as a liberal stance, the 'spirit of adaptation,' is (recall) central to Lippmann's argument (that Lippmann traces to Adam Smith, and I think is discernible in Locke). And this spirit is needed in virtue of the expectation of (i) technological change (e.g., faster means of transport vs the time of stagecoaches) and in virtue of the idea that (ii) the law may express and, thereby, entrench political power, which itself needs to be guarded against. In addition, (iii) as society develops and grows there will be more sources of mutual friction which require legal pacification or resolution. And so Lippmann and Rougier reject nineteenth century ('Manchester') liberalism and its adoption of laissez faire (while also rejecting the 'planners.')

And because (iv) the market itself generates never seizing outcomes ('spontaneous arbitration of consumers'), and so evolves according to its own logic, and in virtue of (i-iii), the liberal, who understands the need for the spirit of adaptation, always sees liberalism as an unfinished project, which requires the never-ending work by the state to create the framework in which markets can work. (Again, markets are not self-justifying but are a mechanism that do not just generate efficient growth and innovation, but are a mechanism by which political/concentrated power can be resisted.)

Foucault correctly corrects Rougier from the perspective of an ORDO. And he explains that the significance of Rougier's (Lippman-esque) reinterpretation of liberalism entails a rejection of the marxist thought that the law is a 'pure and simple expression or instrumentality to the economy' or is determined by the economy.  Rather, the law shapes the economy and, in turn, is shaped by it. Such that the legal and economic are in non-trivial inter-defined/intertwined as (in Weber's terminology) relations of production.** The legal 'regulation' that Foucault speaks of here is -- as I had noted the lecture before -- at the level of framework enhancing and framework ordening policies. (It is not regulation in the market place.)

The law helps create and constitute economic agents with rights and legal tender and practices of credit generation, and these in turn influence the shape of the law. Significantly, and here I make something explicit that Foucault gestures at, it also means that from the perspective of neoliberalism, that a well-functioning system of law is not just neutral arbiter, but itself a form of capital to society it helps order. And in so far as the system of law is 'more or less adapted' to the processes it simultaneously helps shape, the more productivity and freedom enhancing it is.

As Foucault  goes on to say, what the spirit of adaptation entails is that at any given time capitalism has the possibility to be (reasonably) adapted to its circumstances or not. And this means that from the reconstituted progressive liberal (not to be confused with the modern progressive), who resists the status quo bias of nineteenth century liberalism, capitalism always has a multiplicity of possibilities. This is not a bug, but a virtue of this liberalism. For, it both contradicts the Marxist analysis -- which treats capitalism as homogeneous 'with its own necessity' that is simultaneously self-contradictory (164) -- and it affirms liberalism (recall) as a potential (moral and political) critic of any really existing Mercantile-Imperialist capitalism.

And, second, it opens the productive role to what Foucault has been calling the liberal 'art of government,' which is rooted in a set of intellectual ideas as much as it is in a set of practices, as an instrument to reinvigorate liberalism's spirit of adaptation. In practice what this means is that in a liberal polity there must be a site of intellectual and scientific freedom in which its own dogmas are critically explored and rejuvenated in order to help shape the politics of liberal survival. 

Of course, this leaves hanging what it might mean for a system of law to be more or less adapted to the processes it simultaneously shapes? Or: what does a rule of law in the spirit of adaptation amount to then? This is the subject of the core of Foucault's seventh lecture, and I turn to that soon.

Popper, Schmitt, and Friend & Foe

It cannot, of course, be denied that human individuals are, like all other things in our world, in very many respects very unequal. Nor can it be doubted that this inequality is of great importance and even in many respects highly desirable.12 (The fear that the development of mass production and collectivization may react upon men by destroying their inequality or individuality is one of the nightmares13 of our times.) But all this simply has no bearing upon the question whether or not we should decide to treat men, especially in political issues, as equals, or as much like equals as is possible; that is to say, as possessing equal rights, and equal claims to equal treatment; and it has no bearing upon the question whether we ought to construct political institutions accordingly. ‘Equality before the law’ is not a fact but a political demand based upon a moral decision; and it is quite independent of the theory—which is probably false—that ‘all men are born equal’. Now I do not intend to say that the adoption of this humanitarian attitude of impartiality is a direct consequence of a decision in favour of rationalism. But a tendency towards impartiality is closely related to rationalism, and can hardly be excluded from the rationalist creed. Again, I do not intend to say that an irrationalist could not consistently adopt an equalitarian or impartial attitude; and even if he could not do so consistently, he is not bound to be consistent. But I do wish to stress the fact that the irrationalist attitude can hardly avoid becoming entangled with the attitude that is opposed to equalitarianism. This fact is connected with its emphasis upon emotions and passions; for we cannot feel the same emotions towards everybody. Emotionally, we all divide men into those who are near to us, and those who are far from us. The division of mankind into friend and foe is a most obvious emotional division; and this division is even recognized in the Christian commandment, ‘Love thy enemies!’ Even the best Christian who really lives up to this commandment (there are not many, as is shown by the attitude of the average good Christian towards ‘materialists’ and ‘atheists’), even he cannot feel equal love for all men. We cannot really love ‘in the abstract’; we can love only those whom we know. Thus the appeal even to our best emotions, love and compassion, can only tend to divide mankind into different categories. And this will be more true if the appeal is made to lesser emotions and passions. Our ‘natural’ reaction will be to divide mankind into friend and foe; into those who belong to our tribe, to our emotional community, and those who stand outside it; into believers and unbelievers; into compatriots and aliens; into class comrades and class enemies; and into leaders and led.---Karl Popper The Open Society and its Enemies (one volume edition), 439-440 (emphasis in original)

Yesterday Jerry Gaus (1952-2020), who was the greatest theorist of the open society in our life-time, died. This post is an imperfect homage to his memory. 

Nearly every word in the passage quoted above is a response to Schmitt's Concept of the Political (perhaps mediated by Strauss' commentary). This is easy to miss because in a rare moment of self-command, Popper does not name the target nor attaches a lengthy discursive footnote.* My present interest is to discuss the significance of this, rather than to offer complete proof of the claims in the first sentence of the present paragraph. The quoted passage occurs in chapter 24 of The Open Society. And it helps clarify Popper's decision to call the critics and alternatives to liberalism/Open Society -- which he describes and criticizes with a mixture of polemics and admiration -- 'enemies.' 

