Digressions&Impressions

Hume's odd footnote to Grotius, and Pufendorf

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Readers who come to David Hume through the Treatise may be forgiven for thinking that he wasn't an especially learned or scholarly philosopher deviating from the reigning tendency toward eclecticism. I include myself among these, until I heard a paper (which may still be unpublished) by Ken Winkler on the way Hume carefully edited his notes engaged with Locke through the successive editions of the Enquiries. In fact, Hume's long essay on population exhibits him as quite learned. So much for set-up.

After offering his famous definition of convention in the third Appendix to the Second Enquiry (paragraphs 7-8), Hume adds a note suggesting that this "theory concerning the origin of property, and consequently of justice, is, in the main, the same with that hinted at and adopted by Grotius," (De jure belli & pacis. Lib. ii. cap. 2. §2. art. 4 & 5.) which he then quotes in Latin. There are four peculiarities pertaining to the passage from Grotius that Hume quotes.

First, throughout it his writings, Hume himself had explicitly denied that property had its origin in an explicit/verbal convention (that is, social contract), whereas Grotius explicitly allows that this is a possible source: "Simul discimus, quomodo res in proprietatem iverint; non animi actu solo, neque enim scire alii poterant, quid alii suum esse vellent, ut eo abstinerent, & idem velle plures poterant; sed pacto quodam aut expresso, ut per divisionem, aut tacito, ut per occupationem." (emphasis added.) Yes, Grotius does more than hint at his preferred account of tacit contract of property, so I am not suggesting Hume gets this wrong.

But, second, as readers of Hume would have been quite aware that's developed by Locke (and Pufendorf). In fact, I have been arguing that Hume completely effaces how much of the distinctive details his own definition of convention (including that of property) is already present in Locke (recall here; here; and see here for slightly more scholarly version).

Third the passage from Grotius cited by Hume is utterly banal. He could have cited any number of ancient authors here (from Plato's Laws to Lucretius) as one can readily see in Pufendorf's Of the Law of Nature and Nations, Book IV, chapter IV, paragraphs viii-X.

In fact, in Book IV, chapter IV, paragraph IX Of the Law of Nature and Nations, Pufendorf had partially commented the very passage from Grotius that Hume quotes. I quote Pufendorf in Basil Kennett's translation (from the fourth, corrected 1729 edition which includes Barbeyrac's notes): 

Thus far Grotius is in the right, that were the first negative Communion to continue, without disturbing the general Peace, Men must live with great plainness and simplicity, contented to feed on what they found, to dwell in Caves, and either to go naked or to cover their Bodies with the Barks of Trees, and the Skins of Beasts: Whereas, if they grew more inclined to a Life of Elegance and Refinement, the Conveniences of which must be acquired by Diligence; there was a necessity of introducing distinct Properties. But when he adds, That this Communion might have lasted, had Men lived under the Influence of an eminent Charity and Friendship towards each other; he confounds negative Communion with positive; such as was observed by the Essenes of old, by the primitive Christians inhabiting Jerusalem, and by those who now follow an Ascetic Life: For this can never be constituted nor kept up, except amongst a few Persons, and those endued with singular Modesty and Goodness. When Men are scattered into different places, and fixed at a distance from each other, it would be a foolish Labour to gather all the Provision into one Heap, and to distribute it out of the common Mass. And where ever there is a great Multitude of People, many must of necessity be found, who through Injustice and Avarice, will refuse to maintain a due Equality, either in the Labour required for the getting of the Fruit, or afterwards in the Consumption of them. Plato insinuates as much as this, when he makes only Deities, and the Sons of Deities, Members of the Republic where he would have this Communion absolutely obtain. But 'tis idle to believe, that when Men were divided into numerous Families, they neither actually established, or had any design to establish such a Communion. Lastly, it's a true Remark of Grotius, That things were at first turned into Property, not by the bare Act of the Mind, or by Thought and inward inclination. For neither could others know what any Person intended to keep for his own, to direct them in abstaining from it, and besides, it was very possible that many should be Competitors for the fame thing. There was need therefore of some external Act of the Mind formal seisin [sign?],* which, that it might be capable of producing a Moral Effect, or an Obligation in others to forswear what each Man had thus taken for his peculiar, must necessarily have depended on the force of some precedent Covenant: When things which lay together in Common were to be parted amongst many, then the Business was transacted by express Covenant. But a tacit Covenant was sufficient, when Men fixed a Property in things which the first Dividers had left for waste. For we must suppose them to have agreed, that whatever in the primary Partition had not been assigned to any particular Owner, should belong to him who first took possession of it. [emphases in original; modernized spelling by ES]+

