Digressions&Impressions

On The End of History and the Displacement of Logic

[I will phase out D&I at typepad. This post was first published at  digressions.impressions.substack here. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber at <digressionsimpressions.substack.com>]

Because we understand ourselves as forward-looking problem-solvers, and recognize with the sciences that through inevitable progress today's ruling views will seem quaint when the research frontier has shifted (as it will), analytic philosophers have no major investment in curating themselves as a tradition. It has a sponge-like character in assimilating doctrines and techniques from without, and, as seen from a distance, appears to reinvent itself continuously. Because it is such a moving target external critics often seem comically out of date to knowing insiders whereas internal critics often end up being domesticated by subsequent generations (without, alas, getting credit for it). That it is a tradition is the effect of intellectual and sociological path dependencies that express themselves in certain aesthetic (clarity, transparency, rigor, etc.) and epistemic values, and the existence of bits of post Frege-Russell-Whitehead logic as a kind of (often tacit) lingua franca long after developments within logic stopped being a source of major disciplinary excitement or much utility elsewhere. 

The move from a logic requirement to a 'formal methods' in Yale University's graduate curriculum [see here at Dailynous; here at Leitterreports] tracks and, as it will be copied, shapes a much larger set of shifts in professional philosophy. In what follows, I, first, say something about how this constitutes the discipline going forward, and, second, I close -- as the previous paragraph hints -- at what predictably will be lost. The shift to 'formal methods' is often articulated in (broadly consequentialist) terms of what is useful to PhD students in their actual research or employment possibilities. It's anodyne to suggest that this actual work is interdisciplinary (with STEM/Social Sciency disciplines) in character in some sense. 

What it (really) is are three different projects (at a certain level of abstraction): (i) the projects that I have called 'synthetic philosophy' which, while using a particular technical/formal model/theory, brings together insights, knowledge, and arguments from the special sciences with the aim to offer a coherent account of complex systems and connect these to a wider culture or other philosophical projects (or both); (ii) the projects one can subsume under 'conceptual explorative research,' which amounts to developing concepts and techniques (including formal) that either are generative of scientific or social projects or help explain/understand perceived foundational problems in them; (iii) the continuous working out of inherited-as-philosophy puzzles. Presumably all three of these projects will involve collaboration with AI as coupled (human/machine/network) systems. With new base-lines, progress is possible. To be sure, the practice of wisdom does not require academic philosophy.

These three projects are at this level of generality not always at tension with each other, and because the fruits can be felt in disciplines outside of philosophy are not always zero-sum (job-wise). But we should expect near continuous hybridization and splitting and reconfiguration among such projects until a new political hegemon reconfigures higher education in the service of new ideals. (I am hinting at the fickleness of student-demand or donors as instruments of permanently shaping the discipline.) What I am, thus, stipulating -- perhaps rashly -- is that we should not expect hegemonic intellectual schools to re-emerge except temporarily. 

At this point one may object that 'argument' is missing in the previous paragraph. Perhaps, it will remain as constitutive element of philosophy. I am pretty skeptical about this possibility once formal logic is displaced from the intrinsic DNA of our professional formation. Yes, there are statistical arguments, but the skill one acquires is not argumentative, but something distinct. (What that is may be beyond my expertise, but I am inclined to say it is a skill at spotting differences that make a difference.) To be sure, I am a pluralist about the nature of 'argument' so it may be safer to predict that what will count as a paradigmatic argument will shift.

Now, before I mention some of the predictable 'losses' that follow from the shift under way, I want to prevent the misinterpretation that I somehow mourn the end of analytic philosophy (in the sense described by Liam Kofi Bright). I see nothing wrong in the fact that the half dozen departments (and the ones that mimic them) that train the influential PhDs of the next generation do not want to defend the intellectual path that got them there. The end of the unfolding history of analytic philosophy turns out to be a historical whimper. So I am using 'loss' analogously to or in the sense of 'Kuhn-loss'--the systematic forgetting of certain results and insights.

Second, it's predictable, for example, that as logic disappears as a (tacit) lingua franca much of the history of analytic philosophy will seem like strange territory and unmotivated to future students, and will become near unreadable. All kinds of moves that seemed obvious or intelligible -- think of the uses of regimentation, or Tarski's account of truth, bound variables, etc. -- will stop being self-evident. I had a glimpse of this when I read Quine's Word and Object a decade ago with Dutch undergraduates who were simply bewildered. 

In addition, I suspect that lacking such a tacit lingua franca, the three kinds of projects I mentioned will become increasingly at least partially estranged from each other and will, thereby, reflect the underlying social pluralism of our societies. That is compatible with each sharing in structural commonalities (including some that may well turn out to be politically or socially problematic). Unfortunately, that will imply that metrics and measures that are orthogonal to (intrinsic) philosophical worth, if there is such a thing, will be increasingly used for purposes of evaluation and advancement. 

• This first appeared at: <On The End of History and the Displacement of Logic (substack.com)> a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

 

On Information and the State: from Justin Smith to George Stigler

[Over time I plan to phase out D&I at typepad. This post was first published at  digressions.impressions.substack here. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber at <digressionsimpressions.substack.com>]

A recent wide-ranging, erudite, and politically salient Substack post by Justin Smith defends the thesis that "we may identify a vast process currently underway whereby we are moving, in our efforts to understand reality and to harness it to our ends, from its to bits. It seems to me the real story of the past few decades, a story that easily explains the rise in popularity of the simulation argument...is of a fairly total regime change, from physics to informatics —here I am adapting the French informatique, which names the research domain in question far more appropriately than “computer science”— as the Prima Scientia or ultimate science of reality." (The post may be gated so you will have to trust me on its interest or take a subscription to Justin's excellent substack, Hinternet.) Presumably, by 'regime' Smith is suggesting that the wide world of learning is fundamentally ordered and (he makes an explicit nod to Hacking here) ordering and authoritative in some sense. 

In these digressions, I have been joking over the years that economics will soon be displaced by computer science. But as is usual while I have been focusing on a change in one tree, Justin is noticing the shifts in the wider forest.

Unfortunately, Smith never defines 'information' (and its non-trivial cognate,) 'units of information processing' despite it playing a key role in his overall argument. That's probably a feature and not a bug of his argument because part of his point is that in virtue of the significance and fluidity (within constraints) of symbolic representation information is not (ahh) ontically stable, eternally out there. 

Inform has Latinate roots (to give form to, to shape, educate, etc.), and, perhaps, there are echoes of the scholastic doctrine of hylomorphism lurking here. (Not so long ago, I was pleased to learn that computer scientists use 'hylomorphism' to refer to a certain recursive function which struck me as very funny and profound at once.) As I was barely conscious contemplating the possible significance of this, through the mystery of the associative process and the rapidity of modern networks (and Google), I looked up and downloaded George Stigler's (1961) "The Economics of Information." This paper has over 12000 citations, and alongside his work on economic regulation, crucial to his importance to the development of economics (for which he got a Nobel).

Somewhat amusingly, Stigler also fails to give a definition of information. He tends to use 'knowledge,' 'advertising,' subjective beliefs, and the comparison of prices by consumers as ways of understanding and describing information. Information can be 'pooled' and has a 'flow.' Most famously, information is costly (and can be bought and sold).

That information is costly is both part of the cause and part of the effect of the dispersion of prices. (In an older tradition of economics -- as David M. Levy taught me, one can think of Wicksteed -- prices were thought to be uniform in a market at a given time; although earlier, during the 18th century, Adam Smith and his contemporary, James Steuart, thought that prices dispersed, too although their analysis is not identical.) I don't mean to suggest that this exhausts the role of information in Stigler's analysis of economic life because it connects means and ends, but about that some other time more.