In the Concept of the Political, Schmitt claims (recall) that "there is a specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy.'" In German it is 'feind' which can be translated as 'enemy' and as 'foe.' There is some debate among readers of Schmitt, no doubt encouraged by writings by Schmitt after the war, that there is an important distinction between enemy and foe in Schmitt. But such a distinction is unavailable to Popper in 1943. 

In the quoted passage, Popper twice echoes Schmitt's distinction between friend and foe, and he treats the genesis of the distinction in our emotions ("the division of mankind into friend and foe is a most obvious emotional division.")  That he has Schmitt in mind is clear from the second use of 'friend and foe' which marks those recognized to "belong to our tribe" (compatriots) and not to those outside of it, or as Schmitt would put it, "the other, the stranger."

For Popper the embraces of the Schmittian distinction facilitates the emotional rejection of what Popper calls equalitarianism. Because from the vantage point of our emotions, our differences are highly salient. As Schmitt puts it, "emotionally the enemy is easily treated as being evil and ugly," (emphasis added).

That Popper is shadowing even trolling Schmitt is obvious from his next move -- which one can only describe as chutzpah -- in which he points out that the distinction is recognized by the Christian commandment. Schmitt by contrast had insisted that the Christian love in the commandment is not reserved for the "political enemy."+ 

It is important for Schmitt to make his distinction compatible with Christianity because for Schmitt his rejection of liberal universalism, ultimately rests on his submission to a providential (Christian) faith opposed to the liberal's "anthropological profession of faith."** Strikingly, and as a good Kantian, Popper grants Schmitt the claim that at bottom the choice, for or against liberalism, rests on a species of faith (this is crucial to Strauss' interpretation of Schmitt and Strauss subsequent  historiography).

As Popper puts it, "the choice with which we are confronted is between a faith in reason and in human individuals and a faith in the mystical faculties of man by which he is united to a collective." (450) The second option is the Schmittian outlook. The former option, the "right kind of faith" is Popper's liberalism, which "frankly admits its origin in an irrational decision." (437; emphasis added.) That Popper thinks that there is a faith in individuals as an alternative to a faith in the collective begs the question against Schmitt's insistence that always, a "collectivity of people confronts a similar collectivity," (which begs the question, too). 

I do not mean to claim that for Popper, the choice between himself and Schmittian is reducible to such an existential Kierkegaardian leap (while rejecting any belief in providence). He also thinks the consequence of the Schmittian choice is that it "must lead to an appeal to violence and brutal force as the ultimate arbiter in any dispute." (440)*** That is to say, Popper claims (and here he echoes Strauss again) that Schmitt returns us to a kind of state of nature not worth having. 

Now, the significance of all of this is that it allows us to raise the question how the open society should treat its enemies? In fact, I already noted that Popper thinks a kind of defensive violence, even tyrannicide, is permitted (recall), even obliged, in order and only in order to restore democracy. But the more challenging question is, how should the open society treat its enemies before they have succeeded in overthrowing it? And part of Popper's answer is: make sure you can (conceptually) recognize that there are enemies. What follows from this recognition I explore before long. 

14 February 1979: Foucault on Eucken and the birth of Biopolitics (XX)

What is a framework policy? I think it will appear clearly if we consider a text from Eucken’s Grundsätze, that is to say, from 1952, where he takes up the problem of German agriculture, although he says the same arguments apply to most of European agriculture. Basically, he says, agriculture has never been normally, fully, and exhaustively integrated within the market economy. It has not been integrated within the market economy because of protective customs that, throughout Europe, have marked off, and cut out the spaces of European agriculture. These protective customs were made indispensable both by technical differences and generally by the technical inadequacy of each country’s agriculture. These differences and inadequacies were entirely linked to an over-population that made intervention, the insertion of technical improvements, pointless and, in truth, undesirable. So, what must be done if we want European agriculture to function within a market economy? The text is from 1952. We will have to act on facts that are not directly economic facts, but which are conditioning facts for a possible market economy. So on what will it be necessary to act? Not on prices, and certainly not on a particular sector, ensuring support for a scarcely profitable sector, since these are bad interventions. What will good interventions act on? Well, on the framework. That is to say, first, on the population. The agricultural population is too large, so it will have to be reduced by interventions enabling population transfers, migration, and so on. We will also have to intervene at the level of techniques, by making implements available, by the technical improvement of elements like fertilizers, etcetera, and also by the training and education given to farmers, which will enable them to modify [agricultural] techniques. Third, we will also modify the legal framework of farms, and in particular the laws governing inheritance, governing tenant farms and the location of estates, trying to find the means to get the legislation, structures, and institutions of society to play a part through action in agriculture, and so on. Fourth, as far as possible we will modify the allocation of the soil and the extent, nature, and exploitation of the soil available. Finally, if necessary, we will have to be able to intervene on the climate.
You can see that none of these elements—population, technology, training and education, the legal system, the availability of land, the climate—are directly economic and they do not affect market mechanisms directly, but for Eucken they are conditions for agriculture to be able to function as a market, for agriculture to be able to function within a market. The idea was not, given the state of things, how can we find the economic system that will be able to take account of the basic facts peculiar to European agriculture? It was, given that economic-political regulation can only take place through the market, how can we modify these material, cultural, technical, and legal bases that are given in Europe? How can we modify these facts, this framework so that the market economy can come into play? You can see here something that I will return to shortly, which is that to the same extent that governmental intervention must be light at the level of economic processes themselves, so must it be heavy when it is a matter of this set of technical, scientific, legal, geographic, let’s say, broadly, social factors which now increasingly become the object of governmental intervention. What is more, you can see in passing that this 1952 text programs, even if in a completely rough and ready way, what will become the Common Agricultural Market of the next decade. The text is from 1952. The Mansholt plan is already in Eucken, or it is in part in Eucken, in 1952. So there you are for conformable actions, for conjunctural actions and organizing actions at the level of the framework. This is what they call the organization of a market order, of an order of competition. And this is actually what European agricultural policy is: How to reconstruct a competitive order that will regulate the economy? Michel Foucault, 14 February 1979,  translated by Graham Burchell, Lecture 6, The Birth of Biopolitics, 140-141.