What's neat, given my present purposes, is that Pufendorf praises Grotius for exactly the passage that Hume cites as the origin of his own theory. In fact, Pufendorf's criticism of Grotius here also kind of anticipates Hume's account because Pufendorf implies that Grotius theory is too naïve: because Grotius' approach presuppose a too rosy picture of human nature ("singular Modesty and Goodness") and cannot scale up ("except amongst a few Persons"). That is, the question is, as Pufendorf shows, how can large-scale tacit social conventions be established among potentially self-regarding people? Pufendorf's own answer seems to be: through trial and error and habit/custom.

Building non-trivially on Locke (whose contribution is ignored), Hume's explicit answer is "through a sense of common interest; which sense each man feels in his own breast, which he remarks in his fellows, and which carries him, in concurrence with others, into a general plan or system of actions." This answer may seem to work if one allows, as Hume stipulates, that one generally benefits from the common interest.

However, Adam Smith recognizes that Hume's answer puts the cart before the horse, because it is not obvious how the common interest is recognized before the convention is relatively stable, and so Smith suggests that the convention itself originates in and is stabilized by drawing on our reactive attitudes (especially resentment and gratitude). But that story I have told elsewhere. 

• This first appeared at: <Hume's Odd Footnote to Grotius, and Pufendorf - by nescio13 (substack.com)>a reader supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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*A seisin is a possession of a fief. But it seems more likely that 'sign' is intended here in light of Pufendorf's account of the origin of social/moral entities.

+I thank Dario Perinetti for nudging me back to Pufendorf. And I thank Bart Wilson and Vernon Smith for emphasizing the importance (alongside Buckle and Haakonssen) of Pufendorf to the Scots.

Adam Smith and the 'liberal' Swedish revolution of 1809

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As regular readers know, (recall here; and here) I have argued that the political meaning of 'liberal' that became influential in the nineteenth century can be found in Adam Smith. In Particular, rather than seeing the origin story of liberalism as a reaction to the European religious wars between Catholics and Protestants, I argue that originally liberalism is centered on taming, even domesticating state power. And that ‘liberal’ in this sense acquired its original meaning in Adam Smith (see here for a popular version of my argument).

I tried to bolster my argument by building on the work of Spanish scholars that Smith played a very considerable role in the Cortes debates around the Spanish Constitution. In the earlier posts (here; and here), I used Duncan Bell's (2014) influential paper, "What is Liberalism?" as my foil. It's important to my argument that in these Spanish debates Smith isn't merely perceived as a free-trader, but an advocate of political and institutional reform (including of Empire) and understood as such by the Spanish. I won't repeat my arguments here now.

The Spanish Liberales often show up in debates over the early history of liberalism. In part, because is clear that Bentham tried to influence them, and also because, as I show, Bentham used 'liberal' to self-describe in contact with them. But until I read The Lost History of Liberalism: from Ancient Rome to the Twenty-first Century (2018, Princeton) by Helena Rosenblatt I was unfamiliar with early Swedish self-described liberals of 1809. Here's what she writes:

Dissatisfied with the leadership of their [Swedish] king, a circle of high government officials staged a palace coup and deposed him in 1809. It was around this time that a group calling itself “the liberal party” came into existence. Not much is known about its members except that they were influenced by French revolutionary ideas and advocated principles such as equality before the law, constitutional and representative government, and freedom of the press, conscience, and trade. They were also known as “the liberal side,” or just “the liberals.”

