Digressions&Impressions

Covid Diaries: Covid Induced Migraine

It's time for another Covid Diaries update. (For my official "covid diaries," see here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here;  here; here, here; here; and here, and here).

 

It's been about a month since my last covid update. Unfortunately, the news is that it's been challenging. The last update coincided with the end of teaching and my return to London. And I figured that I would take ten days off, get back into a swimming routine, and then start working on some small projects before I would return to major research.

 

As you may recall I also saw the NHS long covid clinic neurologist, who diagnosed me with covid induced migraine. I have to admit that I was a bit surprised by her diagnosis because I thought my headaches were only triggered by social interactions beyond thirty minutes and i didn't have any other major characteristics of migraine. (In fact, the interactions first induce a weird fatigue and not always a headache.) On the other hand, she was optimistic I would continue to improve because on the whole I keep improving slowly.

 

But as it happened, my family left for a US trip and I was alone for a week without any social interactions at all (except very small talk at the swimming pool, supermarkt, and British Library). In their absence, I lost two days to debilitating headaches while they were away. Looking back over the month I have clocked six days of headaches--and my current best guess is that bad sleep and social interactions are possible triggers. I do find that days when I swim well and am well rested it's less likely to happen.

 

What's annoying about this is that in some respects the pattern of long covid has been that every two to three months the major symptoms shift. And this time is no different. Luckily on the non headache days I can swim, and do my reading and writing. But my social life is very limited, although my spouse has said I am in much better general mood than last year (which she takes as evidence that I am suffering much less). I still can't enjoy terraces, and even joint hiking. (There is a weird issue that walking and talking/coordinating with another while walking totally floors me--same with biking. It's as if cognitive load is too much.)

 

Unfortunately, the migraine meds I received have contraindications with pre-existing conditions/meds, so it's been a bit challenging to find the palliatives when the headaches hit. I know lots of people who manage migraines with varying degrees of success, so in a strange way I feel less alone with my condition. (It has made me wonder about the medical pathway from post-viral infection to migraine.)

 

Anyway, thanks to Federica Russo and Jean Wagemans, we finished one paper, and thanks to Nick Cowen we finished another. (Both under review.) And I wrote a book review. And then a week ago I did start my Foucault project, and while I lost one day through headaches, I have a nice writing rhythm and folks are even recognizing me again in the British Library. And I am really excited about the project--which started as a kind of therapy last year, but now feels like it might become a very neat book. I am lucky I have a work related passion that can be done in relative solitude for long chunks of time.

 

Before I left Amsterdam my occupational physician thought it was a good idea if I can figure out a research leave this Fall. So now I am in touch with various places which might sponsor a visit (you know who you are and I am very grateful for your help), so that I can take an unpaid leave. Hopefully I can sort something out that ticks various boxes and not be away from home too long.

 

That is it, I feel very grateful I have such supportive family, and the kind of job that is relatively secure and also so flexible now that teaching is done. I am still hoping that in six months i can attend workshops again and enjoy going out on dates with my better half, but I also thought that six months ago. So now I am mostly taking one day at a time.

On the session where McDowell insisted that Taylor and Putnam had failed to understand him

This post was prompted by an exchange with the eminent philosopher, Michael Kremer, on Twitter on the prose style of John McDowell in Mind and World. My side of the exchange with Michael is not very edifying, but in reflecting on it, I realize I had been a kind of eye witness to a philosophical event that in the hands of myth-makers could easily match the Davos clash between Cassirer and Heidegger in world historical significance. 

 

As I note below, for various reasons I am not an ideal witness, and I certainly do not intend to comment on the merits of the philosophical debate or even the merits of the mutual evaluation. But after sharing an earlier version of this post on facebook (here), and after hearing from at least two other witnesses (both much closer to the protagonists at the time), I have come to believe that my memory of the event is not fatally skewed. What I didn't do ahead of this post is re-read Mind and World, and I have not tried to obtain the original manuscripts, if they still exist, of the papers presented at the Author-Meets-Critics session I am about to describe.

 

On Saturday, April 27 1996, in Chicago, at the Palmer House, there was an epic, bewildering Author Meets Critics session on McDowell's (1994) Mind and World with Charles Taylor and Putnam as Critics and John Haugeland presiding (see here for the program). It was near the end of my first year in graduate school, and more than 25 years ago, so I wouldn't trust by memory on fine-grained philosophical issues. However, at the time there were plenty of fans of McDowell in the Chicago philosophy department, which subsequently tried to hire him (while I was still a PhD student), and we did some kind of student  reading group on Mind and World that year. So, I was excited about the event, and prepped to be impressed. (Not everyone at Chicago was a fan of McDowell, for example one of Howard Stein's most beautiful papers is organized as a searing critique of McDowell's Mind and World.) 

 

Just to give you a sense of my stance then: while I was enmeshed in Quine, Davidson, and Putnam at the time (these had been staple of my undergraduate education), I found reading McDowell a frustrating experience; I constantly felt that when I finally grasped what he was claiming, I didn't see the pay-off relative to work put in. In preparing this post, I notice I am not alone in this, one of the protagonists of my story below, Hilary Putnam, actually starts his published contribution to Reading McDowell: On Mind and World (2002, edited by Nicholas H. Smith, London: Routledge) "I find Mind and World an enormously difficult book—as difficult as it is important." (174)*

 

What's unclear from the remark I have just quoted is whether this was Putnam's view before the session or an effect of the session. For, Putnam's chapter in Reading McDowell does suggest that the session itself transformed his understanding. He writes, "When I encountered Mind and World I naturally read it in the light of the direct realism that McDowell defended in such papers as his 1982 British Academy Lecture, “Criteria, Defeasibility, and Knowledge.” When I read an ancestor of the present essay to the Central Division of the American Philosophical Association, to my surprise I discovered that McDowell regarded the issues as entirely independent." (177) There is an accompanying footnote (n. 5) that I will quote below. 

 

At the time, I was also a dogmatic naturalist (but not the “bald naturalists” that are McDowell's official target, but the more real patterns, take a stance, find robustness, kind of naturalist) -- think more Dennett/Wimsatt than the Churchlands -- , so unlikely to be sympathetic to his position in the exchange. Eventually I grew out of my dogmatic naturalism, but not in virtue of my exposure to McDowell. As it happens, my shift away was the effect of a reading group I did with John Haugeland on a manuscript copy of Dennett's Freedom Evolves, where befitting a fine teacher, John, made me (the Dennett group-y) take on the role of Dennett critic in our morning discussions of the manuscript at the Bonjour Bakery in Hyde Park. This forced me to question my commitments in a way that drove me into a species of skepticism.

 

The session attracted a packed room (Private Dining Room #9, which makes me guess there were about 75 people present, but it's been a few years since I saw the inside of those rooms at the Palmer House). To be sure, I think Taylor went first. (But the program says Putnam, and I do have a memory of him re-grabbing the microphone, so that makes sense, perhaps, too. ) It was the first and only time I saw Taylor in person. I found him genuinely charismatic and imposing, but it's possible my perception of him was colored by my exposure to Taylor's Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity, which had appeared while I was an undergraduate student and which I bought before I graduated. I tried reading Sources before I went to graduate school, but I found it difficult because I was constantly reminded of my lack of knowledge. (At the time I was an Isaiah Berlin aficionado, and Berlin did not have this effect on me.) I don't think I ever sat down to read through Sources, but I have read many sections multiple times.

 

A few years after the events I am about to recount, in 2000, Taylor published a review of two of McDowell's collections, Mind, Value, and Reality and Meaning, Knowledge, and Reality, in which he ascribes to McDowell "an extremely interesting and original philosophical position, one of the most subtle and penetrating on the contemporary scene" (The Philosophical Quarterly, 50(199), p. 243). And, in passing, he calls Mind and World, "a major recent book." 

 

Taylor starts his contribution to Reading McDowell, with the following praise, "I hardly know where to begin in commenting on John McDowell’s rich and interesting Mind and World. Of course, everything I say stands against a background of massive agreement with the main line of his thinking, and excitement and admiration for his formulations." (106) This understates how I remember Taylor's presentation.

 

For in my memory, Taylor seemed to offer huge amount of --world historical --praise for McDowell, and some modest criticism at the end. This effusion is not wholly absent in Taylor's contribution to Reading McDowell, because Taylor treats McDowell as making possible "a “fusion of horizons” [which] seems imminent" (p. 108). In my memory, at the session, Taylor was more adamant that the moment had arrived. And that we had taken the first steps in a world historical philosophical revolution in which Taylor and McDowell were joint agenda-setters (which would also bring together the analytic and continental traditions). But it is possible that I simply misunderstood him in my youthful enthusiasm. There is, however, evidence in his contribution to Reading McDowell that hints at a a reconsideration. For, in the paper Taylor notes himself "I’m genuinely not sure whether we’re dealing with a disagreement, or just a shift in emphasis." (p. 110; see also "some uncertainty in relation to McDowell’s argument" on p. 114)** McDowell's response to Taylor at the event was rather surprising to me (after so much praise), because he clearly suggested that Taylor (one of the best readers in the field) had seriously and simply misunderstood him. 

 

The exchange between McDowell and Putnam was stranger yet. I should say that at this point I had encountered Putnam a few times in person as a visitor to my undergraduate department (Tufts) and also somebody who one might bump into on the Cambridge (MA) streets if one was in the company with another professional philosopher and talk to. In order to prepare for graduate school I had, in fact, at the suggestion of Jody Azzouni read the three volumes of his collected Philosophical Papers, but strikingly little of work after 1990. As it happens at Chicago, Stein and Tait were relentlessly critical of Putnam, and I was busy learning that not everyone agreed about his stature. 

 

Putnam started his comments kind of granting that his own earlier criticism of McDowell was mistaken, that he had in fact underestimated the significance of McDowell's argument, but that he now was excited about McDowell for various reasons.*** McDowell's response pretty much implied that Putnam was wrong then, and now and that Putnam, too, had misunderstood him.

 

There is some evidence that supports my memory. As I noted above, Putnam comments on the exchange in footnote 5 to his contribution to Reading McDowell. I quote note in full:

In his reply to my APA paper, McDowell accused me of crediting him “with aims I don’t have, and not crediting me with aims I do have.” And he went on to complain that

Putnam evidently thinks my primary aim is to insist on “direct realism” about perception, to reject a picture in which perceptual experience makes contact with the world only at an interface. He talks as if this interface conception is simply there as a problem for us, because of how modern philosophy has unfolded. To defend “direct realism” in this sort of spirit, one would need to undermine all the rationalizations philosophers have concocted for the interface conception. That is why it bothers Putnam that I don’t go into the Argument from Illusion and all that. He thinks I make my book unnecessarily difficult by presupposing earlier work on such topics. (p. 188)+

In addition, there are various locutions in his chapter that signal caution about his interpretation of Mind and World (e.g. "if I do not misunderstand it"). I am pretty confident Putnam added these signals of caution after the APA session.

 

I think that after McDowell's response to Putnam, Haugeland tried to direct the discussion to the (somewhat stunned) audience, but that's when (in my memory) Putnam retook the floor and microphone, and offered a kind of complex ad hoc reconciliation of McDowell's response and his view. It was not a happy moment because Putnam was clearly aggrieved by McDowell's response.

 

A few years later, I audited a few seminars with Putnam. And there I learned that his practice inside the classroom and outside was to take on an extreme version of the principle of charity. He would always assume that his interlocuter -- student or peer -- was saying something massively important and insightful and he would run with it through intricate number of permutations. (I don't think he was always like this, but that's for another time.) But at this point of his life, I don't think there was anything that could have prepared him for McDowell's response.

 

The subsequent Q&A with the audience was kind of a hushed, disbelieving experience. Michael Kremer asked a question (I had not met him yet, so I would not have known it was him) Here's a link to his question: https://twitter.com/m_j_kremer/status/1519242943487479808 I do recall an audience member say loud enough 'if these giants didn't understand you, what chance do lesser mortals like us have' to elicit some chuckles in the back. (No it wasn't me!)

 

As I noted above, later I got to know Haugeland pretty well, and I have regretted not asking him what it was like to chair that session. In response to a draft of this post that I circulated on facebook, Professor Kukla, a former PhD student of Haugeland, who also witnessed the event, has reported it was an acutely "uncomfortable experience" for Haugeland.

 

Now, it is, of course, by no means implausible that both Taylor and Putnam misinterpreted Mind and World. (As I got to know Putnam better I thought this quite plausible, in fact.) And McDowell has, of course, every right to say that. I mention this because it's possible you may read this post as critical of McDowell. That's not my intention. To be sure, there was something in his response that to me at the time seemed to lack a generosity of spirit and undoubtedly that colors my memory. (After all, one can equally see in his stance a magnanimous self regard that does not require the approval of others!) But most of all, at the time I was surprised by his boundless confidence that the author knew the meaning of the text better than his accomplished readers. For students of McDowell, there may be interesting starting points for how his experience at Oxford shaped his philosophical persona (see Michael Morris' reflections here).

 

As I said above, obviously, you shouldn't trust my memory as the final word on this episode, but I do think there is a moral here. One that reiterates one I have peddled on digressions before (recall this post on Dennett on Bennett and this post on Wimsatt on Bennett). There is, after all, in contemporary epistemology and in the practice of so-called contextual history of philosophy a defeasible premise that peers (or epistemic peers) are in a privileged position relative to the rest of us. This may be true, but the solidity of that position may be more feeble than is commonly allowed. 

