Digressions&Impressions

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.

Again, Foucault, Kuhn, Carnap and Incommensurability

Despite the reassuring pleasure that historians of medicine may feel when they recognise in the great ledgers of confinement what they consider to be the timeless, familiar face of psychotic hallucinations, cognitive deficiencies, organic consequences or paranoid states, it is impossible to draw up a coherent nosological map from the descriptions that were used to confine the insane. The formulations that justify confinement are not presentiments of our diseases, but represent instead an experience of madness that occasionally intersects with our pathological analyses, but which could never coincide with them in any coherent manner. The following are some examples taken at random from entries on confinement registers for those of ‘unsound mind’: ‘obstinate plaintiff’, ‘has obsessive recourse to legal procedures’, ‘wicked cheat’, ‘man who spends days and nights deafening others with his songs and shocking their ears with horrible blasphemy’, ‘bill poster’, ‘great liar’, ‘gruff, sad, unquiet spirit’. There is little sense in wondering if such people were sick or not, and to what degree, and it is for psychiatrists to identify the paranoid in the ‘gruff’, or to diagnose a ‘deranged mind inventing its own devotion’ as a clear case of obsessional neurosis. What these formulae indicate are not so much sicknesses as forms of madness perceived as character faults taken to an extreme degree, as though in confinement the sensibility to madness was not autonomous, but linked to a moral order where it appeared merely as a disturbance. Reading through the descriptions next to the names on the register, one is transported back to the world of Brant and Erasmus, a world where madness leads the round of moral failings, the senseless dance of immoral lives.

And yet the experience is quite different. In 1704, an abbot named Bargedé was confined in Saint-Lazare. He was seventy years old, and he was locked up so that he might be ‘treated like the other insane’. His principal occupation was 

lending money at high interest, beyond the most outrageous, odious usury, for the benefit of the priesthood and the Church. He will neither repent from his excesses nor acknowledge that usury is a sin. He takes pride in his greed. Michel Foucault (1961) [2006] History of Madness, Translated by Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa, pp. 132-133

In larger context, Foucault is describing how during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (the so-called 'classical age') a great number of people (Foucault suggests a number of 1% of the urban population) were locked up in a system of confinement orthogonal to the juridical system (even though such confinement was often practically indistinguishable from prison--both aimed at moral reform through work and sermons). This 'great confinement' included people with venereal disease, those who engaged in sodomy and libertine practices as well as (inter alia) those who brought dishonor (and financial loss) to their families alongside the mad and frenzied.

To the modern reader the population caught up in the 'great confinement' seems rather heterogeneous in character, but their commonality becomes visible, according to Foucault, when one realizes that it's (moral) disorder that they have in common from the perspective of classical learning. According to Foucault there is "no rigorous distinction between moral failings and madness." (p. 138) Foucault inscribes this (moral disorder of the soul/will) category into a history of 'Western unreason' that helps constitute (by way of negation) the history of early modern rationalism (with special mention of Descartes and Spinoza). Like a true Kantian, Foucault sees (theoretical) reason as shaped by practical decision as constitutive of the whole classical era (see especially p. 139).  My present interest is not to relitigate the great Derrida-Foucault debate over this latter move, or Foucault's tendency to treat -- despite his nominalist sensibilities -- whole cultural eras as de facto organically closed systems (of the kind familiar from nineteenth century historiography).

My interest here is in the first two sentences of the quoted passage. It describes what Thomas Kuhn called 'incommensurability' in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn's Structure appeared in 1962, and initially there seems to have been no mutual influence. I don't want to make Foucault more precise than he is, but we can fruitfully suggest that for Foucault incommensurability involves the general inability to create a coherent mapping between two theoretical systems based on their purported descriptive content. I phrase it like to capture Foucault's emphasis on 'descriptions' and to allow -- mindful of Earman and Fine ca 1977 -- that some isolated terms may well be so mapped. As an aside, I am not enough of a historian of medicine (or philosopher of psychology) to know whether nosological maps can be used for such an exercise. (It seems like a neat idea!) 

So, Foucault is thinking about ruptures between different successive scientific cultures pretty much from the start of his academic writing (recall this post on the later The Order of Things). In fact, reading History of Madness after reading a lot of Foucault's other writings suggests a great deal of continuity in Foucault's thought--pretty much all the major themes of his later work are foreshadowed in it (and it also helps explain that he often didn't have to start researching from scratch in later writings and lectures). 

In fact, reading Foucault with Kuhn lurking in the background helps one see how important a kind of Kantianism is to Foucault's diagnosis of incommensurability. I quote another passage in the vicinity that I found illuminating:

The psychopathology of the nineteenth century (and perhaps our own too, even now) believes that it orients itself and takes its bearings in relation to a homo natura, or a normal man pre-existing all experience of mental illness. Such a man is in fact an invention, and if he is to be situated, it is not in a natural space, but in a system that identifies the socius to the subject of the law. Consequently a madman is not recognised as such because an illness has pushed him to the margins of normality, but because our culture situates him at the meeting point between the social decree of confinement and the juridical knowledge that evaluates the responsibility of individuals before the law. The ‘positive’ science of mental illness and the humanitarian sentiments that brought the mad back into the realm of the human were only possible once that synthesis had been solidly established. They could be said to form the concrete a priori of any psychopathology with scientific pretensions.--pp. 129-130

For Foucault, a concrete a priori is itself the effect of often indirect cultural construction or stabilization. In fact, for Foucault it tends to be an effect of quite large-scale and enduring ('solidly') social institutions (e.g., the law, penal/medical institutions) and material practices/norms. The discontinuity between concrete a priori's track what we may call scientific revolutions in virtue of the fact that systems of knowledge before and after a shift in a concrete a priori cannot possibly be tracking the same system of 'objects' (or 'empirical basis'). 

I don't mean to suggest that for Foucault a system of knowledge cannot be itself a source/cause of what he calls a 'synthesis' that makes a concrete a priori possible. That possibility is explicitly explored in (his discussion of Adam Smith in) his The Order of Things. But on the whole a system of knowledge tends to lag the major cultural shifts that produce a concrete a priori. 

Let me wrap up. A full generation after Structure appeared there was a belated and at the time revisionary realization that Structure could be read as a kind of neo-Kantian text and, as such, was actually not very far removed from Carnap's focus on frameworks and other projects in the vicinity that were committed to various kinds of relativized or constitutive a prioris. This literature started, I think, with Reisch 1991. (My own scholarship has explored [see here; here] the surprising resonances between Kuhn's Structure and the self-conception of economists and the sociology of Talcott Parsons at the start of twentieth century and the peculiar fact that Kuhn's Structure was foreshadowed in Adam Smith's philosophy of science.) I mention Carnap explicitly because not unlike Carnap [see Stone; Sachs, and the literature it inspired], Foucault does not hide his debts to Nietzsche. 

So here's my hypothesis and diagnosis: it would have been much more natural to read Structure as a neo/soft/extended-Kantian text if analytic philosophers had not cut themselves off from developments in Paris. While I do not want to ignore major differences of emphasis on scope between Kuhn and Foucault, their work of 1960 and 1962 has a great deal of family resemblance despite non-trivial differences in intellectual milieus. I actually think this commonality is not an effect of a kind of zeitgeist or the existence of an episteme--as I suggested in this post, it seems to be a natural effect of starting from a broadly domesticated Kantianism. But having said that, that it was so difficult initially to discern the neo-Kantian themes in Kuhn also suggests that not reading the French developments -- by treating 'continental thought' as instances of unreason (which is Foucault's great theme) -- also created a kind of Kuhn loss in the present within analytic philosophy. 

 

 

Kuhn, Ortega y Gasset, Adam Smith and Mental Mutilation (and even a side comment on Graeber and Wengrow)

Who is it that exercises social power to-day? Who imposes the forms of his own mind on the period? Without a doubt, the man of the middle class. Which group, within that middle class, is considered the superior, the aristocracy of the present? Without a doubt, the technician: engineer, doctor, financier, teacher, and so on. Who, inside the group of technicians, represents it at its best and purest? Again, without a doubt, the man of science...

And now it turns out that the actual scientific man is the prototype of the mass-man. Not by chance, not through the individual failings of each particular man of science, but because science itself-the root of our civilisation-automatically converts him into mass-man, makes of him a primitive, a modem barbarian. The fact is well known; it has made itself clear over and over again; but only when fitted into its place in the organism of this thesis is does it take on its full meaning and its evident seriousness...

But the development of physics introduced a task opposite in character to unification. In order to progress, science demanded specialisation, not in herself, but in men of science. Science is not specialist. If it were, it would ipso facto cease to be true. Not even empirical science, taken in its integrity, can be true if separated from mathematics, from logic, from philosophy. But scientific work does, necessarily, require to be specialised.

It would be of great interest, and of greater utility than at first sight appears, to draw up the history of physical and biological sciences, indicating the process of increasing specialisation in the work of investigators. It would then be seen how, generation after generation, the scientist has been gradually restricted and confined into narrower fields of mental occupation. But this is not the importantpoint that such a history would show, but rather the reverse side of the matter: bow in each generation the scientist, through having to reduce the sphere of his labour, was progressively losing contact with other branches of science, with that integral interpretation of the universe which is the only thing deserving the names of science, culture, European civilisation.--José Ortega y Gasset (1932) The Revolt of the Masses (anonymous translator), pp. 108-110.