The Spanish liberal party emerged soon after Napoleon’s armies invaded Spain in 1808, deposed the Spanish King Ferdinand, and replaced him with Napoleon’s brother, Joseph. The Spaniards promptly rebelled and established a government in Cádiz. In 1810, a group of delegates to the parliament there, called the Cortes, took the name Liberales and labeled their opponents Serviles, from the Latin servi, meaning slave. The Spanish Liberales, like the Swedish liberals, advocated principles such as equality before the law and constitutional, representative government. pp. 61-62

In a note Rosenblatt cites a 1926 paper by Arthur Thomson. Unfortunately, I don't read Swedish. Now, Rosenblatt is explicit that the Swedish liberals were influenced by French ideas. That seemed eminently plausible, of course. And since Rosenblatt doesn't link Smith to the Spanish liberales for her these two events are just a marvelous coincidence (although, of course, we can't rule out that the Spanish Liberales were inspired by the Swedish liberals). But I wondered if I could show it's possible that the Swedish 1809 liberals took the name from Smith, too.

The short answer is, YES! It involves a man called Count Adlersparre (1760 – 1835). But first I want to share a false start. After scholar.googling, I bumped into a lovely 2022 paper by Anna Knutsson. In it she describes Erik Erland Bodell (1774–1848), who was a customs officer (like Smith in the closing decade of his life). She reports that in 1800, Bodell produced  partial translation of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, Book V, Chapter 2, “Of the Sources of the General or Public Revenue of the Society.” This actually disappointed me because while Smith uses the word 'liberal' and its cognates in this chapter a number of times, all of these involve the older meaning of 'generous' and 'aristocratic.' In addition, as Knutsson reports, Bodell uses this material to argue for free trade. Neat, but orthogonal to my present purposes. It is no surprise that Bodell also later translated Book IV, Chapter 2 from The Wealth of Nations, “Of Restraints upon the Importation from Foreign Countries of such Goods as can be Produced at Home” for the same effect.

Knutsson reports that Bodell went on to write and publish Berättelse för år 1805, afgifven till Höglof.Gener.Tull-Arrende-Direktionen, Ifrån Marstrands Kongl. stora sjötulls-kammare: Om handeln: fabriker och manufakturer: orsaken till minskning eller förhöjning i sjötulls-inkomsterna: huru tillfällen till sjötulls-uppbördens minskning måga förekommas: om lurendrägeri: och medel till en bättre sjötulls-bevakning, (Account for the Year 1805 [ … ] about Trade: Factories and Manufactories: the reason for decrease or increase in the Maritime Customs Revenue: how the Maritime Customs revenue decrease might be overcome: about Smuggling: and measures for a better Maritime Customs Surveillance). I love these descriptive titles! And she quotes a wonderful passage from it, that I reproduce in full:

We watch and complain that the trade is decreasing, that the manufacturing is stagnating, that poverty is increasing and that Residents are leaving, and cannot understand that the cause of it are our many prohibitions, high customs taxes [ … ] Most nations are following the enlightenment of the age, they are led by more liberal tenets in their public economy [statshushållning], and enjoy all the more profitable consequences. – I love my King and my Fatherland too much, to make this comparison with indifference [ … ] the Nation’s devotion and confidence in their Regent and his officers would increase considerably, if they got laws which agreed with their own desires.

There is an interesting question on how to translate statshushållning; words like this show up in German and Dutch too during this period and all involve a kind of transposition and explication of household-management (which is a translation of the Greek 'oeconomy') directed at the state. While in the passage 'liberal tenets' could mean 'generous policies', I'd like to think that because Bodell is steeped in Adam Smith (even his opponents accused him of wanting to be the Swedish Smith, as Knuttson notes), it's safe to say that he is using 'liberal' here in a more Smithian inflexion. That is, where liberalism is explicitly opposed to mercantilism (which is 'illiberal') and where liberalism is not reducible to free trade. Of course, Bodell's concerns here are strictly economic, so it does not advance my larger argument. In addition, Bodell did not participate in the events of 1809.