In Stigler's paper, I encountered a fascinating passage that is worth quoting and discussing (and this is the real point of this digression):

The maintenance of appreciable dispersion of prices arises chiefly out of the fact that knowledge becomes obsolete. The conditions of supply and demand, and therefore the distribution of asking prices, change over time. There is no method by which buyers or sellers can ascertain the new average price in the market appropriate to the new conditions except by search. Sellers cannot maintain perfect correlation of successive prices, even if they wish to do so, because of the costs of search. Buyers accordingly cannot make the amount of investment in search that perfect correlation of prices would justify. The greater the instability of supply and/or demand conditions, therefore, the greater the dispersion of prices will be.
In addition, there is a component of ignorance due to the changing identity of buyers and sellers. There is a flow of new buyers and sellers in every market, and they are at least initially uninformed on prices and by their presence make the information of experienced buyers and sellers somewhat obsolete.
The amount of dispersion will also vary with one other characteristic which is of special interest: the size (in terms of both dollars and number of traders) of the market. As the market grows in these dimensions, there will appear a set of firms which specialize in collecting and selling information. They may take the form of trade journals or specialized brokers. Since the cost of collection of information is (approximately) independent of its use (although the cost of dissemination is not), there is a strong tendency toward monopoly in the provision of information: in general, there will be a "standard" source for trade information. (Stigler 1961, 220)

Chicago economists are not exactly known for assuming that any market will tend toward a monopoly. As I noted last week, in the 1950s Stigler's work was, in fact, prominent for undermining empirically the Marxist (and Marx-inspired) thesis that markets tend naturally tend to monopoly. 

Now, later when (in part inspired by the work of the sociologist Morton and in part because of his interest in which economics Phds would be hired where) Stigler turned to the sociology of scientific knowledge, he tackled this tendency toward monopoly in knowledge production head on. And so I will return to it some other time. But in the 1961 paper he leaves the point in the quoted passage alone.

It would be tempting here to discuss the role of google or wikipedia or the stanford encyclopedia of philosophy as standard sources of information in our ecologies. (And to what degree ChatGPT can displace these or become one itself.) But I want to close with an important broader context in which i situate Stigler's passage.

In the liberal tradition — with which Stigler was very familiar — which understands, as a a core function of the state, it (the state) as a machinery of record, a collector and disseminator of accurate public data. A lot of our social practices, inside and outside the market, presuppose a social infrastructure in which the machinery of record is reliable, allowing public authorities and private actors to plan their activities. For that to happen, the public must be well-informed, and the only way citizens can possibly be well-informed on complex matters of policy is for state experts to organize and process information. Elsewhere, also in joint (forthcoming) work with Nick Cowen I have argued that Walter Lippmann's (1922) Public Opinion puts this vision forward.[1]

In fact, the germ of Lippmann’s idea is expressed in the closing paragraph of John Stuart Mill’s and Harriet Taylor’s On Liberty (1869, Ch. 5), where they claim that “the greatest dissemination of power consistent with efficiency” should be allied with “the greatest possible centralisation of information, and diffusion of it from the centre.” In context, it is clear (recall) that they are responding to Tocqueville’s fears that in order to prevent democratic despotism through local self-government, incompetent art of government is inevitable.

So, lurking in Stigler (1961) is a causal account that both explains the origin of the state and justifies the state's continued existence as a (perhaps even natural) authoritative monopoly provider of the machinery of record. (In fact, this is how Smith explains the epistemic origin of the state: as guarantor of measures and weights and the soundness of currency. ) And that even in a bit-rich world this will remain so.

Of course, Marxists and Libertarians may object that the account hinted at here effaces the violence of the state. This is undoubtedly so, but I consider this a feature not a bug of the argument.

• This first appeared at: <On Information and the State: from Justin Smith to George Stigler (substack.com)> a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Chicago Economics, MIT, and Monopoly Capitalism

[Over time I plan to phase out this blog at typepad. This post was first published at  digressions.impressions.substack here. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber at <digressionsimpressions.substack.com>]

Marxism predicts that left to its own devises capitalism tends toward monopoly. Let's call this the 'monopoly capitalism thesis.' I suspect the most famous articulation of this thesis was develop in the context of debates over the nature and fate of early twentieth century imperialism. For, both (recall; and here) Hobson (not a Marxist) and Lenin noticed that (militaristic) imperialism and monopoly were mutually reinforcing. For Hobson (in his 1902 Imperialism), monopoly capitalism was the effect of rent-seeking political behavior (by corrupt, imperial, financial interests). Lenin (ca 1916) didn't deny this, but while drawing on German data, especially, thought that capitalism had an inevitable tendency toward monopoly and cartels, and that imperialism (the search for monopoly markets overseas) is an effect of this tendency.

Arguably, (recall) Schumpeter (in Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (1942) synthesized the two positions by suggesting that in conditions of modernization, monopoly would be caused (perhaps not by an internal logic of market economies, but rather) by, the "concentration of decision-making centers of the administration and the state" who seek out social counterparts in capitalist enterprises, who in turn take advantage of rents. While Burnham (in The Managerial Revolution 1941) is not interested in exploring the dynamics of the monopoly capitalism thesis, one can find a similar conclusion in it (see also my comment about Berle & Means below).

In what follows, I don't mean to suggest that the theoretical structure of the monopoly capitalism thesis was not developed after mid-century. Arguably Joan Robinson, Paul Sweezy and Baran, and Ernest Mandel all did so in various ways, and have inspired renewed work. From the left one could mention (recall this post) Durand, Cédric Durand's (2017) Fictitious capital: How finance is appropriating our future; from the more libertarian right one could mention Eric A., Posner and E. Glen Weyl (2018) Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society, which strongly implies our age is characterized by monopoly capitalism.

As an aside, with the revival of scholarly interest in the roots of neoliberalism, it is quite natural to come away thinking that the major point of contention between Marxists and liberals within political economy centered on the socialist calculation debate. This debate is theoretically very interesting because it brings together epistemology, social theory, political economy, and (after Oskar Lange) artificial intelligence. And because Hayek got an early Nobel (in part) for his contribution to it, and Austrian economics shaped American libertarianism, there has been impressive continued interest in it even after central planning lost its luster. But even critics of Marxism can acknowledge the soviet style central planning and administrative pricing need not be the only way really existing Marxism can be tried out. This observation made me return to the fate monopoly capitalism thesis: why did it not haunt mid twentieth century economics?

Now, a key part of the answer has to be in the success of Keynes & Keynesianism and also the very idea of a mixed economy (the genealogy of which I have not studied, but I assume involves Samuelson). But in a way this pushes the problem back a level--why think a mixed economy is stable so as to block the monopoly capitalism thesis (or road to serfdom thesis)?

Part of the answer can be found in a number of empirical, inductive studies associated with 'Chicago economics,' especially Warren Nutter’s (1951) The Extent of Enterprise Monopoly in the United States, 1899–1939, which originated in his (1949) dissertation and the fifth lecture, “Competition in the United States,” of George Stigler's (1949) Five lectures on economics problems first delivered at LSE at the behest of Robbins. (For detailed description of the material I am about to discuss see my paper, but back then I studied it through lens of paradigm building.)

I doubt I need to re-introduce Stigler (a future Nobel), who was at Columbia, to my audience. But despite the recent political and polemical focus on the Virginia School, Nutter is understudied (even his Wikipedia page is scarce), and only Daniel Kuehn has written much on him. Nutter, who during the cold war was one of the pre-eminent scholars of the Soviet economy Stateside (together with my very teacher Franklyn Holtzman), was at Yale when his dissertation work made an impact on American public life (it was featured in Fortune magazine). He later joined and co-founded the Virginia school of public choice and ended up a significant figure in the Nixon administration. In 1969, he published an extension of the dissertation with Henry Einhorn: The Extent of Enterprise Monopoly: 1899-1958. 

Now, as my comments above suggest, the 'monopoly capitalism thesis' drifted out of Marxism into mainstream-ish opinion during the Great Depression. Nutter's official target the “hypothesis that monopoly is automatically generated in a private-enterprise system” was also defended by Arthur R. Burns "in his book, The Decline of Competition.” Burns was an institutionalist economist at Columbia. (This Burns should not be confused with another economist at Columbia, Arthur F. Burns, who became more prominent as Chair of the Federal Reserve.) In his book, our Burns argues that technological developments alongside patent laws (which generate rents) made monopoly inevitable (and that anti-trust was imperfect).