I have devoted some attention to Lecture 6 because in the passage quoted above Foucault finally gets to the main theme of the lecture course.* Remember that on Foucault's reading of the ORDOs a framework policy is a government action that conditions the very existence of a market (sometimes Foucault calls this "organizing actions (actions ordonnatrices).") For, markets are  constructed. Because the contrast here is with ideas that treat the market as natural or spontaneous, and there has been a lot of heat about neo-liberal authoritarian governmentality, it is easy to assume mistakenly that markets are imposed top-down, grafted on societies, in the ORDO program. But that's not what Foucault claiming about the ORDOs.

Rather, to condition the possibility of a market means to let the materials that make markets possible emerge from existing societies and practices. I do no mean to deny that this involves government policy, and changes in the law, but people are not forced, say, to farm or forcibly transported to new areas.

Many of the policies proposed involve the removal of tariffs and regulations that prevented competitive or profitable (or both) farming. I mention this explicitly because the "interventions enabling population transfers, migration, and so on" involve removing barriers to voluntary movement into cities or other trades by agricultural population.  Of course, Foucault also recognizes that to let markets emerge requires government investment in education and technology and in laws that allow farms to be inherited without having to sub-divide them in inefficiently small parcels (something central to Mansholt's original plan). 

Now, originally, the liberal of government, as conceived by Locke (and as Foucault noted in first lecture), was committed to growing populations alongside growing and competitive economies in order to make possible extensive markets with cheap commodities and growing productivity. And, as a useful side-effect, growing populations allow, if necessary, for large armies and navies. What Foucault recognizes is that the ORDOs break with this and make the size of the population optative. Population now becomes a parameter in the service of the framework. This strikes me as the birth of biopolitics in Foucault's sense.

Now, the ORDOs do not invent this move. It is pretty clearly visible (recall here; here) in Plato's city of pigs, where controlling population size is the mechanism by which famine and/or the growth of luxury is prevented. (As some readers now, I tend to think of the city of pigs as an almost liberal utopia.) But the ORDOs improve on Plato by treating population as one of several parameters in a broader social policy so that an "economy can come into play"

Above, I have used the language of emergence to contrast the ORDO approach to the origin markets to both the spontaneous order as well as the top-down approach. It would be better, perhaps, to use the language of organization, or ordering, or development. This is generally thought of as something apt for the third-world or them. But what the ORDOs recognize, and Foucault is quite clear-sighted on this, is that the conditions of market society need to be cultivated and developed with pre-existing materials by policy (especially the legal, material, and educational pre-conditions). 

Now, once markets are developed they, in turn, can help regulate and order society (and prevent concentrated economic and political power). And, as markets enrich society, it in turn can invest in the preconditions for better markets and the policing of anti-trust (etc.).

Now, what I want to close with are three observations: first, note that the ORDOs are committed to a form of social and indirect perfectionism (recall here, and here)), which goes back to Adam Smith. (Against most commentators of Adam Smith, I claim the basic idea is in The Theory of Moral Sentiments; “some general, and even systematical, idea of the perfection of policy and law, may no doubt be necessary for directing the views of the statesman.” (emphasis added).) By 'indirect' here I mean that certain substantive moral commitments are pursued, but they are pursued by way of the framework and the general policy rules that leaves ample space for individual human diversity and pursuit of life-goals. Among the ORDOs this is most visible in Röpke, whose views sometimes edge into a species of social conservatism, although others are echt-liberal. So, rather than a neutral state, the ORDOs pursue actively (echoing Lippmann) a good society with liberal characteristics.

Second, the ORDOs presuppose considerable commitment to science in shaping society in three senses:  (i) considerable technical expertise in lots of domains; (ii) a kind of systemic knowledge that understands the interactions among domains. So, this requires a mixture of specialists and generalists, able to develop and steer (iiii) state capacity of weberian-rule following bureaucracies linked to proper functioning legal system. That is to say, among the framework institutions one finds also the reproduction of the institutions for framework knowledge. (Some other time we will explore the nature of the particular conception of science.)

Third, when Foucault gave these lectures, spending on the Common Agricultural Policy was about 70% of EU-10 budget. (Even now, it is still more than a third of the EU-27/28 budget.) That is to say, Foucault is reminding his worldly Parisian, urban audience, proud citizens of the most centralized European state, that European federation is ground in no small part in ORDO policies for peripheral, rural areas. 

On Kautsky and the Origin of the United States of Europe

Therefore there is today only one way: The union of the States of European civilisation in a confederation with a universal trade policy, a federal Parliament, a federal Government and a federal arm – the establishment of the United States of Europe.

This attained, something enormous would have been achieved. These United States would possess such overwhelming power that, without any war, they could compel all other nations, so far as these did not willingly do so, to join them, to disband their armies and give up their fleets. But with this would also disappear every necessity for the new United States themselves to be armed. They could then not merely give up all further armaments – the standing army, the warships for attack – the abandonment of which we to-day demand, but also every means of defence; even the citizen army itself would he longer be necessary.

Thereby would the era of eternal peace be securely founded, and unlimited economic means be set free – some 20 milliards it year in round figures for the whole world,

What rapid movement could this enormous sum by itself not give to social change, how painlessly might that change be thereby accomplished

But how is the constitution of the United States of Europe to be brought about?

....

Nevertheless the attempt to peacefully unite the States of Europe in a federal Commonwealth is by no means inconceivable. Its prospects are bound up with the prospects of the Revolution.

The Revolution in favour of peace may spring from two separate causes: one being the revolt against the intolerable burdens which have been imposed on the peoples by armaments; with the result that the peoples of Europe will have no other alternative than to drive to the devil all Governments which are imposing upon them new taxes simply in order to be able to continue indefinitely the development of armaments.

That it should come to this will be all the more likely in proportion as the armaments-folly takes on a more powerful form. But, really, it is so near that any Government which is most threatened by a revolution, which feels itself most threatened thereby, which, without prospects of escape, finds itself, as English people say, between the devil and the deep sea, would rather go down in the surging sea of war than give itself over to the devil of Revolution.