Now, Knutsson mentions Adlersparre's role as follows, "Adlersparre, who had been the first to translate Adam Smith into Swedish ten years previously in his anti-government journal Läsning i blandade ämnen." Her footnotes suggests this occurred as early as 1799 and through 1800. In fact, a number of my Swedish informants -- Max Skjönsberg, Lena Halldenius, Johan Norberg -- all pointed me to him as well. In a paper he just published, Max writes, "Adlersparre was the leader of the 1809 coup that led to the king’s deposition and a new constitution that was particularly inspired by Montesquieu’s separation of powers theory." (Notice that’s subtly different than Rosenblatt’s version.) Some other time, I’ll return to the Montesquieu-Smith connection in political thought. (This is a bit understudied.)

In fact, in his article Max never links Adlersparre to Smith. That's because Max is focused on Nils von Rosenstein (1752–1824). The point of Skjönsberg's argument is that Von Rosentein's Försök til en afhandling om uplysningen, til dess beskaffenhet, nytta och nödvändighet för samhället (An Attempt at a Dissertation on the Enlightenment, Its Character, Usefulness and Necessity for Society), is shaped by Scottish Enlightenment ideas, including Adam Smith's. Fair enough.

Crucially for my argument Max quotes some Von Rosenstein that helps set the stage for my claim: "When we speak of politics, it is not only FENELON, MONTESQUIEU, SMITH, who have enlightened the world, but also all the great and virtuous Rulers and Ministers, who have intended to make people happy’" That is, for Von Rosenstein Smith is not just an economist or moral philosopher (in fact, Max notes he calls Smith a 'metaphysician'), he is also a guide to what I call (following Locke and Mill) the 'art of government.' Max comments: "Theory and practice worked best when they supported each other." Indeed. And so in Sweden, Smith is not just received as a free-trader. (The role of Fenelon on the same side of Montesquieu and Smith is also neat, and will please my friend Ryan Hanley, but that’s also best left aside now.)

I don't mean to suggest that Skjönsberg doesn't know the significance of Adlersparre to the dissemination of Smith in Sweden. He notes in passing that "Excerpts from Smith’s Wealth of Nations were published in the periodical press." And elsewhere in his article Max notes that Adlersparre's journal Läsning i blandade ämnen (Readings in Various Subjects) "discussed political economy with reference to Smith." But that's not Skjönsberg's  main focus. Knutsson notes that Adlersparre's "Smith extracts published in Läsning i blandande ämnen focused primarily on his work on agriculture and the use of paper money. However, an extract on the balance of trade was also translated, which dealt with matters of international trade policy, arguing that “the Trade, which is conducted without force and restrictions, naturally and without interruption, between two locations will always be beneficial”." Unfortunately, while Knutsson notes that Bodell was against the 1809 revolution, she does not go into Adlersparre's role.

Now, Johan Norberg was on this very trail a decade ago. Here's what he writes:

George Adlersparre, who led the Swedish Western army at the time, published a proclamation saying that military conflict and political oppression were about to destroy Sweden. It was a revolutionary manifesto: To save the country, the army should move against the king. Adlersparre and his troops began a popular march toward Stockholm. The king fled south, but was arrested by people within the Stockholm bureaucracy. To ensure that this led to real political changes, Adlersparre’s march continued and the army occupied Stockholm, until a new parliament was formed, and reforms began to take place. This was the Revolution of 1809 – the only violent revolution in Sweden’s modern history, and it was realized by a liberal officer and publisher, inspired by Adam Smith.