 

21 February 1979: Foucault on the Neoliberal Response to Marxism (ep. XXXXIII)

It seems to me that we are seeing the birth, maybe for a short period or maybe for a longer period, of a new art of government, or at any rate, of a renewal of the liberal art of government. I think we can grasp the specificity of this art of government and its historical and political stakes if we compare them with Schumpeter (and I would like to dwell on this for a few moments and then I will let you go). Basically, all these economists, Schumpeter, Röpke, or Eucken, all start (I have stressed this, and I come back to it) from the Weberian problem of the rationality or irrationality of capitalist society. Schumpeter, like the ordoliberals, and the ordoliberals like Weber, think that Marx, or at any rate, Marxists, are wrong in looking for the exclusive and fundamental origin of this rationality/irrationality of capitalist society in the contradictory logic of capital and its accumulation. Schumpeter and the ordoliberals think that there is no internal contradiction in the logic of capital and its accumulation and consequently that capitalism is perfectly viable from an economic and purely economic point of view. This, in brief, is the set of theses shared by Schumpeter and the ordoliberals.--Michel Foucault, 21 February 1979,  translated by Graham Burchell, Lecture 7, The Birth of Biopolitics, pp. 176-177.

In re-reading Foucault's seventh lecture, I now realize that my two previous digressions on it (here; and here) missed two very important themes in it that are, in a way, the capstones to his interpretation of the ORDOs. And because of this i missed out on essential features of the neoliberal response to Marxism. To grasp this, it may be useful to return to the debate between Hobson and Lenin over the roots of imperialism. I will do so in schematic fashion.

Both (recall) Hobson and Lenin noticed that (militaristic) imperialism and monopoly were mutually reinforcing. For Hobson (in 1902), monopoly capitalism was the effect of rent-seeking political behavior (by corrupt, imperial, financial interests). Lenin (ca 1916) didn't deny this, but he also thought that capitalism had an inevitable tendency toward monopoly and cartels, and imperialism (the search for monopoly markets overseas) is an effect of this tendency. 

Lenin's position doesn't just build (explicitly) on Hobson's position, but it can also grant (not in Lenin's character) that counterfactually even if Lenin were wrong about the causal arrow, Hobson lacks a political or economic solution to the problem Hobson diagnoses.

Now, I had always assumed that robust anti-trust/anti-cartel policy is the neo-liberal response to the Hobson-Lenin debate. Obviously, this only works as a response, (i) if and only if (anti-cartel/trust) policy is kept at arm's length from political arena. And this helps explain the focus on the rule of law in neoliberal thought. A non-trivial part of lecture 7 is on the nature of the rechtsstaat according to Hayek, and Foucault is very much tracking this.

It's important to recognize that the critique of monopoly capitalism among neoliberals is not primarily economic or ground in efficiency. It's political -- this is especially clear among Ordos -- because monopolies have concentrated power in the market place and in political life.

Now, as it happens while (i) is necessary, it is not sufficient. For, (ii) the content, the juridical or economic theory guiding anti-trust/cartel policy also matters greatly. And while what follows is well understood among aficionados, but surprisingly little noticed among academics that use 'neoliberalism' rather freely, there was a major divergence within neoliberalism between the content of anti-trust policy. 

To simplify greatly (and see also this nice recent intro by Biebricher), the Ordoliberals were vigilant against concentration of economic paper. And while they failed to get all their views enshrined in law, they helped shape German and EU competition policy. At 'Chicago,' they initially agreed, but eventually two things happened: first in the late 1940s (in studies by Stigler and Nutter), they found empirically (even in the aftermath of a great war) that market concentration was much less than public and academic perception had thought and in most US industries not very disconcerting (I have done scholarship on this episode here). This suggested to, say, Milton Friedman (as Biebricher also notes) that the tendency toward monopoly was (absent political decisions) overblown. In addition, Harberger proposed a method of studying and quantifying the welfare loss to consumers of existing economic concentrations that suggested the problem was not very large. And so, the Chicago school and law & economics embraced a 'consumer welfare' model that turns out to be rather forgiving of monopoly in practice in industries that are not stagnant. (And even w/o the effects of industrial lobbying, this has shaped the more permissive US antitrust since.) It's only since the post Corona pandemic rise inflation and increased power by technology companies that we are seeing second thoughts on this issue Stateside.

Okay, with that in place let's go back to Foucault. In the quote above Schumpeter represents the Leninist insight in response to Hobson. In Foucault's re-telling Schumpter agrees with Hobson that markets do not have an "inherent to the economic process of competition" tendency toward monopoly (177). But the tendency is a social effect of, and caused by, the "concentration of decision-making centers of the administration and the state" (177). This concentration is, itself, the effect of the kind of modernization that modern capitalism promotes (and facilitates). This makes rent-seeking easier, and also the centralized decisionmakers of administration and the state have a natural desire for counterparts in industry (to reduce coordination costs), which, in turn, facilitates an extrinsic tendency toward monopoly (and so Socialism is inevitable, alas). Schumpeter then adds for good measure that socialism while not ideal may be a price worth paying.

Now, the ORDO response to this is really four-fold. The first, as Foucault notes, is to deny that the price is worth paying (178). But taken by itself that's not very interesting. The other parts are where the action is. 

The second part is, in fact, something Foucault misses in this context. But pretty straightforward: it's the embrace of federalism and anti-concentration of political power--and accompanying embrace of pluralism in social organization. This is most pronounced in Ropke's fondness for Suisse political life, and the strain of topics associated with Vitalpolitik Foucault does pick up on in earlier lectures. (I return to this below.)

To grasp the other two, it is worth recalling something about Eucken's scientific (and morphological) program. This is really diagnostic in character, and it is based on a limited number of taxonomic categories (about suppliers and demand side in each market segment) that when permutated exhaustively describe all possible market types. And what this does -- and this is the third part of the response to Schumpeter and the more orthodox communist -- is to motivate the denial that 'capitalism' is one thing with its inner laws. All existing economies are fundamentally mixed (with different kind of planning in them at different levels) in innumerable permutations characterized by what Foucault calls an "economic-institutional ensemble." (It's interesting how by interpreting Eucken as a kind of applied Husserlian, Foucault's use of 'ensemble' seems quite natural.) The denial that capitalism is a single thing or that there is a logic of capitalism is explicit in Eucken, by the way as Foucault notes earlier in the lecture (see pp. 164-165). 

As an aside, if there is no logic of capitalism, then there is also no crisis of capitalism that somehow is revealed in or manifest by an impasse today (165). And this reinforces the idea that I have already attributed to Foucault that in so far as there is a crisis of capitalism, it is better viewed as constitutively part of liberal society (recall the end of lecture 3 here.) 

Now, fourth, and this is the part that Foucault emphasizes, is their sense that the economy is an effect of law and the rules as the are understood in a historical and historically evolved context. And this entails that an economy can be socially constructed (up to a degree), and can ordered in the service of competition:

Precisely by seeing to it that the tendency Schumpeter identifies in capitalism towards the organization, centralization, and absorption of the economic process within the state, which he saw was not a tendency of the economic process but of its social consequences, is corrected, and corrected precisely by social intervention. At this point, social intervention, the Gesellschaftspolitik, legal interventionism, the definition of a new institutional framework of the economy protected by a strictly formal legislation like that of the Rechtsstaat or the Rule of law, will make it possible to nullify and absorb the centralizing tendencies which are in fact immanent to capitalist society and not to the logic of capital (178-179)

I think this is right. And Foucault's way of articulating this actually is compatible with the point about federalism (at the sub-national and European levels) that I made above. As Foucault notes social intervention here does not mean, in its pure form, a 'compensatory mechanism for absorbing or nullifying the possible destructive effects of economic freedom'* (160). Rather it/Gesellschaftspolitik is directed at nullifying the 'possible anti-competitive mechanism of society...or that could arise within society' (160). And with Foucault I would emphasize that this creates a kind of attitude might well create a hyper-active social/government policy.

Folded in this fourth point are non-trivial substantive views about the nature of law and how it ought to function (recall this post for the details). And these details matter greatly if one wants to understand why Foucault would call this a "birth" of "a new art of government" or the "renewal of the liberal art of government." So, I will return to that soon.

But here I want to close with an observation, which is really a kind of dilemma at the heart of ORDO-liberalism (although variants of it show up in other forms of liberalism, too). The response to Lenin and Schumpeter involves putting a number of key governmental functions at arms length from mechanisms that allow for rent-seeking (hence an independent judiciary, independent central bank, independent cartel office, etc.). And this means that these institutions require an esprit de corps and right mechanism to prevent capture by special interests. (Röpke is actually pretty explicit about the significance of such shared attitudes.)

Often among ORDOs the site of rent-seeking is articulated in terms of democratic politics, but conceptually and empirically that's not necessary. For example, central banks are organized in such a way that rent-seeking behavior by commercial banks is pretty much woven into their structure (and so bail-outs of the entirely predictable) and their independence has not prevented this. De facto, in some contexts putting an institution at arms length from democratic political decision makers actually makes 'capture' by some special interests easier. This is why I tend to emphasize, when articulating ORDO thought, that they are suspicious of all concentrated power.

But, of course, in medias res, once one discerns rent-seeking behavior by well connected insiders, it may be too late to do something about it with existing institutional mechanisms (and their internalized attitudes). And so, it is entirely foreseeable that sometimes only political and widespread social mobilization, when attempts to shape elite opinion have failed, can save the conditions of Gesellschaftspolitik.

 

 

Tocqueville, Physiocratic Despotism, and Foucault (and Coleridge and Adam Smith), EP XXXXII

About the middle of the [eighteenth] century, a class of writers devoted their attention to administrative questions; they had many points in common, and were hence distinguished by the general name of economists or physiocrats. They are less conspicuous in history than the philosophers; they exercised a less direct influence in causing the Revolution, but still I think its true nature can best be studied in their writings. The philosophers confined themselves, for the most part, to abstract and general theories on the subject of government; the economists dealt in theories, but also deigned to notice facts. The former furnished ideal, the latter practical schemes of reform. They assailed alternately all the institutions which the Revolution abolished; not one of them found favor in their eyes. All those, on the other hand, which are credited especially to the Revolution, were announced beforehand and warmly lauded by them: it is not easy to mention one whose substantial features are not to be found in some of their writings.

Their books, moreover, breathe that democratic and revolutionary spirit with which we are so familiar. They hate, not certain specific privileges, but all distinctions of classes; they would insist upon equality of rights in the midst of slavery. Obstacles they regard as only fit to be trampled on. They respect neither contracts nor private rights; indeed, they hardly recognize individual rights at all in their absorbing devotion to the public good. Yet they were quiet, peaceable men, of respectable character, honest magistrates, able administrators; they were carried away by the peculiar spirit of their task.

Their contempt for the past was unbounded. “The nation,” said Letronne, “is governed on wrong principles; every thing seems to have been left to chance.” Starting from this idea, they set to work to demand the demolition of every institution, however old and time-honored, which seemed to mar the symmetry of their plans. Forty years before the Constituent Assembly divided France into departments, one of the economists suggested the alteration of all existing territorial divisions and of the names of all the provinces.

They conceived all the social and administrative reforms effected by the Revolution before the idea of free institutions had once flashed upon their mind. They were in favor of the removal of all restrictions upon the sale and conveyance of produce and merchandise. But of political liberty they took no thought; and when it first occurred to them they rejected the idea. Most of them were strongly opposed to deliberative assemblies, to local and subordinate authorities, and to the various checks which have been established from time to time in free countries to counterbalance the supreme government. “The system of counterpoises,” said Quesnay, “is a fatal feature in governments.” A friend of his was satisfied that “the system of counterpoises was the fruit of chimerical speculations.”

The only safeguard against despotism which they proposed was public education; for, as Quesnay said, “Despotism is impossible in an enlightened nation.” “Mankind,” says one of his disciples, “have invented a host of fruitless contrivances to obviate the evils arising from abuses of power by governments, but they have generally neglected the only one that could really be of service, namely, a general permanent system of public education in the essence of justice and natural order.” Such was the literary nonsense they wanted to substitute in the place of political guarantees.

Letronne bitterly deplores the government’s neglect of the rural districts, and describes them as having no roads, no industry, no intellectual progress; but he never seems to have imagined that they would have been better regulated if their affairs had been intrusted to the people themselves.

Even Turgot, with all his peculiar breadth of view and rare genius, was but little fonder than they of political liberty. He had no taste for it till late in life, when public opinion pointed in that direction. Like the economists, he conceived that the best of all political guarantees was public education afforded by the state; but he desired it to be conducted in a particular spirit, and according to a particular plan. His confidence in this intellectual course of medicine—or, as a contemporary styled it, this “educational mechanism on fixed principles”—was unbounded. “I will venture to answer,” said he to the king, in a memorial on the subject, “that in ten years the nation will be so thoroughly altered that you shall not recognize it; and that, in point of enlightenment, morality, loyalty, and patriotism, it will surpass every other nation in the world. Children now ten years old will then be men, trained in ideas of love for their country, submissive to authority from conviction, not from fear, charitable to their fellow-countrymen, habituated to obey and to respect the voice of justice.”

It was so long since political liberty had flourished in France that its conditions and effects had been well-nigh forgotten. More than this, its shapeless relics, and the institutions which seemed to have been framed to take its place, rather aroused prejudice against it. Most of the surviving state assemblies exhibited the spirit as well as the forms of the Middle Ages, and hindered instead of assisting social progress. The Parliaments, which were the only substitutes for political bodies, could not arrest the mischief done by government, and often impeded it when it desired to do good.

The economists did not think it possible to use these old institutions as instruments for the accomplishment of the Revolution, nor did they approve the idea of intrusting the business to the nation as sovereign; they doubted the feasibility of effecting so elaborate and intricate a reform by the aid of a popular movement. Their designs, they thought, could be best and most easily accomplished by the crown itself.