It would then forget, however, that it would not escape the devil by throwing itself into the sea; but that he would at once have it there completely. If the first possible cause of Revolution is the revolt against armaments, the second would be war itself.

The Revolution would follow upon war with unerring certainty; not as the product of a Social-Democratic plan, but from the foredoomed logic of the thing. Present-day statesmen count upon that outcome of war.

But whether the Revolution comes from armaments or from war, it will present an international phenomenon, and its first care will be to put an end for ever to the horrors of war. The Revolution will not, like our bourgeois pacifists, simperingly content itself with such petty palliative means as arbitration courts and armaments reduction, which at every moment may tweak down, but will strive to establish such conditions as will make a war thenceforth impossible. That it can only attain through the establishment of the United States of Europe. Governments which would, or could, set themselves in opposition would no longer exist.

Moreover, if the Revolution does not spring from the reaction against the burden of armaments, or against the horrors of war, but from some other ground, and it at the beginning it is not international but limited to a single State, it cannot in existing circumstances long remain so. It must spread over into other States, and it is inevitable that these then will combine. Together it is inevitable that these then will combine together in a close confederation which will exclude any possibility of war between themselves. The proletarian International will them have arrived at the reality of existence as a State. The United States of Europe and their final expansion into the United States of the Civilised World – that, and not the single nation is the stately foundation of the coming Socialist Society. What the cantons are for the Switzerland of today the present nations will be of the Socialist Commonwealth on the States of the future.--Karl Kautsky (1911), War and Peace

Earlier in the week, I noted that Kautsky's conception of the united states of Europe echoes, in some respects, Kant's Perpetual Peace. However, unlike Kant, who envisions multiple growing, regional defensive voluntary federations, Kautsky assumes that a United States of Europe's power is so overwhelming that, were it joined together, it can de facto enforce peace on the world and spend the peace dividend on prosperity. Despite the existence of mighty European empires and navies, it is to be doubted, with the benefit of hindsight, that this was an accurate understanding of the then existing balance of power (giving the growing industrial might of the USA and Japan, etc.).  

Kautsky thinks there are three routes to European peace: (i) a tax-revolt by citizens against the costs of armaments; (ii) a war so destructive that a socialist-cosmopolitan revolution would follow; (iii) a peace-time worker's revolution in a state that would be copied by others, and so usher in a cosmopolitan socialist federation.

As an aside, what's fascinating about this is the openness of the future in Kautsky's writings. At the time of this writing Kautsky is kind of the embodiment of orthodox marxism rejecting the accommodationist Bernstein (and others). While Kautsky does not seem to doubt the possibility of socialist revolution, he is not prophesying it either. He seems, in fact, more confident that once a revolution has been successful it will spread then that a revolution will be successful. 

More important, for Liberals interested in the retreat of liberal ideology after 1870 -- something lamented by then after the catastrophic first world war and at the height of the depression -- Kautsky offers a salutary reminder why this was so: imperialism was both profitable to many of liberalism's natural supporters and created the conditions for successful war-mongering among states. The Kantian (but not Smithian!) premise, that in a commercial society folk would be pacific gets fatally undermined.* It is to Kautsky's credit (this is the main message of the first two sections of the quoted essay) that he is willing to contemplate alliances with the weak, peace-wing of the bourgeoisie to forestall war. 

Chris Brooke, in comments on my previous post, noted that prior to decolonization most proposals for a federation of European States were, in effect, attempts at consolidating empire be it (to quote Lenin from 1915) "reactionary" -- with capitalism not overthrown -- or, as Kautsky hopes, "socialist." And, indeed, when the EU was founded, it still included non-trivial colonial empires (some of which a constitutive part of the EU). That the EU has survived shrinkage is conveniently forgotten by ardent federalists and Brexiteers alike.

That (iv) two catastrophic wars, hyperinflation, genocide, loss of empire and global hegemony, and, not least important, fear of soviet invasion did bring European political and financial elites voluntarily together around a European project was not foreseen by Marxists (although clearly Lenin does not rule out the possibility of a non-socialist Europe). [I am not ignoring the role of the US's efforts to nudge them into this!] It strikes me there are two, related important lessons here.

First, none of the Marxists believed in the strategic adaptability of European capitalism.+ All the Marxists believe in the inner contradictions of capitalism (with its rise of monopoly and surplus abroad) that create the conditions of war and revolution. They were not altogether wrong about this, but failed to foresee that in defeat, and when faced with possible revolution, European capitalism was more pragmatic than anybody ever imagined.+ In part, and here I echo Foucault, this is because Marxists have systematically underestimated (and ignored) the liberal art of government, which has a richer history than allowed.+ 

Second, one reason European capitalism could be pragmatic is because of the existence of a social democratic version of European federation. That this social democratic version has (inter alia) its roots in Kautsky, when he was still taken to be an orthodox marxist, is I think an important part of the story (something that had eluded me before). As is well known (I hope), Kautsky eventually preferred even imperfect democracy over dictatorship. And here he stands in for a world-historical possibility. For, when after WWII, European (liberal and christian democratic) elites moved to build European federation, social democrats, who had turned their back on the dictatorship of the proletariat and the permanent war-footing of Soviet experiment, were waiting for them. That is to say, they had followed Kautsky journey to the building blocks of a federated state, inspired by Kant and Adam Smith, Mazzini, (and going back to Rousseau, Spinoza, and More, with a joint trade policy and parliament. 

On Newton's Third Rule of Reasoning and Rational Theology (or on Brading on Newton's Philosophy of time), pt I

I agree [with Schliesser] that [I] Newtonian absolute time (p.18) should not be conflated with Newtonian true time. I agree that, for [II] the purposes of the Principia, Newton does not need his time parameter to extend from infinity to infinity. I agree that [III] the spatial reach of Newton’s time parameter in the Principia is an empirical matter. However, I do not think that, [IV] for Newton,“absolute” and “true” mark Schliesser’s distinction between a spatially limited empirical time parameter and a theologically motivated, infinitely extended “time.”
Initial doubts about Schliesser’s interpretation arise when we notice that in the scholium Newton does not make the positive assertion that absolute, true, or mathematical time are eternal in duration, nor does he assert that space is infinite, and nor does he assert that each moment of time extends from infinity to infinity. We are familiar with these claims from other places in Newton’s writings, but in this part of the text, where Newton is setting out what is needed for the project of the Principia, no such positive claims are made.
Moreover, the distinction that Schliesser draws is not one that we find doing work for Newton in his argument in the Principia, such that he has reason to mark it by means of a terminological distinction. As evidence for this, consider that Newton has just as good reasons to think that his absolute time extends to the physics of the distant stars and to the planetary systems around distant stars (if any such exist) as he does to think that his laws of motion and law of universal gravitation apply to such bodies, and he does not make the solar system the boundary of applicability for these latter.
Newton worried about how we extend our knowledge to bodies beyond the reach of our experiments, and this worry is explicitly addressed in his Rule 3 of Reasoning, added to Book 3 in the second edition of the Principia (Newton 1999, 795):

Those qualities of bodies that cannot be intended and remitted and that belong to all bodies on which experiments can be made should be taken as qualities of all bodies universally.