One the least flattering elements to science of Tomas Kuhn's philosophy of science is his insistence that most normal science is akin to puzzle-solving of a very specialized kind. And as Kuhn reminds his audience, "it is no criterion of goodness in a puzzle that its outcome be intrinsically interesting or important... intrinsic value is no criterion for a puzzle." It follows from this view, that science -- broadly viewed as a social institution -- selects for a certain kind of narrow, to-be-disciplined ingenuity. Of course, that's compatible with, as Kuhn hastens to add, a whole range of nobler motives in the scientist to join in science and stick with it. Kuhn's treatment of science is a functional analysis not psychological. But at bottom, science flourishes on a socially useful mental mutilation--and if you think that phrase too strong, Kuhn himself, more modern (and so medicalized) uses the euphemistic language of "addiction.

Kuhn leaves unaddressed whether society, which, let's stipulate, largely benefits from the fruits of scientific activity, owes the scientists any concern. Certain kinds of addiction may well be compatible with individual happiness after all. But if one takes a more expansive view of human flourishing, there is something disconcerting about the picture Kuhn draws for the scientist qua individual.

Writing a generation ahead of Kuhn, Ortega y Gasset emphasizes a mental mutilation (notice the 'barbarism') in the vicinity of puzzle-solving: hyper-specialization as an effect of the cognitive division of labor. To underlying claim is pretty clear: in order to advance on the research-frontier, one must focus on increasingly esoteric material disconnected from most other features of one's discipline and the other science. Kuhn himself captures the idea in terms of the effect of 'subdivision.'

Now, earlier in the (short) book than the passage I quoted (from chapter 12), Ortega y Gasset had offered an earnest plea for the continued significance of pure science as the fount of all technical advance (see chapter 9). And on his view this requires that the larger society embraces a set of ideals and mores conducive to people wanting to become scientists. (He recognizes that with rising affluence would be scientists have lots of other opportunities. Although his real interest is in culture.) So, Ortega y Gasset is not a critic of science or scientists as such. 

But, anticipating James Burnham and echoing themes also familiar from Hayek, he thinks both that modern "men of science" ((112)) his is a very gendered view) are the exemplary element in (to use Burnham's terminology) the ascendant managerial class, and that their mental mutilation -- their hyper-specialization -- makes them wholly unsuitable to the task of political and cultural leadership. Because while the "specialist "knows" very well his tiny corner of the universe, he is radically ignorant of the rest." (111) He is an "learned ignoramus." (112) 

The problem is, however, that while most specialists understand their own limitations and stay in their lane, the ones that stray into "politics, art, religion, and the general problems of life and the world" are likely too impressed by their own skills and smarts. (I need not remind you here of the pontificating popular scientist who makes elementary philosophical blunders and seems oddly unread.) Interestingly enough, Ortega y Gasset is not especially interested in the policy failures this may engender. Rather he thinks once these kind of people are empowered to shape society, they will fail to reproduce a culture worth having. And while he understands himself as a liberal democrat, this part of Ortega y Gasset's project is clearly very indebted to Nietszche's musing about the last man.

What Ortega y Gasset, himself a scion of Marburg Kantianism, failed to foresee is that in his own age, philosophy would also turn professional under the leadership of Carnap and Ernest Nagel, And that we, too, have become increasingly a  discipline of specialists. So, by his light (and Kuhn's) we, too, are likely to be mentally mutilated.

Because alienation is associated with Marxism, I am using 'mental mutilation.' Ortega y Gassett's interest in the political significance of mental mutilation is anticipated by Adam Smith.  I don't know whether Smith was the first person to diagnose mental mutilation as a side effect of employment, but his version of it remains striking (recall):

In the progress of the division of labour, the employment of the far greater part of those who live by labour, that is, of the great body of the people, comes to be confined to a few very simple operations, frequently to one or two. But the understandings of the greater part of men are necessarily formed by their ordinary employments. The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects too are, perhaps, always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding, or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become. The torpor of his mind renders him, not only incapable of relishing or bearing a part in any rational conversation, but of conceiving any generous, noble, or tender sentiment, and consequently of forming any just judgment concerning many even of the ordinary duties of private life. Of the great and extensive interests of his country, he is altogether incapable of judging; and unless very particular pains have been taken to render him otherwise, he is equally incapable of defending his country in war. The uniformity of his stationary life naturally corrupts the courage of his mind, and makes him regard with abhorrence the irregular, uncertain, and adventurous life of a soldier. It corrupts even the activity of his body, and renders him incapable of exerting his strength with vigour and perseverance, in any other employment than that to which he has been bred. His dexterity at his own particular trade seems, in this manner, to be acquired at the expence of his intellectual, social, and martial virtues. But in every improved and civilized society this is the state into which the labouring poor, that is, the great body of the people, must necessarily fall, unless government takes some pains to prevent it. Adam Smith Wealth of Nations WN 5.1.f 50

Smith is explicit that the structural cause of the underlying problem is the division of labor. And while the example of those who are confined to a few very simple operations is a limiting case, ,Smith leaves no doubt that social advancements come at the expense of most of our individual capacities. Unlike most members of 'team progress,' he thinks, as he puts it in the next paragraph, that people in 'backward' civilizations actually have better trained and cultivated judgments, including most notably political judgments:

It is otherwise in the barbarous societies, as they are commonly called, of hunters, of shepherds, and even of husbandmen in that rude state of husbandry which precedes the improvement of manufactures, and the extension of foreign commerce. In such societies the varied occupations of every man oblige every man to exert his capacity, and to invent expedients for removing difficulties which are continually occurring. Invention is kept alive, and the mind is not suffered to fall into that drowsy stupidity, which, in a civilized society, seems to benumb the understanding of almost all the inferior ranks of people. In those barbarous societies, as they are called...Every man too is in some measure a statesman, and can form a tolerable judgment concerning the interest of the society, and the conduct of those who govern it.  

I used this very passage (recall) in responding to an essay by David Graeber and David Wengrow, and could re-use it in light of their recent The Dawn of Everything. They attribute something like this insight to Marshal Sahlins, and it informs a lot of the most glorious passages in their book when they describe the statesmen and women of native society in colorful detail. I mention the book, because one effect of their argument is to make me see that for Smith what we may call republican self-government (of the sort promoted by Graeber and Wengrow) of society becomes every more problematic as the division of labor advances to encompass all.* And so there is a sense in which we should not be surprised by the near disappearance of such practices of deliberative self-governing citizen assemblies (that Graeber and Wengrow like): it's a prediction that follows naturally from Smith's theory. Our representative assemblies should then be viewed as a necessary, second best.

That Smith is also concerned with the effects on self-government is clear from the next paragraphs where he holds up as exemplar "Greek and Roman republics." (His main interest is, however on 'martial spirit.') Notice, that size of population or scale are not the issue on limits of self-government. (This is rightly attached by Graeber and Wengrow.) Rather, it's the division of labor that makes us collectively smarter, but individually stupider. 

Now, Smith himself thought that to combat life-long mental mutilation, the state should creative conditions in which kids needed to be taught alongside literacy, the "principles of geometry and mechanics." And in context it is clear that he thinks this, can promote self-government. It's unfortunate that Smith does not explain what the virtues of geometry and mechanics are such that they combat mental mutilation, but he does think that even in extreme division of labor the kind of principles one can discern in them would be regularly re-activated. 

Before one suspects that Smith's criticism of the 'working' classes is meant to open the door to the interest of capital, Smith himself thought the merchant classes could not be trusted with government because they would be too self-interested. But he takes for granted that  landowners and philosophers have room to take in a wider frame and develop good judgment (an important theme in Sam Fleischacker's interpretation of Smith). But since Smith's philosophy of science is broadly proto-Kuhnian, and the Wealth of Nation pretty much starts with the observation that philosophy has become incorporated into the division of labor, he cannot be sanguine about its future.

As an aside, even though Kuhn draws attention to the analogy between political and scientific revolutions, he himself thought that judgments were paradigm relative: "neither a decline nor a raising of standards." So, for Kuhn the problem that is immanent in his work never fully arises.

Writing just as the Great Depression is about to start, Ortega y Gasset's analysis implicitly suggests that Smith was too optimistic. That as the market grows and the division of labor becomes wider, as society becomes complexer, we should not expect good judgment among what passes for the educated classes at all. Because our universities will increasingly churn out hyper-specialists (including specialists in 'governance'); and even where there is book-learning as part of a liberal arts curriculum, political judgment can never be properly cultivated in a society like ours because all of us are always too distant from the conduct of those who govern us until it's too late.*

I should stop here. Yet, I want to add one more comment. The reservoir of nineteenth century bourgeois culture has been emptied. Despite the political implosion of Europe in the 1930s, liberal democracy recovered while the cognitive division of labor (and the economy) expanded greatly. We now have lots of tools that even expert practitioners have to black box (and arguably contributed to causing the Great Financial Recession). Yet our political process muddles through. This raises the suspicion that there is more judgment in our society than Ortega y Gasset has any right to expect, or that judgment is not needed. One cannot help but suspect that the unfolding environmental crisis will test both options severely.

