Digressions&Impressions

A rant on FTX, William MacAskill, and Utilitarianism

Philosophy goes through self-conscious, periodic bouts of historical forgetting.* These are moments when philosophical revolutionaries castigate the reading of books and the scholastic jargon to be found in there, and invite us to think for ourselves and start anew with a new method or new techniques, or new ways of formulating questions (and so on). When successful, what follows tends to be beautiful, audacious conceptual and even material world-building (in which sometimes old material is quietly recycled or reinterpreted). Hobbes, Descartes, Bentham, Frege, and Carnap are some paradigmatic exemplars of the phenomenon (that has something in common with, of course, religious reformations and scientific revolutions). There is a clear utility in not looking back.

What’s unusual about utilitarianism is not that it’s a nearly continuous intellectual tradition that is more than two centuries rich. Even if we start the clock with the pre-Socratics that’s not yet a very old tradition by the standards of the field. But rather that it has become so cavalier about curating and reflecting on its own tradition. In one sense that’s totally understandable from within the tradition: the present just is the baseline from which we act or design institutions or govern society (etc.). Spending time on the past just is opportunity costs foregone or, worse, a sunk-cost fallacy. Worrying about path dependencies and endowment effects prevents one from the decisive path forward.

Of course, the previous paragraph is too crude: some active utilitarians write with sensitivity and care about the less savory parts of tradition’s past (I think of Bart Schultz); And certainly Julia Driver has shown that moral complexity can be fruifully discussed in the tradition. Yet, most of what’s produced about the past from within the tradition is either very narrowly focused or the product of people who don’t really develop the tradition forward. (This claim becomes more evident if you look at the practice of Kantianism, Humeanism, and the variety of virtue ethics out there. Even within formal philosophy there is better curating of their own past.) Nothing has matched Halevy’s The Growth of Philosophic Radicalism in the century since it has appeared in richness and insight (and philosophically it is by no means without problems). Obviously, too much looking back stalls progress (one may think that this what happened say, within, phenomenology or Austrian economics at one point or another), but never checking the rearview mirror also generates certain known risks.

In fact, there is a clear recruiting advantage to this march-forward stance. The barriers to entry are very low, the fundamental principles are well developed and clear enough, and one can start making progress within utilitarianism or applying it to sets of problems rather quickly. And while that’s a gross simplification for areas where there has been lots of existing utilitarian activity, it remains true in the large. If you are earnest and want to improve the world, utilitarianism gives you ready-made tools to think about doing so!  And what tools–elegant, systematizing, and action-guiding! That they risk flattening things is a virtue not a bug. And because the baseline is given, a side effect has been that working within existing institutions is seen as more efficient and more promising to contribute to improving the world –say by making lots of money trading in crypto-currency — than by tackling some of the opaque, entrenched structural injustices through the political processes that got us here.

That’s to say, within utilitarianism there is a curious, organic forgetting built into the way it’s practiced, especially by the leading lights who shape it as an intellectual movement within philosophy (and economics, of course), and as a social movement. And this is remarkable because utilitarianism for all its nobility and good effects has been involved in significant moral and political disasters involving not just, say, coercive negative eugenics and – while Bentham rejected this — imperialism (based on civilizational superiority commitments in Mill and others), but a whole range of bread and butter social debacles that are the effect of once popular economics or well-meaning government policy gone awry. But in so far as autopsies are done by insiders they never question that it is something about the character of utilitarian thought, when applied outside the study, that may be the cause of the trouble (it’s always misguided practitioners, the circulation of false beliefs, the wrong sort of utilitarianism, etc.).

In my view there is no serious study within the utilitarian mainstream that takes the inductive risk of itself seriously and – and this is the key part – has figured out how to make it endogenous to the practice. This is actually peculiar because tracking inductive risk just is tracking consequences and (if you wish) utils. It is especially odd because there is, within utilitarianism, a continuous return to the question — which in a way is crying out for an inductive risk analysis — of how much lying and deception of the public is permissible, or to be precise, “the possibility of esoteric morality.” (I also find it odd that this literature is part of the public, credit economy rather than an oral tradition. But what do I know about esotericism?)

For example, the best example I am familiar with that has really started to do something like what I propose within philosophy (within economics I warmly recommend work by David M. Levy, Sandra Peart, and Thomas C. Leonard), from someone who at least gives utilitarianism all the benefits of the doubt, Allen Buchanan’s (2007) “Institutions, Beliefs and Ethics:  Eugenics as a Case Study” ends up arguing that “ethics must incorporate social moral epistemology, the systematic comparative evaluation of the effectiveness and efficiency of social institutions in producing, transmitting and sustaining the beliefs upon which our moral motivation, judgment and reasoning depend.” This paper has received fewer citations that some of my papers on long dead figures, so it is fair to say it has not generated a major discussion fifteen years on. UPDATE: It has received little scholarly attention.** The most serious response I found suggests (by De Volder, who I admire greatly) basically that ‘this time is different’ (because liberal eugenics does not involve coercion—a claim that is not scrutinized). Maybe I have missed the utilitarian that has taken it seriously, but if it’s out there it has not generated a real debate or uptake.

Notice that Buchanan simply denies the autonomy of ethics. But even if one accepts that diagnosis (and this helps say, guard, against expert over-confidence and misplaced trust in other experts) this does not exhaust the inductive risk. And while in some philosophical theories downstream consequences are shrugged off within utilitarianism today long distance, downstream consequences are the opiate of several projects (including, of course, longtermism). In wider historical context, this unwillingness to take seriously inductive risk of philosophy, in a project that aims to reshape the world, is also odd because the father figure of philosophy, Socrates, was executed, in part, in virtue of the perceived negative effect he had on his students.

Don’t get me wrong utilitarianism is a beautiful, systematic theory, a lovely tool to help navigate acting in the world in a consistent and transparent matter. When used prudently it’s a good way to keep track of one’s assumptions and the relationship between means and ends. But like all tools it has limitations. And my claim is that the tradition refuses to do systematic post-mortems on when the tool is implicated in moral and political debacles. Yes, somewhat ironically, the effective altruism community (in which there is plenty to admire) tried to address this in terms of, I  think, project failure. But that falls short in willing to learn when utilitarianism is likely to make one a danger to innocent others.

This present rant — feel free to check out my more judicious scholarship and blogging about this topic — is obviously triggered by the failure of FTX and the subsequent public comments by William MacAskill, who quite naturally seems angry that he was lied to (although how sincere he is in light of the possibility of esoteric morality I leave to others), and correctly outraged on behalf of the victims that the benefactor of his movement probably committed significant fraud and theft. And if you do not believe me that massive historical forgetting is at play here, at one point in his twitter thread MacAskill writes, “I know that others from inside and outside of the community have worried about the misuse of EA ideas in ways that could cause harm. I used to think these worries, though worth taking seriously, seemed speculative and unlikely.”  As if to think such harms had not already occurred in the past!

I close with one final criticism of MacAskill (who in some ways is a victim of the stories utilitarians tell themselves). When it comes to his own role in the FTX debacle — and the story has been told in many media (in the context of his book launch) — about how he encouraged  Bankman-Fried to embrace “earning to give” over a by now mythical lunch in Cambridge, about that no word in his thread. (Just to be sure, I am actually a fan of effective altruism, albeit a critic of long-termism.)

By framing the problem as Mr. Bankman-Fried’s “integrity” and not the underlying tool, MacAskill will undoubtedly manage to learn no serious lesson at all. I am not implicating utilitarianism in the apparent ponzi scheme. But Bankman-Fried’s own description back in April of his what he was up to should have set off alarm bells among those who associated with him–commentators noticed it bore a clear resemblance to a Ponzi.+ (My regular readers know I am no enemy of markets.) Of course, and I say this especially to my friends who are utilitarians; I have not just discussed a problem only within utilitarianism; philosophy as a professional discipline always assumes its own clean hands, or finds ways to sanitize the existing dirt.