This rule plays a crucial role in enabling Newton to extend results from terrestrial experiments to the celestial bodies of the solar system. In applying Rule 3 to bodies beyond the solar system, we would certainly be wise to be tentative given the flimsiness (even non-existence) of our empirical evidence, but there is nothing in Newton’s writings to indicate a sharp cutoff at the outer edges of the solar system such that we should not consider distant stars to be bodies. On the contrary, the possibility of other worlds around other Suns, governed by the same laws, is very much part of Newton’s thinking. For example, there is a manuscript in which Newton (p.19) asserts that the fixed stars are bodies just like our Sun: they are formed into spheres by their own gravity, and since they are bodies, they are, by definition, subject to the laws of motion. It seems to me that the distinction Schliesser draws is not important for Newton’s purposes.
Finally, the contexts in which Newton extends moments of time to spatial infinity are generally also those in which he is talking about God’s presence in the world, rather than those in which he is concerned with methods of reasoning from the phenomena.
In my opinion, we have good reason to suspect that Newton was careful not to overreach empirically when he was setting out his accounts of time and space in the scholium (i.e., at the outset of the empirical project of the Principia). There is therefore reason to doubt that the inclusion of “true time” is an “unnecessary addition” (Schliesser 2013, 91). In the following section I propose an alternative interpretation of the terminology, in which each of his three distinctions—absolute versus relative, true versus apparent, and mathematical versus common—are relevant and important for the project of the Principia.--Katherine Brading (2017) "Time for Empiricist Metaphysics" in Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Science: New Essays edited by Matthew Slater and Zanja Yudell [emphases added for ease of discussion.]

While it's pretty baffling to be told by a referee#2 to cite [fill in your name + year], there is, in academic life, no stranger feeling than to publish a scholarly paper about which one thinks firmly, 'this has to be wrong' and one simultaneously believes in exhilarated fashion, 'I am on to something really important.' So far I have only thought that once, when my Newton's Philosophy of Time (2013) appeared in print (thank you Adrian and Heather for seeing it through!)

Now, between (ca) 2007 and 2015, I was immersed in a collegial community of Newton scholars, which -- thanks to email and a steady stream of workshops -- shared papers and ideas regularly  (Brading's letters were often at the root of my papers); and many of the best ideas in my Newton's Philosophy of Time paper originated with or had been commented on by them. And, in fact, the (2013) paper's core starting point, that we ought not assume that absolute and true time are identical, originates in reflecting on a paper by Nick Huggett, who had claimed that absolute and true motion should not be treated as the same concept in the famous scholium to the definitions of the Principia.

Somewhat strangely, while there is huge sophisticated literature on Newton's philosophy of space, there are only a few papers on Newton's philosophy of time. There is, however, a general presumption that Newton's treats them in more or less identical or at least symmetrical fashion as was more common in early modern world (Geoff Gorham has explored this). And Newton invites the idea when he writes, in the scholium to the definitions, 'Just as the order of the parts of time is unchangeable, so, too, is the order of the parts of space.'

In the scholium to the definitions, Newton tells us that space and time are both abstract "quantities" and that these can be distinguished "into absolute and relative, true and apparent, mathematical and common."

But alerted by Huggett's paper, I had noticed something quirky. Compare the following two sentences (they are both the first sentence of the respective paragraphs in which these quantities are explained):

[A]: Absolute, true, and mathematical time, in and of itself and of its own nature, without reference to anything external, flows uniformly and by another name is called duration.

[B] Absolute space, of its own nature without reference to anything external, always remains homogeneous and immovable.

'True, and mathematical' are absent in [B]! Now look at what Newton says about the relevant contrast (in the next sentence of each paragraph):

[A*] Relative, apparent, and common time is any sensible and external measure a (precise or imprecise) of duration by means of motion; such a measure—for example, an hour, a day, a month, a year—is commonly used instead of true time.

[B*] Relative space is any movable measure or dimension of this absolute space; such a measure or dimension is determined by our senses from the situation of the space with respect to bodies and is popularly used for immovable space, as in the case of space under the earth or in the air or in the heavens, where the dimension is determined from the situation of the space with respect to the earth.

Again, "apparent, and common" are absent in [B*].+ In addition, there is a further asymmetry in the measures.  When the (regular) motion of bodies are used (qua measure of time), something physical is deployed to track an abstract quantity (viz. absolute time, etc.) But when the situation of one body relative to another body is used,  it looks like the very abstraction you are trying to track is already in the measure. (Of course, this is also true of motion, qua measure, which presupposes the very abstract regularity you are trying to track.) But to put the point informally, Newton is proposing to treat a part of space as the measure of space. He treats something that is prima facie not time as the measure of time.+ 

This is not the place to recount what I did with these initial observations. You can infer some of what I claimed in my paper from some of Brading excellent criticisms quoted above. As I said above, I had strong feeling that something had gone wrong in my argument. And, as it happens, in the piece I partially quoted above, Brading has articulated the version of Newton's position that I would have expected to articulate myself (except that she does so much better than I could imagine myself doing) before I had started writing my own paper. And when I first heard her paper, and than read it when it appeared, I was both pleased she agreed with me on [I-III] and convinced she is right about the remaining differences between us, that is [IV]. 