 

 

Nancy Bauer vs Carnap and Langton on Philosophical Authority

    What kind of authority is necessary for a philosopher’s vision of how things are with the world to hold sway? What is necessary, to put the question in Austinian terms, for the successful execution of a philosophical speech act? More fundamentally, what is a philosophical speech act? What sort of illocutionary force does a felicitous philosophical speech act wield? Under what conditions is such a speech act felicitous? Let us pose these questions in light of one of Langton’s philosophical speech acts. At the climax of “Speech Acts and Unspeakable Acts” Langton writes: “The claim that pornography subordinates has good philosophical credentials: it is not trickery, or ‘sleight of hand’; it is by no means ‘philosophically indefensible.’” What act is being attempted in this passage? Well, at this juncture in her article Langton is epitomizing a claim that she has been trying in the article to defend. She is also engaged in a further act of claiming (that the claim that pornography subordinates has good philosophical credentials). If we inspect the felicity conditions for such an act, we will not find that having authority is one of them. But we can say more about Langton’s speech act than that she is lodging a claim. For isn’t she trying to legitimate MacKinnon’s view of the relationship between pornography and sexual subordination, to rank this claim as better justified than the claims that would purport to undermine it, and perhaps even to make it the case that the lodgers of these would-be undermining claims are silenced at the level of the success of their own illocutions—that their attempts to extol pornography will come off as unauthoritative? If so, then by her own lights these actions will misfire to the extent that she lacks the requisite authority. But what is the requisite sort of authority? What authorizes philosophical speech?
    The obvious answer is: reason itself. But this answer begs the question of how reason, on any construal of the notion, gets its authority in the culture. All you have to do is look around to conclude that, contrary to the assumption that appears to pervade philosophical writing these days, the culture does not take reason’s authority to be self-evident. Plato, for one, felt this state of affairs to be intolerable: on his view, any philosopher worthy of the name was obligated not just to commune with the forms but to come down from the mountaintop and attempt to attract the citizenry to the sublime, if almost imperceptible, beauty of reason. It was not enough for the philosopher to churn out journal articles on the mountaintop and hope that the hoi polloi would at some later date decide to take an interest in their acts of legitimating, ranking, and so on. To be a philosopher for Plato is to provide a vision of how things are with the world and to attempt to attract people to the project of recognizing themselves—or not, as the case may be—in this vision.
    Aristotle agreed with Plato. So did the medievals, and so did any number of modern philosophers. In fact, it was not until the mid-twentieth century that philosophy seems to have beaten a retreat to the proverbial ivy tower. Part of the impetus, of course, has been the increasing specialization and institutionalization of the discipline. But philosophers’ relatively recent reluctance to worry about our authority in the culture also has nobler roots. It is to some extent a product of horror at the way their colleagues’ work had been exploited by dangerous ideologues—how Marx’s investment in humanizing humanity had given way to Stalinist Russia, how Nietzsche’s celebration of human nature had provided grist for the mill of Hitler. The young Rudolph Carnap alludes to this horror in the preface to the Aufbau, as we see in the following passage:

We cannot hide from ourselves the fact that trends from philosophical-metaphysical and from religious spheres, which protect themselves against [a scientific, rational, and anti-individualistic conception of philosophy], again exert a strong influence precisely at the present time. Where do we derive the confidence, in spite of this, that our call for clarity, for a science that is free from metaphysics, will prevail?—From the knowledge, or, to put it more cautiously, from the belief, that these opposing powers belong to the past.

Vigorously progressive in his politics, committed to the ideals of socialism, and horrified by the elitism he saw in the metaphysics of, most prominently, his contemporary and compatriot Martin Heidegger, Carnap passionately believed that he was morally and politically obliged to treat philosophy as an at least potentially rigorous science. It is understandable, then, that Carnap in his day and age felt that the cost of philosophizing in the old way—the cost of attempting to arrogate cultural authority by the sheer act of writing—was simply too high. Philosophy was instead to take its carefully circumscribed place in a new world, one grounded not on the philosopher’s personal metaphysical vision but on pure reason itself. The philosopher’s goal, Carnap thought, was to employ reason to make progress on fundamental scientific questions of universal interest and importance. The social and political cost of construing the cultural role of philosophy otherwise, he claimed, was simply too high.
   Carnap is to be lauded for his relentless thoughtfulness about what he was doing, within both philosophy and the wider world. My beef is neither with Carnap nor with the style of philosophizing he bequeathed to the next century. My worry, rather, is that Carnap’s conception of philosophical reason has come apart from the reasons for his investment in it—that we have inherited his thought but not his thoughtfulness. (Crucially, I could say exactly the same thing about Freud or Wittgenstein or Kant as an ethicist.)
   What I am in effect worrying about, then, is whether we can afford to continue to cleave to the narrow conceptions of philosophy we have inherited and their implicit claims to self-evident authority. I am not suggesting that we dumb philosophy down in order to rescue the masses. I am not advocating a return, or forward leap, to any particular style or form of philosophizing. I am not denying that we take tremendous political, social, and moral risks when we attempt to provoke other people to unsettle their settled opinions. I am not encouraging us to aim too high. But I am calling for us to commit ourselves to a grander, more ambitious, and more explicit expression of interest in the question of what it is that we are doing and what licenses our doing it. What would it look like for philosophy to issue an audible call for genuine thinking, to compete, that is, with the penchant for self-anesthetization that contemporary culture encourages? What would it look like for us to aspire above all to have a say in the world?--Nancy Bauer (2015) "On Philosophical Authority" in How to do Things With Pornography, pp. 125-128 

Last week, in the context of her criticism of Timothy Williamson, I noted that Bauer's book is full of metaphilosophy. In many ways the quoted passage, which ends chapter 7, is the meta-philosophical core of the book which is why I quoted it length. 

In contemporary philosophy, clarity and rigor in argument is often held up as the ideal. And this can be understood in two ways. One sees in getting the argument right a means to facilitate further discussion (about the premises, or significance of the conclusion). I associate this (dialogic) view of argument with my former NewAPPS colleague, Catarina Dutilh Noveas, and it can also be discerned, as a dynamics of progress, in Daniel Stoljar (recall) Philosophical Progress: In Defence of a Reasonable Optimism.

The other way sees that arguments have a silencing effect at the pain of being called, as Nozick noted, 'irrational.' Nozick expressed the idea as follow:

The terminology of philosophical art is coercive: arguments are powerful and best when they are knockdown, arguments force you to a conclusion, if you believe the premise you have to or must believe the conclusion, some arguments do not carry much punch, and so forth. A philosophical argument is an attempt to get someone to believe something, whether he wants to believe it or not. A successful philosophical argument, a strong argument, forces someone to a belief” Philosophical Explanations, p. 4.*

Bauer's worry about Langton's paper has a family resemblance to Nozick's concern about arguments. I mention Nozick, because there is a natural way to construe Langton's exercise as a kind of legitimate self-defense against the previously successful efforts to delegitimize MacKinnon's views which attempt to end the silencing and subordination of women. To put that in context, in May, I put a tentative syllabus for a feminist theory course online, and a very distinguished legal and political philosopher opined on my facebook page that I should put Langton and not MacKinnon on my syllabus because Langton is far more sophisticated and, after I pushed back, that MacKinnon is philosophically not rigorous. His reaction suggests that indeed Langton has legitimated certain views (and simultaneously and ironically allows some to continue to devalue MacKinnon's contribution). And Langton has become the (ahh) authoritative spokesperson within certain overlapping disciplines -- because conforming to certain standards -- for these views.

Nozick also rejects the self-defense model: "For one's own protection it should not be necessary to argue at all, merely to note publicly what bludgeoning the others are attempting-intellectual satyagraha, to use Gandhi's term for nonviolent resistance." (5) But while this is a noble stance in philosophy, perhaps, it is not apt for the law where it might entail unilateral acquiescence in one's subordination. And while satyagraha is a legitimate political stance, it is not to be prescribed to others (because then it can be a further means of subordination). 

In fact, Langton's paper is not just directed at philosophers who did not give MacKinnon's ideas their due (because they mistakenly treated these as incoherent), it is, as the closing sentence of her paper reveals, also designed to open the door to a change in government policy/law.** And the line of influence is pretty clear: if legal philosophers and judges better understand the coherence and legitimacy of MacKinnon's views, they may well prevent courts from rejecting local (and national) anti-porn ordinances. The form of Langton's speech act is perfectly calibrated to try to shape legally influential elite opinion (which has been preventing local democratic majorities from exercising their political authority). So, it strikes me as a mistake to claim that Langton has not properly conceptualized, as Bauer claims "the illocutionary force of her own words." (114)

I mention this because while Bauer recognizes that Langton is "underwriting a particular political position," (120) Bauer also represents Langton as taking a "very carefully circumscribed role with respect to a certain feminist antipornography position...simply to remove a stumbling block--a charge of incoherence---from the path of MacKinnon and like-minded activists" (122). And as should be clear from the long block quote above, Bauer opposes to this a "grander vision of our profession, our capacity to speak in an authoritative voice in our culture, our capacity to call ourselves and others to task of serious reflection." (122) But because the way elite legal opinion co-shapes judicial review, Langton's approach is not a good exemplar for "the irrelevance of contemporary philosophy in the culture at large....for to be worthy of the name feminists must...be committed to serious and social transformation." (116) For, while Langton's approach (writing in P&PA in 1993) may not be known to the culture at large it does help shape social transformation. 