The royal power had not taken its rise in the Middle Ages, and bore no mediæval stamp. They discovered in it good as well as bad points. It shared their proclivity for leveling all ranks, and making all laws uniform. It detested as heartily as they did the old institutions which had grown out of the feudal system, or which favored oligarchy. It was the best organized, the greatest and strongest government machine in Europe. Its existence seemed to them a very fortunate accident; they would have called it providential had it been the fashion then as now to allude to Providence on all possible occasions. Letronne observes that “France is much more happily situated than England; for here reforms that will change the whole state of the country can be accomplished in a moment, whereas in England similar measures are always exposed to be defeated by party strife.”

Their idea, then, was not to destroy, but to convert the absolute monarchy. “The state must govern according to the laws of natural order (règles de l’ordre essentiel),” says Mercier de la Rivière; “on these conditions it should be absolute.” “Let the state,” said another, “understand its duty thoroughly; this secured, it should be untrammeled.” All of them, from Quesnay to Abbé Bodeau, were of the same mind.

They were not satisfied with using the royal power to effect social reforms; they partly borrowed from it the idea of the future government they proposed to establish. The one was to be, in some measure, a copy of the other.

The state, said the economists, must not only govern, it must shape the nation. It must form the mind of citizens conformably to a preconceived model. It is its duty to fill their minds with such opinions and their hearts with such feelings as it may judge necessary. In fact, there are no limits either to its rights or its powers. It must transform as well as reform its subjects; perhaps even create new subjects, if it thinks fit. “The state,” says Bodeau, “moulds men into whatever shape it pleases.” That sentence expresses the gist of the whole system. --Tocqueville, The Old Regime and Revolution. Book II, CHAPTER XV: How the French Sought Reform Before Liberties (translation from 1856)

Near the end of Foucault's first lecture of the Birth Of Biopolitics (10 January, 1979), he remarks about the physiocrats being "the first political economy." And he adds that they "concluded that political power must be power without external limitation, without counterbalance, and without any bounds other than arising from itself, and this what they called despotism." The editors of his edition add a note here to P.P.F.J.H. Le Mercier de La Rivière, L’Ordre naturel et essentiel des sociétés politiques (published without the author’s name, London: Jean Nourse, and Paris: Desaint, 1767) ch. 24: “Du despotisme legal.” Foucault goes on to lecture "Despotism is an economic government, but an economic government which not hemmed in and whose boundaries are not drawn by anything but an economy which it has itself defined and which it completely controls." (p. 14) As I have noted elsewhere (recall here; and here) Foucault treats the physiocrats as a kind of exemplary temptation toward despotism within the development of economics, including some branches of liberal economics.

Adam Smith was a respectful critic of physiocracy. And to the best of my knowledge he does not single them out as especially tending towards despotism.  Since he is not shy about calling mercantilists dangerous warmongers, and he explicitly calls political rule by merchant run companies 'despotical,' (WN 4.7.c.104, p. 638), this got me reflecting a bit on Foucault's characterization, and its source(s). I don't think this is an eighteenth century view of physiocrac. (I am open to suggestions otherwise!)

To be sure, Smith strongly implies that France in his day -- then at least shaped by if not sometimes governed by physiocrats and their followers -- is a mild form of despotism, so in context he may well be thinking of them. But he writes so in the context of discussion of ecclesiastic privileges (in Book V of the Wealth of Nations) not in the context of his treatment of physiocracy in Book IV.* I also don't think that a fondness for despotism is something that one immediately notices about most physiocrats, although once one is alerted to it it jumps out at you.

As it happens, Smith tends to treat most physiocrats as rather derivative from Quesnay. But he does praise Le Mercier de La Rivière as being the best of the lot ("the most distinct and best connected account of this doctrine is to be found in a little book written by Mr. Mercier de la Riviere,  sometime Intendant of Martinico, intitled, The natural and essential Order of Political Societies." (WN 4.9.38, p. 679. A book Smith owned in French, as the editors of the Glasgow edition note.) As Smith recognizes, Le Mercier de La Rivière was a colonial administrator.

Interestingly enough, Coleridge, in his Essays entitled The Friend, explicitly connects physiocracy to despotism, and he singles out Le Mercier de La Rivière (see here), the "simplicity" of his theory "promised the readiest and most commodious machine for despotism." (Essay IV) This work dates I think from 1812. Since he is writing while Boneparte is emperor the concern with despotism is a living one. I am inclined to think that Coleridge may even be the original source of connecting physiocracy with despotism. But I leave that for others to explore.

It's pretty likely, however, that Tocqueville inspired the characterization we find in Foucault. (When I say that I don't mean to deny that Foucault would have read the sources he mentions himself; I tend to think that even when he is manifestly relying on another authority he will have read the underling sources.) And the reasons I say that are four-fold.

First, when Foucault introduces the physiocrats for the first time, he explicitly links them to despotism and reminds the audience [vous savez] that this is common ground (recall: "The first political economy was, of course, that of the physiocrats, and you know that from the very start of their economic analysis the physiocrats...and this is what they called despotism.") And while this can be a rhetorical affect, I think it's also a way of alluding to work with presumed canonical status. It's, of course, not obvious everyone in the audience would have recognized that Foucault is alluding to Tocqueville's L'Ancien Régime et la Révolution. After all, the very erudite editors of Foucault's Birth of Biopolitics don't mention it, and just last week (recall) I read a reputable scholar (Behrent) denying that Foucault was "inspired by the political liberalism of Benjamin Constant, Alexis de Tocqueville, or Francois Guizot, whom other intellectuals were busily dusting off at the time." But this at least suggests that Tocqueville was in the Parisian air in the late 70s.

Second, Tocqueville suggests that while the physiocrats were relatively obscure their writings reveal the true nature of the Revolution. He very explicitly and at length links physiocratic despotism with the idea of public enlightenment. And this Foucault echoes in the third lecture, when he treats the "physiocratic conception of enlightened despotism" (emphasis added, 24 January, 1979, p. 24) as the main exemplar of "governmental naturalism." 

In fact that the physiocrats exhibit a kind governmental naturalism is even more explicit in Tocqueville's French: "Ils sont, il est vrai, tre s­favorablcs au libre echange des denrees, au laisser-faire ou au laisser-passer dans le commerce et dans l'in­dustrie" (emphasis in original; the English translation that They were in favor of the removal of all restrictions upon the sale and conveyance of produce and merchandise is not so eloquent in comparison).

Third, Tocqueville attributes the governmental naturalism explicitly to Mercier de La Rivière  (“The state must govern according to the laws of natural order (règles de l’ordre essentiel)"; the French is in the English translation. And, in turn, Tocqueville emphasizes the significance of the absence of counterbalances.

Finally, Tocqueville anticipates Foucault in identifying the complex, reflexive nature about the relationship between future model, which is supposed to shape (as of yet not existing) social reality and the underlying existing social reality as a source for the the model. (Recall: "They were not satisfied with using the royal power to effect social reforms; they partly borrowed from it the idea of the future government they proposed to establish. The one was to be, in some measure, a copy of the other. The state, said the economists, must not only govern, it must shape the nation. It must form the mind of citizens conformably to a preconceived model.") Admittedly, Foucault doesn't say this about the physiocrats, but he posits it as a general property of governmental practice at the start of the first lecture, "I tried to locate the emergence of a particular type of rationality in governmental practice, a type of rationality that would enable the way of governing to be modeled on something called the state which, in relation to this governmental practice, to this calculation of governmental practice, plays the role both of a given—since one only governs a state that is already there, one only governs within the framework of a state—but also, at the same time, as an objective to be constructed. (pp, 3-4).

To sum up, I think Foucault is treating Tocqueville's characterization of the physiocrats as common ground between his audience and himself. And while it is surely possible that he and Tocqueville were struck by the same issues in physiocracy, I think it's also highly plausible that Tocqueville directed Foucault's attention in these sources. 

 

 

Hayek (and Robert Bork on Mill) and permissiveness

BORK:   Well,  in  your  latest  book.  Law,  Legislation  and  Liberty,  you're  starting  from  a  premise,  I  take  it,  that liberty  is  really  declining  throughout  Western  democracies,  and  in  fact  is  in  considerable  danger  of  extinction  within  the  foreseeable  future.   I  wonder  if  you'd  care  to  talk  a little  bit  about  the  evidence  you  see  for  the  proposition that  liberty  is,  in  fact,  declining  and  is  in  danger.

HAYEK:   Well,  of  course,  the  original  occasion  was  my analysis  of  the  causes  of  the  intellectual  appeal  of  the Nazi  theories,  which  were  very  clearly--  I  mean,  take  a man  like  Carl  Schmitt,  one  of  the  most  intelligent  of  the German  lawyers,  who  saw  all  the  problems,  then  always  came down  on  what  to  me  was  intellectually  and  morally  the wrong  side.   But  he  did  really  see  these  problems  almost more  clearly  than  anybody  else  at  the  time--that  an omnipotent  democracy,  just  because  it  is  omnipotent, must  buy  its  support  by  granting  privileges  to  a  number of  different  groups.   Even,  in  a  sense,  the  rise  of Hitler  was  due  to  an  appeal  to  the  great  numbers.   You can  have  a  situation  where  the  support,  the  searching  for support,  from  a  majority  may  lead  to  the  ultimate  destruction of  a  democracy.

...

BORK :   Well,  I  wonder  if  you  see,  for  example,  in  the United  States,  evidence  of  the  decline  of  freedom.

HAYEK:   Well,  I  think  in  a  way  the  necessity  for  an American  government,  in  order  to  capture  the  support  of  all kinds  of  splinter  groups,  to  grant  them  all  kinds  of  special privileges  is  more  visible  than  in  almost  any  other country.   It  hasn't  gone  as  far  yet,  because  your  development is  not  a  steady  one,  unlike  the  British  one,  which  has been  continuously  in  the  same  direction.   You  make experiments  like  the  New  Deal  and  then  undo  it  again.

BORK:   Well,  we  never  really  undid  a  lot  of  the  New  Deal, I'm  afraid,  did  we?

HAYEK:   No,  it's  quite  true.   But  at  the  time  I  formed  these ideas,  because  it  was  during  the  New  Deal,  the  New  Deal was  very  largely  evidence  for  me  that  America  was  going  the same  way  in  which  Europe,  at  least  England,  had  gone  ahead.

BORK:   I  suppose  a  lot  of  people  would  say  that,  in  fact, in  some  sense  freedom  was  increasing  in  America,  because we  certainly  now  have  much  more  freedom  for  racial  minorities

HAYEK:   Yes.

BORK:   There  is  much  more  freedom  in  the  area  of  sexual permissiveness.   There  is  much  more  freedom--if  you  want to  call  these  things  freedom--in  the  area  of  things  that  may be  said  or  written  or  shown  on  film  or  shown  on  the  stage. Now,  I  suppose  the  latter  could  be  evidences  of  depravity rather  than  freedom,  but  I  take  it  you  think--

HAYEK :   Well,  I  think  America  is  in  a  very  early  stage  of the  process.   You  see,  it  comes  with  a  restriction  of economic  freedom,  which  only  then  has  effects  on  the  mental or  intellectual  freedom. In  a  way,  American  development  is probably  a  generation  behind  the  one  which  gave  me  the illustrations--the  German  development. The  American  degree of  restrictions  of  freedom  is  perhaps  comparable  to  what it  was  in  Germany  in  the  1880s  or  1890s  under  Bismarck, when  he  began  to  interfere  with  the  economic  affairs.   Only ultimately,  under  Hitler,  did  the  government  have  the  power which  American  government  very  nearly  has.   It  doesn't  use it  yet  to  interfere  with  intellectual  freedom. In  fact, perhaps  the  danger  to  intellectual  freedom  in  the  United States  comes  not  from  government  so  much  as  from  the  trade unions.

BORK:   Well,  I  think  what  you're  saying,  then,  is  that although  in  some  ways  society  is  becoming  more  permissive, that  the  basic  freedom  upon  which  all  others  ultimately depend  is  economic  freedom.

HAYEK:   Yes.   And,  you  know,  even  the  permissiveness--  I have  certain  doubts  whether  this  sort  of  permissiveness, in  which  the--  I'm  not  now  speaking  about  governmental activities.   The  change  in  morals  due  to  permissiveness is  in  a  sense  antiliberal,  because  we  owe  our  freedom  to certain  restraints  on  freedom.   The  belief  that  you  can make  yourself  your  own  boss--and  that's  what  it  comes  to--is probably  destroying  some  of  the  foundations  of  a  free society,  because  a  free  society  rests  on  people  voluntarily accepting  certain  restraints,  and  these  restraints  are  very largely  being  destroyed.   I  blame,  in  that  respect,  the psychologists,  the  psychoanalysts,  as  much  as  anybody  else. They  are  really  the  source  of  this  conception  of  a  permissive  education,  of  a  contempt  for  traditional  rules, and  it  is  traditional  rules  which  secure  our  freedom.

BORK:   I  think  somebody  said  that  the  reason  John  Stuart Mill  and  others  could  talk  about  the  requirements  of  now almost  absolute  freedom  in  some  areas  was  that  they  were really  relying  upon  an  understood  set  of  morals,  which people  would  not  transgress.   Once  the  moral  capital of  that  era  has  been  dissipated,  that  kind  of  permissive-ness or  freedom  is  no  longer  restorable.

HAYEK:   John  Stuart  Mill's  attitude  toward  this  was  very ambiguous.   In  a  sense,  his  argument  is  directed  against the  tyranny  of  the  prevailing  morals,  and  he  is  very  largely responsible  for  the  shift  from  protest  against  government interference  to  what  he  calls  the  tyranny  of  opinion.   And he  encouraged  a  disregard  for  certain  moral  traditions. Permissiveness  almost  begins  with  John  Stuart  Mill's  On Liberty.