Norberg's essay is a kind of popular lecture. And so his use of 'liberal officer' begs the question for my purpose. However, in correspondence, Norberg notes that "Nothing certain is known about why they called themselves liberals." But he also added that he has found evidence that Adlersparre called himself a 'liberal' in the period between his Smith translations and the revolution. I hope to pursue this trail in future research!

So, here's where we are: I don't think it's a mere coincidence that in 1809-1812 two revolutions a continent apart, the anti-imperial/mercantile, reformist parties called themselves 'liberal.' Part of the common cause is familiarity (inter alia) with Adam Smith's writings on political economy. In the Swedish case the link is, in fact, most direct through the centrality of Adlersparre. That is, I hope the Spanish and Swedish political events will also help in re-thinking Smith’s significance in the early history of liberalism.

Let's return again to a celebrated anti-Mercantile passage (the explicit target is Colbert) at Wealth of Nations, 4.9.3, it concludes with, "instead of allowing every man to pursue his own interest in his own way, upon the liberal plan of equality, liberty, and justice." I won't relitigate my argument that 'liberal' does not merely mean 'generous,' but rather just want to emphasize here that 'equality, liberty, and justice' were not intended or read as merely a free-trade doctrine; this a moral, political, and legal program.*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Milton Friedman on Marx and Mill (pt 1): The Road to Serfdom and the Art of Government

Judged by the course of events of the last century, rather by the avowed aim of Mill and Marx, there is much for reversing the stereotyped roles assigned to the two men. If collectivism ultimately triumphs over individualism, it will be in no small measure a result of the influence of the ideas first popularized and made respectable by Mill; whereas, if individualism ultimately triumphs, it will be in no small measure a result of the ultimate effects of the belief in revolutionary action to which Marx and Engels gave such vivid expression in the Manifesto…

The great defect of the Benthamite liberals among whom Mill grew up was the absence of any theory or doctrine of the positive role of the state in the organization of economic activity. Benthamism was at bottom a fervent belief in the possibility of improving the condition of mankind through legislative enactment devoted to achieving the “greatest happiness of the greatest number.” These central premises do not themselves prescribe any particular content for legislative action. They are, in strict logic, consistent equally with fargoing collectivism and paternalism or with the ”laissez faire” doctrines with which they were in fact combined. The acceptance of laissez faire as a guiding principle was far less the product of explicit analysis or comparison of any exhaustive set of alternatives[;] prohibited were largely assaults on person or property overwhelmingly regarded as clearly indefensible and the appropriate subject for punitive legislation. In this way, the success of laisses faire removed one of the chief factors responsible for the initial acceptance of laissez faire. By the end of John Mill’s life, the state was no longer what it was during his father’s or Bentham’s time—a corrupt, inefficient instrument whose enactments were widely held in low repute. It had become a relatively honest and efficient body, whose enactments were held in high esteem by the body politic.

The sweeping away of the hindrances to the free movement of men, goods, and capital was followed by the great improvements in economic well being. Yet there obviously remained much misery and poverty to which a passionate humanitarian like Mill could not remain blind. It was perhaps not unnatural that we was willing to sanction action by an honest and much improved state administration to redress grievances. He had no principles of state action by which to test proposals for reform. He was almost certain to minimize or reject entirely the argument—if it were made—that direct interference by the state would threaten that private liberty he prized so highly.  For this argument conflicted with his deep, though naïve, belief in the perfectibility of human beings through education. Once men were educated, he believed, they would become not only wise but also good.--Milton Friedman (September 10, 1948) "Discussion of Paper by V.W. Bladen The Centenary of Marx and Mill" at The Eight Annual meeting of the Economic History Association. Hoover Institution, Collection Title: Milton Friedman papers Container: box 39. [HT David M. Levy]

Bladen's paper can be found here. Originally Friedman had been invited to comment on a paper on laisser faire by J. Bartlett Brebner (which was turned into an influential article: "Laissez Faire and State Intervention in Nineteenth-Century Britain." The Journal of Economic History, 8(S1), 59-73.) From the correspondence at Hoover it's unclear what prompted the move, but Bladen's paper was the opening and keynote to the conference, and Friedman did not object. The other commentator on the program is Elizabeth Schumpeter--the schedule adds in parenthesis: "Mrs. Joseph A." And it would be lovely to locate her comments. 