What Bauer misses is that Stateside, and in places with traditions of constitutional review, the authority of philosophical speech is albeit partially, imperfectly, and indirectly, secured by the constitutional order and the customs/practices and force that secure it. (And if one thinks that philosophy or reason is immanent in the sciences, then the political process institutionalizes philosophy into a powerful force in society in many more (imperfect, partial etc.) ways.) This is why it is not wholly misleading to call constitutional government an Enlightenment project. For contemporary critics (often religious and nationalist in character), these constitutional orders also exhibit the dangers of giving a certain philosophy too much power.+ 

Notice that if this is right, it suggests it is wrong to treat Carnap and others move into the ivory tower as a retreat from political influence. (This is not Bauer's view, but it is sometimes associated with Reisch's influential interpretation of cold war philosophy of science.) For in the proper constitutional order, philosophy's uptake is mediated by judiciary, bureaucracy, technology, and sciences. This is, in fact, a kind of mediated trickle-down of philosophy. 

But this observation actually helps illuminate Bauer's larger project: given the incentives, it is very tempting to speak to fellow elites and not the culture at large if you happen to be a philosopher aiming at political influence. On my view this is, for example a feature of utilitarianism as a technology of government, and helps explain some of its moral failures (when it fails to notice that those not at the table or not as sophisticated with the tools may be harmed badly). Of course, political influence may well fall short of social transformation and so one can, with equal justice, describe the position I have just outlined as a form of pacification of philosophy.

So far I have suggested that Bauer has asked the right question about the authority of philosophical practice. I also have suggested she offers the right diagnoses of most of it, but that it misfires in the case of Langton's project. And while I agree with Bauer that in general, philosophers have 'appropriated' Austin's distinctions against the spirit of Austin's own philosophy, Langton's speech act is an important example of how philosophers can do things with words in our political culture. And I say this even though I agree with Bauer's more methodological criticisms of Langton's approach to claims of pornography's authority (on which I have been silent here).

Now,  I have not suggested that Bauer is wrong to want something different from philosophy. But I think her position is at odds with herself and that her use of Plato exhibits this tension. For even in her depiction of Plato, philosophy does not have an authoritative voice in a culture if by that we mean capable of shaping and even transforming the culture.

Rather, what she shows Plato as doing (and I think this is a plausible and inspiring reading of Plato's philosophy and its role as an instrument to call people to the academy) as being skilled in persuading some to an intellectual way of life in which they are challenged to think autonomously. She never mentions Thoreau, but Thoreau's (delayed, perhaps) effect on the young may be thought an instance of such a true education. This still involves philosophy with a public-facing rhetoric, but it is not a rhetoric aimed at the people at large.  

Yet, feminism has -- by her own lights -- a broader ambition: to end patriarchy, and, thus, to transform society radically. And one may well believe that a kind of mediated trickle-down and the Platonic call to individuals are insufficient if it is divorced from a larger social movement shaping the culture, as it were, from below.  Of course, social movements are populated by individuals who think for themselves and recognize themselves in properly transformed social reality. But if you want an authoritative philosophy apt for that project, I suspect you have to be willing to play with the fire that Carnap warns against.

 

 

On Being a Boring/Bored Academic (Via Huemer and Ernest Nagel)

It wasn’t until much later that I started to get annoyed with the field of philosophy. We give the good stuff to undergraduates — free will, the existence of God, the objectivity of morality, etc. The boring, unimportant material is saved for the academic journals, meant to be read by professors — arguments about whether professor x’s objection to y’s version of such-and-such argument shows that that version of the argument fails to establish its conclusion, etc. The issue of free will, for example, is super-interesting, but the free will literature is some of the boringest stuff you’ll ever encounter. I feel drowsy just thinking about it.--Michael Huemer (Colorado) "What's good and bad about philosophy" [HT DAILYNOUS]

During the past year Huemer wrote a number of blog posts that inspired much buzz (approval and scoffing) in the philo-blogosphere. But while they were on topics of interest to me and known to provoke me into digressions, I did not feel much urge to chime in. In part, my reticence was due because it seemed that his underlying sensibility was one of misery. And I was imaging Yoda telling me to stay away from the dark side. But because I have been miserable during the pandemic, and to the best of my knowledge I had never met Huemer, I also worried that I was projecting my state of mind on to his blog persona. I don't mean to suggest I thought it was merely projection: my virtual diagnosis of him was prompted by his post on the terrible nature of academic writing, in which he writes (inter alia) "academic style isn’t fun to read, and it isn’t fun to write. So who is making us do this?" That reads like an authentic expression of misery to me (perhaps -- now I am glancing over the details of his argument -- prompted by justified rage at referee 2).

Now, continental philosophers have fine theories about the role of boredom in late, or very late, capitalism, say, as a species of alienation for a parasitic class. One can find such theories ending up being marketed in the spectacle of the art world. And it is also easy to become satirical about self-help books that tell us that boredom is the condition of creativity and that letting kids not be bored at all stunts their development. It is also easy to be belittle the sad reality that the very conditions of philosophy are undermined by the dread and nihilist despair of reading the literature. 

For some of you Huemer's diagnoses may not resonate. I have had colleagues for whom digesting and writing for Analysis is sufficient condition for flourishing,--bless their soul. If that's like you, nothing I say is intended to make you feel unhappy about this.

But Huemer's remarks quoted above and his conclusion -- "what we we get is discussions of niggling details, which make no sense and have no interest to you if you haven’t read the specific academic literature from the last 10 years; discussions focused on the literature rather than the issues, filled with qualifications and digressions into potential misunderstandings and errors that you probably would never have been tempted toward in the first place – and all to get to some anodyne, highly qualified claims about incredibly circumscribed questions" -- resonated with me. By contrast, I adore my undergraduate teaching in large part because the material we explore together is so glorious and I love where the students take me as their minds expand. I rarely feel anything like this in reading even the scholarly papers I admire most.* 

As it happens, yesterday I read the following passage in Ernest Nagel back in 1935:

Santayana remarks in one of his books that he would be ashamed to hold views in philosophy which he did not believe in daily life, and that he would deem it dishonest and cowardly to sail under colors in an argument which were not those under which he habitually lived. The precept implied by these comments can serve as a criterion for evaluating the quality of integration which a thinker achieves in his own life but more significantly, it helps to fix the subject matter and task of philosophy, and so to disclose the relevance of the philosophic pursuit to the society which nourishes it. It is a precept which I take for my own wholeheartedly, and one which I wish were taken as a guide in all philosophic inquiry. "Notes Toward a Naturalistic Conception of Logic, republished in Logic Without Metaphysics (1956), p. 39.

Now, 1935 was in the midst of the great depression. And so the question of nourishment was not merely a metaphor. Nagel himself was about to embark on a funded tour of Europe where he would discover and partially help, as I have argued, legislate a very different philosophical scene. 

Even so, it is pretty clear that the conception of philosophy inspired by Santayana, fairly or not, is less likely to be boring than the pointless and dull activity memorably described by Huemer in his post. Nagel discerns a way in which existential concerns with integrity between thought and deed (recall here) are connected to the social purposes of one's society. I recognize that Nagel has anticipated an idea that I have digressed on (and distinguished from other notions in the neighborhood), that a philosopher's philosophical integrity involve the way(s) in which one's professional arguments, professional credit, and public utterances and comportment cohere. 

I do not mean to deny that there are tensions in Nagel's position. His views are (recall here; here) resolutely pluralist, and, if his "all philosophic inquiry" is not meant to refer to his own, he may be thought inconsistent with his other views here. And he is a bit quick, too quick, to assume that the disclosure to society of the relevance of one's philosophical pursuit will be met by approval of that society. Even a democratic philosophy may irritate, even bore, the masses, after all. 

Now, Nagel is relevant here because there is a sense in which he gave up, in practice, on the commitment he just described. And, there is a further sense that, together with Carnap, as Abe Stone has emphasized (here; here), he helped inaugurate the professional turn of philosophy so familiar to us now and that drives the Huemers among us to existential despair (okay, that was over the top; sorry). Nagel himself recognized all of this, and he discusses it un-sparingly, and appropriately, at the start of a presidential address to the APA in December 1954, where he discuss this feature of "recent analytical literare":

The past quarter century has been for philosophy in many parts of the world a period of acute self-questioning, engendered in no small measure by developments in scientific and logical thought, and in part no doubt by fundamental changes in the social order. In any event, there has come about a general loss of confidence in the competence of philosophy to provide by way of a distinctive intellectual method a basic ground-plan of the cosmos, or for that matter to contribute to knowledge of any primary subject-matter except by becoming a specialized positive science and subjecting itself to the discipline of empirical inquiry. Although the abysses of human ignorance are undeniably profound, it has also become apparent that ignorance, like actual knowledge, is of many special and heterogeneous things; and we have come to think, like the fox and unlike the hedgehog of whom Mr. Isaiah Berlin has recently reminded us, that there are a great many things which are already known or remain to be discovered, but that there is no one "big thing" which, if known, would make everything else coherent and unlock the mystery of creation. In consequence, many of us have ceased to emulate the great system-builders in the history of philosophy. In partial imitation of the strategy of modern science, and in the hope of achieving responsibly held conclusions about matters concerning which we could acquire genuine competence, we have tended to become specialists in our professional activities. We have come to direct our best energies to the resolution of limited problems and puzzles that emerge in the analysis of scientific and ordinary discourse, in the evaluation of claims to knowledge, in the interpretation and validation of ethical and esthetic judgments, and in the assessment of types of human experience. I hope I shall not be regarded as offensive in stating my impression that the majority of the best minds among us have turned away from the conception of the philosopher as the spectator of all time and existence, and have concentrated on restricted but manageable questions, with almost deliberate unconcern for the bearing of their often minute investigations upon an inclusive view of nature and man.
Some of us, I know, are distressed by the widespread scepticism of the traditional claims for a philosophia perennis, and have dismissed as utterly trivial most if not all the products of various current forms of analytical philosophy. I do not share this distress, nor do I think the dismissal is uniformly perspicacious and warranted. For in my judgment, the scepticism which many deplore is well-founded. Even though a fair-sized portion of recent analytical literature seems inconsequential also to me, analytical philosophy in our own day is the continuation of a major philosophic tradition, and can count substantial feats of clarification among its assets. Concentration on limited and determinate problems has yielded valuable fruits, not least in the form of an increased and refreshing sensitivity to the demands of responsible discourse.