Another, politically more important target (for Nutter and Stigler) is The Modern Corporation and Private Property (1932), co-authored by A.A. Berle and Gardiner Means. This was a major work that shaped the New Deal, corporate governance, and corporate law for  a generation. Berle and Means analytically (and legally) separated corporate ownership (which, under modern conditions, was diffused) from corporate control (which was concentrated). They thereby anticipate Schumpeter and Burnham's focus on a relatively narrow managerial-corporate class (albeit not to be identical simply with capital in a Marxist sense).

Nutter and Stigler have different empirical ways of tackling the underlying question, and they use different proxies to get a handle on the empirical problems (of operationalization concentrations within a industry and measuring its change over time, and of the whole economy). And their empirical findings don't always agree. But in a rather critical review (1953) article, "Is monopoly increasing?" Solomon Fabricant (an economist associated with NBER [see this portrait drawn by Lipsey]), who notes Nutter's and Stigler's partiality toward competition, and hostility to anti-trust policy, and implies they may be systematically biased,  concludes, nevertheless, “Yet, whatever the outcome, by the essential validity of their conclusion must stand. All the doubts that can be raised do not destroy, rather they support, the conclusion that there is no basis for believing that the economy of the United States is largely monopolistic and has been growing more monopolistic.” (92. Nutter himself had suggested there might have been very modest growth in monopoly, but mostly as an effect of government policy.) 

That is to say, by the early 1950s the economics profession thought the monopoly capitalism thesis was, if not empirically falsified, then at least decidedly unpromising empirically. This is especially notable because the data they covered included the impact of the Great Depression and all the New Deal activity.

In work (1951) that covered later time-series data for manufacturing through 1949, "The measurement of industrial concentration," another economist, M.A. Adelman, also decried the imperfection of the data (although he praised Nutter's measures explicitly) and diagnoses underdetermination of theory by data. (He also acknowledges that Nutter is more interested in monopoly, while he is more interested in concentration.) At the end of his survey Adelman concludes: 

"But although a given set of facts is compatible with more than one policy conclusion, this does not make it compatible with any conclusion, i.e., the facts are not simply irrelevant. Stated somewhat differently: our conclusions, if correct, should mean something for the atmosphere in which policy is formed. References to "the growth in economic concentration," or statements that "during the past I6 years [I932-48] big business has been getting bigger and little business littler," or that "the forces of concentration [are] growing stronger by the hour," or that "concentration of industry is increasing so fast that no half-measures can stop it," and many others of like tenor - these must now be dismissed as unfounded. Concentration may be a problem, but for better or worse it is not threatening to engulf the economy. The moral, therefore, is simply that there is time to stop, look, and take thought. This may detract from the color and excitement of our public life, but it may also contribute to better results."  

Adelman has, I think, attracted no scholarly attention. But he became one of pillars of the MIT economics department that Samuelson built to pre-eminence. (After his early work in anti-trust he became somewhat well known in the 1970s as a leading expert of energy economics and how to tackle the oil crisis.) And so he very much represents the middle of the road of the economics profession of the era.

I quote Adelman's passage at length because it gives a sense of how he takes the empirical results to license considerable de-politicization. (One can also find this in Fabricant's conclusion.) While economists remained highly interested in theories of monopoly and imperfect competition, and how to deal with (ant-trust) policy questions emanating from actual monopolies and economic concentration (and a whole range of potentially fascinating technical questions), the monopoly capitalism thesis was effectively dead, or at least temporarily pushed to the margins. 

As I noted in my original paper, this conclusion remained intact even if this inductive approach to the question of monopoly as pursued by Nutter and Stigler got displaced by a very different approach articulated by Harberger in “Monopoly and Resource Allocation.” (1954) And while this, in turn, was quite consequential for the shape of American anti-trust (not the least compared with the Ordoliberal approach), it was unconcerned with the monopoly capitalism thesis.

• This first appeared at: <On the controversy in the philosophical blogosphere. (substack.com)> a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

 

On the latest controversy in the philosophical blogosphere.

[Over time I plan to phase out this blog at typepad. This post was first published at  digressions.impressions.substack here. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber at <digressionsimpressions.substack.com>]

At Leiterreports (here; here; here) and DailyNous another 'philosophy controversy' is playing out. I am sure most of my readers know that it was triggered by an autobiographical essay in Quillette accusing OUP, widely regarded as the leading press in English language professional philosophy [humble-brag: that's where I publish my stuff], of irregular editorial practices with a monograph and handbook chapter on one of the central topics in the contemporary culture wars. (The author has already found new homes for both works.) As has become clear, the handling editor was Peter M., who is widely regarded as the most prestigious philosophy editor within the field. (No, I work with the other Peter, O.) The author of the autobiographical essay is a senior professor at MIT, Alex Byrne.

Nearly all the people crying 'foul' now are people that happily participate in a system that is opaque, riddled with systematic conflicts of interests, editorial unaccountability, and that usually apparently does not cause them any friction. For, when I read Byrne's essay in Quillette, I was stunned by his surprise that he received 'bizarre' referee reports that do not substantiate their claims and that are uncivil. And that, after a life-time in the profession, he sincerely claims "a reviewer is expected to give reasons for her verdict." The tone of referees has been a widely discussed problem in professional philosophy (including in a thoughtful piece unrelated to culture wars in TLS by Tim Crane not so long ago.)

I was bemused to read in Byrne (and some commentators in the blogosphere) that "publication is practically guaranteed" for a handbook article. Twice in the last decade a handbook chapter drafted by me was rejected: once with the suggestion that one of the co-editors could rewrite it with me (I pulled that article and it became chapter 1 of my monograph), and once because my work was not deemed up to par and the editors decided there was too little time for me to improve it. While that stung, for all I know the editors were right about that latter call because another version of that paper was rejected in another special issue. (I can't hate the essay because it was my successful job-talk paper.) I certainly agree with Byrne that receiving editorial word via Twitter is seriously odd; it's probably still marginally better than the time the Monist canceled a special issue with one of my accepted papers without informing me! (We eventually published the paper in Metaphilosophy, where it was published after a year and half (including a mysterious delay because of an editorial mix-up.)) Yes, I did publish a subsequent paper with the Monist. None of my experiences are newsworthy because they are so common and they do not involve the culture wars (although some of my anonymous referees single out my blogging for special ire).

More than a decade ago, I was galvanized into blogging because of a massive plagiarism scandal involving a senior scholar that I sometimes collaborated with that exposed lackadaisical refereeing and publishing practices in an adjoining field. Recently that very same field was rocked by a second major plagiarism scandal (involving a more junior scholar), and dropped the ball in its response in lots of ways. In fact, shortly after NewAPPS was founded several controversies involving Synthese unfolded (we had a 'Synthese Affair' tab): one triggered by a special issue on intelligent design involving editorial improprieties that even made it to the New York Times and one involving inappropriate pictures on a course website by one of the very editors involved in that scandal. A few years later another special issue by Synthese exploded into the news when its guest editor suggested that logical pluralism and homosexuality are linked. This produced a moratorium on special issues at Synthese.

As an aside [feel free to skip to the next paragraph], after the moratorium ended, I co-edited a special issue for Synthese. My very own contribution to that special issue did not make it through the revamped referee process.  So, I can attest that Synthese has learned its lesson. (It's chapter 13 of my 2017 OUP monograph now.)

I don't mean to leave you with the feeling that professional philosophy has a Synthese problem, or that this journal was/is especially badly managed, or that controversy always only involves then-culture-war issues.  Some of the purportedly best journals in professional philosophy, Nous and PPR went through a phase when they had to put moratoria on submissions for extended periods, in part because they had been edited by the same highly respected editor, who also edited Philosophical Issues. In that very same period, another highly respected long-time editor of Philosophical Studies resigned after 25 years because he was unhappy about how a fellow editor handled a paper critical of a paper (by Byrne) thar he had published in the same journal. (Okay that also involved culture war issues.) After the resignation, stories surfaced that this very editor did not always practice double-anonymous reviewing when it suited him. 