Mill, The Art of Government, Tocqueville (and Foucault), Part II

The native of New England is attached to his township because it is independent and free: his co-operation in its affairs ensures his attachment to its interest; the well-being it affords him secures his affection; and its welfare is the aim of his ambition and of his future exertions: he takes a part in every occurrence in the place; he practises the art of government in the small sphere within his reach; he accustoms himself to those forms which can alone ensure the steady progress of liberty; he imbibes their spirit; he acquires a taste for order, comprehends the union or the balance of powers, and collects clear practical notions on the nature of his duties and the extent of his rights.--Tocqueville (1835) Democracy in America, Translated by Henry Reeve, Esq. (1835) Vol 1. Book 1, Chapter 5, Necessity Of Examining The Condition Of The States—Part I

The quoted passage also caught Mill's attention because he quotes it verbatim in his review of the Reeve translation.* My interest here is not in the empirical basis of Tocqueville's presentation of New England.+ But in the claims about the art of government. Anticipating Dewey (and his followers), Tocqueville emphasizes that the New England township facilitates practical learning of the art of government in a relatively circumscribed political domain. The effects of such practice have a multiplicity of purported benefits: some are relate to individual character formation (e.g., a taste for public order), some involve knowledge of the structure of government (the balance of powers), some involve an education in citizenship and one's legal protections (the nature of one duties as well as acquiring the "spirit" of freedom, and extend of one's rights), and some involve practical knowledge  (how to promote liberty). What's striking here is the heterogeneous character of the consequences of engaging in the art of knowledge locally. 

Now, this heterogeneity can be partly explained by the fact that, as Tocqueville explains, while townships end up delegating a lot of tasks to particular individuals, the setting of the tasks in light of each other and in light of a whole number of practical constraints: e.g., what taxes will pay for them, do county, state, and federal laws impact these aims: how will neighboring townships respond, does the town have capacity and expertise to pursue them. The nuts and bolts deliberation is a collective enterprise. (As Mill notes ruefully, this is easier in the context of "high wages and high profits," [where] "every citizen can afford to attend to public affairs." And, surely, one of the motives for defending a basic income on democratic grounds.)

Tocqueville is unclear exactly which parts of the process are included in the art of government. But here it seems to involve (i) the setting of political aims, (ii) the assigning of positions and officers to complete these, and (iii) the execution/administration of these. And the skills required for this clearly involve training by doing it. And what makes townships so useful for this is that the issues are relatively low stakes, and tend to repeat over time and in nearby townships. So, that in any deliberative body there will be those that have experienced how the township has handled the problem before (and there may well be legal precedents around) and how others might have tackled them. In his review, Mill puts the point as follows in his review:

But the ever-increasing intervention of the people, and of all classes of the people, in their own affairs, he regards as a cardinal maxim in the modern art of government: and he believes that the nations of civilized Europe, though not all equally advanced, are all advancing, towards a condition in which there will be no distinctions of political rights, no great or very permanent distinctions of hereditary wealth; when, as there will remain no classes nor individuals capable of making head against the government, unless all are, and are fit to be, alike citizens, all will ere long be equally slaves.**

Even so, Tocqueville is quite clear that township education in the art of government is not a panacea for the more topdown art of government. As he writes in chapter 13 (in a section titled, "Instability Of The Administration In The United States"):

But the persons who conduct the administration in America can seldom afford any instruction to each other; and when they assume the direction of society, they simply possess those attainments which are most widely disseminated in the community, and no experience peculiar to themselves. Democracy, carried to its furthest limits, is therefore prejudicial to the art of government; and for this reason it is better adapted to a people already versed in the conduct of an administration than to a nation which is uninitiated in public affairs.

In this passage from chapter 13, the 'art of government' almost seems equivalent to what we would call 'public administration" (recall (iii)).  'Tocqueville's underlying point is also registered by Mill in his review. Tocqueville intimates that one of the benefits of an aristocratic political order is that it provides a ruling class leisure to prepare for and acquire the theoretical, empirical, and practical skill-set of running a great state. And one may well add that getting elected may itself not be so useful in running things. (Schumpeter, of course, picks up on this theme.) Lurking in Tocqueville's account is also a more general view that while democracy involves a raising of median and mean quality of the population along many dimensions, it also involves a certain kind of leveling, which generates the conditions of despotism (something highly salient again, and that also attracts the attention of learned commentators). It's passages like these that create the reperation of Tocqueville as a kind of aristocratic liberal.

But on Tocqueville's view this leveling should impact the quality of science and art of administration.  With regard to science, democracies have found it useful to develop lengthy apprenticeship programs and many decades of education in degreed programs to combat this problem. (And one may add that in more recent times assortative mating among scientists is also nudged by the way such education is organized.) No such equivalent exists for the running of society (except the existence of occasional political dynasties in families.) 

The final use of the 'art of government' in Democracy of America is found in the chapter summary of chapter 16. Initially, it also seems to involve the fairly narrow use of he term as public admininistration (which, of course, is a very heterogeneous category itself):

The townships, municipal bodies, and counties may therefore be looked upon as concealed break-waters, which check or part the tide of popular excitement. If an oppressive law were passed, the liberties of the people would still be protected by the means by which that law would be put in execution: the majority cannot descend to the details and (as I will venture to style them) the puerilities of administrative tyranny. Nor does the people entertain that full consciousness of its authority which would prompt it to interfere in these matters; it knows the extent of its natural powers, but it is unacquainted with the increased resources which the art of government might furnish.

The underlying point is an important one for those that defend the social utility of federalism and intermediary bodies against desposotism (and more prosaically) bad legislation. But a closer look suggests that the art of government is more than public adminsitration, if we think of it as just the skill at running things. Clearly here (iv) the art of government provides resources for active citizenship. In fact, what we might call the version involved 'civil disobedience' or 'practical resistance against authority' from below. (Passages like this tend to get ignored by friends of aristocratic liberalism.)

Notice that one of the effects of the art of government can teach citizens the extent of their own power to resist. I suspect lurking here is the idea that in a democracy, even the despotic kinds, ultimately authority rests on (informed) opinion. Informed in so far as that the art of government teaches theoretical knowledge and practical skills. And in particular it teaches citizens where in the gigantic state structure local action can be effective in slowing things down, if not halting them.

As regular readers know, yesterday (here) I suggested that in his (1861) Considerations on Representative Government, Mill divides political theory/philosophy in two. One is engaged with  the basic structure or as he puts it, the "fundamental constitution of the government." This is institutional design. (Recall this post, which discusses some of the pertinent vies of Mill's System of Logic.) And the other, is the art of government, that is, the understanding of the mode of conducting the practical business of government, including a normative version of it in liberal democracies.

Now, there is a rather prominent use of the phrase 'art of government' that I have skipped so far. So let me close with it. The final stirring paragraph of Mill's (1859) On Liberty (which also the final section V), starts with the following passage:

To determine the point at which evils, so formidable to human freedom and advancement, begin, or rather at which they begin to predominate over the benefits attending the collective application of the force of society, under its recognised chiefs, for the removal of the obstacles which stand in the way of its well-being; to secure as much of the advantages of centralized power and intelligence, as can be had without turning into governmental channels too great a proportion of the general activity—is one of the most difficult and complicated questions in the art of government. It is, in a great measure, a question of detail, in which many and various considerations must be kept in view, and no absolute rule can be laid down. But I believe that the practical principle in which safety resides, the ideal to be kept in view, the standard by which to test all arrangements intended for overcoming the difficulty, may be conveyed in these words: the greatest dissemination of power consistent with efficiency; but the greatest possible centralization of information, and diffusion of it from the centre. Thus, in municipal administration, there would be, as in the New England States, a very minute division among separate officers, chosen by the localities, of all business which is not better left to the persons directly interested; but besides this, there would be, in each department of local affairs, a central superintendence, forming a branch of the general government.++ 

The reference to "municipal administration" in "New England" suggests that he is harking back to Tocqueville (and his own discussion of Democracy in America). And, in fact, Mill is suggesting here a way to correct the problems with township governance by creating a parallel administrative central structure to be alert to problems and whose main task would be to supply information and shared practices. (Nick Cowen and I have used this passage to discuss the role of what we call the articulate state.)