Nagel reminds us that the very best criticisms of analytic philosophy have been stated within the tradition. More subtly, his idea that ignorance is not univocal strikes me as worthy of ongoing rediscovery. More pertinent here, Nagel grants de facto that philosophical professionalization and specialization necessarily involves generating the conditions of mental mutilation. Huemer's spleen was foreseen by the legislators/prophets of our tradition and - oh amor fati --  willed eternally in the name of the greater good and responsibility. 

Nagel thinks the bitter medicine worth our pain. He does offer some remedy: "a philosopher...owes it to himself to articulate, if only occasionally, what sort of world he thinks he inhabits, and to make clear to himself where approximately lies the center of his convictions." Allowing for the unfortunately gendered language, this is salutary advice. I suspect the readability of many philosophy papers would be helped, and the sanity of their authors enhanced, if it were normal to add a paragraph, say at the end of the introduction, that linked the minute arguments to follow to the geography and significance of their philosophical convictions. While this would be undoubtedly comical too, I hope referee 2 can get behind this as an innocent convention. With online publishing the political economy of this modest proposal should be not too constraining.

On Karl Pearson on Spinoza and Maimonides; On Jerusalem, Athens, and Eugenics

In the above remarks I have considered only the Yad Hachazakah, because hitherto attention seems to have been entirely directed to the More Nebuchim (cf. Joel, Sorley and others). It is not impossible that in the intervening ten years Maimonides somewhat altered his views. I should not be surprised to hear that the More was held more 'orthodox' than the Yad. The latter, despite much Talmudic verbiage and scriptural exegesis, notwithstanding many faults and inconsistencies, yet contains the germs of a truly grand philosophical system, quite capable of power- fully influencing the mind even of a Spinoza. Such a reader would, while rejecting the exegesis, recognise the elements of truth in the pure theosophy (cf. Joel, Zur Genesis, p. 9), and this is the point wherein the two philosophers approach most closely. In the second place, I have confined myself entirely to the influence of the Yad on the Ethica. Greater agreement would have been found with the Korte Verhandeling van God, &c., while Spinoza's views of Biblical criticism (especially his conceptions of prophets and prophecy as developed in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus) owe undoubtedly much to the Yad. Yet I wished to show that the study of Maimonides was traceable even in Spinoza's most finished exposition of his philosophy. Those who assert that Spinoza was influenced by Hebrew thought have not seldom been treated as though they were accusing Spinoza of a crime. Yet no great work ever sprung from the head of its creator like Athena from the head of Zeus; it has slowly developed within him, influenced and moulded by all that has influenced and moulded its shaper's own character. Had we but knowledge and critical insight enough, every idea might be traced to the germ from which it has developed. While recognising many other influences at work forming Spinoza's method of thought, it is only scientific to allow a certain place to the Jewish predecessors with whom he was acquainted. Critical comparison must show how great that influence was. We naturally expect to find considerable divergences between any individual Jewish philosopher and Spinoza; these divergences have been carefully pointed out by Mr. Sorley, but they are insufficient to prove that Spinoza was not very greatly influenced by Hebrew thought. My aim has been to call in question the traditional view of Spinoza's relation to Jewish 'philosophy, i.e., that he learnt enough of it to throw it off entirely. I cannot help holding that, while Spinoza's form and language were a mixture of medieval scholasticism and the Cartesian philosophy, yet the ideas which they clothed were not seldom Hebrew in their origin. He might be cast out by his co-religionists, but that could not deprive him of the mental birthright of his people- those deep moral and theosophical truths which have raised the Hebrews to a place hardly second to the Greeks in the history of thought. Hebrew Philosophy seems to have a history and a development more or less unique and apart from that of other nations; once in the course of many centuries it will produce a giant-thinker; one who, not satisfied by the narrow limits of his own nation, strives for a freer wider field of action, and grafts on to his Hebrew ideas a catholic language and a broader mental horizon. He becomes a world prophet, but is rejected of his own folk. Such an one of a truth was Spinoza, and another perhaps, albeit in a lesser degree, Moses, the son of Maimon.1--Karl Pearson "Maimonides and Spinoza," Mind (8), No. 31 (Jul., 1883): 352-353 [HT: Jeffrey Bernstein]. 

Recently, I posted a picture of Karl Pearson's blue plaque in Hampstead on social media. In which he is presented as "pioneer statistician." By implication, I noted (recall here; and here) that Pearson's eugenic activities where, pardon my expression, white-washed. In subsequent discussion Prof. Bernstein asked whether this is "the Karl Pearson who also wrote some essays on Spinoza?" 

I had no idea! But the answer is: yes. 

I have quoted the conclusion of the essay above. As it happens, a few days before I presented a draft paper, "Spinoza's Emendation of the Hebrew Bible in the Ethics," at an online version of a department colloquium at Santa Cruz (recorded here). While I had removed Maimonides from the slides in the presentation because I had re-read parts of his Guide to the Perplexed in the weeks leading up to the presentation and had grown a bit skeptical of my earlier enthusiasm connecting the two thinkers. So, the timing of Bernstein's comment was perfect because the relationship between Spinoza and Maimonides had become a matter of urgency to me. 

Let me start with Pearson's paper. He offers excellent set of argument for the idea that Maimonides'  Yad Hachazakah (literally: strong hand) is, despite non-trivial differences of presentation and the manner of treating the subject matter, a major influence on Spinoza's Ethics. The Yad is generally known as The Mishneh Torah (מִשְׁנֵה תּוֹרָה‎, or "Repetition of the Torah"). Its main purpose is to articulate and codify Jewish written and oral law. Despite receiving a rocky reception -- parts of which were burned --, it has become an extremely influential work within the development of Jewish law and ritual. 

Some other time I return to the details of Pearson's paper. Here's the thing: I missed the angle between The Mishneh Torah and Spinoza Ethics entirely. And this made me wonder how this is possible. The first thing to note is that Pearson's paper -- despite, and perhaps (I return to this below) the fame of the author -- has had negligible impact on Spinoza reception since. It is cited in a well known paper "A Portrait of Spinoza as a Maimonidean," by Warren Harvey a significant figure in Spinoza scholarship. But the citation is totemic; Pearson's paper is not used at all. And the reason for this is that Harvey is interested in connecting Spinoza to Maimonides' Guide of the Perplexed not The Mishneh Torah (which is barely mentioned by Harvey in his article.) 

Now, it is possible that Harvey considered Pearson's papers on its merits and simply rejected the argument. This is not impossible because Pearson cherrypicks favored passages, sometimes relies on a bad translation, and systematically ignores lots of ways in which Spinoza and Maimonides differ in approach. (He does mention a few doctrinal differences, but mostly in order to illuminate the agreements).

But it is more likely that for Harvey the connection that Pearson drew was simply far-fetched. And the reason for thinking this is that Harvey is working with an opposition between Athens (philosophy) and Jerusalem (faith) in which The Guide falls on one side and the Mishneh Torah on the other side. For, Harvey starts his paper with announcing, "I try to sketch a portrait of Spinoza as a Maimonidean, as the last major representative of a tradition that mightily dominated Jewish philosophy for almost five centuries following the appearance of the Guide of the Perplexed." Much of the paper constructs this very tradition of Jewish philosophy artfully and unobtrusively.  In this tradition there is no place for Mishneh Torah, except the accidental one that its author also happens to have been an exceptionally gifted philosophical author of the Guide. Because the Mishneh Torah does not even qualify as philosophy.** 

I do not mean to suggest that learned commentators on Spinoza's Ethics never mention the Mishneh Torah. (Carlos Fraenkel discusses a passage in Cogitata Metaphysica in light of Mishneh Torah). Or that all commentators would agree with the implicit contrast between Jerusalem and Athens. For many, Spinoza's Ethics is timeless philosophy unrooted from any historically situated tradition. If one comes to believe, as is increasingly common for good reason, that Spinoza is to quote Michael Della Rocca "an arch-rationalist," there would be no reason to connect Spinoza's thought with Maimonides' Yad that appears to take revelation for granted. 

Of course, even scholars doubtful of the significance of Jewish philosophy on Spinoza, will recognize that Spinoza discusses the Mishneh Torah in the Theological Political Treatise. But that book, while important to the founding of the radical Enlightenment, is itself generally treated as an application of his philosophy to practical problems (including the relationship between revelation and philosophy). And while political philosophy is now treated as philosophy again, by and large commentators do not read the TTP to find Spinoza's true metaphysics. And so while I do not want to claim that the TTP is itself treated as belonging to Jerusalem, even its fans think of it as less philosophical than the Ethics. This attitude is also visible in Pearson (who treats the Ethics as much more "finished" philosophically than the TTP.