Bladen was late sending Friedman his paper, and this may help account for the fact that much of Friedman's discussion reads as a riff on A.V. Dicey's (1905 [1914]) Law & Public Opinion rather than a detailed criticism of Bladen (although Friedman added a passage on trade unionism that clearly is critical of Bladen). Throughout Friedman's writings Dicey is an important source, not the least his better studied (1951) “Neo-Liberalism and its Prospects” Farmand, 17 February 1951, pp. 89-93 [recall this post] and his (1962) "Is a Free Society Stable?" New Individualist Review [recall here] some other time I will return to that. (The 1962 piece draws on themes from the manuscript I am discussing today.) And while in today's post 'Marx' is clickbait in the title, I will return to Friedman's comments on Marx, too. Okay, with that in place, let me turn to the text.

Friedman attributes to Dicey (1835 – 1922) a kind of road to serfdom thesis in which Mill's good intentions lead not just to the prevailing support for collectivism that Dicey diagnoses as the effect of Mill's writing at the end of the nineteenth century, but also that the collectivist reforms proposed by Mill would (now quoting Friedman) "seriously threaten political liberty" in virtue of the gradualism that Mill advocated and the tendency to attribute difficulties consequent intervention to the "defects of the price system." Crucially, for Friedman it's the historical experience of Marx's effect on the Russian revolution that halts the English road to serfdom. 

Now, in his analysis Friedman ignores the role of imperialism, and the opportunities for rents this provided, in changing the political culture of nineteenth century liberalism. Hobson, for example, argued that this undermined the pacific, free trade coalition. And while Dicey has less nostalgia for this coalition, he concurs with Hobson's diagnosis. {Of course, given Mill's own advocacy for a civilizational mission of British imperialism, it's not as if this lets Mill off the hook.} It is worth noting that Dicey thinks that imperialism (and high taxation that is the effect of it) may well have slowed the road to serfdom process that Friedman attributes to him (see, especially, the 1914 introduction to the second edition, and chapter XII).

It's a bit odd that Friedman misses the significance of (financial and military procurement) rents to imperialism. Because earlier, in describing the rise of laissez faire, Friedman argues in a public choice vein, that “The Benthamites devoted much attention to improving public administration. Their success in this connection was as great as in establishing a large measure of laissez faire, and the two achievements are not of course unrelated. The establishment of laissez fair enormously reduced the benefits which civil servants could confer on private individuals and greatly lessened the incentive or opportunity to break laws.” 

As an important aside, I am pretty confident that Friedman had read Hayek's Road to Serfdom by 1948. And there is no sign in his 1948 argument that he is as critical of Hayek in the way that his later use of Dicey in 1962 suggests (recall here). 

What's neat about the material I have quoted above is that according to Friedman the key defect in Mill's political economy is that "he had no principles of state action by which to test proposals for reform." That is, the central problem that Mill faces in using state action to ameliorate the plight of the poor and miserable, is that according to Friedman Mill lacks -- and now I am using terminology common to Mill, J.N. Keynes, Friedman, and Foucault -- an art of government.

In fact, (recall) we know from his correspondence with Stigler (Hammond & Hammond) that by 1948 Friedman had started working on his (1953) "Methodology of Positive Economics" paper that uses that very terminology. And that Friedman ends up echoing Mill by treating the art of economics as dependent on empirical science. For it’s this science that provides the knowledge that constitute at least part of the rules of how one gets from given ends to proper outcomes. That is, the dependence of the art on positive science is epistemic in character. And so lurking here is a more fundamental (Marshallian) criticism of not just Mill's art of government, but his political economy more generally one that attributes to Mill a kind of violation of a do no harm principle in political life. To be continued.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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. 