Here the art of government is clearly not merely public administration. It involves considerable judgment, and the capacity to balance empirical and normative considerations. In addition, while knowledge of the mode of conducting the practical business of government is presupposed in it here, it also involves what we might call questions of mechanism design, even institutional design in light of multiple political aims (efficiency, freedom, and progress).***

Since this post has gone on, I close here and leave discussion of the significance of this semantic instability, or broad reach of the 'art of government' to another time. 

 

Mill's Elitism and Progressivism, The Art of Government, Tocqueville (and Foucault), Part I

The mode of conducting the practical business of government, which is best under a free constitution, would generally be best also in an absolute monarchy: only, an absolute monarchy is not so likely to practise it. The laws of property, for example; the principles of evidence and judicial procedure; the system of taxation and of financial administration, need not necessarily be different in different forms of government. Each of these matters has principles and rules of its own, which are a subject of separate study. General jurisprudence, civil and penal legislation, financial and commercial policy, are sciences in themselves, or rather, separate members of the comprehensive science or art of government: and the most enlightened doctrines on all these subjects, though not equally likely to be understood or acted on under all forms of government, yet, if understood and acted on, would in general be equally beneficial under them all. It is true that these doctrines could not be applied without some modifications to all states of society and of the human mind: nevertheless, by far the greater number of them would require modifications solely of detail, to adapt them to any state of society sufficiently advanced to possess rulers capable of understanding them. A government to which they would be wholly unsuitable, must be one so bad in itself, or so opposed to public feeling, as to be unable to maintain itself in existence by honest means.--J.S.Mill (1861) Considerations on Representative Government, Chapter 2 ("The Criterion of a Good Form of Government.)

One can find passages in Mill's writings that suggest he was a skeptic about the very possibility of an art of government. But some of the works that endured endorse the art, and even suggest it, as above, that it is a "comprehensive science." In Mill, this tends to mean, amongst other things, that it is a body of rules (see System of Logic). But in the quoted passage he also emphasizes that these involve certain "doctrines."

In virtue of the fact that these rules are context insensitive, Mill is willing to call these rules a 'science.' Presumably the rules, which are built on a body of empirical generalizations (in the indicative), have the character of (what he and his followers) would call 'imperative statements' (recall this post). These have the task of providing one the means for given ends, that is, a kind of instrumental or conditional rationality. This is actually something meta, because government itself has this kind of instrumental rationality baked into its purpose according to Mill; it exists (no surprise here given his utilitarianism) to promote "the interests of any given society." 

Interestingly enough, and this anticipates Foucault's observation (recall here) on the liberal art of government as such in the first few sentences of the Birth of Biopolitics, for Mill there is a version of the art 'which is best under a free government.' Now undoubtedly he does not mean to say, in the first instance, that this is the optimal art of government, but in the second instance he notes that is best sans phrase. It turns out that there is a normative art of government that would be context invariant.

Obviously, I overstate Mill's explicit position. As the ancients teach there are more modes of tyrannical government, where, as he notes, the normative art of government is impossible by definition because it would be self-underming ("A government...so bad in itself, or so opposed to public feeling, as to be unable to maintain itself in existence by honest means").* But what Mill calls a 'free constitution' and an 'absolute monarchy' do not exhaust the non-tyrannical options. (By a 'free constitution' Mill means something like what we call a 'liberal democracy' to considerable degree.) I return to this issue below. But Mill allows (and there are echoes of Hume here), that good government is, in principle, possible in an absolute monarchy even if it is rare in practice.

I take it that the 'art of government' just is, for Mill, well grounded skill at what he calls 'the practical business of government.' And this happens to be subdivided into a whole number of practical disciplines commonly taught we might surmise in law schools ("General jurisprudence, civil and penal legislation") and public policy or and/or economics departments ("financial and commercial policy.") The point is not just that within the art of government there is a cognitive division of labor, specialization, but also that these disciplines are ultimately subordinate to a larger purpose.

Some of you may be eager to remind me that strictly speaking the art of government is not really context insensitive. Mill quite clearly presupposes something like a distinction between advanced civilization, and those cultures that still require some tutelage. As he puts it at the start of the chapter that I have been quoting, "the proper functions of a government are not a fixed thing, but different in different states of society; much more extensive in a backward than in an advanced state." This stadial idea of cultural development is deeply woven into Mill's social theory (and, obviously, is a part of his support for a certain kind of reformed imperialism.) Strictly speaking, and this is a further strain of elitism in Mill, only those that would have to apply the art of government need to 'advance' to the level familiar from civilized culture. 

As an aside, every time I confront these features of Mill's thought I always despair a little bit for the liberal tradition. But I also find in it a salutary lesson that great moral sensitivity is compatible with great obtuseness, and this should make us skeptical in our dispositions about our own certitudes. (No, I won't preach more of my skepticism today.)

Be that as it may, somewhat paradoxically, where the art of government is most needed (the underdeveloped state), according to Mill, because there government must have many functions, it is unavailable because (to put in modern slightly more neutral terms, well only slightly) of a lack of human capital to develop and implement it. Mill himself uses puts it as follows: "the most important point of excellence which any form of government can possess is to promote the virtue and intelligence of the people themselves." So, lurking here is the idea that real development presupposes considerable state capacity and expertise that rests on considerable human capital. And as a people develop government functions disappear or wither away. (I put it like that because there is something analogous in Marxism.) A nation of super-intelligent spinozist sages would not need any government. But the tragedy of human life (and development) is, on Mill's view, that (knowledgeable) investment in human capital only really gets going after decent enough government has been achieved.

For Mill, "one criterion of the goodness of a government, the degree in which it tends to increase the sum of good qualities in the governed, collectively and individually, since, besides that their well-being is the sole object of government, their good qualities supply the moving force which works the machinery [of government]." When I started this post, I wanted to say something about how we can discern here in Mill a response to Tocqueville but about that some time more. I do note that we can see here some non-trivial kinship between Becker and Stigler and Mill. So, when discussing the programming of human capital by Chicago, Foucault's tendency to treat Becker and Stigler as the natural culmination and intensification of the utilitarian-philosophical-radical traditon (in context Mill is clear that his views on this point have an affinity with Bentham's) is actually well grounded. (I have a suspicion that Halevy and Lepage have something to do with this. But again, some other time more.)

One element of the art of government is guided by the following doctrine (which looks back to Hume and Spinoza and Madison): "The ideally perfect constitution of a public office is that in which the interest of the functionary is entirely coincident with his duty." And this, for Mill, scales up to what Rawls calls the 'basic institutions:' "What we have said of the arrangements for the detailed administration of the government is still more evidently true of its general constitution. All government which aims at being good is an organization of some part of the good qualities existing in the individual members of the community for the conduct of its collective affairs." 

That is, we may say then, that Mill divides what we can call political theory/philosophy in two. One is engaged with  the basic structure or as he puts it, the "fundamental constitution of the government." This is institutional design. (Recall this post.) And the other, is the art of government, that is, the understanding of the mode of conducting the practical business of government, Obviously, there is an important connection between the two because there are going to be many interaction effects between them. While it is tempting to see the designing of the 'fundamental constitution' as the more important institution (since it molds the rest), as the argument above has revealed, without the proper clay it won't get off the ground. And so that means that, in practice, the constitution, and even the most general principles that enter into the art of government must respect context. (The rest of the chapter articulates this very point.) In this chapter, Mill treats the art of government as part of political philosophy.** 

Here I want to close with an observation. One may well think in light of the significance of professional schools above, that fundamentally the art of government is something technocratic for Mill. But I don't think that's quite right. Not only because of the ways in which empirical and normative elements blend in it. For the aim of the art is something programmatic: the capacity to articulate and implement modes of government that "favor and promote, not some one improvement, but all forms and degrees of it." And while that  presupposes an ideal constitution, which is to be developed theoretically, it also presupposes a program of open-ended intellectual, moral, and social progress in our capacities for (and this is the significance of my Spinozist joke above), self-government. 

 

 

 

Adam Smith's Stadial History; On Paul Sagar's Adam Smith Reconsidered, Pt 1.