BORK:   So  that  there's  a  direct  line  between  John  Stuart Mill  and  Times  Square  in  New  York  City,  which  is  a  rather overly  permissive  area?

HAYEK:   Yes,  yes,  I  think  he  is  the  beginning.   You  know, I  sometimes  said--I  don't  want  really  to  exaggerate--that the  decline  of  liberalism  begins  with  John  Stuart  Mill's On  Liberty.--recorded on November 4, 1978, pp. 278-282 "Nobel prize-winning economist oral history transcript by Hayek, Friedrich A. von Pacific Academy of Advanced Studies; University of California, Los Angeles. Oral History Program

At the start of The Morals of the Market: Human Rights and the Rise of Neoliberalism (2019, Verso), Jessica Whyte writes "Hayek distinguished morals from laws by arguing that morals lacked coercive enforcement, but that this did not make them any less crucial to the functioning of a market society. Indeed, Hayek believed that liberalism had taken a significant wrong turn in the nineteenth century, when the British liberal philosopher John Stuart Mill had begun to criticise the 'tyranny of the prevailing morals' thereby encouraging a disregard for moral traditions and a growing 'permissiveness' in society." (p. 11) In the accompanying footnote Whyte cites the end of the material I have quoted above. Switching to citing different passages from volume 2 of Law, Legislation and Liberty, Whyte goes on to attribute to Hayek what she calls a 'deeply functionalist' (p. 12) account of the morals of the market or "commercial values that prioritised the pursuit of self-interest above he development of common purposes. A market society required a moral framework that sanctioned wealth accumulation and inequality, promoted individual and familial responsibility, and fostered submission to the impersonal results of the market process at the expense of the deliberate pursuit of collectively formulated ends. It also required that moral obligations are limited to the requirement that we refrain from harming others, and do not require positive obligations to others." (11-12)

Now, none of what Whyte says here is exactly wrong. But I was curious about the wrong turn attributed to Mill and its relationship to growing permissiveness. So, I went to the interview with Hayek. As the quoted passage above suggests this part of the interview is conducted by Robert Bork, who was then, I think, at Yale Law School. (Other parts of the interview are conducted by other luminaries.) Bork was already infamous for his role in the "Saturday Night Massacre," but his (failed) supreme court nomination was still a few years away.

The whole interview is fascinating, but also frustrating because neither Bork nor Hayek distinguishes between different kinds of freedom in a careful way. But I think it is pretty clear that Bork ("sexual permissiveness") is concerned with what used to be called 'license' (and distinguished from liberty). 

Now, I started the block quote where I do because I was struck by how Hayek invokes Schmitt without prompting from Bork. Now, in that part of the quote, Hayek suggests a road-to-serfdom thesis in which for electoral gain, governments give groups economic privileges (tariffs, monopolies, subsidies, etc.). And these privileges set off a slippery slope of planning, further privileges, and eventually democracy is undermined by itself. I am not  going to try to formulate the mechanism here that Hayek might have in mind in a way that tries to make this compelling because, interestingly enough, in the interview (that I cut out) Hayek kind of admits that his initial formulation (in the Road to Serfdom) of the road to serfdom thesis is unsatisfactory, because he grants "it's only now, almost forty years after I started on the thing, that in Law, Legislation and Liberty I've finally written out the basic ideas as they have gradually shaped themselves."

Unfortunately, Bork doesn't ask Hayek to spell out the new mechanism. But rather, he asks Hayek to explain what the evidence is that liberty is really declining. (At this point we're in the first Reagan administration.) And Hayek's answer is a bit of a muddle, because while he notes the reality of "special privileges" to different "splinter groups" he then actually says "It  hasn't  gone  as  far  yet,  because  your  development is  not  a  steady  one... you  make experiments  like  the  New  Deal  and  then  undo  it  again." So, this suggests that for Hayek liberty has not really declined very far Stateside (although he seems to think the potential for decline is very strong

Then Bork (of all people) suggests it's not obvious that freedom is declining in the States because (some people will say) "we  certainly  now  have  much  more  freedom  for  racial  minorities." And Hayek assents to this.

And then the conversation turns to permissiveness. And while Hayek is clearly no advocate of license (and sexual permissiveness), what he is exercised by and is attacking -- the 'belief  that  you  can make  yourself  your  own  boss' as promoted by psychologists and psychoanalysts -- is really the idea of authenticity. And this stance he takes to be illiberal. Because he thinks it is antithetical to the idea of respecting self-imposed restraints, that is, to act with responsibility and self-prescribed limitations (I'll call this 'freedom with responsibility').* Hayek is clearly a certain kind of mitigated Kantian in these passages (and lurking in his view are ideas about duty associated with the following of traditional rules of morality to which one submits freely). And while it almost makes no sense (except for polemical purposes) to associate Mill with the idea of sexual license, it is fair to treat Mill as one of the godfathers of promoting authenticity. 

Along the way, a new road to serfdom mechanism is introduced (by Bork). This is an idea that exists in different variants (including ones promoted by critics of liberalism inspired by Karl Polanyi) in which liberalism presupposes moral and social capital that it "runs down." As Daniel Nientiedt recently reminded me, in Germany there is a version of this debated as the Böckenförde Dilemma, which suggests that secular liberal states draw on and draw down the religiosity that make them possible.

Now, Bork seems to thinks that Mill promoted license and thereby undermined existing moral capital, whereas, if I am right, Hayek seems to think that Mill promoted an agenda for authenticity and thereby undermines a form of autonomy associated with freedom with responsibility (which accepts socially useful constraints on one's behavior). Whyte tracks this tendency in Hayek in the quote above as 'individual and familial responsibility' and this is not false at all. But it's not quite right to conflate this with the critique of 'permissiveness' if that's understood in Bork's sense of license.

Of course, in certain contexts (say, 1960s Californian counter-culture) license and authenticity may be the same side of the coin, but I think it's fair to say that Bork and Hayek are exercised by slightly different demons (even to be sure Hayek is no friend of license). We can discern in Bork the culture-warrior, whereas Hayek's position is much more compatible with a private/public distinction, where what really matters is how one takes responsibility for certain socially facing public actions (in the market place and in one's community).

Either way, and I will return to this in the near future, both positions are a political disaster because they prevent folks inspired by so-called 'classical liberalism' from appreciating (and taking partial credit for) and building social/political coalitions with all kinds of emancipatory movements (related to identity, gender, sexuality, religion, etc.) that are freedom enhancing and true experiments in living.  (Luckily, there is a strain in American libertarianism that does recognize this!) And as Melinda Cooper has shown it has made the libertarian/classical liberal side of what before the rise of Trump was known as fusionism too complicit in the carceral state and the force-able regulation of the lives of poor and darker skinned.

I could stop here, and this was the main point of this post, but the interview continues in a remarkable  way that illustrates the problem I am diagnosing:

BORK: That's an interesting thought. Do you agree with the suggestion that Mill was really a much more sensible writer when he was not under the influence of Harriet Taylor?

HAYEK: Yes, but I think that influence can be overrated. He always needed a moral-- He was not a very strong character fundamentally, and he was always relying on the influence of somebody who supported him. First his father, then Comte , then Harriet Taylor. Harriet Taylor led him more deeply into socialism for a time, then he stayed. Well I'll tell you, the next article I'm going to write is to be called, "Mill's Muddle and the Muddle of the Middle." [laughter]

I don't think Hayek ever completed that article. He did publish an essay, "The Muddle of the Middle," which I will discuss some other time (it is only very partially about Mill).+ 

 

Ernest Nagel vs Anna Alexandrova (& Leo Strauss), PT 2 [and Quine]

[I]t would be absurd to deny that in characterizing various actions as mercenary, cruel, or deceitful, sociologists are frequently (although perhaps not always wittingly) asserting appraising as well as characterizing value judgments. Terms like ‘mercenary' ‘cruel' or ‘deceitful’ as commonly used have a widely recognized pejorative overtone. Accordingly, anyone who employs such terms to characterize human behavior can normally be assumed to be stating his disapprobation of that behavior (or his approbation, should he use terms like ‘nonmercenary' ‘kindly' or ‘truthful’), and not simply characterizing it.
   However, although many (but certainly not all) ostensibly characterizing statements asserted by social scientists undoubtedly express commitments to various (not always compatible) values, a number of “purely descriptive" terms as used by natural scientists in certain contexts sometimes also have an unmistakably appraising value connotation. Thus, the claim that a social scientist is making appraising value judgments when he characterizes respondents to questionnaires as uninformed, deceitful, or irrational can be matched by the equally sound claim that a physicist is also making such judgments when he describes a particular chronometer as inaccurate, a pump as inefficient, or a supporting platform as unstable. Like the social scientist in this example, the physicist is characterizing certain objects in his field of research; but, also like the social scientist, he is in addition expressing his disapproval of the characteristics he is ascribing to those objects.
    Nevertheless—and this is the main burden of the present discussion—there are no good reasons for thinking that it is inherently impossible to distinguish between the characterizing and the appraising judgments implicit in many statements, whether the statements are asserted by students of human affairs or by natural scientists. To be sure, it is not always easy to make the distinction formally explicit in the social sciences—in part because much of the language employed in them is very vague, in part because appraising judgments that may be implicit in a statement tend to be overlooked by us when they are judgments to which we are actually committed though without being aware of our commitments. Nor is it always useful or convenient to perform this task. For many statements implicitly containing both characterizing and appraising evaluations are sometimes sufficiently clear without being reformulated in the manner required by the task; and the reformulations would frequently be too unwieldy for effective communication between members of a large and unequally prepared group of students. But these are essentially practical rather than theoretical problems. The difficulties they raise provide no compelling reasons for the claim that an ethically neutral social science is inherently impossible.-- Ernest Nagel (1961) The Structure of Science: Problems in the Logic of Scientific Explanation, pp. 494-495 (emphasis in original)

I noted the other day that Ernest Nagel's attempt to distinguish between characterizing and appraising evaluations are explicitly directed against a series of arguments by Leo Strauss. From the point of view of the sociology of philosophy the passage is remarkable because it is a rare case where Strauss is treated as a serious interlocuter by an analytic philosopher and where much of Strauss' position is conceded, and the remainder of the differences met by an argument.

As regular readers know, I am a fan of Nagel. But the section is not his finest. First, it's not mentioned by Nagel that Strauss' arguments are an immanent critique of Max Weber. And, as I noted, the way Strauss' arguments are quoted this is obscured. Second, in arguing against Strauss, Nagel makes it seem that Strauss is a critic of objectivity in science. In particular, Nagel makes it seem that the critic of value neutrality in social science must be a critic of the value neutrality of natural science and de facto committed to what we now call the 'strong program.'* Whereas Strauss' position is that objectivity in social science is constituted by a commitment to the value-laden-ness of social science. 

Now, as it happens, and I as I also noted, in a recent and already much cited article, Anna Alexandrova has written critically on Nagel's position (and notes explicitly that it was directed against Strauss). And in what follows I draw on her position. But before I get to that it is also worth noting that there exists a published transcript of Strauss's course, “Introduction to Political Philosophy” offered in the winter term of 1965, open to undergraduate as well as graduate students. It was published as Leo Strauss on Political Philosophy: Responding to the Challenge of Positivism and Historicism Edited by Catherine H. Zuckert (The University of Chicago Press, 2018). In it, Strauss responds to Nagel's criticism and also develops his own criticism of Nagel, too, in quite interesting fashion.+

Let's turn to Alexandrova. She introduces special terminology in order to characterize the claims of interest in the debate between Nagel and Strauss (and, in fact, in the debate about the value-ladenness of social science). I quote her:

• A hypothesis is mixed if and only if:
• 1. It is an empirical hypothesis about a putative causal or statistical relation.
• 2. At least one of the variables in this hypothesis is defined in a way that presupposes a moral, prudential, political or aesthetic value judgment about the nature of this variable.

The key part here is (2). In fact (1) is a place-holder or short-hand for more expansive claims about empirical hypotheses. And one should not be misled by the use of 'hypothesis.' It's okay for Alexandrova's position if one treats a so-called mixed claim as established or confirmed. It's, however,  important to recognize that the values in (2) are not the so-called "cognitive values – simplicity, explanatory power, coherence, generality etc. –" but the "non-cognitive values – moral, prudential, political or aesthetic –....(Longino [1990], Lacey [2005])." (Alexandrova). It is the second kind that figures in mixed claims.

Alexandrova usefully distinguishes mixed claims from other kinds of value-ladenness in science. But her position is -- and here she agrees with Strauss -- that in many contexts, mixed claims cannot be eliminated from social science (although she notes that often their presence goes unnoticed), but that this is not itself a barrier to an objective social science. (To be sure, there are real differences between Alexandrova's position and Strauss, but those I leave aside here today.) 

Okay, ley's now return to Nagel's distinction between characterizing and the appraising judgments. As the passage above makes clear, Nagel allows that in practice scientists may well conflate the two or may well use terms that are treated as descriptive, but that in reality also have some kind of appraisal built into them. (One may add that philosophers often introduce special terminology with the same character.) But he asserts that it is not "inherently impossible to distinguish between the characterizing and the appraising judgments implicit in many statements." (emphasis in original)

Alexandrova herself suggests that "A natural way to implement Nagel’s proposal is to convert mixed claims from regular causal or correlational claims into conditional claims." But as Alexandrova convincingly shows, if that's Nagel’s approach then it "eliminates values at one stage, but it only pushes them to another less appropriate stage." Alexandrova then works through three ways in which converting mixed claims into conditional claims does not work. I found it convincing, but go read her paper!