 

 

On Knowing that Imperialism is Bad, Grotius and Plutarch

Victoria therefore rightly saith that the Spaniards got no more authority over the Indians for this cause than the Indians had over the Spaniards if any of them had come formerly into Spain. Nor truly are the Indians out of their wits and unsensible but ingenious and sharp-witted, so that no pretence of subjecting them may be taken from hence, which notwithstanding by itself is sufficient manifest iniquity. Plutarch long since calleth it πρόϕασιν πλεονεξίας ημερώσαι τὰ βαρβαρικά, to wit, a wicked desire of that which is another’s, to pretend this color to himself that he may tame the barbarians. And now also that color of bringing the gentiles against their will to a more civil kind of behavior, which the Grecians in times past and Alexander used, is thought wicked and impious of all divines, but specially the Spaniards.--Hugo Grotius The Free Sea (Hakluyt trans.). Liberty Fund, 1609, chapter 2, pp. 15-16.

It's nice to see Grotius reject natural inequality (of the Aristotelian sort used by Sepúlveda (recall here)); and also to see him reject civilizational missions as a proper justification of imperialism.  I re-encountered the second half of this passage (from Plutarch onward) as a frontispiece to Chandran Kukathas' (2003) The Liberal Archipelago. Before I continue I should acknowledge that I am too aware of the work of Barbara Arneil and Martine Julia van Ittersum, to use this passage to vindicate Grotius from the charge that he was an enabler of settler colonialism (both as a paid lawyer and in his more independent writing). So if you are a debunker of great, dead men don't feel you need to be on guard in what follows (not the least because there may well be a hint of sarcasm at the end of the passage because it is unlikely Grotius treats Spanish theologians -- how rational they may be -- really as authoritative).

I find passages like this useful because they undermine the pseudo-sophistication of what I (recall) call  'modern historicism. Modern historicism is constituted by three claims: first, our minds are "socially conditioned." Second, while we, too, will make socially conditioned moral mistakes, we are the products of moral progress or "Enlightenment." Third, some mechanism of historical change, even improvement, is required. In practice, modern historicism is trotted out to excuse the mistakes of the past and to re-affirm our (moral and intellectual) superiority. 

For, what's really neat about about the passage quoted at the top of the post is that for Grotius the civilizational argument that purportedly justifies imperialism -- one I was taught was only really invented in the Victorian age, and that one could trace back (recall) to Hume  -- is already very old and has been debunked before. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même.

Now the version of the passage that Kukathas cites is translated (in 1916) by Van Deman Magoffin edited by James Brown Scott (here). Somewhat annoyingly the editorial footnote suggests that the passage from Plutarch is on his life of Alexander. The Latin facing text suggests correctly, as does Hakluyt's translation, it's from Plutarch on Pompey (70.3). I quote it in the translation from  Bernadotte Perrin.

Besides, a great task still remained in the subjugation of Scythia and India, and here their greed would have had no inglorious excuse in the civilization of barbarous peoples. And what Scythian horse or Parthian archery or Indian wealth could have checked seventy thousand Romans coming up in arms under the leadership of Pompey and Caesar, whose names those nations had heard of long before that of Rome, so remote and various and savage were the peoples which they had attacked and conquered. 

Now, the wider context here is the Roman civil war (we're on the eve of the battle between Caesar and Pompey) and the self-inflicted implosion of the Roman republic. The romans could have quietly governed and enjoyed "what they had conquered, the greatest and best part of earth and sea was subject to them, and if they still desired to gratify their thirst for trophies and triumphs, they might have had their fill of wars with Parthians or Germans." So, Plutarch's point (and one kind of echoed by Machiavelli long after him) is that the Roman republic could have brought good government (i.e., low taxes, respect for property rights, etc.) to conquered nations, and continued their imperial conquests. But the desire for glory meant an unwillingness to share victory with purported equals. That is, Plutarch defends a kind of manifest destiny for the Romans which is to bring (softly: Greek) civilization to the barbarians (after the Greeks civilized their rulers), as Alexander had done before them.

