Analytic Political Philosophy Before Rawls with special attention to Morris, Naess, and Oppenheim

This post originates in my interest in finding critical engagements with Leo Strauss within analytic philosophy in the post-WWII era (triggered by (recall here; here; here) an invite by Sander Verhaegh). There is remarkably little of it preserved in historical memory, in part because there seems to be remarkably little of it within analytic political theory, it seems, in Strauss' life-time (I emphasize this because later there is plenty), despite Strauss' significance in political theory of the age and despite my growing up with recurring diss of Strauss (and Straussianism). This is all a bit puzzling in one sense because part of Strauss' fame rested on his thesis of persecution generating esotericism, and since Reisch' magisterial work, How the Cold War Transformed Philosophy of Science To the Icy Slopes of Logic, we know that such persecution was experienced by many in the founding generations of analytic philosophy. So, one might have expected some mutual affinity. One hypothesis would be there simply was no analytic political philosophy in the period so there was no felt need to polemize against Strauss (and Straussianism), or to absorb it.*

Thus, the topic intersects with my continuing reflection (recall here; here; here; here; and here) on Katrina Forrester's In the Shadow of Justice, which convincingly shows that Rawls' Theory of Justice creates a kind of light-cone which does not allow us to discern events behind it. She uses archive material and the responses by those whose views were already formed before Rawls to help guide us on Rawls and his reception. Another way to begin to do so is to read reviews and surveys of works blissfully unaware that a Rawlsian tidal wave is about to hit them. 

In 1965 Karl W. Deutsch and Leroy N. Rieselbach published a kind of state of the field, review article, "Recent trends in political theory and political philosophy," in a supplement of The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 360.1 (1965): 139-162. I don't know anything about Rieselbach (sorry), but Deutsch is a fascinating character, who is worth reading. Their survey suggests that in the mid 1960s the field of political theory/philosophy is incredibly eclectic and more heterogeneous than it is today. But in this Digression I want to use their review as a means to point us to the existence of pre-Rawlsian analytic political philosophy. 

Before I get to that, I should mention Jo Wolff's (2013) chapter "Analytic Political Philosophy," in a OUP volume on the History of Analytic Philosophy, edited by Michael Beaney. His strategy to get around the Rawls light cone problem I mentioned above, is two-fold: first, he goes through the series Philosophy, Politics and Society, which started to appear in 1956 (then edited by Peter Laslett). This is a clever choice because this series, which (mostly?) republished existing papers was de facto canonizing then recent work. (There is a peculiarity here that I will quietly skip in that Laslett himself was more of a historian.) This is especially evident if you look at the table of contents of the second series edited by Laslett and Runciman.

Second, and in a way it's the same as the first, Wolff uses as a method or criteria of inclusion of a work in analytic political philosophy that they become "part of a tradition of academic political philosophy." This is why Wolff ends up mentioning Popper, but not discussing his views.

My deviation from Wolff's approach is motivated by the fact that his gives slightly too much weight to the contemporary status quo (and our ancestors). And because I take so-called Kuhn losses rather seriously, and also because of non-trivial linguistic isolation (or linguistic imperialism) of much of the tradition, I am slightly more  permissive than him in that I wish to find work using methods of, say, ordinary language philosophy or those popularized by logical empiricism (etc.) even if ignored by the tradition.

Of course, since on my view it is constitutive of analytic philosophy that it sponge-like assimilates new techniques from other fields, there is a lot to be said for Wolff's approach. In fact, he observes that Rawls himself is an exemplary analytic philosopher in this greedy respect. But in virtue of this spong-like character, Wolff's stance generates historiographic challenges. For example, when it appeared The Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (1944) by von Neumann and Morgenstern, certainly did not belong to analytic philosophy. But you might be tempted to argue, as it was developed within political theory (Schelling, Riker, etc.) that game-theory also became assimilated by the analytic tradition after (say) Gauthier. By Wolff's standard we might well then at some point see von Neumann and Morgenstern's work as a key moment in pre-Rawlsian analytic political philosophy. Perhaps, my friend Ryan Muldoon might even be tempted to claim that! (Something like this has started to happen to Hayek as I discovered to my surprise.)

Anyway, Wolff's chapter is lovely. If for example, you want to know more about T.D. Weldon, who I mentioned in my digression last week on Riker's review of Buchanan and Tullock (because he was mentioned by Riker), you should check it out. But because of its reliance on the Philosophy, Politics and Society series, Wolff's chapter does have a modest bias to the English language even British philosophy. (The first series was explicitly insular in geographic/linguistic orientation.) And that can be seen if we read the survey by Deutsch and Rieselbach.