Interestingly enough, in the quoted passage above, Nagel suggests that there is a vantage point from which one can evaluate and "reformulate" statements used in science and then distinguish between their characterizing and appraising content. In fact, this vantage point is occupied by the Nagelian philosopher of science. This is not obvious from context, but it is the stated aim of Nagel's Structure. As Nagel puts it in his "Introduction:"

However, if the nature of the scientific enterprise and its place in contemporary society are to be properly understood, the types and the articulation of scientific statements, as well as the logic by which scientific conclusions are established, also require careful analysis. This is a task—a major if not exclusive task—that the philosophy of science undertakes to execute. (p. 14)

That is to say, Nagel here comes very close to the idea associated with Quine that one can regiment science and that it is the philosopher of science's task to do so. Today I leave open to what degree Quine or Nagel influenced each other (and questions of priority).

Nagel doesn't say how one should regiment 'mixed claims.' He only claims that for practical purposes it can be done.** That's to say, he thinks there is a vantage point from which appraising value connotations in apparent mixed claims can be kept at arm's length. (This is why Alexandrova's suggestion that he is thinking of turning them into conditional statements is so plausible.) But because he does not explain how that practical (ahh) stance can be achieved -- and why in regimentation we can be properly neutral--, he raises the suspicion that much of the rhetorical work of his argument is being done by the implication that if one insists that social science cannot eliminate mixed claims, then one must be an adherent to the 'strong program' or be a skeptic about the possibility of an objective social science. 

On Foucault and the Anxiety of the Left; pt.1: 'Economic Liberalism'

What both Foucault's critics and his defenders have failed to consider is a deep affinity between Foucault's thought and neoliberalism: a shared suspicion of the state. Foucault's antistatism was, in the first instance, theoretical. He famously complained that “in political thought and analysis, the king's head has still not been cut off.” What he meant was that political theorists too often understand power on the model of the state, viewing it as flowing top-down from a transcendent authority, rather than as a force disseminated across the social space through complex and open-ended relations, involving a wide range of actors and institutions. This position was a logical consequence of Foucault's antihumanism: the main fallacy of state-based models of politics is that they anthropomorphize power by viewing it as the conscious expression of a will. The theoretical antistatism implicit in Foucault's thought required, however, a specific configuration of circumstances to be actualized. In the 1970s, however, Foucault's theoretical antistatism became increasingly normative: his claim that we should abandon the state as our model for understanding power evolved, in other words, into an argument that the state should cease to be the primary focus of engaging in politics. The context in which this shift occurred is both significant and underappreciated. The economic crisis that struck France in 1973, accompanied by the implosion of the statist assumptions that had driven the country's remarkable postwar growth, suddenly made economic liberalism far more relevant to public discourse than it had been for decades. Spurred by these events, Foucault seems to have recognized the affinity between his theoretical objection to state-based conceptions of power and the economic liberalism that was the subject of contemporary debates. The onset of prolonged economic malaise in the early 1970s, I argue, proves to be as critical a factor in the intellectual transformations of the 1970s as antitotalitarianism or the so-called “death of Marx.”

Thus Foucault did indeed have a liberal moment – but it was inspired not by the political liberalism of Benjamin Constant, Alexis de Tocqueville, or François Guizot, whom other intellectuals were busily dusting off at the time, but by economic liberals like Adam Smith, Wilhelm Röpke, and the Chicago School. In his 1978 and 1979 lectures, the antistatism latent in Foucault's theory of power was nurtured by the resurgence of neoliberal ideas that the 1973 economic crisis precipitated. In this climate, Foucault found economic liberalism to be intellectually appealing for two crucial reasons. First, at a juncture when he, like a number of his contemporaries, was attempting to free French intellectual life from the headlock of revolutionary leftism (or gauchisme), economic liberalism proved to be a potent theoretical weapon for bludgeoning the Left's authoritarian proclivities. Second, Foucault could endorse economic liberalism because, unlike its political counterpart, it did not require him to embrace philosophical humanism – the outlook that Foucault had, from the outset of his career, contested with all the energy that his intellectual skills could muster. The theoretical condition of possibility of Foucault's neoliberal moment was his insight that economic liberalism is, essentially, a liberalism without humanism. The limitation of state power that defines the practice of economic liberalism does not occur, Foucault maintained, when “subjects” are recognized as having “rights.” Of such hypotheses it has no need. Rather, economic liberalism justifies itself on the basis of its greater efficiency: it is a practice that arises when power realizes that it has an interest as power in limiting power. Far from being grounds for denouncing it, this is precisely why Foucault found economic liberalism so appealing: it offered a compelling terrain upon which his practical aspiration for freedom might merge with his theoretical conviction that power is constitutive of all human relationships.--Michael C. Behrent (2016 [2014]) "Liberalism without Humanism: Michel Foucault and the Freemarket Creed, 1976-1979." in Foucault and Neoliberalism, edited b Daniel Zamora & Michael C. Behrent, pp. 29-31. [The paper was first published in 2009.]

It is fair to say that Zamora and Behrent's volume set off an anxious debate on 'the Left' on how to evaluate late Foucault's work. My interest here is not to save Foucault for 'the Left;' but I want to engage some of the more important contributions of that debate because some of its terms prevent, I think, an adequate appreciation of Foucault's position. The problems I want to call attention to are present in Behrent's essay.

But before I get to that, I want to avoid some misunderstanding. I like, even admire Behrent's attempt to situate Foucault's thought in political and activist developments of the 1970s in France and its political economy (including stagflation, and debates over the electoral alliance between communists and socialists). So, if you are  not familiar with his paper, do read it!

In addition, in the passage quoted above, Behrent notes an important oddity in Foucault's treatment of liberalism in the Birth of Biopolitics; Foucault seems to skip the French, nineteenth century liberal tradition, including its leading lights, Constant, Tocqueville, and Guizot. (We know that Foucault was quite familiar with Tocqueville, especially.) This apparent omission matters because it entails that Foucault's treatment of the 'radical' tradition --  utilitarianism -- is biased toward Bentham and Robbins (and later Becker), and away from J.S. Mill (who was shaped by Tocqueville and Constant, especially) and who is never mentioned in the Birth of Biopolitics (nor is Sidgwick). 

Unfortunately, Behrent ends up misunderstanding the significance of this because he treats the omission as instantiating a distinction between political and economic liberalism with political liberalism committed to (philosophical) humanism and economic liberalism not. To be sure, I don't mean to deny that Foucault's engagement with liberalism exhibits anti-humanist tendencies, but Behrent's presentation ends up conflating a number of issues. 

First, the distinction between political and economic liberalism is Behrent's not Foucault's. Unfortunately, it is orthogonal to Foucault's own distinction between (recall 17 January 1979, lecture 2  The Birth of Biopolitics. p. 42) (i) an "axiomatic, juridico-deductive approach" which starts from law (and which Foucault associates with Rousseau). That is a republican-contractual approach. and (ii) "The other approach does not start from law but from governmental practice itself...and tries to analyze it in terms of the de facto limits that can be set to this governmentality." This (ii) Foucault associates with English radicalism, that is utilitarianism. And according to Foucault (i) and (ii) are two traditions of conceptualizing freedom in liberalism. That is to say, while Constant is not mentioned Foucault is actually engaged in a polemic with him.

I have quoted Foucault to make clear that in Foucault's hands (ii) is also a political form of liberalism (it's focused on governmental practice, after all). Moreover, as Behrent belatedly recognizes, it is kind of odd to slot Röpke, and Ordoliberalism generally, into a non-political or economic liberalism. And so Behrent introduces a further ad hoc claim (about the status of law in liberal thought) that ends up undermining his own distinction between political and economic liberalism:  

the Ordoliberals were not, however, crude free-marketeers. Their beliefs boil down to a single crucial insight: everything that neoclassical economics says about the free market's virtues is true; the problem, however, is that competition is a quasi-mathematical ideal, not an empirical reality. For competition to work its magic, it must first be jump-started by the state. Specifically, the state needs a robust legal framework, one that allows marketplace competition to approximate its ideal form (though like the utilitarians, it should be noted, the Ordoliberals conceived of law as a political tool, not as the state's metaphysical foundation). What seems to have intrigued Foucault about Ordoliberalism is that it confirmed his intuition that economic liberalism should be thought of as a political and not merely an economic system. Behrent "Liberalism without Humanism," p. 49

To save his distinction between economic and political liberalism, Behrent introduces a further distinction between those that treat the law "as the state's metaphysical foundation" (that is, "political liberals") and those that treat it merely as a political tool (that is, "economic liberals").

Unfortunately, we're now slipping furth away Foucault's own understanding. For, first, Foucault doesn't treat "axiomatic, juridico-deductive approach" as treating the law as a metaphysical foundation for the state--he actually thinks that in so far as law is derived from anything, it's revolutionary violence (or war). But let's stipulate for the sake of argument that Behrent is correct about this.

More important for present purposes, second, it it is quite clear that Foucault treats the "axiomatic, juridico-deductive approach" as leading into Kantianism and he understands Ordoliberalism (plausibly) as itself explicitly a species of Kantianism, but one shaped by the influence of phenomenology (recall especially lecture 5). For, in fact, when Foucault treats of ordoliberalism, they are represented as recognizing explicitly (recall my treatment of lecture 4, 31 January 1979, The Birth of Biopolitics)  that "a state which violates the basic freedoms, the essential rights of citizens, is no longer representative of its citizens." That is to say, the ordoliberals constitute the state in terms of its capacity and willingness to respect citizens' rights. (It is no surprise that James Buchanan, who is a contractualist, admired the Ordoliberals.) So, while Behrent is right to claim that the law is also a tool for Ordoliberals (in particular a means to help battle the effects of concentrated power), Behrent's distinction between economic and political liberalism mischaracterizes them (as an interpretation of Foucault and of their self-understanding). 

As an aside, Behrent's distinctions make a total hash of Röpke's political philosophy. For, Röpke himself is a big fan of Tocqueville (their mutual overlap can be characterized as a kind of 'aristocratic liberalism'). And while Foucault doesn't mention it, it would have been odd if he had missed it.

Now, above I noted that I am open to Behrent's idea that Foucault's attraction to neoliberalism, if it is one, might be found in a kind of shared anti-humanism. The problem with Behrent's way of articulating this insight is that Foucault is quite clear that the Ordos are humanists (this is actually evident from the titles of Röpke's books alone: Civitas Humana; Mass und Mitte; Humane Economy.) Crucially, Foucault explicitly treats and recognizes the Vitalpolitik and Gesellschaftspolitik  of Ordoliberalism as enmeshed in humanism, I quote (recall) lecture 10 (21 March, 1979) of The Birth of Biopolitics: for the Ordos, "The individual’s life must be lodged, not within a framework of a big enterprise like the firm or, if it comes to it, the state, but within the framework of a multiplicity of diverse enterprises connected up to and entangled with each other, enterprises which are in some way ready to hand for the individual, sufficiently limited in their scale for the individual’s actions, decisions, and choices to have meaningful and perceptible effects, and numerous enough for him not to be dependent on one alone." (p. 241, emphasis added; there is an echo of Heidegger here, but without his anti-humanism!)

As an important aside, while Foucault clearly admires Ordoliberalism, Behrent misses that Foucault treats the French uptake of their ideas as a "radicalization" (lecture 8, p. 207; in context Foucault is discussing Giscard and Barre). And so Behrent misses, I think, how Foucault is criticizing how Giscard and Barre have applied ordoliberal (and Austrian) ideas in France. But about that another time more.

Now, as I have noted before, inscribed in the Birth of Biopolitics, is a natural history of the changing conceptions of homo oeconomicus: (i) in the Smithian period he is the man of exchange (224) or with explicit reference to Hume (as an exemplar of English empiricism) "the subject of interest" (273); in the (ii) classical period starting with Ricardo he is man the consumer in terms of satisfaction/pursuit of needs (p. 225);+ (iii) in the neoliberal period, especially in the (recall) ORDO senses, "he is the man of enterprise and production." (147, lecture 6). And (iv) at Chicago he is also "an entrepreneur," but now, especially, "an entrepreneur of himself," who develops and produces/maintains his own human capital as a source of earnings (226), even a possible earning stream into the future (230), and (crucially for present purposes) "reacts to reality in a nonrandom way." (p. 269, 28 March 1979).* 

Now, of these only Becker (iv), perhaps, may be slotted into a kind of philosophical antihumanism in Foucault's hands (recall this post). (I return to that some time.) But in so far as there is a tradition of economic liberalism as constructed by Behrent, it is not constituted by philosophical antihumanism in Foucault's presentation (or, I would add, in 'reality'). And so this means that in so far as we're trying to explain Foucault's attraction, if any, to neoliberalism something has gone off the rails. And this is, I have argued, because Behrent mistakenly treats "economic liberalism" as a kind term that somehow combines Smith, Röpke, and Becker whereas Foucault does not. It doesn't follow from this, of course, that 'the Left's anxiety' about Foucault's seeming attraction to neoliberalism is itself mistaken. To be continued.

On Starship Troopers (and Peckinpah)

Paul Verhoeven's Showgirls has gone through the complete cycle. It was initially received as a notorious turkey, then it became a cult hit that college students watched while playing Showgirls-themed drinking games, and before long it gained a reputation among highbrow commentators including legendary New Wave director Jacques Rivette) as one of the greatest American films of the era.