According to the natural course of things, therefore, the greater part of the capital of every growing society is, first, directed to agriculture, afterwards to manufactures, and last of all to foreign commerce. This order of things is so very natural, that in every society that had any territory, it has always, I believe, been in some degree observed. Some of their lands must have been cultivated before any considerable towns could be established, and some sort of coarse industry of the manufacturing kind must have been carried on in those towns, before they could well think of employing themselves in foreign commerce.--Adam Smith (1776) Wealth of Nations (hereafter WN), 3.1.8, 380)

The quoted paragraph presupposes a distinction between a stagnant and a growing society. This is as an important distinction because for Smith only growing societies, with the right sort of institutions -- especially the legal protection of all against violence by the wealthy and with, as Lisa Herzog (2016) has put it, with the possibility of “working one’s way up” --  can really be flourishing, including the vast majority of the working poor. (Growth is as Herzog notes instrumental to that.)* This is not to deny that for Smith individual or sectorial/class flourishing (and individual great virtue) is possible in stagnant socities. 

In fact, in Smith's anlysis stagnant societies can be very wealthy. Then contemporary China "a country much richer than any part of Europe," (WN 1.11.n.1, 256) is the most prominent example. (See also WN 1.11.e.34,  208) In fact, as is well known, according to Smith "China seems to have been long stationary, and had probably long ago acquired that full complement of riches which is consistent with the nature of its laws and institutions." (WN 1.9.15, 111) On my account (which is pretty standard) this suggests that Smith thinks a different set of laws and institutions may well be capable of turning China into a growing society again. 

By contrast, most stagnant societies are poor (and miserable) because they are characterized by lawless violence. The characteristic exemplar of this is feudalism (e.g. WN 3.3.12, 405), “where men are continually afraid of the violence of their superiors.” (WN 2.1.31, 285) To be sure, very rich countries can engage in lawless violence abroad, and he relentlessly criticizes “the savage injustice of the Europeans” in their colonial imperialism (WN 4.1.32, 448), which is defended by ideologues and merchants (hence the name, 'mercantile system'). 

Now, in the quoted passage at the top of the post, Smith clearly presents a stadial growth model of the direction of capital (accumulation and) investment. This has three stages corresponding to three sectors of the economy (viz. "agriculture....manufactures...foreign commerce.) This natural growth model has a kind of ceteris paribus condition built into it. Because in the very next paragraph Smith recognizes that “unnatural and retrograde order(s)" are possible and in fact have existed throughout European history. (WN 3.1.9, 380) Somehow these do not falsify or refute the stadial growth model (or its natural path). I return to the relationship of the stadial growth model and historical reality below.

The present post is triggered by the first chapter of Paul Sagar's new (2022) book, Adam Smith Reconsidered.  The main point of the chapter is to suggest that nearly all scholars have misunderstood Smith's concept of a 'commercial society.' [Even by his own lights, Sagar is rather "polemical."  (p.10)] And that's because according to Sagar, who self-consciously is following his mentor István Hont (p.12), 'society' "properly denotes the internal relations of a given community." And this is "distinct from 'nation', 'country', or 'state'. In Smith's usage 'nation', 'country', and 'state' denote a community in regards to its external relations...in particular in the arenas of military and economic competition." (pp. 47-48. Emphasis in original.) And because other scholars (including Hont) tend to miss or forget the distinction, they end up misrepresenting or distorting Smith's views. Let me stipulate, for the sake of argument, that Sagar and Hont are right that there is an important theoretically salient contrast between Smith's use  of 'commercial society' and 'commercial nation' (state/country). And, so it follows that if one were to attend to the distinction one would represent Smith otherwise. So, in what follows I leave Sagar's main claim untouched (in part because it would require engagement with the rest of the book).

Now, as Sagar notes, it is common among Smith scholars to attribute to Smith a stadial account of history. And usually by this is meant a four-stage large scale social development model that runs from hunter-gathering, to shepherding, to agricultural, and to -- and this is key to Sagar's argument --the fourth stage, that is, 'commercial society.' These stages are kind of (Weberian) ideal types in which a particular form of economic organization predominates (and, user-friendly, gives the stage its name) and greatly shapes the social order. (This way of understanding Smith became especially popular through the influence of Marx and Marxist scholarship, but is now mainstream.)

In my view, there are two standard ways of understanding this stadial, large scale social develoment model. One treats it as a rough outline of actual historical development and another treats it as an instance of (what since Dugald Stewart, who, besides being an influential philosopher, also penned an early influential biography of Smith) is called 'conjectural history.' (To simplify: conjectural history is a kind of counterfactual, 'how possible' account that is generally causal in character.) I was a bit surprised to read Sagar claim that there is a 'standard model' of interpreting Smith in which nearly all scholars hold both ways at once. (p. 15) I had never noticed this (despite the obvious tensions it would entail). But let me leave that aside in what follows.

Here's the first important point: the stadial growth model and the stadial, large scale social development model are clearly not the same! They focus on different things (capital vs whole social orders) and they don't even have the same number of stages. While Sagar never quite diagnosis it like this (and misses some details), his polemics start from this textual fact. And I think he could agree with everything I said up until now (except that I explicitly added a Ceteris paribus condition to the economic model).

So, the existence of these two contrasting stadial models, requires a number of exegetical and conceptual choices among scholars. According to Sagar other scholars have botched those choices. (His footnotes are relentless on this.) This matters because Sagar wants to reject the idea that Smith is a defender of 'commercial society' in the (unqualified even anachronistic) way this is usually presented by other scholars, but really is a theorist of politics and (to look ahead to future chapters) that the choice is really about the kind of commercial society we want. I actually have lots of sympathy for, and agreement with, Sagar's larger project. So, while I will be critical of Sagar in what follows, I don't want to hide my agreements.

In my 2017 book, I had treated the large scale social model in chapter 6. (Sagar calls it a 'nuanced picture.') Sagar entirely misses that I had treated the stadial growth model in a chapter "The Methodology of the Wealth of Nations" that I think Sagar completely skipped. (In fairness to him my book is long and I don't alert the reader to the fact that I treat the stadial models differently in part because I was more interested in exploring the epistemic pay-offs of them.) On my account the stadial growth model is a tool to develop an analysis of the causes (many of them political in character) and institutions that prevent long term growth. (Recall the treatment of China above.) My account of the growth model and its focus on institutions builds on earlier, widely cited work by the economist Nathan Rosenberg (1960)  and the intellectual historian (1993) Jerry Muller.+ What I added to their approach is simple: historical deviations from the growth model (pretty much all of European history since the fall of the Roman Empire!) help identify major social (and natural) causes. (What I learned from Sagar's book (e.g. p. 24) is that I should have emphasized more the role of war among these casues for Smith.) I argued for this understanding of Smith's project in Books I-III of Wealth of Nations by offering a new account of Smith's philosophy of science. So, my reading of the stadial growth model rejects it as real history and rejects it as conjectural history.** 

By contrast, I argued that the large scale social model is indeed a kind of conjectural history. (Inspired by Emma Rothschild's work, most of my own interpretation of Smith is very cautious about accepting Dugald Stewart's account of Smith. By contrast Rothschild barely registers in Sagar.) But the large scale social model is, on my account, designed to identify important social-conceptual necessitation relations within and between stages. You don't have to accept my reading, I mention it here as an illustration of what a scholar might do. (And also to suggest that Sagar misses alternative options to the ones he diagnoses in others and to his own.) 

Sagar's own position is not far from my own, but he synthesizes the two stadial models into one, and then treats this as "a simplified economic model charactising the anticipated path of development for individual socities absent political distruption." (p. 16) As you can see that's not far of my chapter on the methodology of WN (and an earlier, well cited 2005 article, which was the core of my dissertation). I have to admit I was a bit surprised he did not drop a note to Rosenberg's, Mullers, or my work (anywhere between pp. 20-23), but since Sagar has no or negligible interest in the details of what we would now call 'Smith's economics' (and his philosophy of science) I would not expect detailed discussion of my analysis. (I do admit that I find it peculiar to do book length studies of Wealth of Nations without interest in the details of Smith's political economy, but to each their own.)