Analytic philosophy barely registers in their account. But the section on the "impact of communication studies," [sic!]closes with the following two paragraphs:

Insofar as the analysis of communications involves the analysis of messages, it leads to a concern with semantics. Insofar as it involves the analysis of communication channels and networks, it soon enters common ground with the theory of organizations. Logical analysis may be relevant for either of these two concerns, for logical analysis clarifies the content and meaning of messages and theories, and logical conjunctions and disjunctions-the "ands" or "ors" of logical discourse-often may correspond to the switching points or points of decision in communication networks or organizations.

Semantics has been developed in ways relevant to political theory and to the analysis of values by Charles Morris, Arne Naess, Charles E. Osgood, and in the semantic portions of the political writings of Anatol Rapoport. Symbolic logic has been used as a tool of political analysis by Robert Dahl in his A Preface to Democratic Theory and more recently by Felix E. Oppenheim in his Dimensions of Freedom. (153-154)

Sadly Weldon is absent, perhaps because he died in 1958.+  The two accompanying footnotes list the following works:

Charles Morris, Signification and Significance: A Study of the Relations of Signs and Values (Cambridge, Mass.: M I.T. Press, 1964) and his influential earlier work, Varieties of Human Value (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956); Arne Naess, Democracy, Ideology and Objectivity: Studies in the Semantics and Cognitive Analysis of Ideological Conflict (Oslo and Oxford: Oslo University Press and Basil Blackwell, 1956); Charles E. Osgood, G. J. Suci, and P. H. Tannenbaum, The Measurement of Meaning (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1957); Anatol Rapoport, Fights, Games and Debates (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960), Part III, "The Ethics of Debate," pp. 245-358; and Strategy and Conscience (New York: Harper, 1964), Part III: "The Two
Worlds," pp. 199-288. Robert A. Dahl, A Preface to Democratic Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956); Felix E. Oppenheim, Dimensions of Freedom (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1961).

Not all of these works would be thought analytic philosophy today.** Of these there are really only three candidates for inclusion: Morris, Naess, and Oppenheim. Charles Morris was really one of the key figures in the scientific wing of pragmatism which welcomed the European exiles who helped bring analytic philosophy to the United States through the unity of science movement. (Today Morris has been disowned by pragmatists and analytic philosophers alike.) I don't know anything about Signification and Significance, but his Varieties of Human Value is explicitly situated in the unity of science program, albeit more towards the empirical end and without (alas) much attention to political theory or politics.

I don't think many people today associate Naess with analytic philosophy given his towering influence on deep ecology (and even a subtle branch of Spinozism), but if you would open up his (1936) Erkenntnis und wissenschaftliches Verhalte you would feel like you had entered a Borgesian world. It's clearly analytic philosophy, but at the same time uncannily unfamiliar because (to bow to Wolff's criterion) it has had no discernable impact on the tradition. (I bet there is a similar aesthetic experience to be had if you read some of the untranslated folk from the Lvov-Warsaw School, and you can read Polish.) 

Naess's book, Democracy, Ideology and Objectivity has rightly been rediscovered (I hope) by XPHI folk (a sub-branch of analytic philosophy, but not especially salient in political philosophy alas, I think, but definitely salient to ethics). It is one of the funkiest books ever with a weird mix of history of ideas and new kinds of snowballing survey techniques to elicit views on the context relative views (of experts) on the meaning(s) of democracy and ideology. (That sentence does no justice to it.) While it seems entirely off the wall to call this 'analytical', it's worth nothing it is pretty contemporary with (recall) Donald Davidson's & Patrick Suppes' and Sidney Siegel' (1957) Decision Making. An Experimental Approach. The early 1950s are really an age of philosophers jumping into doing empirical social science alongside conceptual work. And from that vantage point, Morris actually looks like very much of his age.

Oppenheim's book is really very much how one would imagine a behaviorist, logical positivist analysis (including lots of capital Xs and ordinary y's.) It aims to offer an analysis even explication of 'freedom' such that the concept can be used in, or operationalized for, empirical social science (while still being fairly close to ordinary usage). It also has a normative aim: to make wise discussions about freedom possible. I don't think it had much uptake in either end.

Oppenheim "taught at the University of Delaware (1946–57), was a visiting faculty member in Philosophy at Yale University (1951–52), Research Associate in Philosophy at Stanford University (1954–55), Visiting Lecturer in Politics at Princeton University (1960), faculty member at the New School for Social Research (1960–61), Visiting Professor of Political Science at Amherst College (1963–64), Visiting Professor at Instituto di Scienze Politiche of the University of Turin (1965), Visiting Professor of Government at Columbia University (1967), Visiting Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford (1970), and Professor of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst from 1961 until his retirement in 1983." So, in his day he was clearly not obscure. 