But as she guessed in a recent note to me, I don't really believe in the inner recess of my heart that I am wrong about [IV]. And so here I want to begin spelling out why. And, rather than going to the heart of the matter, I start by sorting out some preliminary disagreements. Today I tackle two such disagreements. I fully agree with Brading that rule 3 "plays a crucial role in enabling Newton to extend results from terrestrial experiments to the celestial bodies of the solar system." And that, while there are epistemic risks, the rule also encourages to project "to bodies beyond the solar system." But notice that in the quote from Rule 3, Newton mentions bodies, or as David Miller has emphasized, systems or, as I (influenced by Chris Smeenk) would say, interactions among bodies in rule 3. He does not mention space or time in the rule. 

And, in fact, in the Opticks, Newton had queried “it may be also allowed that God is able to create particles of matter of several sizes and figures, and in several proportions to space, and perhaps of different densities and forces, and thereby to vary the laws of nature, and make worlds of several sorts in several parts of the universe.” (Query 31; emphases added.) This passage is interesting for what Newton thinks about the nature of the laws of nature (see my (2017) piece with Zvi Biener, which engages with Brading's influential views on laws).  But here I use it to note an important contrast: for Newton it is quite conceivable that bodies and the laws they obey could be different whereas he does not think space could be different. And, in fact, for Newton it is conceivable, as a speculative matter, that in solar systems (what he calls "worlds") far from ours bodies and their laws are different (such that the galaxy is populated (by "worlds of several sorts in several parts of the universe"). Such speculations are not to be used in active research (which is, in fact, governed by rule 3).

As an aside, because solar systems are so far apart, and separated by empty space, there is negligible interaction among them. (According to the general scholium, this is a providential thing because it prevents the solar systems from collapsing onto each other.) I say 'negligible' because light does reach us from afar. And there is no reason to think it obeys different laws. 

But crucially, space cannot be created differently by God. And that is, as Newton explains in the general scholium,“by existing always and every where, [God] constitutes Duration and Space . . . ’Tis allowed by all that the supreme God exists necessarily; and by the same necessity he exists always and every where.” So, space, and time, are unchanging because they are constituted by God. In effect, they are privileged attributes of God. So, while time is not mentioned in the passage quoted from Query 31, it seems natural to read Newton as claiming that fundamentally time is necessarily unchangeable, while bodies could be different. 

Okay, this puts me in position, to mark a second (less important) misconception (for which my terminology may be to blame). Brading appears to think that when I use 'rational theology' I mean unempirical. Now, it is true that I argue that unlike absolute time, true time is of no use in Newton's dynamics or the physics proper of the Principia. But by this I do not mean that true time is thereby unempirical. For, Newton is quite explicit in the general scholium that theology is, in part, an empirical enterprise: "to treat of God from phenomena is certainly a part of "natural" philosophy.""

But rather by 'rational theology' I meant (by way of analogue to 'rational mechanics') that there are features of Newton's theology that, while attentive to the phenomena, rely on conceptual moves and (what I have called (recall) Newton's 'modal metaphysics' [see also here; here]) from those phenomena and that (those moves) are not overdetermined by the empirical findings. So, for example, what grounds (true) time in God is a constitution relation governed by a species of necessity.

Now this second misconception is not just a terminological matter because for Brading Newton's contribution to metaphysics (and its history) is precisely to allow the kind of distinctions between true and absolute time to "become empirically tractable in the context of the project of the Principia (or some such project)." I think she is right about this, but that she also has a tendency to downplay the extra-empirical conceptual/metaphysical moves (e.g., constitution, necessity, etc.) Newton makes from the phenomena. (That is she turns Newton into an empiricist of a sort I don't think he is.) But I have gone on for too long today.

Notice that everything I have said thus far is compatible with Brading being right about how we should distinguish between true and absolute time in Newton and also that both kinds of time have a place in Newton's physics, that is, the project of the Principia proper. But to settle these matters it is not sufficient to nitpick about her criticism of my view, but I must engage with her "alternative view." [To be continued...]

How Utopian is a United States of Europe (on Rosa Luxemburg's criticism of Kautsky)

Plausible as the idea of the United States of Europe as a peace arrangement may seem to some at first glance, it has on closer examination not the least thing in common with the method of thought and the standpoint of social democracy.

As adherents of the materialist conception of history, we have always adopted the standpoint that the modern States as political structures are not artificial products of a creative phantasy, like, for instance, the Duchy of Warsaw of Napoleonic memory, but historical products of economic development. But what economic foundation lies at the bottom of the idea of a European State Federation? Europe, it is true, is a geographical and, within certain limits, an historical cultural conception. But the idea of Europe as an economic unit contradicts capitalist development in two ways. First of all there exist within Europe among the capitalist States – and will so long as these exist – the most violent struggles of competition and antagonisms, and secondly the European States can no longer get along economically without the non-European countries. As suppliers of foodstuffs, raw materials and wares, also as consumers of the same, the other parts of the world are linked in a thousand ways with Europe. At the present stage of development of the world market and of world economy, the conception of Europe as an isolated economic unit is a sterile concoction of the brain. Europe no more forms a special unit within world economy than does Asia or America.

And if the idea of a European union in the economic sense has long been outstripped, this is no less the case in the political sense.

The times when the centre of gravity of political development and the crystallising agent of capitalist contradictions lay on the European continent, are long gone by. To-day Europe is only a link in the tangled chain of international connections and contradictions. And what is of decisive significance – European antagonisms themselves no longer play their role on the European continent but in all parts of the world and on all the seas.

Only were one suddenly to lose sight of all these happenings and manoeuvres, and to transfer oneself back to the blissful times of the European concert of powers, could one say, for instance, that for forty years we have had uninterrupted peace. This conception, which considers only events on the European continent, does not notice that the very reason why we have had no war in Europe for decades is the fact that international antagonisms have grown infinitely beyond the narrow confines of the European continent, and that European problems and interests are now fought out on the world seas and in the by-corners of Europe.

Hence the “United States of Europe” is an idea which runs directly counter both economically and politically to the course of development, and which takes absolutely no account of the events of the last quarter of a century.

That an idea so little in accord with the tendency of development can fundamentally offer no progressive solution in spite of all radical disguises is confirmed also by the fate of the slogan of the “United States of Europe.” Every time that bourgeois politicians have championed the idea of Europeanism, of the union of European States, it has been with an open or concealed point directed against the “yellow peril,” the “dark continent,” against the “inferior races,” in short, it has always been an imperialist abortion.