Even when proper refereeing procedures are followed a journal can screw up post publication. By the time the 'transracialism controversy' (which also made the New York Times) had played out, the editorial team, many of the associate editors, and many of the governing board had resigned or been nudged out from the feminist journal Hypatia. (I wrote lots of earnest, widely read blog posts about this case none of them made it into the wikipedia entry.)

The previous paragraphs hint at the proverbial tip of the ice-berg. For much of the post WWII period, analytic philosophy has been characterized by a concerted effort at journal capture and then these journals were subsequently run in a clubby fashion that disproportionally served the interests of people in the network of these journals, which have absurdly low acceptance rates, in a discipline that is characterized by incredibly steep economic and prestige hierarchies. It is, in fact, not uncommon to receive incredibly uncivil referee reports, which, if they do materialize, often are slow in coming. At many journals editors de facto farm out the decision by effectively giving a single, sometimes idiotic referee veto power.

It's not just journals. When I was still very junior a highly respected editor at one of the other leading philosophy presses forced a paper out of the volume I co-edited because one of his/her/their referees was incensed over a footnote in one of the papers (never published) that re-litigated a conference dispute (between the referee and the chapter’s author) decades earlier. The referee revealed himself to me and wisely recused himself, but the editor felt loyalty to the referee and insisted that the chapter be withdrawn. (The author refused to submit a different paper.) I thought it very odd that the editor (with no expertise in the field) took sides in a professional dispute. It didn't stop me from working with this editor again, of course. And when I look into my soul, I recall times that as an editor I was involved in decisions that may have seemed badly motivated to some of the rejected authors.

If we step back from the details of any controversy, such controversy is only to be expected: academic philosophers are humans not sages, who have few reliable measures to navigate a very scarce job environment and informational overload while norms of quality and professional conduct are constantly contestable (and, more slowly, shifting). While there are a lot of truth-guided and earnest people in the profession, whenever we get a glimpse under the hood of how confidential consequential decisions (e.g., publication, admission, appointments) are really made irregularities seem to proliferate. (That is compatible with the vast majority of decisions being defensible on intrinsic and/or procedural grounds.)

Moreover, in each controversy, a very senior figure will gravely and shamelessly intone that other scholars are afraid to speak up because they fear for their careers. It somehow never registers that the structural, cultural, intellectual, and economic conditions that generate such -- let's stipulate -- real fear (sometimes even co-produced by said senior figure) also existed in some shape or another in the lost golden age they cherish, but that then they were on the right side of history in which the people in their network could count on obliging editors, referees, and appointment committees (just ask continental philosophers, or anyone working in other margins of the field).

In our collective behavior we reveal that professional philosophy is, in part, a (modest-in-the-long-term-scheme-of-things) spoils system because during each controversy we go through the same charade sincerely felt debates and sophisticated and laughable arguments (including by world class experts on argument, the working of evidence, inductive risk, deliberative democracy, and ethics, etc.), but we never really risk changing the system and incentives -- our role in a wider political economy of credentialing and knowledge production -- that produce these kinds of controversies (and the many less noticed irregularities that they hint at) so frequently.

The predictability, frequency, and manner of these controversies makes me suspect that such controversies serve a social function. It would be nice if they represented the birth-pangs of a new, healthier intellectual age. But I doubt they are truth-functional because they are characterized by what Mill called ‘vituperative’' speech; I used to think the function was still epistemic: to signal a shift in norm, practice, or attitudes. I increasingly suspect they recur because they drive people without a taste for cruelty and combat away from the discipline (and thereby reduce competition over jobs and prestige, and rid ourselves of sources of dissent) and help entrench the same type of enduring professional hierarchy, even if the tokens at the top move around a bit.

• This first appeared at: <On the controversy in the philosophical blogosphere. (substack.com)> a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

 

 

Hayek on Liberal Utopia, the Long Game, and Weberian Politics

[Over time I am plan to phase out this blog at typepad. This post was first published at  digressions.impressions.substack here. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber at <digressionsimpressions.substack.com>]

In response to my recent suggestion, in my celebration of Chandran Kukathas, [see also this nicely edited reprint in Liberal Currents] that, not unlike other liberal thinkers, "Hayekians" are profoundly anti-political (even suspicious of politics), I was redirected to Hayek's (1949) "The Intellectuals and Socialism" by the doyen of Hayek studies, Bruce Caldwell. In that paper, Hayek argues that liberal intellectuals should focus on the long game and develop what Hayek calls, "liberal utopia." Contemporary neo-Hayekians -- I am thinking of people not unlike Caldwell and Kukathas, but also Pete Boettke (whose writings [see, for example here] first alerted me to the significance of the passage I am about to discuss) -- seem to be  inspired by the following passage as articulating the task of liberal intellectuals:

What we lack is a liberal Utopia, a program which seems neither a mere defense of things as they are nor a diluted kind of socialism, but truly liberal radicalism which does not spare the susceptibilities of the mighty (including the trade unions), which is not too severely practical and which does not confine itself to what appears today as politically possible. We need intellectual leaders who are prepared to resist the blandishments of power and influence and who are willing to work for an ideal, however small may be the prospects of its early realization. (F.A. Hayek (1949) "The intellectuals and socialism," p. 432; emphasis added).

Somewhat sadly most critics of Hayek and what is now known as 'classical liberalism' or 'neoliberalism' do not take this passage seriously at all. They are quick to associate Hayek with Reagan, Thatcher, and Pinochet and all kinds of (dirty) practical politics. Such critics find it hard to believe that the argument's effect on Hayekian intellectuals has been to urge them to keep their hands politically clean and to focus primarily on the noble task of contributing to articulating the elements of a liberal utopia unhindered by short-term feasibility.

digressionsimpressions’s Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Subscribed

In a creative (2022) paper, Mikayla Novak plausible treats Hayek's pre-WWII proposal for interstate federation as a kind of exemplar of the sort of liberal utopian thinking, which she treats as an instance of heterotopia, Hayek may council. In an important article, Caldwell himself points to Hayek's theorizing in The Constitution of Liberty (1960) and Law, Legislation and Liberty (1973-79) as other examples of such utopian theorizing. The function of a liberal utopia is not to guide day-to-day policy based on a blueprint (that's there error of the so-called 'man of system' derided by Adam Smith), but to offer an ideal (even a social theory) that may mobilize others in the long term and that also may be useful in interpreting reality. In fact, in Law, Legislation and Liberty Hayek puts the point as follows: "It is not to be denied that to some extent the guiding model of the overall order will always be an utopia, something to which the existing situation will be only a distant approximation and which many people will regard as wholly impractical. Yet it is only by constantly holding up the guiding conception of an internally consistent model which could be realized by the consistent application of the same principles, that anything like an effective framework for a functioning spontaneous order will be achieved." And in context, it is clear that Hayek treats Adam Smith's impact on the development of British free trade as the exemplar to be emulated.

However, if we look again at the passage quoted from "The intellectuals and socialism," it is worth noting that a liberal utopia is also called a "program" (Foucault picks up on this) and that in his choice of words, 'truly liberal radicalism,' Hayek is evoking the Philosophical Radicals, the politicians who were inspired by Bentham's program. The natural implicature in light of Hayek's relentless criticism of the constructivism of Bentham, which is thus a false liberal radicalism, is that Hayek is trying to generate a program that involves both an intellectual revolution and eventually actionable legislation of the sort we find in the circle of Bentham's political admirers in the 1820s and 30s. Since Hayek (and other neo-liberals of the period) was in dialogue with Dicey's Lectures on the Relation between Law and Public Opinion (recall; also here; and here), and Dicey describes the significance and impact of the Benthamite program, it stands to reason Hayek was inspired to offer an alternative.

Now, I admit that the claims of the previous paragraph rests on slender evidence. But the liberal utopia passage is preceded by another one on the previous page that motivates my reading:

"The difficulty of finding genuine and disinterested support for a systematic policy for freedom is not new. In a passage of which the reception of a recent book of mine has often reminded me, Lord Acton long ago de-scribed how "[a]t all times sincere friends of freedom have been rare, and its triumphs have been due to minorities, that have prevailed by associating themselves with auxiliaries whose objects differed from their own; and this association, which is always dangerous, has been sometimes disastrous, by giving to opponents just grounds of opposition..." More recently, one of the most distinguished living American economists has complained in a similar vein that the main task of those who believe in the basic principles of the capitalist system must frequently be to defend this system against the capitalists-indeed the great liberal economists, from Adam Smith to the present, have always known this. --Hayek "The intellectuals and socialism." (p. 431).