Now, Sagar is not uncommon in presenting Smith as offering one kind of stadial model.  Let's call this the monomodel approach, and Sagar may well be right it is the dominant approach (although as I suggest above his depiction of the consensus seems off to me). Moreover, while I reject the monomodel approach,  Maria Pia Paganelli has argued  that Smith holds no stadial model at all. Be that as it may, Sagar is, in fact, almost alone among contemporary monomodel-types of treating it as a "simplified economic model."

Another important feature of Sagar's approach is that the final, fourth stage is not a "commercial society," which recall from above has a technical meaning, but a "commercial age." And if he is right about Smith's usage, this is an important correction to the standard picture of the monomodel he is criticizing. 

At this point a reader may well wonder why Sagar attributes to Smith four stages (since the passage I quote at the top of the post only has three stages). In fact, to the best of my knowledge in this book he never engages with the passages I quoted at the top of the post (or if he does rather obliquely). This is rather odd because he treats surrounding passages in WN (e.g. p. 23); and the editors of the (standard) edition of WN that he uses and cites,  single it out in their general introduction (WN p. 55).

Now, it is worth noting that in Wealth of Nations, Smith never explicitly mentions a four stage model as many scholars have observed. But Smith does discuss a four stage model in his Lectures on Jurisprudence (and many commentators have projected it onto WN). In fact, I really admire Sagar's treatment of Smith's account of this material from the Lectures throughout the chapter. (Because I am interested in the public Smith, I had downplayed this material.) And Sagar is very attentive to development between the earlier Lectures and WN. So far so good.

But while Sagar is an official monomodeler, he does identify another ad hoc three stages model in Book of V of Wealth of Nations  (WN 5.1.a.7). [Sorry, I knew this might be dizzying!] Now Sagar claims that this three stage model is basically the standard stadial model circulating in the period (p. 36). He offers no evidence for the claim, although it is certainly true that three stage models (note the plural) circulated in the period. But in Sagar's account this three stage ad hoc model is only making a restricted point in Smith: "that matters of defense are conditions by the subsistence methods prevalent in any form of human community." (37) And, if I understand Sagar correctly, this is primarily a rhetorical/pedagogical device ("to make this apparent to his audience Smith" (p. 37)) and not to be confused with the official (four stage) model Sagar attributes to Smith.  

You may note that the ad hoc model shares an imfortant feature with what I have called the large scale social development model: that modes of production constrain and shape other important social features. Some Marxists have seen in this a partial anticipation of the materialist conception of history, after all. And it should be clear now why most monomodelers don't think of WN 5.1.a.7 as ad hoc at all. They see in it the application of the main four stage model. By contrast, I treat it as evidence to reconstruct my (nuanced) interpretation of large scale social model. Either way, I find it really odd that after so much sturm und drang, Sagar needs to introduce an ad hoc model into his account. 

Now, if we return to Sagar's analysis of the main model, it is crucial to Sagar's argument that, first, only the first two stages of Smith's model have a genuine counterpart in real history according to the sources available to Smith (16). And, second, in "real history," and the presence of pervasive violence, Smith identifies a developmental trap so that almost no societies advance to the third stage (25-26). The second, especially, is an important point and I hope generates further discussion. (I am not sure why Sagar would deny that for Smith there have been quite a few agrigultural ages.)

But notice that Sagar's diagnosis is compatible with the distinction I started out with in this post. While there is much fascinating change, when it comes to structural capital growth, most societies are in virtue of the effects of pervasive violence treated as stagnant by Smith. (As should be clear if Sahlins, James C. Scott, Graeber & Wengrow are right, Smith is wrong about this.) And, in fact, there is an important distinction lurking here.

Among stagnant societies there are really two kinds according to Smith. Those societies that stagnate in virtue of such pervasive violence are de facto barbarous (or savage). And wealthy societies (with arts and sciences) that stagnate in virtue of their laws and institutions fall under the class of civilized societies. (That is, there are stagnant and growing civilizations.) This distinction (made famous by Pocock) operates explicitly in a passage that Sagar quotes (p 50 n. 48):

The fall of the western empire is the third great revolution in the affairs of mankind, of which antient history has preserved any distinct or circumstantial account. It was brought about by the irresistible superiority which the militia of a barbarous, has over that of a civilized nation; which the militia of a nation of shepherds, has over that of a nation of husbandmen, artificers, and manufacturers. (WN 5.1.a.36, 704)

But rather than treating Rome as a 'civilized' state, Sagar insists that it is "made plain" here that Smith treats Rome as a "commercial society." (P. 50 note 48) Now, textually the passage simply does not support Sagar's claim. (In fact, Smith doesn't use 'commercial' anywhere near it.) My point is not to nitpick about this passage. But rather, that Sagar is so wedded to his own monomodel that he imposes it on the text in places where there is no need to do so. He could, of course, argue in the other direction that given that civilized states are always 'commercial society' in the technical sense diagnosed by Hont and Sagar, he can interpret the passage in the way he does. But this is not Sagar's procedure, and it would be false.

Finally, Sagar is just wrong that the ad hoc model that he ascribes to Smith in Book V just is the one circulating in the period. It is very clear that Smith disagrees with Hume's influential three-stage-model. (I have described this in my book p 309ff.) This bears on Sagar's treatment of the distinction between a society and a nation/state, so I will return to it before long. But for now I should stop.

 

 

Foucault on Hume on Interest and (Adaptive) Preference

What English empiricism introduces...and doubtless for the first time in Western philosophy, is a subject...who appears in the form of a subject of individual choices which are both irreducible and non-transferable....

Second, this type of choice is non-transferable. I do not mean that it is non-transferable in the sense that one choice could not be replaced by another. You could perfectly well say that if you prefer health to illness, you may also prefer illness to health, and then choose illness. It is also clear that you may perfectly well say: I prefer to be ill and that someone else is not. But, in any case, on what basis will this substitution of one choice for another be made? It will be made on the basis of my own preference and on the basis of the fact that I would find someone else being ill more painful, for example, than being ill myself. In the end the principle of my choice really will be my own feeling of painful or not painful, of pain and pleasure. There is Hume’s famous aphorism which says: If I am given the choice between cutting my little finger and the death of someone else, even if I am forced to cut my little finger, nothing can force me to think that cutting my little finger is preferable to the death of someone else.
So, these are irreducible choices which are non-transferable in relation to the subject. This principle of an irreducible, non-transferable, atomistic individual choice which is unconditionally referred to the subject himself is what is called interest.--Michel Foucault, 28 March 1979, The Birth of Biopolitics, pp. 271-272. 

This is the third of my recent posts on Foucault's reading of Hume in The Birth of Biopolitics (recall here; and here). In the first paragraph of the quoted passage I have removed Foucault's reference to Locke as the world-historical origin of English empiricism as the fount of Utilitarianism. Foucault is almost certainly inspired by Élie Halévy's classic (1901-1904) The Growth of Philosophic Radicalism, which I now know Foucault studied. (We have some of Foucault's note-taking on volume 2 [see here].) I have also removed Foucault's taxonomy of different kinds of approaches to identify a subject in 'Western philosophy.' Here I am also skipping Foucault's treatment of Appendix 1, “Concerning Moral Sentiment” to Hume's (1751) An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, which illustrates  what it is for a choice to be irreducible in empiricism, according to Foucault. I do so not because these topics are uninteresting (on the contrary, they are too interesting), but because I want to focus on Foucault's analysis of Hume's account of the non-transferability of choices. (I am unfamiliar with other work on this topic so feel free to share your suggestions.)

In the paragraph I skipped Foucault had shown that for an empiricist (like Locke and Hume) "The painful or non-painful nature of the thing is in itself a reason for the choice beyond which you cannot go." (p. 272. This is irreducibility of choice, or what Foucault calls "the regressive end point in the analysis.") While a lot can be said about this, let's stipulate it's true for the sake of argument. But for what follows, you need to keep in mind that at bottom the agency of an empiricist subject consists in choices that are ground in (the desire for) pleasure or the aversion to pain. And according to Foucault this is what creates a subject with an interest (as a kind of characterization of agency.) That's a big claim, but I am interested here in the details. 