And now if we, as Social Democrats, were to try to fill this old skin with fresh and apparently revolutionary wine, then it must be said that the advantages would not be on our side but on that of the bourgeoisie. Things have their own objective logic. And the solution of the European union within the capitalist social order can objectively, in the economic sense, mean only a tariff war with America, and in the political sense only a colonial race war. The Chinese campaign of the united European regiments, with the World Field Marshal Waldersee at the head, and the gospel of the Hun as our standard – that is the actual and not the fantastic, the only possible expression of the “European State Federation” in the present social order.--Rosa Luxembourg (1911) Peace Utopias, translator unknown.+  [HT Dana Mills (2020) Rosa Luxemburg, p. 103]

One neat thing I learned from Dana Mills' entertaining, intellectual biography of Rosa Luxemburg is the existence of a 1911 debate between Luxemburg and Kautsky over the possibility of a federated Europe. Kautsky's piece, in particular, pleased me because it corrects my intuition that the idea of a federated Europe is primarily liberal, even neo-liberal, in character inspired by Kant and Adam Smith, Mazzini, (and going back to Rousseau, Spinoza, and More). But before I turn to Kautsky's positive argument, it is useful to look at Luxemburg's reservations. These are especially useful because Luxemburg's criticism of the European project is not offered from a narrow nationalist perspective (she is, as Mills describes, a critic of the very idea of national self-determination), but from a cosmopolitan one (with due attention to imperialism and colonialism).

Moreover, Luxemburg acknowledges that some (geographical and historical) conditions for European federation already exist.  What she rejects is a federation that understands itself as an "isolated economic unit." In an imperial age and a globalizing economy such a self-conception is indeed fantasy. It cannot simply de-couple from the world. 

 I doubt Kautsky really imagines an autarkic Europe. Kautsky seems to me far closer to Kant than Luxemburg allows. He proposes a "confederation with a universal trade policy, a federal Parliament, a federal Government and a federal arm." Since Luxemburg seems to be attacking a straw-man I leave that aside.

The other, more interesting and perhaps still pertinent argument is that she argues that in virtue of the antagonisms generated by capitalism, peaceful cohabitation is impossible within the would-be-federation and with the outside world, where the Federation either continues to dominate colonial subjects or gets trapped in zero-sum trade wars with other would be imperial, capitalist powers. 

Now it is pretty clear that Luxemburg thinks capitalism just is what Smithians (recall) prefer to call the mercantile version of capitalism with its (zero-sum) spirit of war distinct from a more pacific, liberal capitalism. And even if Luxemburg were to grant that there is a compelling liberal critique of such mercantile capitalism -- while, perhaps, sarcastically noting that a lot of nineteenth century liberals cheered on colonial and civilizational imperialism --, she may also claim (and I will be quoting from the recent criticism by Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò and Liam Kofi Bright of Walzer in Dissent magazine) that "theorists" of "capitalism are not interested in the characteristics capitalism could have had in some conceivable world," but on "the features it does, in fact, have."

As Luxemburg correctly notes, then existing European peace was in some sense illusory. There had been non-stop small wars, and after each war some great power engaged in "military reorganisation" of a sort that made a Great War more likely. And with the benefit of hindsight, we can argue that she was quite prophetic in noting that the European state-system was hurtling toward military conflagration.**

At the same, the question is what alternative future is possible/feasible.* Kautsky's proposal is, in part, designed to change and shift the incentive structure of European politics. On his view, to simplify (again I return to his piece some time), the cause of war is (I) a competitive great power arms race. And he thinks that peace can be secured when the arms race is thwarted/reversed and (II) a peace dividend can be used to secure economic prosperity for all.

So, from Luxemburg's perspective Kautsky denies that war is inevitable given bourgeois society. And this entails Luxemburg must discount the very possibility of a liberal, pacific form of capitalism; indeed in the first half her essay,+ belittles any evidence of the pacific tendency within bourgeois society and its capacity to redirect capitalism to liberal, pacific ends. She thinks that capitalism is essentially antagonistic ("For the international antagonisms of the capitalist states are but the complement of class antagonisms, and the world political anarchy but the reverse side of the anarchic system of production of capitalism.")

Luxemburg is alert to the fact that European world dominance cannot be taken for granted anymore (even a century ago). But she does not foresee the possibility that European bourgeois society could engage in systematic, pacification strategies of domestic conflicts and, with the existence of non-European hegemons, embrace the potentialities of federation. To what degree the underlying capitalist antagonisms remain untamed, and can never be tamed short of socialist revolution, is the question for theorists of the European Union to tackle...(to be continued).

 

 

On Cancel Culture and the Implosion of The Civic Religion of Freedom of Speech

Debates about free speech on American campuses today suggest that the rival concepts of isegoria and parrhesia are alive and well. When student protesters claim that they are silencing certain voices—via no-platforming, social pressure, or outright censorship—in the name of free speech itself, it may be tempting to dismiss them as insincere, or at best confused. As I witnessed at an event at Kenyon College in September, when confronted with such arguments the response from gray-bearded free-speech fundamentalists like myself is to continue to preach to the converted about the First Amendment, but with an undercurrent of solidaristic despair about “kids these days” and their failure to understand the fundamentals of liberal democracy.

No wonder the “kids” are unpersuaded. While trigger warnings, safe spaces, and no-platforming grab headlines, poll after poll suggests that a more subtle, shift in mores is afoot. To a generation convinced that hateful speech is itself a form of violence or “silencing,” pleading the First Amendment is to miss the point. Most of these students do not see themselves as standing against free speech at all. What they care about is the equal right to speech, and equal access to a public forum in which the historically marginalized and excluded can be heard and count equally with the privileged. This is a claim to isegoria, and once one recognizes it as such, much else becomes clear—including the contrasting appeal to parrhesia by their opponents, who sometimes seem determined to reduce “free speech” to a license to offend.--Teresa Bejan "The Two Clashing Meanings of 'Free Speech" (2017) The Atlantic,

The present critics and defenders of cancel culture are the children of a relatively recent civic religion that valorized an expansive conception of freedom of speech under the first amendment Stateside. A century ago (e.g., Timlan Act of 1907), the US banned all monetary campaign contributions. About half a century ago, campaign contributions were normalized, and in a string of legislation and judicial rulings, corporations gained the right of pretty much unlimited political spending under the first amendment. Until about thirty years ago, using Texas vs Johnson (1989) as baseline, flag burning (or desecrating) was illegal in nearly all US states. Until about half a century ago, using Miller vs California (1973) as a landmark, much pornography was de facto illegal. 