As an aside, part of the argument I presented at Santa Cruz is that the Ethics is, on some crucial matters, far more pious and guarded than the TTP , and also, and even more surprising perhaps, directly engages with the Hebrew Bible.

So, I have suggested that Pearson's essay and the argument he presented have been ignored because they do not fit the preconceptions of what counts as philosophy even by those friendly to the suggestion that Maimonides is a significant influence on or important to understanding Spinoza. But one may think that the reliance on the category of Jewish philosophy should form no objection to treating the Mishneh Torah as a source of Spinoza's philosophy because, after all, Pearson also relies on the category.

But, as the quote above suggests, Pearson's idea of 'jewish philosophy' is more Herderian and relativistic: the contrast between Athens and Jerusalem here is not a contrast between truth and revelation, but rather a contrast between two competing traditions toward the truth. When people like Harvey speak of Jewish philosophy, they mean that the Platonic-Aristotelian tradition is articulated in a Jewish context and responsive to concerns mediated by jewish experience and history. But Pearson thinks of Jewish philosophy as an autonomous philosophical  tradition: "Hebrew Philosophy seems to have a history and a development more or less unique and apart from that of other nations." That is to say, Pearson's conception of Jewish philosophy is analogous to the way scholars in the period (recall here and here) think of Chinese and Indian philosophy, as belonging to a civilization distinct from western philosophy's home.  (Except that Hebrew philosophy occurred geographically within the West.)

At this point one can understand why some readers will have wanted to keep their distance from Pearson, whose later work shows more interest in racial and ethnic superiority. Pearson's fondness for ranking cultures is already visible in the quoted passage. Although it is not impossible that his contemporaries would have been more bothered by his philo-semitism than the fact that he was ranking intellectual/cultural tradition!

Of course, Spinoza and to a lesser extent Maimonides are treated by Pearson as something more than Hebrew philosophers; they are world (philosophical) prophets. And one can discern in this Pearson's hope that, despite varied starting points (even Ohio will do), true philosophy transcends the culture that births or generates it.+ Pearson himself is clearly speaking from this superior to one's own intellectual culture's vantage-point. And, let me submit that it's this almost cosmopolitan perspective, much more than the sense of superiority toward other peoples, that is at the root of the science of eugenics.

 

 

 

 

 

On Analytic Marxism's Displacement of Dialectics

In each sense of 'analytical', to be analytical is to be opposed to a form of thinking traditionally thought integral to Marxism: analytical thinking, in the broad sense of 'analytical', is opposed to so-called 'dialectical' thinking, and analytical thinking, in the narrow sense of 'analytical', is opposed to what might be called 'holistic' thinking. The fateful operation that created analytical Marxism was the rejection of the claim that Marxism possesses valuable intellectual methods of its own. Rejection of that claim enabled an appropriation of a rich mainstream methodology that Marxism, to!its detriment, had shunned....I said (see section 1 above) that analytical Marxists do not think that Marxism possesses a distinctive and valuable method. Others believe that it has such a method, which they call 'dialectical'. But we believe that, although the word 'dialectical' has not always been used without clear meaning, it has never been used with clear meaning to denote a method rival to the analytical one.[1] There is no such thing as a dialectical form of reasoning that can challenge analytical reasoning. Belief in dialectic as a rival to analysis thrives only in an atmosphere of unclear thought. G.A. Cohen "Introduction to the 2000 edition" (2000 [1978]) Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defence, xvii-xxiii.

Cohen takes non-trivial pride in having helped  found the method of analytic marxism (see p. xvii & xxiii).  This is explicitly opposed to, and intended to displace, what is known as dialectics. Dialectics is dismissed for being unclear . In the quoted passage, and later in the introduction, he suggests dialectics is only taken seriously in a context pervaded by unclarity such that resistance to analytic marxism (by those wedded to dialectic) exhibits "irrational obscurantism." (xxiv) Presumably, the footnote [1] is supposed to illustrate the lack of clarity. It reads,  "I do not think that the following, to take a recent example, describes such a method: 'This is precisely the first meaning we can give to the idea of dialectic: a logic or form of explanation specifically adapted to the determinant intervention of class struggle in the very fabric of history.' (Etienne Balibar, The Philosophy of Marx p. 97.) If you read a sentence like that quickly, it can sound pretty good. The remedy is to read it more slowly." (p. xxiii) 

As regular readers know, I am a bit allergic to the habit, cultivated by my analytic peers, to quote exemplary sentences (generally by continental philosophers) out of context, add some snark (here disguised as sincere advice), and say, see. Perhaps, Balibar's work on Marx is as shallow as Cohen suggests.  But the choice for Balibar (an academic best known by me for his work on Spinoza) is revealing because it is neither Marx nor an accomplished revolutionary practitioner of dialectics, say, Rosa Luxemburg, who calls the "dialectical materialist method of historical analysis" one of two "principles" of the "essence" of Marxism ("Foreword to the Anthology The Polish Question and the Socialist Movement.")

Let's stipulate that clarity is an important intellectual virtue even within Marxism. And if you are already socialized in a certain intellectual habitus, it is perfectly legitimate to take it for granted (even for polemical purposes). But, speaking strictly as a bourgeois intellectual, it is an odd choice for a Marxist to rest one's case on. Let me explain.

For Carnap, whose socialist commitments were not disguised, clarity is, in fact, a property or by-product of formal systems.* Carnapian clarity is really a second-order property of an otherwise esoteric, expert practice.  But if one is interested in revolutionary or even emancipatory politics,  it is not obvious that such clarity is the ruling virtue (as opposed to virtues that motivate action, or enable the proletariat to fulfill their revolutionary potential).  I don't mean to deny that for Carnap, presumably, anybody can be trained to become such an expert. And there is an attractive feature of communism -- emphasized, say, by Ernest Mandel in The Economic Formation of the Economic Thought of Karl Marx 1843 to Capital -- that under communism everybody will be intellectually literate. But that's supposed to be the end-point of the revolution not the (prefigurative) means. 

Be that as it may, the introduction I quoted from is a later addition. In Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defence, Cohen does not (as far as I can tell) engage with the question at all.** I have been unable to find any place where Cohen does the intellectual work to show with some care what's wrong with dialectics. Throughout the book he cites his own (1974) "Marx's Dialectic of Labor;" this paper explicitly sets aside anything that non analytic Marxists might mean by dialectic and only focuses on "the descriptive residue" of the concept.

Earlier yet, in 1969, Cohen did a lovely review essay, worth re-reading for many reasons, "Critical Theory: The Philosophy of Marcuse," of Marcuse in New Left Review . This is a more general critique of (what Perry Anderson has called) Western Marxism to move from to "the aspirations of people" (and being a spokesman for them) to a focus on "culture" (and ideology). In this piece, Cohen suggests there is an authentic Marxist spirit from which Marcuse has deviated. An example of this more authentic Marxism (by Cohen's lights in 1969) is Karl Korsch.+ 

As it happens, Korsch is a lucid writer. And in his (1923) Marxism in Philosophy he offers a useful diagnosis of the motives of those who reject dialectics and a hint of what it might be:

Setting aside any philosophical considerations, it is therefore clear that without this coincidence of consciousness and reality, a critique of political economy could never have become the major component of a theory of social revolution. The converse follows. Those Marxist theoreticians for whom Marxism was no longer essentially a theory of social revolution could see no need for this dialectical conception of the coincidence of reality and consciousness: it was bound to appear to them as theoretically false and unscientific.-- [Emphases in original.] Translated by Fred Halliday.

In context, it is clear that the coincidence of consciousness and reality -- hereafter: the coincidence thesis -- is a constitutive feature of dialectics, but does not exhaust it. That consciousness and reality coincide is a position associated in different ways and with different political sensibilities with Platonism, Spinozism, and Hegel. It is easy to make fun of, but it is not unintelligible or, if you try working through it, nor obscure. (It is a bit tricky to learn to embrace the coincidence between epistemic and ontic perspectives if you have been taught this is a blunder.) Somewhat amusingly in Spinoza the epistemological and metaphysical achievement (recall this post on Tarski) of such coincidence is itself associated with full clarity. Korsch doesn't claim that Marxist dialectic is itself clear, but he thinks it is clear that the coincidence thesis is necessary for the way in which a critique of political economy could become a part of a theory of social revolution. And this, in turn, is a key feature to generate (the right sort of) revolution. 

Let me take stock. I have not here tried to articulate a full theory of dialectics. (That's for another time and perhaps not my role in life.) I have also not discussed the merits of analytic marxism. More narrowly, while Cohen is an early mover in analytic marxism, he is fairly late in the history of analytic philosophy. And so this makes one wonder if anybody in the analytic tradition did the serious work of showing by way of argument what's wrong with dialectics. This question is especially urgent because there are many indications that marxism is receiving renewed consideration within analytic philosophy or at least by our students.