The non-transferability principle is cashed out by Foucault in terms of the fact that preferences are one’s own and that another has no fundamentally no access to them. Foucault really uses the modern (somewhat technical) language of ‘preference’ on p. 272. (It's also there in the French: "À partir de ma préférence à moi et à partir du fait que je trouverai plus pénible, par exemple, de savoir qu'un autre est malade que de l'être moi-même." Naissance de la biopolitique, p. 276.) While Hume certainly has ‘preference’ in his vocabulary, in Hume it generally means something like ‘favoring’ a particular outcome or state of affairs (which is also the use one can find in Ricardo). In Hume 'preference' is not used a technical term to track what is motivationally foundational. In my view it is only in Bentham that the use of 'preference' starts to obtain it's technical, familiar sense. (Something one might pick up from Halévy, who emphasizes Bentham's self-preference principle in various contexts but not in Hume i think.)

I mention this not to castigate Foucault's anachronism. But to remind ourselves that the treatment of Hume in the eleventh lecture follows on Foucault's better known analysis of Becker and Stigler (1977) for who (famously/infamously) hold "the hypothesis of stable and uniform preferences." While I have  no evidence that Foucault read Becker & Stigler (1977, although we know he read papers/works by both), it figures prominently in a fascinating book by Henri Lepage Tomorrow, Capitalism: The Economics of Economic Freedom [first published in French as Demain le Capitalisme in 1978.) As the editors of Birth of Biopolitics note several times (but not in context), Foucault almost certainly read Lepage ahead of his lectures (sadly I have been unable to find any annotations by Foucault on Lepage). I mention this because the stability of preferences in Becker & Stigler (1977) is highlighted by Lepage in his account of human capital more generally (see p. 165 of the English translation). And human capital had been central to the previous lecture of Birth of Biopolitics.

In fact, and as a kind of aside, the 11th lecture is used to tie two major narrative threads in Birth of Biopolitics together: first, Foucault provides a historical eighteenth century framework for his own account of the development of utilitarianism from Bentham to Stigler/Becker. This framework has the shape of a donut in whose hole one can discern the shadow of Halévy's classic The Growth of Philosophic Radicalism. (Basically Foucault skips the heart of Halévy's narrative, and only changes the origin and terminus ad quem of philosophical radicalism/Utilitarianism.) Second, Foucault had claimed that this radical tradition is one of two traditions within liberalism that has an account of liberty. Strikingly, in the material I ommitted, Foucault alludes to this. (I return to that another time, too.)  Now, Foucault does not claim that for Hume preferences are stable. But Foucault's anachronism here alerts us to Hume's role in these two threads. This is exactly made explicit by a passage shortly after the one quoted above:

What I think is fundamental in English empiricist philosophy— which I am treating completely superficially—is that it reveals something
which absolutely did not exist before. This is the idea of a subject of interest, by which I mean a subject as the source of interest, the starting point of an interest, or the site of a mechanism of interests. For sure, there is a series of discussions on the mechanism of interest itself and what may activate it: is it self-preservation, is it the body or the soul, or is it sympathy? But this is not what is important. What is important is the appearance of interest for the first time as a form of both immediately and absolutely subjective will.
I think the problem and that which gets the problematic of homo oeconomicus underway is whether this subject of interest or form of will called interest can be considered as the same type of will as the juridical will or as capable of being connected to the juridical will. (273)

Be that as it may, in the present context 'non-transferable,' thus, refers to the brute fact that we cannot fundamentally feel another's pain or let them feel ours. Even sympathy's role is, as Foucault stipulates, a mechanism "to activate" or shape what we feel and thereby our interests not a means to share or trade one's feelings. Pleasures and pains are not portable from one subject to another. Even Adam Smith, who has a much more capacious understanding of the power of sympathy will grant this point. (For him mutual sympathy requires mutial modulation of our original feelings.) Now, as I mentioned above the point of the analysis is to connect Hume to the development of the formal features of homo oeconomicus as found in the radical tradition. Somewhat peculiarly, in Birth of Biopolitics Foucault shows no interest in Hume's economic writings (including a highly salient essay called "Of Interest.")

Now, the textual support that Foucault offers for all of this is rather fascinating (and that's what I'll end on today). As the editors of Birth of Biopolitics, who recognize in Hume's "famous aphorism" a reference to Treatise 2.3.3.6, and then (as I noted before) quote Hume: “Where a passion is neither founded on false supposition, nor chuses means insufficient for the end, the understanding can neither justify nor condemn it. ’Tis not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger.” This is indeed a famous aphorism (one that clearly exercised Hume's friend Smith at The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 3.3.4, 136–7.)

But while Foucault gets the spirit of Hume's remarks at Treatise 2.3.3.6 right, he is not slavishly following the text of Hume. In Hume the famous aphorism, is introduced to argue that feelings are, in a certain sense, beyond rational scrutiny. However, I use in a 'certain sence' because they are not wholly beyond scrutiny as Hume explicitly notes. For they are often accompanied by judgments and these may well be scrutinized and found wanting. And, more interesting for present purposes, as the quote eveals, when the feeling itself is triggered by "false suppositions" say in cases of adaptive preferences or wishful thinking (or simply bad epistemic luck), or, when it is action guiding and it "chuses means insufficient for the end" and so leads to failures of instrumental rationality. 

Because in the context of 2.3.3.6, Hume is talking about passions more generally and not just about the bedrocks of pain and pleasure, I don't think Foucault really is misunderstanding Hume's general point. But it is a shame that he does not dwell on the specifics because, as I note, 2.3.3.6 is rather important for Hume's ideas on thinking on the contexts in which even a picture that takes preferences as irreducible and non-transferable, one need not treat them as merely given, nor beyond all critical scrutiny. That is to say, Foucault comes incredibly close, but somehow misses, that were the radical tradition and Utilitarianism more Humaen from the start some enduring problems internal to it could at least be diagnosed.

On the Modernity and Popularity of Public Philosophy by Academic Philosophers, and some Foucault on Kant

I sometimes suspect that advocates of public philosophy by academic philosophers [sometimes: PPAP] are (tacitly) are committed to at least two of the following three following propositions.

1. PPAP is a relatively recent invention.
2. Public philosophy is not new at all, it just is (the extension or renewal of) Dewey-ian style pragmatism.
3. Socrates, or the public gadfly, is a good model for PPAP.
4. Public philosophy is the dissemination or making accessible of existing (but otherwise esoteric to the public) philosophical knowledge.

Obviously, this does not exhaust all the possibilities. I want to make two comments about this list. First, those committed to (1.), tend to be analytic philosophers (of the sort that do not tend to understand themselves as intellectual descendants of Dewey--so that can include all kinds of pragmatists). My suspicion for thinking this is that this tribe (my own) has been going through a process of interest and valorization of public philosophy during the last (say) decade. I could point to a lot of blog posts or social media commentary to suggest this (including my own). But this thought also fits with the popularity of the 'icy slopes of logic' thesis (articulated by Reisch) that suggests that analytic philosophy retreated into the ivory tower due to the cold war.

Of course, if the icy slopes of logic thesis were true (which I have been known to doubt), then it follows, almost by definition, that 1 is not true. For, the left wing of Vienna was committed to PPAP. Let's grant that Neurath and Carnap were committed to PPAP before their forced exile. It does not follow that one couldn't say something in the spirit of 1.

One might argue, for example, that as an aspiration PPAP is not recent. But one might say, while reflecting on the fate of the Vienna Circle, that the social conditions to do it right, without danger to oneself (or society, were one takes inductive risk of philosophical praxis seriously) are relatively rare and recent. It's only when what we might call a Mill-ian ethos takes hold of elite/juridical/political institutions (even if grudgingly) and has sufficient popular acceptance then (1.) holds. And we, oh moderns, are blessed with times in which we may think what we like, and say it. Let's call this self-congratulatory stance the Millian Ethos Thesis.