Good-bad films culture is a space where transgressive movies that are rejected by initial audiences can begin the process of reappraisal and rehabilitation...there is a high degree of overlap between good-bad movie fans and art cinema fans. Film maudit culture emerges from this overlap. I don't mean to say that a legendary film maudit such as Heaven's Gate or Showgirls should be seen as good-bad. Rather, I mean that film maudit sits at the nexus where the concepts of cinematic merit and artistic seriousness are problematized and reshaped.--Matthew Strohl (2022)Why It's Ok to Love Bad Movies, p. 19.

I have been living with Strohl's book for a few weeks now. I avidly search, often without luck, the streaming networks for the movies he discusses and I watch (or re-watch) them in light of his sophisticated and amusing analysis. I quietly mourn the days when my laptop had a DVD player and I could go to the university library or rent from Netflix's once enormous supply. 

The passage quoted above got me thinking of Verhoeven, and especially about (1997) Starship Troopers which has always troubled me. The film has stilted dialogues, an insipid story, but a lot of amazing visual imagery. On Twitter I asked Why think Verhoeven's Starship Troopers is satire? And that went viral with everyone assuring me that it is best understood as a parody/satire of fascism. I am not so sure.

Verhoeven's first major cinematic work was a documentary, Mussert (1968)--Anton Mussert was the leader of the Dutch national-socialists and executed for treason after WWII. I have been unable to find it in order to re-watch it on short notice. But I recall it as an engaging character portrait of Mussert, who is humanized in virtue of the kind of ordinariness of the perceptions of people that knew him. It's important for what follows that I do not mean to say that Verhoeven is interested in defending Mussert's ideology or choices. What is important is that Verhoeven has a documented interest in fascism (no surprise given his biography). 

Soldaat van Oranje (1977) is part of Verhoeven's period of great success in the Netherlands. It's based on a true story. What's distinctive about it (other than the nudity which made all his movies appealing later to my teenage self) is that it starts as a kind of group portrait of students and the choice to collaborate or to resist seems largely arbitrary and driven by ambiguous motives. It's a movie that repays multiple viewings because it's also unusually reflexive about the power of images and the way mutual surveillance is internalized. But I wouldn't call it an antiwar movie because it also treats war as an adventure. (Feel free to challenge this; it's been a while.)

This all by way of prologue. In what follows I want to argue that Verhoeven's Starship Troopers actually expresses a fascist viewpoint. At a high level of abstraction this actually echoes the initial unease about and reception of the film that by now is widely thought inadequate. Since the film also clearly and repeatedly parodies and satirizes a world government that deploys an explicitly fascist aesthetic and propaganda methods most people I know disagree with me.

Moreover, if I am right it also goes against how Verhoeven's claims about the film are usually interpreted (2014). Verhoeven is quoted as follows:

"I stopped after two chapters because it was so boring," says Verhoeven of his attempts to read Heinlein's opus. "It is really quite a bad book. I asked Ed Neumeier to tell me the story because I just couldn't read the thing. It's a very right-wing book. And with the movie we tried, and I think at least partially succeeded, in commenting on that at the same time. It would be eat your cake and have it. All the way through we were fighting with the fascism, the ultra-militarism. All the way through I wanted the audience to be asking, 'Are these people crazy?'" Empire. By Adam Smith, Owen Williams

Interestingly enough, Neumeier is on record (see here) of being a huge fan of the novel.

In what follows, I take for granted that Verhoeven's intentions are anti-militarist. Even so, there are two weird things worth noticing about Verhoeven's claims. First, the main points of the first chapter of Heinlein's Starship Troopers, are the fear and adrenaline in the confusion of battle. The first sentence of the narrator is "I always get the shakes before a drop" despite being full of drugs! I am not suggesting Heinlein's Starship Troopers isn't fascist -- that's a different debate --, but it is quite striking that Verhoeven claims he could tell after the first two chapters. (The second chapter is a flashback to the narrator's decision to join the service which is how the movie starts.) So, I want to suggest that this passage is worth being cautious about.

Second, Verhoeven himself explicitly qualifies the success of his own effort, he claims he only "partially succeeded." Verhoeven is not known for modesty, and I suggest that he must have discerned something of the argument I intend to offer.

Now, in the quoted passage fascism and ultra-militarism are equated. And such militarism and fascism are indeed on display in the first visual of the movie with the logo of the federal network (and the soundtrack playing a marching tune). The first scene of the movie is a slick recruitment video for the mobile infantry. Strikingly, this is a racially and gender integrated force. (The US Armed forces did not allow women in combat roles until much more recently.) We also learn that the world is imperiled ("help save the world") and something of the ideology of the federation: "service guarantees citizenship." (I return to this below.)

The second scene is shot as if embedded with the infantry in the process of invading Klendathu (the planet of the bugs), "which "must be eliminated." This invasion turns out to be disastrous not the least for the reporter and camera man embedded with the troops which are destroyed by the local bugs. This scene is not slick at all. 

That Klendathu "must be eliminated" is an echo of Cato's famous genocidal claim about Rome's arch-rival, Carthage (censeo Carthaginem esse delendam). This is important to my argument. For, the political ideology of the federation, as presented (and mocked and satirized) in the film, is a militaristic form of civic republicanism. This is, in fact, explicitly articulated in the third scene.

The third scene is a flashback (partially analogous to the second chapter of the book). And we find ourselves in a high school classroom where we are introduced to the hero -- or (if he you disagree with me) main character -- of the film, Rico, a conventionally attractive young man, who is drawing a picture of a boy and a girl and not paying attention to the teacher (Rasczak) who we learn is veteran missing part of an arm (and later turns out to be lieutenant commandeering an elite infantry unit that Rico joins after his initial unit is largely wiped out).*

In the flashback, Rasczak immediately summarizes the main point of the year: "the failure of democracy and the social sciences who brought the world to the bring of chaos."+ We learn that humanity is united in a federation akin to the United Nations (and Star Trek's federation). This federation has been transformed by a coup d'état of veterans who have created a system characterized by social stability for generations.

As we hear the teacher intone, Rico returns to drawing and we see the girl (Carmen Ibanez), who is his model. And as she smiles to him (into the camera), we clearly see her and a portrait of Spinoza. (I return to this below.) Raszcak switches to a Socratic method, and asks another student why are only citizens allowed to vote? And so the audience gets a civics lesson of the ruling ideology, which has a number of distinct elements:

• A distinction between citizens and civilians. The distinction is political and moral.  
• Citizenship is gained through service, primarily (perhaps exclusively) military service.
• The political distinction is that the voting franchise is limited to citizens.
• The moral distinction is that citizenship is freely chosen, and accepts personal responsibility for the safety of the body politic. (Later, by focusing on Rico's parents, we learn that the life of a civilian is basically hedonist enjoyment without responsibility.) This moral distinction is characterized in terms of civic virtue. 
• Importantly, while the students view citizenship as a means toward social benefits (including college entry), as reward for services rendered, the teacher rejects this. Gifts are never of value.**
• Voting is treated as an expression of political authority, which rests on force, especially violence.
• Violence is the supreme authority from which all other authority is derived. (This is much quoted.)

A student (Dizzy Flores, who is interested in Rico) objects that her mother claims violence does not solve anything. We then get another look at Spinoza, when Raszcak asks Carmen Ibanez (the student who is being portrayed by Rico), what the "city fathers of Hiroshima would say about that," (to which the astute and chilling response is, nothing because they are dead). Near the end of the scene we see a drawing of Hannah Arendt and a bust of Marcus Aurelius. It's not silly to have images of Spinoza, Arendt, and Marcus Aurelius in the classroom if one's ideology is a kind of realist, civic republicanism. 

At the end of the scene -- it's only 90 seconds long -- the question is asked (of Rico) if he believes the ruling ideology and Rico honestly says, he doesn't know. And Raszcak responds that he doubts any of them would 'recognize civic virtue if it bit them in the ass.'

I have spent some time on this because the federation's self-understanding and its structure is formally not fascist. (I don't deny, by the way, that there are important connections between, say, the roman republic and fascism.) We also learn quickly that the federation's military is a meritocracy. And there is some freedom of speech in the federation because there is no suggestion that there will be dangerous consequences for Dizzy Flores' mother doubting of official ideology (and Rico's own lack of conviction). 

Now, the film goes on to show that much of this is sham. The aesthetics of the federation are openly fascist (we see Neil Patrick Harris --  of Doogie Howser, MD fame -- visually transform into a Gestapo officer), it seems committed to open-ended wars of aggression, its claims about citizenship largely a sham because soldiers are treated as expendable; many of the scenes provide us a window into the propaganda that the federation directs at its own citizens. In addition, the federation clearly presents itself as superior to bugs (whose intelligence it constantly underestimates). And it is this fact, this exposure of the militaristic hollowness of the federation, alongside the sheer craziness of its way of life, that is taken as representing the viewpoint of the film and this, in turn, is treated as its anti-fascist message. 

The problem is, however, that exposing that civic republicanism and the duties of citizenship are a sham is itself a feature (not a bug [sorry]) of fascism, or at least what we now call the alt right. In addition, Rico's journey in the film is treated sympathetically. And his species of masculinity is also familiar from contemporary alt right. 

That is to say, while some viewers may end up thinking that Rico is a kind of idiot, I don't think that's the perspective of the movie itself. Initially, his decision to join the service is a rash rebellion against his parents and motivated by his desire to stay near Carmen Ibanez. (This plan fails because Carmen, who is much smarter, is sent to space-force to become a pilot.) He has a change of heart once he is responsible for the death of a fellow trainee (and Carmen far away), but he rescinds his decision to leave the military after his parents (and the city of Buenos Aires) are destroyed by the bugs. After this, this decision is existential. and he devotes his life to killing bugs. 

Rico never questions his decision. And whatever limited growth he shows, it's primarily in the art of killing and military tactics. Rico shows himself to be brave and a good, loyal platoon leader, who rises through the ranks because infantry has a high mortality rate. Importantly, while the smart kids who become officers are uniformly shown to be awful and true believers, in the infantry we see mutual care and comradery of beautiful young people willing to sacrifice for each other and the greater good. 

Now, for some people it's obvious that in virtue of serving an awful regime, which is parodied in the film, Rico and his friends are also so satirized. On social media Liam Kofi Bright suggested, with a knowing nod to Stanley Fish, that it represents a kind of surprised by sin structure. I actually think that's right. For Kofi Bright the lesson is, for the viewer, 'you too can be made to empathise with and root for the villains.' This may be Verhoeven's intention, although it is worth noting that we never root for the senior officers or the federation while watching Starship Troopers. 

My response is that to be surprised by sin just is the human condition. And it does not follow that in virtue of serving an awful regime -- in Kofi Bright's words "objectively what they're doing is aiding a fascist war of conquest...[a]ll their virtues and vices play out against that unquestioned background" -- Rico and his friends are also satirized or parodied. It's not even obvious that Raszcak is satirized in the film. (He turns out to be rather brave and caring of his troops.) In fact, we see Rico taking on the virtues that Raszcak extolls (and exemplifies). 

My position is illustrated by Sam Peckinpah's (1977) Cross of Iron, which appeared the same year as Verhoeven's Soldaat van Oranje. Cross of Iron, which explores the comradery and conflicts of a German platoon on the Eastern front, was a flop Stateside and was panned by critics. (Interestingly enough it did very well in West Germany.) Now, Cross of Iron is very violent, but there is no reason to think that in virtue of coming to sympathize with Corporal Rolf Steiner (James Coburn), whose home is on the front, and who is shown to be courageous and have quite a bit of humanity toward the enemy, we end up admiring the Wehrmacht or Nazi Germany.++ It's pretty obviously an antiwar movie, even though we are shown that for some men war is preferred over domestic life (a good part of the movie explores a romance between Steiner and his nurse Eva, who he ends up rejecting). 

Of course, Cross of Iron is not satire, so structurally it is not identical to Starship Troopers. And whatever aesthetic surrounds Coburn's Steiner, it is by no means fascist. But the aesthetic surrounding Rico and his friends is fascist. The ones that survive keep their beauty. And at the end of the movie Rico even 'gets' Carmen, while the morally superior Dizzy Flores dies. And so while insipid militarism is clearly criticized, Rico's military service is not. 

Now, one might object that Rico's inability to see through the lies and his dedicated service to a corrupt regime make him flawed. Obviously, I am not interested in convincing you otherwise. But I don't think the movie manages to convey this; unlike the smart elites of the federation, he is not obviously "crazy." In fact, he remains likeable and heroic to the end; he is a fascist poster boy. 

If  am right then this episode also illustrates something else: that so many people defend the movie as merely satire also shows something of how difficult it is to distance ourselves from fascism.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ernest Nagel vs Leo Strauss, PT 1

3. There is a more sophisticated argument for the view that the social sciences cannot be value-free. It maintains that the distinction between fact and value assumed in the preceding discussion is untenable when purposive human behavior is being analyzed, since in this context value judgments enter inextricably into what appear to be “purely descriptive” (or factual) statements. Accordingly, those who subscribe to this thesis claim that an ethically neutral social science is in principle impossible, and not simply that it is difficult to attain. For if fact and value are indeed so fused that they cannot even be distinguished, value judgments cannot be eliminated from the social sciences unless all predications are also eliminated from them, and therefore unless these sciences completely disappear.
For example, it has been argued that the student of human affairs must distinguish between valuable and undesirable forms of social activity, on pain of failing in his “plain duty” to present social phenomena truthfully and faithfully:

....