To find such an attempt, we must look, I assume to Vienna (in the 1920s-30s) or New York (in the late 1930s), or perhaps Lodz (in the 1930s). As it happens, Cohen echoes in uncanny fashion -- the lesser,  lazy polemics*** of -- Ernest Nagel's treatment of dialectics; Nagel presents (recall) dialectics like the early moderns treat the terms of scholastic philosophy: as fundamentally unintelligible. And so, we seem to be stuck in an eternal return of name-calling. However, Nagel was intimately familiar with Sidney Hook's (1939) "Dialectic in Social and Historical Inquiry," (published in JPhil) which presents itself as doing such thankless work, and, perhaps, the only such effort in the analytic tradition (now broadly conceived).++ I shall turn to it soon in order to establish whether Nagel's (and so by extension) Cohen's polemics rest on intellectual granite or quicksand.

 

 

On the Norms of Philosophy; On Liam Kofi Bright and entering the life world of another

Because people take subjectivism to be such a wildly implausible view they make no effort to see the world from a subjectivist's point of view. Even calling the view "relativism" betrays that - because it imagines a point of view beyond any particular person's perspective, surveys all of them at once, and says "truth for the individual is just what is believed by them, and so truth per se is relative to each individual's beliefs and all beliefs are true for their believers". From this last conjunct objections are drawn out. But from a committed subjectivist's point of view that cannot be right - their point of view is the one from which truth is evaluated,  and the other points of view are not on a par with that but simply errors. The objection imagines a kind of God's-eye-perspective on truth and launches their attack from there, but the kind of person who is attracted to subjectivism (or for that matter relativism) is almost certainly the kind of person who is suspicious of the idea of such a God's eye perspective. Seen from within, these objections simply lose their force, they don't take seriously what the subjectivist is trying to do or say as a philosopher of truth.

Of course one can always make the move against the subjectivist that many philosophers now make against the sceptic. One can say that after all our job is not to find arguments that would persuade the subjectivist, our job is just to explain why they are wrong in an internally coherent manner. We wish not to help the subjectivist see their error but just ensure others do not fall into it. Well, good luck and God speed to those whose philosophical mission is explaining why they are right to their own satisfaction. But if you want philosophy to help you enter into the lifeworld of others quite different from yourself, this cannot be enough.--Liam Kofi Bright "Truth Subjectivism and Giving Implausible Views their Due"

Because I am an inconstant skeptic, perhaps, the final three sentences of Liam's essay resonated strongly with me. I cannot tell you how often I have encountered refutations of skepticism (or Hume's problem of induction) where I quietly think 'you [confident, smug X] have not even started to grapple with the problem.' Even the very best efforts that, say, offer an immanent critique of skeptical positions tend to reveal primarily that it is very difficult to be a (certain kind of) skeptic consistently. This is treated as an objection. But, duh, 'I already know sense how difficult it is to be me.' That the non-skeptic has a more satisfying life is good for her.

I often complain that in professional philosophy there is a tendency to cherry pick objections (often correlated with the perceived status of another philosopher).+ I often claim that we ought to have a norm that we seek out alternative viewpoints and the strongest possible objections from perspectives distinct from ours. When I do this, I basically tacitly embrace a partially agonistic model of philosophy. The idea being that philosophical development is enhanced when we have rival viewpoints come into combative contact with each other and are improved by their mutual agonistic albeit genuine engagement.

As others have noted (see here Michael Della Rocca), the methods of reflective equilibrium, intuition mongering, and cost-benefit analysis of theoretical virtues have enormous status quo even confirmation bias built into them. What I'd like to see is a lot more of a kind of stress testing of concepts (see this paper by Stone, which is suggestive). This would shift us from a confirming bias, to a more (ahh) Popperian ethos. (The interesting Popper, not falsificationism.) If mirabile dictu I were to get my way on this, it would only make philosophy more robust.

By contrast, Liam's post (which echoes the loveliest parts of Carnap's program with a surprisingly Husserlian/Levinasian sensibility) opens the door to a much more humanistic understanding of philosophy. The very point of the enterprise would be to facilitate mutual understanding. From the philosophical analyst's perspective the point of analysis or conceptual engineering, then, is not getting the concepts right (or to design them for ameliorative and feasible political programs), but to find ways to understand, or enter into, one's interlocutor life world. To see how radical this is, I just want to note the contrast with the other humanistic ethos of philosophy as a means to self-knowledge often inscribed (with a nod to Socrates or Descartes) with the slogan that the unexamined life is not worth living, 

To be sure, philosophical-translators (recall, when I discussed the transformative effects of entering into another's life-world) and historians of philosophy of a certain sensibility are quite practiced in developing skills to enter into the life-worlds of philosophers from different epochs. And precisely to generate some such understanding, I have argued that we (speaking briefly as a historian of philosophy) must reject actor's categories as well as the (imperialistic) application of our own categories, but must be willing to introduce or coin new concepts. (That's a creative and risky practice.) But because our subjects don't talk back, historians can pick to be interested in a very narrow range of the life-world of another. 

Liam's program -- conceptual engineering to enter into lifeworlds of others -- has some fascinating consequences. First, it would open the door to structural collaboration between ethnographic researchers and philosophers. Let's call that (with a nod to my colleague, Enzo Rossi) in honor of the developing interdisciplinary research community PPA+ (that is, philosophy, politics, anthropology). Second, given the increasing cosmopolitan presence of professional philosophy across the globe, and cultural diversification within philosophy, it would generate ambitious, open-ended research programs of bridging attempts among different philosophical cultures, traditions, and research programs. (In addition to Liam's work in Africana philosophy, I think Graham Priest's work are paradigmatic examples of this.)*

There is a lot more to be said about both consequences. But I just want to note two side effects of the second: (i) it would help limit the known risk of philosophy facilitating imperial and hegemonic projects in which our concepts become a form of domination (recall this post; or see the work of Serene Khader (recall).) And (ii) it would be a generative source of philosophical innovation.

To be sure, conceptual engineering to enter into lifeworlds of others is risky: one may be exposed to stuff one prefers not to hear (including for reasons of tact or respect); and one may end up in a philosophical place different from the one was satisfied to defend at all cost. 

 

Caught between Being and Un-Being: The Secret Service, Political Legitimacy, and the Relative A Priori

We're a bit like the third-person narrator of a novel....He's the one who decides what will what will happen and the one who does the telling, but he can't be challenged or interrogating. Unlike a first-person narrator, he has no name and he's not a character, therefore we believe and trust him; we don't know why he knows what he knows and why he omits what he omits and keeps silent about what he keeps silent about and why it is that he can determine the fate of all his creatures, without once being called into question. It's clear that he both exists and doesn't exists, or that he exists but, at the same time, cannot be found, He's even undetectable. I'm speaking about the narrator, mind, not the author, who is stuck at home and is not responsible for anything his narrator says; even he can't explain why the narrator knows as much as he does. In other words, the omniscient third-person narrator is an accepted convention, and the average reader of novels doesn't usually stop to ask why the narrator takes the floor and doesn't relinquish it for hundreds of pages, droning on in that invisible man's voice, that autonomous external voice that comes from nowhere...Well, we're something similar, an accepted convention, just as one accepts and doesn't object to chance, as one accepts and doesn't dispute accidents or coincidences, illnesses, catastrophes, events fortunate and unfortunate. We can stop a disaster from happening, but rather as a sudden change in the wind direction can save a boat, or a fog can conceal the pursued from their pursuers, or a snowfall can erase the footprints of the former, disorienting the latter and their dogs, or as a black night can stop someone in their tracks and black their view. Or just as the sea parted to make way for the Israelites, then closed again on Pharaoh's army following behind them in order to destroy them. That's what we are, and we really don't represent anyone. Javier Marías Berta Isla (2018) translated by Margaret Jull Costa (2018), p. 119

Regular readers of Marías know (recall) that he has a perhaps excessive fondness for self-referentiality and intertextuality which used to be called postmodern. The settings are often Oxford and Madrid. He also often presents narrations in which spies and secrets play significant role. The passage is quoting a spy-recruiter/handler in the midst of the act of initial recruitment, if not entrapment; the quoted passage is expressed in a pub, The Eagle and Child, in Oxford. The listener (Nevinson) is a Madrid born student at Oxford.  So the quoted passage can be used as a key to interpret the novel, which -- I note -- shifts between different third and first person narrators.

Here I am interested in going in the other direction, and use it to reflect a bit on the nature of spies in liberal democracy. To be sure, the quoted passage makes no such restriction, and you, my dear reader, need not do so either if you so wish. Okay, with that out of the way, let's do some stage-setting. First, I take it that in the passage, "average reader of novels" stand in for the public in a democracy. Not any citizen (or non-citizen) -- because not everybody reads novels --, but those that read the papers, sign petitions, and may even call representatives from time to time.

Second, I take it that the author stands for the government. The government is often taken to be the author of the actions of spy agencies, but the whole point of having spies is to allow the government to deny, plausibly, responsibility for actions she does not want to be held accountable for. And, in fact, governments are, themselves, often, as we have been reminded during the last few years, on a need-to-know basis lest they accidentally or deliberately reveal state secrets (or valuable assets) or are infiltrated by other countries' spies. And, third, spooks are taken to be like third-person narrators. 

Now, the first crucial point to make is that the actions of spies are somehow authorized by the government, but that in so doing they do not represent the government. The functionality of this to government and spooks is pretty obvious so I won't belabor that. But in virtue of being nameless and characterless, the spy simply cannot play the metaphysical, moral, legal, and political role(s) of being a (institutional) person that can held be held accountable or represent. Without a name, there is no object or person to play such roles. 