For those who recognize their Spinoza or Hume (or Tacitus) in the previous paragraph, neither were professional academics. Hume famously did not get the job at Edinburgh, Spinoza prudently declined a position at Heidelberg. This failure is especially notable in the case of Hume who starts his Treatise with the express aim to 'to try the taste of the public.'

That such an ethos relatively recent achievement may be illustrated by the fate of (the otherwise well connected) Bertrand Russell, who was sacked from his position at Trinity for his public pacifism during WWI and later was denied a position at City University (for his views on sexual morality and his atheism).* I use Russell here not to argue for the suggestion that PPAP only exists when there is no limitation on what can be said in public, but rather to remind the reader the range of topical constraints that existed until quite recently on the very possibility of PPAP. (There is a real contrast between the way, say, Noam Chomsky has been treated and Russell.)

Second, Socrates is a terrible example of PPAP for mass societies like ours. By this, I don't just mean that he was not an academic and his life ended badly, but also we don't reach anything like 'the public' if we go around a popular spot in town and have elenctic conversations with the folk. (I don't diss the activity, by the way.)  Implicitly this is understood because usually when people talk about public philosophy for our kind, they talk about editorials, TV, podcasts, You Tube channels, etc. These have in common that, with luck, they reach a very wide audience. They also tend to presuppose commitment to (4.) more than (3.), and are often nudged along by grant agencies and administrators.

Of course, when people mention Socrates or Diogenes the Cynic, they really mean something like 'being a gadfly of society.' The problem with a gadfly model is that it often presupposes a kind of persistent challenge to the social and political status quo. Almost no academic has time for that alongside our teaching, publishing, and service obligations. And I know of no modern example that fits the case when one ignores PR machines and looks at the facts dispassionately. (Feel free to offer your examplars.)

These impressions were triggered by reading the following passage in a lecture by Foucault, who was, of course, a significant public philosopher in his own right, to a French group of professional philosophers:

In this definition of the Aufklärung, there will be something which no doubt it may be a little ridiculous to call a sermon, and yet it is very much a call for courage that he sounds in this description of the Aufklärung. One should not forget that it was a newspaper article. There is much work to be done on the relationship between philosophy and journalism from the end of the 18th century on, a study ... Unless it has already been done, but I am not sure of that ... It is very interesting to see from what point on philosophers intervene in newspapers in order to say something that is for them philosophically interesting and which, nevertheless, is inscribed in a certain relationship to the public which they intend to mobilize. And finally, it is characteristic that, in this text on the Aufklärung, Kant precisely gives religion, law and knowledge as examples of maintaining humanity in the minority condition and consequently as examples of points where the Aufklärung, must lift this minority condition and in some way majoritize men. What Kant was describing as the Aufklärung is very much what I was trying before to describe as critique, this critical attitude which appears as a specific attitude in the Western world starting with what was historically, I believe, the great process of society's governmentalization. Michel Foucault (1978) "What is Critique" translated by Lysa Hotroch, reprinted in The Politics of Truth, edited by Sylvere Lotringer, p48. (Ellipses in original)

In the works collected in The Politics of Truth, Foucault expresses similar views, so this is something he clearly reflected on in the last decade of his life. What's neat for our present purposes is that Foucault calls attention to the fact that in "What Is Enlightenment?" Kant engaged in public philosophy, in the sense we tend to use the term today (and as assumed in this post), while also reflecting on the manner of it (and its limits).  Famously, Kant thought that in one's functional role (as professor, cleric, civil servant, etc.) one must be (passively) obedient to authority, while one simultanously one had a duty or at least the freedom to educate the public, including criticism of the authorities without adverse consequences (if one does so in a way that does not undermine now quoting Kant) "the stability of the community."

To what degree such stability really can be reconciled with the mobilizing function Foucault ascribes to Kant's conception of the public use of reason is no easy matter to settle. But it is worth noting that even a hardnosed thinker like Machiavelli (carefully read by both Foucault and Kant) praises the epistemic and social features of Rome's willingness to endure quite a bit of social rowdiness and mobilization as a means toward stabilizing the community (and the evolution of social practices.)+ As an aside, Kant here is at odds with our modern conception of academic freedom, which precisely creates some zone to be critical of one's authorities (and the authorities, and their dogma's) in one's teaching.

What's important to my present purposes is the violation of (4.) in Foucault's treatment of Kant as an exemplar. For while Kant's own view of the free use of public reason, as presented by Foucault (in non-controversial way) sounds something like (4.), the manner in which Kant defends the view is (to quote Foucault) "philosophically interesting." In fact, in a different essay, "What is Enlightenment?" Foucault starts with a contrast between Kant's age of Enlightenment and ours, favorably to the past, in which he describes the present attitude toward in which in public speech/utterances, "there is not much likelihood of learning anything new." This makes our public intellectual life rather boring, as Foucault suggests. (Of course, I am not discussing YOUR contributions to public intellectual life, my dear sophisticated readers.) Even if one suspects that Foucault may be romanticizing the past here, he is right in noticing that commitment to (4.) tends to part and parcel of what we may call the repetitionof the known. Of course, that may still be an important public service (and I am a friend of philosophy as service of the sort Dotson engages in), but the philosophy part is underserviced by it. 

I could stop here because I think it's pretty clear now why I think 1-4 are all false, or undesirable. But I want to close with two final (related) observations on the triggering passage I quoted from Foucault. First, what he says about  governmentalization is undoubtedly obscure if you don't read the wider lecture, and/or lack familiararity with the lectures he gave in that period at College de France. To simplify, it's a species of statecraft (including the art of governing without states or their apparatus). But for present purposes, we can leave it a bit obscure. But I do want to note the connection to Kant, Foucault asserts just before (in discussing developments since the 16th century in "Western Europe) the following:

And if we accord this movement of governmentalization of both society and individuals the historic dimension and breadth which I believe it has had, it seems that one could approximately locate therein what we could call the critical attitude. Facing them head on and as compensation, or rather, as both partner and adversary to the arts of governing, as an act of defiance, as a challenge, a way of limiting these arts of governing and sizing them up, transforming them, of finding a way to escape from them or, in any case, a way to displace them, with a basic distrust, but also and by the same token, as a line of development of the arts of governing, there would have been something born in Europe at that time, a kind of general cultural form, both a political and moral attitude, a way of thinking, etc. and which I would very simply call the art of not being governed or better, the art of not being governed like that and at that cost. I would therefore propose, as a very first definition of critique, this general characterization: the art of not being governed quite so much. (44-45)

Kantian critique then is, on this view, not some esoteric philosophical doctrine, but the outgrowth of a much wider European ethos that itself has a considerable development. And while there is in philosophy, perhaps, a lot more to critique then the idea that one 'not be governed like that' -- the rejection of permanent immaturity -- this is its central idea. It is to be sure, no anarchism. But it is an embrace of a kind of limitation on being governed. I think it is no surprise then that in the following year, Foucault explored at great length the liberal art of government (and Kant's role in developing it) because it just is the tradition that, warts and at all, embraces the art of not being governed quite so much.

My second remark is-- and this is based not just on the quoted passages like these alone (but a more wider reading in Foucault) - that Foucault embraces the Millian Ethos thesis in its Eurocentric fashion; a version that actually embraces European/Western (cultural) exceptionalism.** But let me stop here.

A note on Foucault and Kuhn on Scientific Revolutions, and Adam SMith & Stigler.