The point of this paragraph is not that the true liberal must restrict herself to devising a new utopia, but that in addition they must seek out ("finding"/"associating themselves") political coalition partners. To be sure, this is not ad hoc policy. It has to be a 'systematic policy' -- that is based on a program -- that can promote freedom. In fact, this is so in the full expectation that these others will not share in Hayek's liberal ideals and may be motivated by much less lofty goals.

In fact, both Acton & Hayek recognize that coalitions with others will involve judgment, including judgements one may turn out to be truly mistaken or "sometimes disastrous." (Just ask the critics of neo-liberalism's occasional flirtation with transitional dictatorship.) And the risks involved include that one must also be willing to speak truth to potentially powerful friends (capitalists), and take on vested interests (unions) that are also dedicated to helping the people whose freedom one claims to promote. This all echoes Weber's account of the sometimes tragic choices facing a “politician with a sense of vocation.”

As an aside: I don't think that Hayek is here anticipating the fusionism (between truly liberal radicalism) and conservative thought that became so characteristic of actual American politics on the right. But that it occurred need not surprise after the fact. What Hayek shows is that political life involves aligning oneself with those, who may share quite different commitments, to make possible one’s goals. This is, in fact, very much like my own view,* and this is why I spoke of 'Hayekians' and not Hayek in my piece.

Now originally, I thought Caldwell understands Hayek to be advocating a kind of political dis-engagement by the intellectual who prepares the way for later generations. But he called my attention to a set of recorded remarks by Kukathas on the 'dilemma' that the liberal, who might exercise power, faces. In his five minute remarks, Kukathas rejects the path of avoiding political life and the path of realism, but advocates restraint and forbearance in power and to stick to liberal principles, especially as ground in the core value of toleration. (The remarks start around 1 hour and 13.) I take it Caldwell thinks this is more principled than the one I endorse. I agree that Kukathas' position is rather noble, it follows (to quote Weber) "the maxim of an ethic of ultimate ends-that is, in religious terms." But this one sided political stance, is not Hayek's.

For, I doubt Hayek believes that when one associates "with auxiliaries whose objects" differ from one's own, one can always stick to one's liberal principles in political life (be at coalition building or power holding). For, if one could stick to one's principles in political life then there wouldn't be any danger or risk of disaster. That's to say, Hayek is, as Foucault discerned, a Weberian in ways that many contemporary Hayekian intellectuals are not.

• Over time I am plan to phase out this blog at typepad. This post was first published at  digressions.impressions.substack here. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber at <digressionsimpressions.substack.com>

---

*Recall I wrote: "So, from this perspective, any program of reform must include a constituency or coalition that can promote the policy effectively. Obviously, the promise here is that this may increase the chances of uptake; it also often makes all liberal proposals much more status-quo friendly. Sometimes the concession to feasibility makes the liberal program appear as a handmaiden to conservatism or common sense morality."

On Tasioulas, Conceptual Inflation, and Public Reason

Hélène Landemore enthusiastically shared a piece, “The Inflation of Concepts,” published at Aeon by John Tasioulas (who she describes as her “Oxford colleague”). Appealing to the work of Jürgen Habermas and John Rawls, Tasioulas focuses on a “threat to the quality of public reason” (which he claims) “tends to go unnoticed. This is the degradation of the core ideas mobilised in exercises of public reason.” And, in particular, what he has in mind is ‘conceptual overreach’. This “occurs when a particular concept undergoes a process of expansion or inflation in which it absorbs ideas and demands that are foreign to it.”

At this point I kind of expected Tasioulas to suggest as an example ‘democracy’ but he initially focuses on “human rights or the rule of law” [he is a legal philosopher] which “is taken to offer a comprehensive political ideology, as opposed to picking out one among many elements upon which our political thinking needs to draw and hold in balance when arriving at justified responses to the problems of our time.” Near the end of his essay he does focus on democracy (which he thinks of as a more “contestable” example!) and while drawing on the excellent work of Joshua Ober, he complains that some people mistakenly use ‘democracy’ and ‘liberal democracy’ interchangeably. (Our reading habits are clearly different because most of the conflations I see involve ‘democracy’ and whatever views a theorist expects/wishes to see approved by their imaginary demos.)

In all three of his main examples, a clear concept is developed by the intellectual class in order to add new features to it, including some that thereby muddle it. Now, Tasioulas does not object to this on the grounds that may tempt what we may call a ‘conceptual purist analytic philosopher’ that true conceptual change is impossible (for the conventional wisdom in the corner of analytic philosophy in which I grew up was that concepts are what they are, eternally). For Tasioulas allows for “the possibility that a given concept might legitimately come to incorporate new demands over time without this constituting a form of conceptual overreach.”

So, lurking in Tasioulas is a kind of consistency requirement that only additions to the content of a concept are legitimate that are compatible with its original identity and, to use a vaguer terms its spirit (this to capture Tasioulas’ examples and his notion of ‘foreign’). Those political agents that inflate concepts beyond the possible limits of intra-conceptual coherence, are conceptual polluters.

I put it like that because Tasioulas shares with his sometime Oxford Colleague, Neil Levy (whose very fine book Bad Beliefs: Why They Happen to Good People I reviewed here [open access]), a kind of fantasy that that the public sphere can remain unpolluted and (this is the public reason part) should remain unpolluted. Of course, if it is a fantasy, then (ought implies can) the duty to keep foreign elements out disappears and one can welcome conceptual hybridization (perhaps even inflation).

Before I explain why it is a fantasy, it is worth noting that the concepts Tasioulas focuses on are also paradigmatic cases of ‘essentially contested concepts’ (in Gallie’s sense) and so one might think that his purist approach to them does not get off the ground. Tasioulas hints at his awareness of this hypothetical objection (not just with his use of ‘contestable’ in the context of his democracy example, but also ) because -- while tacitly invoking the concept/conception distinction that has been used by public reason scholars to domesticate the possibility of ‘essentially contested concepts’ --, he acknowledges that his position “is further complicated by the fact that there might be various equally acceptable ways of specifying the meanings of a range of important concepts.” But it is important to see that for Tasioulas these acceptable ways cannot, in principle, reveal or express internal, latent contradiction(s) or foreign-ess within the concept.

Interestingly enough, and to his credit, Tasioulas does not disguise the elitist commitments in his version of public reason. Alongside the “craving for simplicity,” he fundamentally blames “elite actors and institutions,” “special interest groups,” and “dialectical gambits” by political agents who wish to deprive their “political opponents of a conceptual place on which to stand.” And so in the final paragraph he closes with the claim that the “responsibility” for maintaining a relatively pure conceptual public sphere “falls on all of us, but especially on the wielders of great public and private power.” And this fits his diagnosis at the start of his essay that conceptual inflation is the effect of “the utterances of elite actors, such as bureaucrats, lawyers, politicians and representatives of international organisations and NGOs.”

What’s ironic about all of this is that usually (left) critics of public reason (like my brilliant former teacher Iris Marion Young) tend to point to the elitist presuppositions of public reason (comparing its norms to that of a genteel seminar room) to discredit it and that these norms leave out many other (quite intelligible) forms of contestation and argumentation. By contrast, Tasioulas basically blames the very people who ought to be all in on public reason for not living up to its demands for public speech.

With that in place let me acknowledge that I recognize that communication and decision-making might seem a lot easier if people stuck to a shared notion of particular concepts and that any extensions of these should remain sufficiently pure and avoid what Tasioulas calls inflation. I use ‘seem’ because Tasioulas ignores all the ways in which strategic ambiguity makes peace, collective decisions, coalition-building, and even agreeing to disagree possible.