Moreover, the assumption implicit in the recommendation discussed above for achieving ethical neutrality is often rejected as hopelessly naïve —this is the assumption, it will be recalled, that relations of means to ends can be established without commitment to these ends, so that the conclusions of social inquiry concerning such relations are objective statements which make conditional rather than categorical assertions about values. This assumption is said by its critics to rest on the supposition that men attach value only to the ends they seek, and not to the means for realizing their aims. However, the supposition is alleged to be grossly mistaken. For the character of the means one employs to secure some goal affects the nature of the total outcome; and the choice men make between alternative means for obtaining a given end depends on the values they ascribe to those alternatives. In consequence, commitments to specific valuations are said to be involved even in what appear to be purely factual statements about means-ends relations.--Ernest Nagel (1961) The Structure of Science: Problems in the Logic of Scientific Explanation, pp. 490-491 (emphasis in original).

It is hard to imagine how influential Nagel's Structure was at one point. (Now it has about 10k in citations on scholar.google. Quine's Word and Object, which appeared the same year, has about 50% more citations.) By the time I was a student, it was associated with 'the received view' and a misguided form of reductionism in science, overshadowed by Kuhn's more influential Structure (which appeared a year later) and by all the exciting, technical work in philosophy of special sciences and the burgeoning movement looking at the metaphysics of science. But when it came to presenting the received view, Hempel's lucidity and brevity was preferred. As a consequence I never read Nagel's Structure as an undergraduate or graduate student, but I did frequently encounter discussions of Nagel reduction (see here for an intro). 

The passage I omitted from the text I quoted from Nagel, is Nagel quoting (as the accompanying footnote states), Leo Strauss, “ The Social Science of Max Weber,” Measure, Vol. 2 (1 9 5 1 ), pp. 211-14. To the best of my knowledge it's one of the few instances where a bona fide analytic philosopher engages directly with an argument by Strauss while he was alive. Strauss (1899-1973) is rarely mentioned by political philosophers of the age, but if he is it is mostly in the context of his claims about esotericism (see Nozick here).* To the best of my knowledge, Rawls and Gewirth never mention Strauss.+

To have a sense of how unique Nagel's engagement is, I offer the following illustration. When specialist, analytic ancient philosophers of the age mention Strauss they do so (see Vlastos) by praising a 1974 review, in Philosophical Review, by Irwin of Strauss' (1972) Xenophon's Socrates. In  the review Irwin devotes about half a dozen lines to Strauss:  

Strauss's "interpretation" consists of a tedious paraphrase with comments or questions on major and minor issues. No coherent line of interpretation emerges from his enigmatic asides. His paraphrase merely reminds us how unexciting Xenophon can be, and even reduces the amusing episodes to a uniform level of dullness.

The rest of the review is Irwin describing the questions Strauss should have engaged in. While Irwin's summary is not strictly false -- there is something tedious about Strauss' Xenophon's Socrates -- it is completely uninformative. (More about that some other time.)

As I have discussed, Nagel could be a fierce polemicist, including a public, political polemicist. But the response to Strauss in Structure, does not fit that mold. Rather the section -- it's about five pages -- attributes to Strauss a family of arguments that [A] 'social sciences cannot be value free.' As can be seen from the passage quoted, Nagel treats this as entailing or nearly identical to the thesis [B] that there is no "compelling reasons" that "an ethically neutral social science is inherently impossible." (Structure 495). I am a bit surprised by this conflation in Nagel because ethical neutrality may well be a significant 'value'! To be sure, Nagel himself derives this formulation from Strauss, who attributes the identity of "a "value-free" or ethically neutral social science" to Weber (Natural Right and History (hereafter NRH), p. 40).

Before I get to Nagel's arguments two observations: first, Nagel responds to a version of Strauss's argument published in 1951 in Measure. To the best of my knowledge this journal did not have a long life or wide circulation. (I have requested a copy of it from the British Library.) But Strauss reprinted a version of the article in NRH. The passage that Nagel quotes can be found there in chapter 2, pp. 50-53. The omissions in Nagel are basically all the places where Strauss is criticizing Weber directly. (I return to that below.) Natural Right and History was published in 1953, and famous, so it is a bit weird that Nagel doesn't cite it. Second, a few years ago, Anna Alexandrova published a paper, "Can the science of well-being be objective?." The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science (2020) that has quickly become a classic in its own right. This paper engages with the material I am about to discuss (and even mentions that Strauss was Nagel's target), and expresses my own substantive disagreements with Nagel better than I could.

Now, the discussion by Nagel of Strauss occurs in a chapter 13 on the "methodological problems of the social sciences" in section (V) on "The Value-Oriented Bias of Social Inquiry." This is a rather long, ambitious chapter (over 50 pages). It made Nagel a recognized authority in the philosophy of social science, and got him invited (as I have documented elsewhere) to debates internal to (say) economics. The chapter also includes, for example, Nagel's criticism of Hayek's The Counter-Revolution of Science, which (recall) Nagel partially recycles from a polemical 1952 review in Journal of Philosophy. This section (V) is devoted to the following issues:

Since social scientists generally differ in their value commitments, the "value neutrality” that seems to be so pervasive in the natural sciences is therefore often held to be impossible in social inquiry. In the judgment of many thinkers, it is accordingly absurd to expect the social sciences to exhibit the unanimity so common among natural scientists concerning what are the established facts and satisfactory explanations for them. Let us examine some of the reasons that have been advanced for these contentions. It will be convenient to distinguish four groups of such reasons, so that our discussion will deal in turn with the alleged role of value judgments in (1) the selection of problems, (2) the determination of the contents of conclusions, (3) the identification of fact, and (4) the assessment of evidence. Nagel Structure 485

I quote it for two reasons: first, because it shows that the way Nagel operationalizes 'value neutrality' is in terms of unanimity, or consensus. (To readers of Tom Kuhn's Structure this should be familiar!) The broader context of Nagel's argument shows that the relevant class is "competent workers in the natural sciences" (Nagel Structure, 448). In addition, the question for social science is articulated in terms of the purported "unanimity so common among natural scientists concerning what are the established facts and satisfactory explanations for them." Nagel is aware, of course, that natural scientists don't always agree, but this occurs for him either at the research "frontier" (448) or in contexts where the disagreement is an effect of "alternative formulations" that are "mathematically equivalent" (158).

Second, the response to Strauss falls under what Nagel calls (3) "the identification of fact." In fact, Nagel identifies Weber's position with (1).  He doesn't identify a single author with (2), but in it he treats S. F . Nadel (an anthropologist, who was "a pioneer of multi-sited ethnography,"), his own teacher Morris R. Cohen, and A.E. Burtt (whose work on Newton is important) as typical representatives of it (Nagel's own discussion draws on work by Gunnar Myrdal). Finally, Karl Mannheim is treated as the exemplar of someone who holds (4). What's neat about this list is that it is both politically diverse and reflects views of different kinds of social science(s).

Nagel attributes to Strauss two distinct criticisms: the first is that "the distinction between fact and value.. is untenable when purposive human behavior is being analyzed, since in this context value judgments enter inextricably into what appear to be “purely descriptive” (or factual) statements." The second is that purported "factual claims about means-ends statements" are themselves infected with values.  It's not hard to see that they are similar in kind.

In his response to the views he attributes to Strauss, Nagel emphasizes that Strauss is right about three features: "(a) that a large number of characterizations sometimes assumed to be purely factual descriptions of social phenomena do indeed formulate a type of value judgment; (b) that it is often difficult, and in any case usually inconvenient in practice, to distinguish between the purely factual and the “evaluative” contents of many terms employed in the social sciences; and that (c) values are commonly attached to means and not only to ends." (Nagel Structure, 491--[letters added to facilitate discussion]).

But Nagel insists that Strauss equivocates on two notions of 'value judgment: first, "the sense in which a value judgment expresses approval or disapproval either of some moral (or social) ideal, or of some action (or institution) because of a commitment to such an ideal; and the sense in which a value judgment expresses an estimate of the degree to which some commonly recognized (and more or less clearly defined) type of action, object, or institution is embodied in a given instance." (Nagel, Structure 492) Nagel adds that these notions are often conflated in the social sciences and that sometimes it's not so easy to sort distinguish them. But he concludes his argument that "there are no good reasons for thinking that it is inherently impossible to distinguish between the characterizing and the appraising judgments implicit in many statements, whether the statements are asserted by students of human affairs or by natural scientists." (Nagel, Structure 494).

Now, rhetorically, it's important to see that Nagel's argument -- and this is characteristic of his argument in the whole chapter -- generally has the form 'an apparent problem X in social science occurs also in natural sciences and when X occurs in natural science, X does not prevent the development of consensus in the natural sciences (and, thus has been tamed in the natural sciences) and so X does not pose an in principle obstacle to consensus in social science.' So, for example, Nagel illustrates the two senses of “value judgment” with an example from biology.** And the effect of this move is to turn the critic of value neutrality in social science into a critic of the value neutrality of natural science.  Nagel assumes nobody (not even the sociologist of knowledge he discusses under (4)) will go that far.

Today's post won't be able to evaluate Nagel's arguments, not even as arguments against Strauss. But it is worth saying something about what Strauss is up to. Now, Strauss' argument is directed against Weber, and in particular, because Weber is taken to be a spokesperson for the following position: "Natural right is then rejected today not only because (i) all human thought is held to be historical but likewise because it is thought that (ii) there is a variety of unchangeable principles of right or of goodness which conflict with one another, and none of which can be proved to be superior to the others." (Strauss NRH 36) That is to say, Strauss associates Weber with features of historicism (viz, i) and with value pluralism (viz, ii). To be sure, Strauss recognizes that Weber is not a pure historicist, because Weber recognizes the historical situatededness of the sciences alongside the "trans-historical" nature of its "findings regarding the facts and their causes. More precisely, what is trans-historical is the validity of these findings." (Strauss NRH 39). And because Strauss wants to argue for natural right, or at least, the inherent possibility of the recovery of natural right, he is critical of Weber.

So, Strauss himself is not especially interested in doing social science (although I qualify that below). But he is interested in a kind of self-limitation Weber put on social science: "the absolute heterogeneity of facts and values necessitates [for Weber] the ethically neutral character of social science: social science can answer questions of facts and their causes; it is not competent to answer questions of value." (Strauss NRH 40) But unless values are self-contradictory, the social scientist must be silent about them. Now this position is coherent, and it is not obvious why Strauss cares about social science method at all.

The answer is that Strauss (correctly I think) discerns that Weber is a kind of skeptic about value: "his belief that there cannot be any genuine knowledge of the Ought." (Strauss NRH 41) And so observed value pluralism is a kind of effect of this Weberian skepticism (which according to Strauss naturally leads to a nihilism that Weber obscures from himself). To be sure, Strauss attributes to Weber a kind of formal possession of the norm, "Thou shalt have ideals," (Strauss NRH 44); so on this view Weber is not a radical (second order) skeptic about value. For Weber the content of this norm is, as Strauss notes, "Follow thy god or demon,"  which Strauss reinterprets as "devotion to a cause." (NRH 46). 

As an aside, the really significant observation on Weber's philosophy by Strauss is that "Weber's thesis that there is no solution to the conflict between values was then a part, or a consequence, of the comprehensive view according to which human life is essentially an inescapable conflict. For this reason, "peace and universal happiness" appeared to him to be an illegitimate or fantastic goal. Even if that goal could be reached, he thought, it would not be desirable; it would be the condition of "the last men who have invented happiness," against whom Nietzsche had directed his "devastating criticism."" (Strauss NRH 65) That is to say, Strauss diagnoses how Weber's Nietzscheanism anticipates Carl Schmitt's position. (Schmitt is not mentioned by Strauss in this context.) 

Now, the objection to Weber by Strauss that Nagel cites occurs in the discussion of Strauss' analysis of Weber's sociology of religion, which "presupposes a fundamental distinction between "ethos" and "techniques of living " (or "prudential" rules)." And Strauss suggests that "the sociologist must then be able to recognize an "ethos" in its distinctive character; he must have a feel for it, an appreciation of it, as Weber admitted." (Strauss, NRH 50) Then occurs the passage Nagel (selectively) quotes on 490-491 in Structure as follows:

Would one not laugh out of court a man who claimed to have written a sociology of art but who actually had written a sociology of trash? The sociologist of religion must distinguish between phenomena which have a religious character and phenomena which are a-religious. To be able to do this, he must understand what religion is. . . . Such understanding enables and forces him to distinguish between genuine and spurious religion, between higher and lower religions; these religions are higher in which the specifically religious motivations are effective to a higher degree. . . , The sociologist of religion cannot help noting the difference between those who try to gain it by a change of heart. Can he see this difference without seeing at the same time the difference between a mercenary and nonmercenary attitude? . . . The prohibition against value-judgments in social science would lead to the consequence that we are permitted to give a strictly factual description of the overt acts that can be observed in concentration camps, and perhaps an equally factual analysis of the motivations of the actors concerned: we would not be permitted to speak of cruelty. Every reader of such a description who is not completely stupid would, of course, see that the actions described are cruel. The factual description would, in truth, be a bitter satire. What claimed to be a straightforward report would be an unusually circumlocutory report. . . . Can one say anything relevant on public opinion polls . . . without realizing the fact that many answers to the questionnaires are given by unintelligent, uninformed, deceitful, and irrational people, and that not a few questions are formulated by people of the same caliber—can one say anything relevant about public opinion polls without committing one value-judgment after another?

In Nagel's hands it is completely unclear that Strauss is offering an immanent critique of Weber.