And thus, in fragments here and there, political economy is thought to have been silently bringing into position its essential themes, until the moment when, taking up the analysis of production again in another direction, Adam Smith is supposed to have brought to light the process of the increasing division of labour, Ricardo the role played by capital, and J-B. Say some of the fundamental laws of the market economy. From this moment on, political economy is supposed to have begun to exist with its own proper object and its own inner coherence.
In fact, the concepts of money, price, value, circulation, and market were not regarded, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in terms of a shadowy future, but as part of a rigorous and general epistemological arrangement. It is this arrangement that sustains the 'analysis of wealth' in its overall necessity. The analysis of wealth is to political economy what general grammar is to philology and what natural history is to biology. And just as it is not possible to understand the theory of verb and noun, the analysis of the language of action, and that of roots and their development, without referring, through the study of general grammar, to the archaeological network that makes those things possible and necessary; just as one cannot understand, without exploring the domain of natural history, what Classical description, characterization, and taxonomy were, any more than the opposition between system and method, or Tixism' and 'evolution'; so, in the same way, it would not be possible to discover the link of necessity that connects the analysis of money, prices, value, and trade if one did not first clarify this domain of wealth which is the locus of their simultaneity.--Michael Foucault The Order of Things (1970) {1994, Vintage Books Edition} Translated by Alan Sheridan* (original Les Mots et les Choses, 1966), pp. 166-167.+

In a correspondence shortly after Structure of Scientific Revolutions first appeared, Thomas Kuhn reminded the future Nobel laureate and Chicago Economist, George Stigler, that in Structure he considered economics as a mature science. The passage Kuhn refers to is one that illustrates Kuhn's argument for rejecting a definition of science. 

Furthermore, if precedent from the natural sciences serves, they will cease to be a source of concern not when a definition is found, but when the groups that now doubt their own status achieve consensus about their past and present accomplishments. It may, for example, be significant that economists argue less about whether their field is a science than do practitioners of some other fields of social science. Is that because economists know what science is? Or is it rather economics about which they agree?--Kuhn Structure (Second, enlarged edition), pp. 160-161.

What's notable about Kuhn's position here is that he ties essentially sociological and political criteria and concepts (viz., groups, status, consensus) to help identify if not characterize that we're in the presence of a scientific community. Undoubtedly this is familiar to my readers. But it's worth adding that the agreement isn't merely over the present, but also about the past. A few pages later Kuhn shows that it is textbook that generate such consensus over the past (pp. 165-167), and he is quite explicit that the textbook account of the past is outright fabrication: "the member of a mature scientific community is, like the typical character of Orwell's 1984, the victim of a history rewritten by the power that be." (167)

In Kuhn, the maturity of science and consensus are tightly intertwined and Kuhn is clear that both are, in part, the effect of textbook education (see also. p. 10). Now, I don't think Kuhn ever uses the language of 'immature' science (for it would be characterized by disagreement and so by definition is no science). But he does identify paradigmatic science with maturity, and so it is natural to treat what Kuhn calls as 'pre paradigm' period as the immature era which is, after, all  characterized by disagreement. In context Kuhn alerts the reader to the significance of this comment to "those concerned with the development of the contemporary social science sciences." (p.167)

As an aside, in "What is Enlightenment," Kant associates the progressive possibilities of intellectual autonomy, that is Enlightenment, with maturity. And the periods of authority over individual thought as immaturity. And there is interesting work to be done on the subtle shifts in and appropriations of Kantian commitments in Kuhn (and those that shaped Kuhn's philosophy.)

Before I return to Foucault, it is worth noting two features of Kuhn's position (that are textually connected in subsequent sentences, although I have reversed the presentational order). First, not all criteria that help identify a science are sociological or political in character. In particular, for Kuhn what makes consensus possible is the establishment of a paradigm (more about that below). And a paradigm is characterized by and makes "possible" what Kuhn calls "normal puzzle-solving research." (Postscript from 1969, p. 179) This seems very much internal to scientific practice, and undoubtedly can be characterized, in part, in epistemic terms.

However, and this is my second observation (and it is Foucault-ian in character), Kuhn explicitly assumes that there is no progressive puzzle-solving research in eras that are characterized by disunity of paradigms. Here's how Kuhn puts it: "The members of all scientific communities, including the schools of the "pre-paradigm" period, share the sorts of elements which I have collectively labelled 'a paradigm.' What changes with the transition to maturity is not the presence of a paradigm but rather its nature." (Postscript from 1969, p. 179) It's nature is that makes progressive puzzle-solving possible. So, paradigms make forward looking progress possible; and from the perspective of the paradigm, it's characteristic of the pre-paradigm era to exhibit "initial divergences" (17) of methods, evidential standards, and even what the subject matter really is.

It's quite odd that Kuhn doesn't notice that conceptually (and historically) it's quite possible that during disunified 'immature' eras the paradigms of the competing 'schools' (his term) can be progressive and be (or in virtue of their) puzzle-solving. (I actually think this is true even of cases central to his account of the scientific revolution in 17th century physics, but let me leave that aside here.) Since crisis eras of mature sciences are explicitly likened to pre-paradigmatic eras (72/84/101) -- and in crisis eras  of mature science there is still progressive puzzle-solving despite the anomalies - it is odd that Kuhn does not reflect on this.

Before I get to Foucault one important point as background. That there is a distinction between mature and immature sciences, and that they are seperated by intellectual revolutions of some sort, was widely held view among economists in the late nineteenth century through the middle of the twentieth centuries. This is, in fact, a point that Stigler kind of makes in his side of the correspondence with Kuhn. And he encloses a number of papers that show this. In addition, that consensus is a marker of such maturity is also present in economics. (I have done some scholarship to establish these points, too; see here; and here.) My own speculative view is that Adam Smith's essay on the History of Astronomy is the source, within nineteenth century and twentieth century economics of the existence of these proto-Kuhnian ideas within economics. (That he held such views see here.) But other intellectual sources are possible.

Okay, if we now look at the passage quoted at the top of the post, we see that in the first paragraph Foucault describes what he takes to be a common view on the transition from a fragmented prior era, to a mature unified intellectual discipline. It's easy to recognize a narrative that involves transition from a pre-paradigmatic stage to a paradigmatic stage here. Once there is a ruling paradigm, after all, a field has a coherent forward motion and a clearly defined subject matter (this is, in fact, the constitutive nature of a paradim). In fact, the narrative is common ground among economic textbooks and Marxists (who have a story about the developmental relationship between pre-classical and classicale economics).

I don't mean to suggest the common view is intended as a characterization of Kuhn's position. It's also more likely that Foucault is targeting a kind of whiggishness that is quite common in the writing of the growth of knowledge/science from within and about the sciences. But I don't think the distance between the two is as large as we often now understand it in post Kuhnian philosophy of science. While Kuhn rejected the idea that there was a telos within or of science (he is fond of comparing it to the undirecteness of Darwinian evolution), he still inscribes a soft teleology into his account in virtue of the way the mature/immature, diverging/consensus, and pre-paradigm/paradigm (all seperated by a revolution) distinctions (and the associated network of concepts) operate in his account. Kuhn has gone  native (and so as a matter of Kuhn interpretation he is right to reject the extreme relativists/constructivists in science studioes that have presented him as their progenitor).

But in the second quoted paragraph Foucault goes on to reject the common view. For him the pre-Smithian (and pre-classical) political economists were not different in kind with those that followed Smith-Ricardo-Say. They held very different kind of views and with different methods, but that is because the thought of the age was structured by a very different kind of set of conceptual background conditions (episteme).  These conceptual background conditions can be stable over considerable time and act on and through many different intellectual disciplines at once for Foucault. (Part of the excitement of Foucault's book is his analysis of the structural analogies of different disciplines in the same era (defined by an episteme). I leave aside here the mechanisms of how this is supposed to work.

Now, crucially for my present concerns Foucault recognizes ruptures between successive eras (epistemes) and within disciplines within eras.* These can coincide, when ruptures within disciplines lead to a new era. Interestingly enough, as it happens (and I return to this some other time) Adam Smith's work is a vector of such micro rupture in a field that also happens to inaugurate a much larger set of shifts. (I am not ascribing to Foucault a causal account here because I want to avoid discussing here his account of large scale change between epistemes.)**

So, in Foucault's account, from the perspective of a later time (within a discipline), especially in a later episteme, the earlier work will, when intelligible at all, seem childish or disunified. Very much the way Kuhn describes immature, pre-paradigm eras. But on Foucault's own all things considered view, this is a kind of optical illusion, itself the effect of unexamined teleological commitments. One is literally unable to see what he calls 'the link of necessity that connects' the conceptual structure and practices of those in an earlier age. And because Foucault doesn't use consensus as a marker of scienticity or disciplined knowledge he can actually analyze how it works -- and since he is interested in human sciences -- and how such knowledge works on humans on its own (contested) terms.**

To be continued.