To be sure, I too am tempted by worry over the confusion and lack of clarity that might follow from conceptual hybridization and inflation, and it can be terribly frustrating to see the mis-use of concepts in public. (I am often happy to die on the mole-hill that Trump was an attempted usurper between January 2-6, 2021, but did not attempt a coup d'état.) And I often see ‘violence’ used in ways that I think inflated. It is part of the analytic philosopher’s political faith that if the concepts are clarified, social life can be in a much better state (this is actually visible in Carnap and, as I have argued in, Ernest Nagel). Nothing I say here undermines that faith, or the purported utility that follows from conceptual engineering, conceptual clarification, or conceptual amelioration. After all, I have appealed to the work of a philosopher’s conceptual coining ‘essentially contested concept’ here! (Some time I return to the odd status of Gallie within professional philosophy.)

Now, above, I used ‘fantasy,’ for three reasons. First, Tasioulas ends up having to tell a mythic stories about concepts that originally are (relatively) pure and then are corrupted by (even well intentioned) strategic actors. (It shares quite a bit of elements with standard accounts of the Fall.) The story is mythic because the temporal and conceptual proper base line Tasioulas appeals to in each case is always drawn arbitrarily by him such as to make the concept do the work Tasioulas wants.

This can be seen even the case of the ‘rule of law.’ Tasioulas writes “Traditionally, this refers to a range of formal and procedural requirements that enable people to comply with the law.” (emphasis added) Because ‘traditionally’ is so vague it is hard to contest this on historical grounds (hence my use of ‘mythic,’ although it helps knowing that Tasioulas is an admirer of Raz!) I was a bit taken aback by this understanding of the rule of law because I don’t tend to think of it in such functional terms (that it enables compliance with the law).

For, it is worth noting that Dicey, who is ‘standardly’ (see what I did there?) credited by conservatives and liberals alike in the Anglo-world for giving the central formulation of the rule of law, describes its first principle as "no man is punishable or can be lawfully made to suffer in body or goods except for a distinct breach of law established in the ordinary legal manner before the ordinary Courts of the land.” This makes clear that the rule of law is understood as a kind of constraint on the exercise of power.

My modest point here is not to argue in favor of Dicey as the proper baseline (why him and not Aristotle or Cicero or Blackstone etc?), but just to suggest that in all his explicit examples Tasioulas is engaged in cherry picking to promote his own favored understanding of a concept as the baseline and then to treat deviations from it that he disapproves of as conceptual inflations. This is essentially arbitrary, and even where I happen to agree politically with Tasioulas, one should not expect wider agreement. I happen to think this is part of the human condition because conceptual inflation just is a strategy that is always available to political agents, but nothing I say requires you to accept that.

However, because it is always going to be somewhat arbitrary, conceptual inflation is always going to be a charge that itself will be contestable. And so functionally one can expect that if there is uptake of ‘conceptual inflation’ as a term of abuse, that rather than focusing on the issues under dispute, it shifts dispute to a more meta-level (about the origins and proper use of a concept). This may be good for the business of analytic philosophy (it’s our area of expertise), and other elite intellectuals, but it will neither cure us of the phenomenon (Tasioulas’ professed aim) nor solve the underlying disputes (although they may displace them which can be preferable sometimes).

Second, even by Tasioulas’ own lights his proposal to keep concepts in “good repair” is likely to fail. Because he does not address the grounds, institutions, or incentives that by his own lights give rise to conceptual inflation (This is why I mentioned Neil Levy’s book, which at least begins the important conversation what would be required to keep the political environment relatively unpolluted.) So, even if Tasioulas could establish a duty to avoid conceptual inflation, it seems defeasible in practice (because obeying it would undermine other important morally salient political aims).

Let me close by assuaging a possible worry that I am making a category mistake, and that I am sneakily trying to undermine commitment to public reason on empirical grounds. But that’s not what I am doing here (even though it’s probably true that I lack warmth toward public reason as a project). Rather, third, it is Tasioulas who mistakenly assumes (with appeal to Habermas and Rawls) that adherence to public reason is existing common ground. And if that were true then indeed he could remind participants in it (like a seminar leader) that they are violating shared norms and all would be well. But, unfortunately, contemporary elites (the ones he appeals to) quite clearly do not believe this, their actions (alongside their utterances) belie it.

• This first appeared at: <https://digressionsimpressions.substack.com/p/on-tasioulas-conceptual-inflation> a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

   

On Humean sovereignty with some Dicey, Schmitt,

A.V. Dicey's life (1835-1922) and work is known almost exclusively for the 'rule of law.' I have some amusing, reductive evidence for this claim: the one and only annotation by Foucault on Dicey is the definition of the rule of law (see here). Presumably the annotation was prompted by Foucault's reading and use of Hayek's Constitution of Liberty, where Dicey's Law of the Constitution is treated as a classic (as the editors of Foucault's Biopolitics lectures note in their endnotes 23-25 on p. 282 in the English translation). One of the best essays on Dicey's significance on thinking about the rule of law to political theory, "Dicey and his Legacy" (Political Theory, 1995) by Julia Stapleton, explores its impact on especially what she calls English liberal-conservative thought.

But it is not impossible that Foucault also read Dicey's Lectures on the Relation between Law and Public Opinion for the very passage in his lecture that elicited the editors' comment is this: "the Rule of law is clearly defined as a state in which the state itself does not organize administrative courts which arbitrate between citizens and the public authorities; the Rule of law is a state in which citizens can appeal to ordinary justice against the public authorities. The English say: If there are administrative courts, then we are not living under the Rule of law." (p. 170, 21 February 1979). This echoes the introduction to the second edition of Lectures on the Relation between Law and Public Opinion (hereafter LRLPO):

But administrative law has two defects which have till very recent years forbidden its existence in England. Administrative tribunals always tend to exclude the jurisdiction of the ordinary law Courts. Administrative Courts are always more or less connected with the Government of the day. Their decisions are apt to be influenced by political considerations. Governmental officials cannot have the thorough independence of judges....An administrative Court is never a completely independent tribunal. (p. 373 in the Libertyfund edition)

Anyway, as I have noted before (recall; here), Dicey's LRLPO (sorry) had a significant impact on mid-twentieth century neo-Liberal thought (including Lippmann, Milton Friedman, and Hayek (see also this paper by Nathanaël Colin-Jaeger).* But to the best of my knowledge there has been no real attempt to explore LRPLO's political theory in light of some of their theoretical concerns, and the viability of liberalism.

At the very start (pp. 4-5) of LRLPO, while drawing on the opening lines of Hume's "Of the First Principles of Government," Dicey notes that "Hume’s doctrine holds good, and the opinion of the governed is the real foundation of all government." (This Humean stance has been explored in my own scholarship, and also in book-length works by Andy Sabl and Paul Sagar.) Dicey then turns this into a Humean theory of sovereignty that is, as it were, neutral among constitutional forms:

the public opinion which governs a country is the opinion of the sovereign, whether the sovereign be a monarch, an aristocracy, or the mass of the people.

This conclusion, however, though roughly true, cannot be accepted without considerable reservation. The sovereign power may hold that a certain kind of legislation is in itself expedient, but may at the same time be unwilling, or even unable, to carry this conviction into effect, and this from the dread of offending the feelings of subjects who, though they in general take no active share in public affairs, may raise an insuperable opposition to laws which disturb their habits or shock their moral sentiment; it is well indeed, thus early in these lectures, to note that the public opinion which finds expression in legislation is a very complex phenomenon, and often takes the form of a compromise resulting from a conflict between the ideas of the government and the feelings or habits of the governed. This holds good in all countries, whatever be their form of government,--Albert Venn Dicey Lectures on the Relation between Law and Public Opinion, p. 10 (libertyfund edition)

So, if I understand Dicey correctly, sovereignty is constituted by the effectual public opinion that governs the country (which we might call 'conventional wisdom') but this opinion is self-limited by considerations of practical wisdom or prudence. I set aside the non-trivial challenges in measuring effectual public opinion in ways that would meet contemporary standards of rigor in political science. Dicey's lectures are a game attempt at exhibiting its existence, but does often flirt with the 'post hoc ergo propter hoc' fallacy.+

Now, as is well known, in the preface to the (1934) second edition of Political Theology, Schmitt presented his account of sovereignty as a polemic with 'liberal normativism and its kind of "constitutional state.'  And certain radical-chic scholars with contempt for liberalism have been all too willing to echo Schmitt's three-fold typology: among (i) "the pure normativist [who] thinks in terms of impersonal rules, and [(ii)] the decisionist [who] implements the good law of the correctly recognized political situation by means of a personal decision, and [iii)] institutional legal thinking unfolds in institutions and organizations that transcend the personal sphere" and then associate liberalism exclusively with the proceduralist-normativist (by taking Rawlsian intellectual hegemony as a kind of natural outgrowth of liberalism or the only liberalism left standing).