One of the gravest political right under a regime devoted to liberty, to speak against war, was denied by the Espionage Act of 1917, and was upheld by the Supreme Court after the war had finished. (The ruling -- applying a "clear and present danger" doctrine to an argument against the use of force! -- was penned by Oliver Wendell Holmes.) Thankfully it was repealed. For every era in which the pentagon papers can be published there are many more where each and every war brings a new curtailment of speech.

Eighty years ago Bertrand Russell never got to teach at CUNY; he was prevented from doing so by a court, in part, because he was taken to hold immoral views regarding sexuality. This is a good reminder that the relatively robust, but at times quite fragile, defense of academic freedom in the US itself is a relatively recent phenomenon dating back to that era, in part a consequence of changing views promoted by Dewey as a response to this case. 

Undoubtedly the expansive understanding of the first amendment was a consequence of the experience of the McCarthy era, increasing religious diversity, the needs of modern capitalism with proliferating technologies and platforms, and a better educated and increasingly heterogeneous population. Feel free to offer other intellectual and sociological explanations.

I believe the expansive understanding of the first amendment only developed in the 1960s. Since it became a kind of civic religion taught in schools and presumably sincerely believed and promoted by its own high priests (lawyers, judges, professors, etc.), including crucially businesses. It provides a social glue in a country that has a dynamic form of capitalism and many latent political conflicts. This civic religion also become, itself, a steady source of profit and influence.

As a depressing aside, arguably the Supreme Court started to develop a more expansive conception of freedom of speech in 1969 not to protect civil rights protestors, or Vietnam protestors, but when it allowed that the Klan's advocacy of violence was protected speech (under the first amendment) because the speech did not call for “imminent lawless action” (Brandenburg v. Ohio.; see also Virginia v. Black (2003)) Perhaps, it is smart politics to protect everybody's rights by protecting the racists first.

But despite this expansive understanding of freedom of speech, there is negligible freedom of speech in the workplace to this day. And, in fact, even during the golden age of expansive freedom of speech, there was considerable restraint and self-censorship not to mention regulated speech in the mass media. One reason to watch Public-access television channels on cable back in the day (1980s), before the rise of the internet, was that it was one of the few places one could encounter genuine viewpoint diversity in the mass media (in addition to assorted goofballs, etc.). Bernie Sanders' recent political campaign renewed interest in that era.

Unfortunately, the cumulative effect of the golden age of freedom of speech is not only a marvelous diversity of speech, but also the empowerment of corporate, rent-seeking interests; and with the growth of the internet menacing racists/supremacists and would-be-fascists have found ways to circumvent all the self-censorship and gate-keeping of the mass media. After the implosion of the local newspaper/radio/tv monopolies, the racists and fascists, and the anger they provoke (cf. the rise of Breitbart, the dark web) are inevitably copied by the rest of corporate media. Feeding on anger is the prevailing business model.

With the rise of President Trump, it is no surprise that the myths that support the expansive free speech civic religion receive new scrutiny and in some cases have become perceived to be rank superstition. It is not unusual to hear advocates of freedom of speech claim that only exposure and argument can defeat evil ideas--no empirical evidence is ever offered for that. There is a persistent tendency among free speech defenders to minimize or belittle the whole range of harms that come from spreading of incitement, political propaganda, as well as microaggression, political gaslighting, testimonial injustice, etc. 

It is no surprise at all that people of good will come to think that (a) if they are not protected by freedom of speech in the workplace, and (b) if those with concentrated economic power and those with malicious intent are protected to spread their lies and hatred, then freedom of speech merely stacks the decks against all kinds of other important political ends. It is no surprise at all that the internet is being used as a means to mobilize and generate countervailing powers that restrict the range of speech (from many political ends).

Contemporary  freedom of speech fundamentalists may well lament most of the restrictions I have mentioned, and perhaps even the outcomes that have strengthened corporations and would-be-fascists. But that they personally welcome caustic counter-speech from all quarters makes them folk of high integrity. It does not address the crumbling of the ramshackle edifice that is today's liberalism.

That we're in the realm of a decaying civic religion is clear from the fact that those among the high priests of our intellectual elite that defend it can't recognize the emptiness of their own incantations and their refusal to engage with their critics with minimal good faith: they claim sincerely and without evidence that any restriction on debate is supposed to end up in harming the most vulnerable; yet no restrictions may also (and does) harm the most vulnerable.* One can hold in equally good faith, even find empirical support for, the idea that some restrictions on speech may well be the condition of possibility of reasoned debate. As Teresa Bejan, who has anticipated much of my claims here, taught me: one way to understand cancel culture is, in fact, as an imperfect mechanism for equal speech.

One may well misinterpret me as defending cancel culture (this happened to me to my surprise after a recent post) or that I somehow willfully miss all the bad effects of cancel culture (these are very real). In fact, our civic and educational institutions have an obligation to defend scholars' and artists' ability to think and speak freely and to experiment in all kinds of forms of creative lives. 

Let me close: defenders of the decaying civic religion often accuse its critics of illiberalism. And undoubtedly there are illiberal critics of freedom of speech who cheer on cancel culture. But it is not illiberal to learn from experience and to worry about the political and civil harms that follow from experiments in freedom. We have had a half-century trial in relatively expansive freedom of speech. I lament the demise of that culture's assumptions. But it is not illiberal to take stock of the effects of policy, and to wish to correct for known harms.

The great political insight of liberalism as a creed is that our destiny is uncertain and surprising. And that as our great project unfolds we emphasize different means and different ends to face the political problems of the moment. What's urgently needed is that the eloquent and creative defenders of the old civic religion set their minds to the task of helping the young devise new norms and institutions that can promote human emancipation, equality, justice, and, yes, a bit wiser freedom for the next half century.