There is not nothing, of course, because spies do produce (inter alia) intelligence. Strikingly, their epistemic authority does not rely on the methods or causal story that produces their utterances. All of that is black-boxed in the way that miraculous,  learning algorithms spit out stuff. (If you look inside the box all you see is a string of computer code.)* This is also the conceit of the novel, where the life of the spy is left mostly invisible and recounted strictly in terms of the effects on his family and love life. Neither his actions nor his inner life are disclosed.

This is, of course, profoundly unsettling for democratic legitimacy and accountable because it suggests that true, as opposed to ritual, oversight and accountability of intelligence agencies is not really possible (unless one has one's own spies, and then infinite regress looms). For, in a non-trivial sense there is no there, there. I think something similar is happening with oversight of central banks where what they do, and how they do it, and when they do it, has become illegible to parliaments and governments. All that's being tracked are effects, many of which not at all attributable to anything--these days even central bankers (who have a name and are held accountable in some sense, but who are primarily authorized to do stuff), admit they are clueless about the so-called transmission mechanisms (here's the ECB:  "The transmission mechanism is characterised by long, variable and uncertain time lags." Take a look at the accompanying chart.) Spies leave traces, but one can't tell if they are dummies or not.

This much is familiar enough. But, the sting in the passage is not the assumed paraconsistent ontology ("he both exists and doesn't exists"),** but the thought that the shapeless (viz., spies) is constitutive of political life and so while changeable (particular "conventions" are not eternal after all), indispensable to states in the way that any novel to count as a novel must have an implied narrator. 

As an aside, the mechanisms of such kind of constitutive devices are central to the aesthetics, and political theory, pursued by Stanley Cavell and his school. So, I don't mean to suggest the claim is novel to Marías. I also think there is an interesting question whether what is claimed in the quoted passage is really true of novels. It's not impossible that by now there is an avant-garde version of the novel that has dispensed entirely with the shapeless narrator (even as a mechanism to be denied or refuted or mocked), but that has not shaken our stereotype of the nature of the novel.

One may wonder why spy agencies are not a dispensable convention. Perhaps, it is mere self-interest or a useful consoling-to-spies-professional myth that they are indispensable the way numbers are to science? For, one may be tempted, if one has any liberal faith left, to think their existence is a by-product of the global order, which, while not perhaps a Hobbesian state of nature, is full of potential and real enemies. So, if this were right, sleuths are not intrinsic to states, but just a contingent fact of the absence of world-government or federation.

But if we stipulate a benevolent Kantian world federation on liberal principles with no enemies, it is still likely that spying follow naturally. For, the possibility, real or imagined, of anti/non liberal enemies of the state cannot be ruled out. Democratic theorists do often rule out illiberal citizenry by fiat, but we are not interested in them here. And such enemies, even if we stipulate that they are a minority, need not play by liberal rules. So, for the state to be possible over time it, it must have ways to protect itself against enemies who cannot be bought off and are, in principle, not persuadable. 

That is, while the category of the (domestic) enemy of the state lends itself to great abuse, to not acknowledge its possibility, is to put the state at great peril with no chance to correct. Once one has had that thought, a secret reserve/force becomes a live thought. The justification of having unaccountable, unrepresentative forces is to destroy enemies of the people (cf. Pharaoh, Israelites, etc.) Of course, in reality that may be worse than the problem it is purportedly solving. And if one is small, poor, and insignificant enough, one may well decide, reasonably, that one must make do without uncontrolled, invisible forces. 

That is to say, a state without enemies has no need for secret agents. But such a state would then deny the founding myths that secure its legitimacy. 

 

Status Quo Bias, Classical Liberalism, And the Original Sin of Neo-Liberalism

So what the political economists had conceived in their science was not a picture of the world as it is but a picture of the world as it needs to be remade. They had imagined the kind of human society in which the social problems arising from the division of labor are solved. Thus inadvertently, in the act of trying to simplify the facts in order to understand them, they had been inspired to discover the criterion by which these social problems can be truly defined and the true solutions can be indicated. By making certain assumptions they had described a just society based on the division of labor; then it followed that in the real world of injustice and maladjustment these assumptions were the proper objectives of policy. What they overlooked was that in order to imagine how the division of labor would work with perfect justice, it had been necessary  to assume a reformed society of reformed individuals. It should have followed, then, that, in order to achieve the result in practice, it is necessary to make the reforms in practice.

Instead of the classical economics being an apologetic explanation of the existing order, it is, when properly understood, a searching criticism of that order. It is a theoretical measure which reveals how far short of the promise, how unadjusted to the needs of the division of the labor, is the actual society in which we live. Had the liberal economists realized this implication of their own hypothesis, they would have embarked at once upon the task of exploring the legal, psychological, and social circumstances which obstructed and perverted the actual society. They would not have left the criticism and the reform of society to those who did not understand, or were determined to abolish, the new mode of production. They would have seen  that the mission of liberalism was to develop the principles by which mankind could readapt its habits and institutions to the industrial revolution. They would have carried on the tradition that Adam Smith founded, and, like him, they would have been the critics of the status quo and the intellectual leaders of its necessary reform.

They did not do this. The liberal economists from Ricardo until recent times were obsessed by the deadly confusion that their imaginary world was not a critical introduction to research and reform but the delineation of an order to which the real world conformed approximately, and sufficiently. This error sterilized the scientific advance of liberal thought, paralyzed the practical energies of liberal statesmen, and destroyed the prestige of liberalism. So the economists were properly rebuked by Carlyle, who had his eyes on the real world, as the teachers of a Dismal Science.11--Walter Lippmann The Good Society, 201-2. [HT: David M. Levy]

Lippmann's (1938) The Good Society is the proximate cause of neo-liberalism because the term was caused (recall) at a Paris colloquium in response to his book. It is very much worth re-reading because in the book, Lipmann grapples searchingly and searingly with the failure of (what I have called [recall]) the first wave of liberalism, while aiming to lay the ground-work -- in the midst of a world economic crisis and the ascendancy of Nazism, fascism, and communism -- for liberalism's renewal. I intend to return to it because many of his observations are worth rediscovering. But to do we have to explore first some of Lippmann's failures.

In the quoted passage, Lippmann diagnoses a structural problem with nineteenth century classical (let's call it Ricardian) liberalism. He accuses them of status quo bias in conditions of injustice such that their (normatively desirable) science becomes implicated in serving the needs of the powerful. On his view (one I like), liberalism is a tool to combat status quo bias because reality inevitably falls short of the normative ideal. How it supposed to do that, I won't elaborate (today) beyond his words above (but there is more). 

Here I want to focus, on his claim, "that the mission of liberalism was to develop the principles by which mankind could readapt its habits and institutions to the industrial revolution." Lippmann's underlying idea is that the (ongoing, unfolding) industrial revolution driven by the division of labor is a very disruptive event which turns people's habitats from self-sufficient communities to interdependent communities (part of a great society). Lippmann thinks that both people's habits and institutions needs to be reformed in order to flourish in an industrial society. And this is a process of adjustment that never ends because industrial revolution creates open ended change. Lippmann embraces this conclusion (some other time I return to this in order to discuss his attitudes toward the law).

So, modern society is constantly required to readapt. It follows then that Lippmann would argue for ongoing education not just in job skills, but also social habits. And this is indeed so.  He writes a few pages later, "The economy of the division of labor requires, and the classical economics assumes, a population in which these eugenic and educational problems are effectively dealt with." You may worry that he is describing the classical economists (who he criticizes in the passage I quoted above), but on p. 226 he endorses this in his own words.

Now, I have to admit that Lippmann's interest in eugenics disappointed me, but did not surprise me. My friend, David Levy, had called my attention to the footnote (11), which is a reference to Carlyle's "The Nigger Question." Somehow Lippmann misses (or ignores) that Carlyle is defending slavery and in that famous paper is attacking the (dismal) political economists for their abolitionist criticism of slavery. (Levy has written a terrific book on this.) I kind of suspect that Lippmann's reference to Carlyle is totemic, because Lippmann is certainly not defending slavery. But even so, it raises uncomfortable questions about the nature of Lippmann's eugenics. 

I don't think his eugenics is racialized, but because of the weird Carlyle reference can't be wholly ruled out. But the rationale for Lippmann's defense of eugenics is not to create a superior master race, nor to prevent undesirables from out-breeding the would be master race, or from corrupting the population in the survival of the fittest. Instead it is as quoted above to create what we might call the human capital capable of dealing with adjusting to permanent changing circumstances.  He returns to the topic once more: 

In a wealthy society, there would still remain maldistribution, arising not from injustice, but from the accumulation of more wealth than its possessors need for the then prevailing middle-class standard of life or than they can effectively use in private enterprise. This maldistribution has to be corrected by public investment in the eugenic and educational improvement of the people, in the conservation and basic development of their patrimony in the land and its resources. These public investments would draw upon the excess capital through the levying of taxes and through borrowing at the lowest possible rate of interest. (231-2)

So, Lippmann's eugenics is re-distributive in character: even in a just society, human enhancement of the (not wealthy) "people" will be required. This will be financed by taxes on the capital of the wealthy (there are shades of Piketty here) directly or thought subsidized loans. That's about all he says about the topic in the book. All the (few) mentions of 'eugenics' are coupled with 'education'--and the underlying point is pretty much the same each time. Most humans are not necessarily naturally so adaptable, so in addition to massive education, they will require enhancement to get there. What this involves is left unclear.