Now, I would argue that Dicey's Humean approach to sovereignty formally anticipates the Schmittian decisionist, but without Schmitt's focus on the decisive individual leader (or Führerprinzip) because, to put it classically, Dicey's approach also allows for complex, collective forms of (aristocratic and democratic) leadership. So, to put this as a serious joke: Schmitt's approach is a subset of Dicey's analytically purer approach.

In fact, from a liberal perspective, Dicey anticipates the main problem in Schmitt's analysis of sovereignty, the absence of accountability (a word and its cognates wholly absent in Schmitt's Political Theology and Dicey's LRLPO). By contrast, Hume would also emphasize the role of accountability (recall this post inspired by Lazar's States of Emergency in Liberal Democracies; and this earlier post). [I don't mean to suggest Dicey ignores accountability of government officials.]

Now, it's important that in LRLPO, Dicey recognizes that the actions of the sovereign can be balanced and frustrated by the "checks imposed on such opinion by the existence of counter-currents and cross-currents of opinion." Elsewhere in his theorizing Dicey explored other, institutional checks (like referenda) on sovereignty (especially that effected by parliament).* But without mechanisms of accountability (be it symbolic, formal, political, or juridical) Dicey's Humeanism slides into illiberalism. For, it is not sufficient that there are checks and balances or fractured sovereignty even when the form of the law is obeyed; accountability is required from a liberal perspective. Interestingly enough (in light of efforts to claim that Hayek, who is very influenced by Dicey, is a neo-Schmittian), Hayek does emphasize the significance of accountability to the rule of law by quoting this passage in “Declaration of Parliament Assembled at Westminster” approvingly: “There being nothing more essential to the freedom of a state, than that the people should be governed by the laws, and that justice be administered by such only as are accountable for mal-administration." (chapter on the Origins of the rule of law" Constitution of Liberty, p. 251 in Volume XVII of the Collected Works. n.)

These digressions are all very theoretical, I recognize. And perhaps it would help if we put it in more concrete form if we think of a concrete example: President, Donald Trump's attempted usurpation (starting, roughly, with the phone call to Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia Secretary of State, and culminating in the events of Jan 6, 2021). His actions generated a hasty (second) impeachment on january 13, 2021, by a 232–197 vote. There is no doubt that this conviction had the support of conventional wisdom. But it lacked sufficient votes in the Senate for conviction, primarily, I think, because too many Republican Senators feared the governed, especially their own primary voters' wrath. (Of the seven Republicans who voted to convict only one had to face her voters within two years.) 

The dangerously slow investigation of and legal procedures against Trump's efforts to overturn the Georgia results have undermined accountability and, thereby, help undermine the constitutional order (and risks shifting toward forms of  plebescite despotism). I would be amazed if the delay isn't caused by a general unease felt by prosecutors over the prosecution of a vindictive politician who could return to power and whose supporters are feared. (The perceived odds of his winning again are better than the perceived odds ahead of his first primary run.)

Unfortunately, the conventional wisdom already reflects this shift to some degree by its tendency to deplore the fact that Trump is being prosecuted for mere hush money payments (in a different jurisdiction) without a willingness to urge on prosecution for actions surrounding his attempted usurpation. Noticeably, and in striking contrast, in living memory the French were willing to prosecute (and covinct) former President Sarkozy thereby also derailing any attemp at re-election.

Now, in closing, before you accuse me of Trump derangement syndrome, I don't mean to suggest that lack of accountability is unique to our era or Trump among US presidents. As I have noted in my blogging (recall here; here), since, say, 1940, plenty of US Presidents have committed egregious war crimes (or worse) abroad, including internment of innocent US citizens and assassination of US Citizens on foreign soil, without (symbolic, legal, political,  etc.) accountability. To what degree this gap in American political practice reflects a tacit approval of the American people I leave to the reader.

• This post was first published at my substack account here. Digressionsimpressions’s Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber there.

 

Covid Diaries: Substack and Life plans

Yesterday, I learned I received a 'most valued lecturer among first-year political science students' award. (Technically it was a tie, and I have been toying with asking for a formal recount--the hanging chad jokes write themselves.) It's the first quasi formal teaching recognition I have ever received, and it's bittersweet to receive it while being highly self-conscious of my partial disabilities. It's not wholly a surprise because my giant lecture course has been very popular for about five years now. I have always been popular among some of my students, but others also found me incredibly irritating (at the start of my career my student evals always had bimodal distributions). 

It's not a coincidence that my teaching popularity has improved since the onset of my long covid. (For my official "covid diaries" see here; here; here; here;here; here; here;  here;  here; here; here; here;   here; here; here; here; here;  here; here; here;  here;  here; here; here; here; here;  here; here; here; here; here;  here; here;  here; here; here;  here; here; here; here;  here; here.; and here.) One important life change since I tried to recover from long covid is to reduce cognitive (and physical) multi-tasking through the day and also at any moment. The effect has been that I put much less demands on my teaching: during lectures I am focused primarily on my pedagogical aims for my students and I am not trying to entertain myself (by clever asides or meta-theoretical commentary). 

This past week, I was not allowed to forget my long covid. I violated my no multi-tasking rule, and I could not plan my days (or exercise) in ways that suppress my symptoms (headaches, cognitive fatigue, bad sleep, etc.). I had to do a lot of travel alongside some intense job-related meetings (I had a job search), and so I had to take more regular naproxen as a palliative than I would like. However, now I have almost four months without teaching (and much less travel), so I am looking forward to use the time to get back to some big intellectual projects and also continue my recovery with daily swimming and more leisurely pace.

For, this post is also the start of an experiment with partial monetizing some of my blogging at Substack. During covid and my fall research leave, I had time to reflect on my future. As many of you know, when in health, I split my time between Amsterdam (work) and London (family). But this means that among family, teaching, research, and a whole bunch of job duties I am consistently spread too thin in two (expensive) places. Being on partial disability allowed me to reconfigure my position at work to focus on things that spark joy (and to let go of those that don't): undergraduate teaching and research. I also have cut down on travel between London and Amsterdam, but this has led to less time with family (and less time at work some time of year). But this Fall, I return to full-time teaching and, if my health holds up, I will increasingly be tapped again for tasks that make it hard to square all my commitments and not undermine my health. 

In an ideal world, I would get a new position that either would let me work/live in London or that would pay enough so that I could go half-time as long as my teenage son is in school. But until that happens, I want to blog my way to an income that would require me to be on partial (albeit structural) leave. So all my (after tax) substack income would go to off-setting salary (and so leave) because my university/department rules do not allow me to supplement my income over my basic salary. I am not very optimistic about this plan because (i) I refuse to be a culture warrior; (ii) my topics are a niche product; (iii) I am not the world's greatest writer even in philosophy--having been ruined for modern audiences by translating Cicero as a teenager; (iv) the first sixteen subscribers to my Substack all opted for the free subscription. 

The decision to go with Substack has not been an easy one. When John Protevi made the executive decision to make NewAPPS advertising free, I have always been happy with the fact that my blogging (also at D&I and Crookedtimber) was orthogonal to the monetized market place of ideas and uncorrupted by financial considerations. (This meant money left on the table, especially in the years at NewAPPS.) After all, incentives matter, and they do shape decisions, and your good opinion and refined judgment, dear reader, always matters most to me (feel free to add a choice quote from Seneca or Socrates here). In fact, having become increasingly aware of the role marketing budgets (and publicists) play in recent public facing philosophy, I have taken pride in my role in the intellectual credit economy. 