While I think Oppenheim's 1944 "Logical Analsis of Law" is the more fruitful original work, Oppenheim's book deserves a more detailed, second look. But I mention all of this here because with Oppenheim I have found an early, analytic critic of Strauss (aside from Ernest Nagel). The criticism is developed in two journal articles from 1955 and 1957. To be continued...

 

 

*Since Carnap was not (recall) above using oblique hints (recall also Liam Kofi Bright), it's also possible that Carnap didn't need Strauss since they both had read Nietzsche.

**Rapoport is legendary for tit-for-tat and his role in game theory and general systems theory; Dahl was one of the giants of twentieth century democratic theory, who certainly intersected with and took from analytic methods.

+Russel and Popper go unmentioned in this review. For reasons that Wolff's paper makes clear.

 

Comments

[David Duffy]

FWIW, my only knowledge of this stuff is via John Harsanyi's (1975, but written 1973) "Can the maximin principle serve as a basis for morality. A critique of John Rawls's theory".

"...the concept of the original position...played an essential role in my own analysis of moral value judgments [1953, 1955], prior to its first use by Rawls in 1957...but the usefulness of this concept crucially depends on it being combined with a satisfactory decision rule."

Anyway, he only cites himself, von Neumann & Morgenstern, Arrow, Ramsey, and Anthony Down "An Economic Theory of Democracy" (1957).

PS "about to him them"

[Eric Schliesser]

Hi David,
You may enjoy the post on Riker linked to in this one.
There are variants of the original position out there in the decades prior to Rawls b. I would add, in addition to Harsanyi, also Buchanan/Tullock, and William Vickrey. (I have blogged about this a bit in the past.)
Cheers!
PS Merci, will correct

[Matt]

A few sort of random thoughts:
1) I'm slightly surprised to see no reference to the volume _Political Philosophy_ in the _Oxford readings in Philosophy_ series, edited by Anthony Quinton here. This series was, I think, for many areas very important in setting out "canonical" texts in analytic philosophy. (Searle's volume on philosophy of language, Strawson's on phiosophical logic, Foot's on ethics, Linksy's on reference and Modality, Raz on practical reasoning, etc.) Quinton's volume is in this sense odd. It's pre Theory of Justice (published in 1967), has nothing by Rawls at all, and has more citations of Strauss (1, plus one of Straussian H.V. Jaffa) than of Rawls (zero.) It does have some interesting papers in it (in particular a few by Brian Barry, and Hart's important "Are there any natural rights?"), but reading most of it, you don't get a strong impression that there was a very rich field here that got lost after the publication of TJ.

2) It's not implausible to describe Lastlett as "more of a historian", but he, himself, published Rawls's work in that series, and his work on Locke has been very influential on many philosophers. (His long, very helpful, introduction to the Cambridge History of Political Thought volume on the Two Treatises is one of the best things written on it, I'd say. If you read Rawls's lectures on Locke it's absolutely clear that Rawls is very heavily drawing from this.) (The series he edited didn't only reprint papers - Rawls's paper "Distributive Justice" was originally published in it, for example, though it did at least also reprint them. I'm not sure about the ratio of original to reprinted.)

3) Finally, I'd again insist that it's at least not obvious that Reisch has shown that "persecution was experienced" by many early analytic philosophers, at least not unless we are going to _really_ lower the level of what counts as persecution. My own view is that he doesn't make a very strong case for his causal claims at all, but at least I would want to insist that he's not shown that any significant figure was subject to, or had very strong fears of, "persecution".

[Eric Schliesser]

Hi Matt,
That's Great.

1) Wolff mentions and discusses Quinton's volume. So, the omission is by me. Simple answer: the piece on it is on the anvil. As to your claim that not much was lost; I kind of agree (if we take the Quinton volume as the baseline). If you go to my Riker piece from midweek, I think the third and fourth schools he discuss actually are attractive alternatives (because more shaped by and in dialogue with social science) to (or at least worth having alongside) the post-Rawlsian project but I know lots of folk will disagree with me.

2) Oh, when I say he's a historian, that's a compliment!:)

3) Remember that the Vienna and Berlin Circles (and fellow-travelers] had to flee their countries, and Russell had been imprisoned and denied jobs for his views. [So, we can ignore Reisch's cold war argument for my purposes!]