And if one reads Nagel then it is natural to think that Strauss's rejection of ethical neutrality of social science is an obstacle to consensus or unanimity in social science. And so that lurking in Strauss' argument is a kind of denial of social scientific objectivity. But it is worth noting that for Strauss the whole point of recognizing values in social science is to make social scientific and historical objectivity possible. This is actually completely explicit in Strauss. For, Strauss concludes his own argument against Weber (at least the present one that Nagel is focused on) as follows:

The rejection of value judgments endangers historical objectivity. In the first place, it prevents one from calling a spade a spade. In the second place, it endangers that kind of objectivity which legitimately requires the forgoing of evaluations, namely, the objectivity of interpretation. The historian who takes it for granted that objective value judgments are impossible cannot take very seriously that thought of the past which was based on the assumption that objective value judgments are possible, i.e., practically all thought of earlier generations. Knowing beforehand that that thought was based on a fundamental delusion, he lacks the necessary incentive for trying to understand the past as it understood itself. (Strauss NRH 60-61)

That is to say, establishing the possibility of establishing natural right just is the possibility of establishing a trans-historical consensus/agreement or unanimity in social science. (To avoid confusion: all agree that history is at least partially part of social science.) So, somewhat ironically Nagel and Strauss agree about what we might call the formal aims of social science, that it involves a species of objectivity that makes fundamental consensus possible. This fundamental agreement is completely obscured by Nagel's presentation. To be continued.

 

A puzzle about a footnote in Pippin on Strauss on Hume

[Leo Strauss] is clearly most worried that any position that links the right with what the will legislates for itself quickly slips down the slippery slope toward legal positivism, historicism, relativism, and finally nihilism....

Note 15: NRH, 17. 1 should note here that Strauss only asserts that "the historical school had obscured the fact that particular or historical standards can become authoritative only on the basis of a universal principle which imposes an obligation on the individual to accept." Depending on what Strauss means by "authorative," [sic] such a claim is either a tautology or begs the question at issue. Some principle can be authoritative for me if, in some situation it counts as a reason for me to act; to claim otherwise would require a much more serious confrontation with a figure who Strauss (and, as far as I can see, most of his students) neglect: David Hume.--Pippin, R. B. (1992). "The modern world of leo strauss." Political Theory, 20(3), and note 15 on p. 453 & p. 468

After my paper on Ernest Nagel, Sander Verhaegh kindly asked me to contribute a paper to a collection on how exiles shaped analytic philosophy Stateside (or something like that). And because Nagel is one of the few analytic philosophers to have engaged Strauss in a substantive way (and so I am well placed to discuss it), and because I tend to think analytic philosophy's polemics are at least partially constitutive of its professional identity, I thought it would be illuminating to write a chapter for Sander on how Strauss and his school ended up being conceptualized as not philosophy/philosophical by analytic philosophy. And this last point would also also allow me to reflect a bit on the role of that strange hybrid, José Benardete, in the upstate NY revival of metaphysics within analytic philosophy.

But I have had to confront a scholarly problem. Within analytic philosophy nearly all the writing about Strauss and his followers is excessively polemical (and often not very good, alas). Much of the remaining scholarship in English on Strauss is by his students (and almost inevitably apologetic in character) or by people interested in tracing the misdeeds of neocons to Strauss or tracing the reception of Heidegger's views. And so while there is huge amount of material on Strauss reception (which is, perhaps, all I need), there is remarkably little sober scholarship on Strauss and his school. In fact, Robert Pippin has corned the market in that niche with three papers: in addition to the paper quoted above, there is a companion piece, "Being, time, and politics: The Strauss-Kojève debate." History and Theory (1993): 138-161, and a more recent work,"The Unavailability of the Ordinary: Strauss on the Philosophical Fate of Modernity." Political Theory 31.3 (2003): 335-358.+ (Feel free to nominate other work!)

All three papers are sober engagements with Strauss and repay study in their own right. They are not, if that were possible, impartial scholarship because each is written from the perspective of a kind of Hegelianism that is explicitly being defended against Strauss (and from Kojève's corruption of Hegelianism). In fact, Pippin generally suggests (and my quote above is exemplary in this respect) that Strauss has missed an (Hegelian) alternative in his (that is, Strauss') diagnosis of a philosophical situation or that Strauss has posited a slippery slope, which may be halted along the way. That is, Pippin's response to Strauss tends to engage in genuine philosophical disagreement where the details matter. Pippin also recognizes that one of Strauss' characteristic modes of argument -- something about modernity (say its 'crisis') is the effect, even inevitable fate, of philosophical assumptions of some past thinker -- is non-trivially Hegelian (e.g., "The Unavailability of the Ordinary:" 341). Finally, Pippen recognizes (and articulates nicely) how odd Strauss seems in light of the "usual way[s] of a professional philosopher in a modern university," ("The Unavailability of the Ordinary: 342) despite the fact that Strauss generated a quite successful school in the modern university.

Okay, with that in place, I want focus on a puzzle that reading Pippin raised for me (and perhaps for me alone). In his 2003 article, Pippin suggests that one of the main themes of Strauss' Natural Right and History (hereafter NRH), and "the central theme of all modern European philosophy since Hegel," is the "relationship between philosophy and experience." (336) In fact, Pippin makes point of reminding his audience that this is also a theme found "in the later Wittgenstein, Austin, Cavell" (344) that is, analytic philosophy (on p. 352 he adds Bernard Williams to the list).

Now, within analytic philosophy, it's Hume that is treated as the philosopher who first problematized the relationship between philosophy and experience (if you don't trust me on this go re-read Quine or Russell). Hume is not explicitly mentioned in Pippin's 2003 piece, but his language is adopted even quoted by Pippin at one key point when he explains that for Strauss the recovery of natural right (that we are said to "need" by Strauss) "would seem to require a dualism, a nonteleological science of the universe and in some way a different, teleological “science of man.” Strauss considers this the Thomistic solution but he clearly rejects it, boldly insisting, “An adequate solution to the problem of natural right cannot be found before this basic problem has been solved,” unmistakably implying that it has not yet and appearing to promise that he will solve it, in the book to follow." (344) What's interesting about this formulation (other than it being Humean terminology) is that there is by now a academic cottage industry, at least since Allison Simmons' 2001 paper showing that various early moderns (Descartes, Spinoza, and Hume) proposed nonteleological science of the universe, and yet somehow produced (consciously/intentionally or not) a teleological science of man. 

With that in mind, in note 15 (in the 1992 paper) quoted above, Pippin is explicitly commenting on NRH; p 17. In that book, Strauss explicitly mentions Hume twice. First, a few pages later (p. 20), in the context of a discussion of historicism, Hume is treated (alongside Kant) as an originator of a "philosophical critique of a philosophic and scientific thought" that leads to skepticism. And Strauss uses the occasion to distinguish the philosophy of skepticism from historicism. Importantly, the contrast is drawn in the sense of how skepticism and historicism view themselves: skepticism is a permanent possibility for humanity (it is "coeval with human thought)," whereas historicism is indexed to specific historical situations. And even if one does not know anything about the larger project of NRH, the manner -- which is not historicist -- in which Strauss draws this distinction implies that Strauss identifies more with the skeptical self-understanding more than the historicist one (Pippin would not disagree, I think, see below).

It should be noted that near the end of the book, Strauss notes that historicism itself is an effect of skepticism about theoretical metaphysics. And this is a "skepticism which culminated in the depreciation of theory in favor of practice." (NRH 320) That is to say, Hume (and Kant) are treated both as contrasts to skepticism as well as the philosophical roots or sources of historicism. (We might say then that for Strauss historicism is at the bottom of the slippery slope from Hume.)

Second, near the end of NRH, in the context of analyzing Burke's defense of practical wisdom against the encroaches of theoretical philosophy, Strauss points out there is a connection between Burke's strictures on (and against) metaphysics and "the skeptical tendencies of his contemporaries Rousseau and Hume." And Strauss goes on to offer Burke's "theoretical work" [sic], A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, as evidence for this claim. 

Let's stipulate that these two mentions are not a "serious confrontation." But they do suggest that in so far as Strauss discusses skepticism, and especially where it shades into philosophy's critique of itself and science, it's legitimate to explore how he may well be drawing on, or engaging with, Hume. I don't mean to suggest this is always the case. For, Strauss also thinks there are different kinds of skepticism. For, 'Socratic wisdom' is in virtue of being self-knowledge of one's ignorance, explicitly "a kind of skepticism," albeit of an "involuntary" kind (NRH: 262). Such skepticism is "not dangerous."* Somewhat confusingly if one is unfamiliar with Strauss, in context it is not just Socrates, but also Rousseau who is being described as an exemplar of Socratic wisdom. Importantly, in Rousseau, Socratic wisdom also has an important effect: it allows for science that is compatible with virtue. (In that scheme, metaphysics is the science that is incompatible with virtue.) And Strauss treats Rousseau (but not Socrates) as somebody who thinks that science can be made to serve virtue (although the way this can be institutionalized is by no means obvious).

As it happens, (an)other kind(s) of Socratic wisdom is possible -- one not wedded to natural science (NRH: 277) -- so this kind of skepticism itself comes in kinds. Strauss clearly admires Socratic wisdom, which is philanthropic in character, and this suggests that in NRH, skepticism does not (always) have a negative connotation.

Rousseau is also treated as a source of insight on a "dangerous kind" of skepticism which is a consequence of the search for truth in modern science. And this is caused whenever scientific truth is useless or unattainable. (NRH 258) It is dangerous because in modernity science has discredited faith and opinion and is meant to replace faith and opinion, and so when science fails it leaves society with nihilism. (258). 

Socrates, Hume, Kant, and Rousseau are not the only kinds of skeptics in NRH. Strauss treats Cicero as an Academic skeptic (155). In addition, Strauss recognizes that from the perspective of seventeenth century philosophy, in "traditional" philosophy (prior to the seventeenth century), there is also a form of skepticism that is a kind of natural accompaniment of dogmatism (NRH 171). I think this is clearly meant to be Pyrrhonean skepticism. And, as it happens, such Pyrrhonean skepticism is transformed in seventeenth century philosophy in NRH. For, Strauss treats Hobbes, Spinoza, and Descartes as sharing in the following commitment (one that is often attributed to Descartes alone based on a reading of the Meditations):

To guarantee the actualization of wisdom means to eradicate skepticism by doing justice to the truth embodied in skepticism. For this purpose, one must first give free rein to extreme skepticism: what survives the onslaught of extreme skepticism is the absolutely safe basis of wisdom. The actualization of wisdom is identical with the erection of an absolutely dependable dogmatic edifice on the foundation of extreme skepticism.  (NRH 172)

The significance of this modern strategy to attain wisdom is not just epistemological. For, in raising a central challenge to Hobbes' philosophy (and the manner of the challenge is rather Schmittian as is also clear in the footnote I am about to quote) in his own voice, Strauss adds a curious footnote:

One may state this difficulty also as follows: In the spirit of the dogmatism based on skepticism, Hobbes identified what the skeptic Carneades apparently regarded as the conclusive refutation of the claims raised on behalf of justice, with the only possible justification of these claims: the extreme situation—the situation of the two shipwrecked men on a plank on which only one man can save himself—reveals, not the impossibility of justice, but the basis of justice. Yet Carneades did not contend that in such a situation one is compelled to kill one's competitor (Cicero Republic iii . 29-30): the extreme situation does not reveal a real necessity. (NRH 196 note 39)

This explicitly treats Hobbes' philosophy as erected on, derived from, a skeptical foundation. Now, to be sure, this kind of skepticism is not at all like Socratic wisdom. In fact, it is the explicit denial that a good life is good in virtue of being in accord with nature (NRH 95), which is the truth embodied in skepticism (that is the basis/foundational step on which Hobbes' dogmatic science is built).

But according to Strauss, Hobbes (not Descartes) generates a form of skepticism, too: "It is this fact that ultimately accounts for the persistence of skepticism and justifies skepticism to a certain extent. Skepticism is the inevitable outcome of the unintelligible character of the universe or of the unfounded belief in its intelligibility." (NRH 174; in my own research I tend to attribute this view to Spinoza, but it's not clear to me that Strauss does so.) Hobbes here is treated, thus, as the ultimate source of a "philosophical critique of a philosophic and scientific thought" that Strauss links to Hume and Kant (and their role in generating both the kind of skepticism coeval with thought and modern historicism).

Let me take stock of where we are because I am fast reaching the limits of a Digression. Running through NRH is a classification of different kinds of skepticism. This matters for the argument of NRH because some kinds of skepticism are treated as wise and as exemplary of the (partial) rejection of historicism that Strauss endorses. In fact, Pippen (largely correctly in my view) treats Strauss as a kind of skeptic: "The radically sceptical, incomplete, or zetetic character of Strauss's version of Socraticism."  (note 12 of Pippin's 1992 article). To put my own exegetical cards on the table, I think the word 'radically' is a bit misleading because the tenor of Strauss skepticism is not Pyrrhonean but fideist (about which another time).

And so the question of skepticism in NRH is also a question of classifying Strauss. And as it happens in NRH, in this classification of skepticism, Hume plays a central role as a source , perhaps partially derivative of Hobbes, of modern historicism while simultaneously standing for the non-historicist always living possibility of skepticism in which the question of the relationship between philosophy and experience is central. In fact, what's notable about NRH is that Strauss invites the question which skeptics, if any, have Socratic wisdom, and leaves it to the reader to figure out the answer.** 

It's worth noting, in closing for today, that according to Strauss (and he is right about this) Hume rejected -- what he claims Hobbes, Spinoza, and Descartes accepted -- that is, the skeptical denial that a good life is good in virtue of being in accord with nature. This Strauss notes in a different work in which he explains the difference between Hume and (modern) positivism(s) (see The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism: 21-22). And so my provisional, tentative conclusion is that Strauss does not have a serious confrontation with Hume because, while Strauss generally sounds like the student of Heidegger he was, in key respects he agrees with Hume (or so I claim ex cathedra). And this somewhat perverse result actually makes the vehement rejection of Strauss and Straussianism by analytic philosophy more interesting than I initially thought.