Anyway, I don't want to dramatize this Substack decision too much (it's only an experiment at first, after all): I will continue to blog at Crookedtimber (and D&I), and a lot of my Substack will be freely available. But I am leaving the high ground: alia iacta est, for the price of a cheap glass of wine you can read my near-daily musings here.

On Olaf Stapledon, Technology induced Extinction Risk, and the Awesome new Atomic and AGI power

 The First Industrial Revolution was almost entirely dependent on coal, oil and falling water, which sources occur only in certain localities. Scientists have been exploring the possibilities of deriving industrial power from the tides, from differences of temperature (which means ultimately from sun-light) and from the disintegration of atoms. It is impossible to say yet what success will be attained in these ventures. But it seems probable that the result will be at least a far wider distribution of the sources of power. It may well be that the perfected production of atomic power will involve a vast and complex enterprise undertaken under a world-wide authority, and the universal distribution of electric current derived from atomic generators. As it is certainly probable that the transmission of power in the form of electricity is going to become very much cheaper and more efficient, ample power will be available everywhere. Each village throughout the world will either tap a high tension grid or generate its own power. As to atomic energy, its frightful dangers are obvious. It is not inconceivable that the belt of minute planets, the Asteroids, between Mars and Jupiter, is the wreckage of a world which its inhabitants accidentally destroyed by the unwise use of atomic energy. It would be a pity to turn our planet into another belt of Asteroids. But atomic energy, though dangerous, promises fabulous source of power in comparison with which coal and oil are quite insignificant. It opens up the possibility of transforming the whole face of the planet according to man's needs. It could , for instance, easily render the Arctic islands and the Antarctic Continent warm and habitable. And atomic power for industrial purposes, we are told, is already “in the offing.” Meanwhile the danger of atomic warfare is increasingly frightful. Short of exploding the planet, atomic energy used as a weapon might do so much damage that the present war, in comparison, would seem an affair of flint arrows and axes. The abolition of war becomes more urgent as man's power increases.--Olaf Stapledon (1946) Youth and Tomorrow, pp. 74-5

Olaf Stapledon (1886 –  1950) is known only to aficionados of science fiction now (Last and First Men and Star Maker are classics that shaped the genre throughout the twentieth century, and arguably kept Spinozistic ideas alive in a positivist age), but in his writings he also helped invent 'futurology' and 'transhumanism.'  I hasten to add, in case you are are of more discerning taste, J.L. Borges was an admirer of Stapledon. Stapledon obtained a PhD in philosophy from University of Liverpool under Alexander Mair (hitherto unknown to me). Stapledon's first book (1929), A Modern Theory of Ethics: A Study of The Relations of Ethics and Psychology, was clearly based on his PhD. Judging by citations, it made no impact on the scholarly world of his day. 

The quoted passage is from a short book written in preparation of a post (second) world war age. In the book, Stapledon is  committed to renewed internationalism (he clearly regrets the failures of the League of Nations) and a form of democratic socialism that can avoid dictatorship (even though Stapledon is clearly very impressed by achievements of the Soviet Union). About his politics some other time more.

The passage caught my attention because it entertains the possibility of technology induced human/species extinction of the species that deploys a new technology. This extinction possibility is in the news again thanks to the (recall) impact of Parfit's writing on longtermism and (the publicity surrounding) rapid developments in AI/AGI. 

Contemplating civilizational collapse or the extinction of species are not new thoughts in the history of philosophical writing or social theory. As I have noted (recall), in book 3 of Plato's Laws, (677a-678a) Plato's Athenian stranger entertains the possibility that the Earth has experienced frequent catastrophic natural events (he explicitly mentions massive floods and pandemics, but it's easy to imagine he also assumes earthquakes and perhaps even meteorite impacts) that have wiped out whole populations of humans and other species of animals, and has set-back the technological capability of civilizations for millennia. (We know from the Hebrew Bible account of the flood and other ancient writings that Plato is not unique in this.)

It's also not new to think that civilizational collapse is endogenous to civilizational life. Arguably this is one of the the natural ways to understand the Hebrew Bible's account of the scattering after the tower of Babel; in (recall) The Great Endarkenment, Elijah Millgram suggests that the linguistic diversification and differentiation (and subsequent cultural implosion and scattering) is itself the effect of the advanced division of labor that makes the building of the tower possible. (This is the great set-piece that opens Millgram's (2015) book.) Social theory going back to Ibn Khaldun is rife with cyclical, civilizational processes in which the key drivers of expansion and success also become self-undermining.

It's also not wholly unusual to recognize the potential civilizational collapse that is endogenous to one's own civilizational life. The writings of a number of elite authors of the final century of the roman republic are pretty clear on the fact that endurance of the roman republic is threatened by its own past history of success (due to conquest imported habits of luxury and/or empowered generals to aim for political power). Of course, often the point of recognizing the potential of civilizational collapse is to create a call to political arms, or a philosophical prophecy, to prevent the collapse from occurring (we can see hints of this in Plato's story of Atlantis). But sometimes the doom is inevitable or fated (as some of the Roman authors clearly came to think).

But, as Parfit de facto notes in Reasons and Persons, there is a non-trivial difference between foreseeing civilizational collapse of one's civilization and the collapse of one's whole species. Now, absent a certain kind of ethical or axiological cosmopolitanism, it seems obvious to me that most authors of the past lamented the possible collapse of their own civilization and showed remarkable indifference to the possible collapse of larger humanity. (This is an option that Parfit does not consider, but if he had he would clearly have suggested that this shows a clear error in their implied axiology.)

Now, Stapledown's writings suggest he is a cosmic cosmopolitan. And in this respect, he clearly fits in a philosophical tradition tracing back to Fontenelle, Huygens, and Kant.  So, it's no surprise he contemplates the possibility of endogenous technologically induced extinction among aliens as an example worth avoiding in the harnessing of atomic power. There are some hints in Youth and Tomorrow that it was written during wartime, and interestingly enough he does not mention the use of atomic weapons. But just before the passage quoted at the top of this post, he claims that "the manufacture of atomic bombs necessitates organisation of production on a national scale and the danger of the misuse of these terrific weapons forces world-wide organisation upon us." (p. 73; emphasis added)

It's a bit unfortunate that Stapledown does not clarify what he means by 'misuse' of atomic weapons here. (He was a pacifist during World War I, but not during the second world war.) Does he mean their deployment, or does he worry about them falling in the hands of rogue states/actors, or does he worry about nuclear world war? But he clearly thinks that atomic power isn't merely a technological problem, but also a political problem on a global scale. After all, he thinks that a world-wide organization is required to handle it.

In the quoted passage at the top of this post, Stapledon is discussing what we now call the 'Kuiper belt' (or Edgeworth-Kuiper belt') [UPDATED: see Ken McLeod's comment below.] But was only then recently proposed by K.E. Edgeworth in a 1943 paper in the Journal of the British Astronomical Association. It would be worth trying to figure out if Stapledon knew Edgeworth personally. In Edgeworth there is no mention of an alien civilization. I am not claiming that Stapledon is the first to propose the hypothesis that the asteroids are themselves the effect of a technologically induced existential collapse, but given this timeline he has to be among the first.* Clearly the function of Stapledon's hypothesis is to alert us to avoid this fate (not, perhaps, to create a testable hypothesis for planetary explorers of the solar system).*

It is, of course, an open question to what degree global institutional control of atomic power mitigates risk or accelerates existential risk. But since this post is long enough as is, I close with the following observation: the possibility of technology induced (endogenous) extinction is, thus, not new with the possibility of AGI. Our society has lived with the possibility of technology induced (endogenous) extinction of humanity for almost eighty years now. To say that is not to underestimate the existential risk that follows from the introduction of new technology. But it is worth noting that we have a history of living with, and perhaps managing, such risk, and perhaps we can learn from this history. For, while it would be nice if there were a technological fix to the existential extinction risk of AGI, it's more likely than not we'll need institutional and social mitigation of such risk.