Grotius has turned Plutarch's "πρόφασις οὐκ ἄδοξος ἐπὶ ταῦτα τῆς πλεονεξίας ἡμερῶσαι τὰ βαρβαρικά" into πρόϕασιν πλεονεξίας ημερώσαι τὰ βαρβαρικά, and so misrepresented (or misremembered) him for his own ends. When I realized this I was modestly disappointed. It would have been nice if Plutarch had anticipated Grotius' point, although it's undeniable that Plutarch clearly recognizes that often greed often is the real source of purportedly civilizing missions, even ones he endorses.

 

On MacAskill, What we Owe to the Future, pt 6; in which I diagnose (with help from Kukathas) a different kind of repugnance.

In rejecting the understanding of human interests offered by Kymlicka and other contemporary liberal writers such as Rawls, then, I am asserting that while we have an interest in not being compelled to live the kind of life we cannot abide, this does not translate into an interest in living the chosen life. The worst fate that a person might have to endure is that he be unable to avoid acting against conscience. This means that our basic interest is not in being able to choose our ends but rather in not being forced to embrace, or become implicated, in ends we find repugnant.--Chandran Kukathas (2003) The liberal archipelago: A theory of diversity and freedom, p. 64. 

This is my sixth post on MacAskill's What We Owe the Future. (The first here; the second one is here; the third here; the fourth here; the fifth here; see also this post on a passage in Parfit (here.)) I paused the series in the middle of January because most of my remaining objections to the project involve either how to think about genuine uncertainty or disagreements in meta-ethics that are mostly familiar already to specialists and that probably won't be of much interest to my regular readers. I have also grown uneasy with a growing sense that longtermists don't seem to grasp the nature of the hostility they seem to provoke and (simultaneously) the recurring refrain on their part that the critics don't understand them.

While reading Kukathas' The liberal archipelago (unrelated to EA and longtermism), I was triggered by the passage quoted at the top of the post. (Another win for the associative mechanism; from Kukathas' use of 'repugnant' to Parfit's 'repugnant conclusion' and back to What We Owe the future.) What follows is unlike the detailed textual and conceptual scrutiny I gave to MacAskill's book in earlier digressions.

Before I get to that, for my present purposes I can allow that Kukathas is mistaken that the worst fate that a person might have to endure is that a person be unable to avoid acting against conscience. Maybe this is just a very bad fate (consider, as Adam Smith suggests, being framed and convicted for murder one didn't do; or being tortured for no good reason, etc.) All I stipulate here is that Kukathas is right that being (directly) implicated in bad ends is really very bad. This is, in fact, something that seems to be motivating longtermists and compatibly with their official views. While 'repugnant' is a good concept to use here, having one's conscience violated is, in turn, a source of indignation. I think that's fairly uncontroversial and i don't mean to import Kukathas' wider political theory into the argument (although I am drawing on his sensitivity to the significance of moral disagreement).

MacAskill's book doesn't use, I think, the word 'conscience.' This is a bit surprising because the key example of successful moral entrepreneurship (his term) in the service of moral progress (again his term) is Quaker abolitionism inspired by Benjamin Lay. And Lay certainly lets conscience play a role in (say) his All Slave-keepers that Keep the Innocent in Bondage (although he is also alert to the existence of hypocritical appeals to conscience). It's also odd because one gets the sense that MacAskill and many of his fellow-travelers are incredibly sincere in wishing to improve the world and do, in fact, have a very finely honed moral sense (and conscience) despite arguing primarily from first principles, and with fondness for expected utility, and about (potentially very distant) ends.

Now, it's not wholly surprising, of course, given his (defeasible) orientation toward total wellbeing that MacAskill is de facto attracted to that conscience is not high on his list. (A "conscience utilitarianism" just doesn't get us on the right path from his perspective.) In fact, in general the needs and views of presently existing people are a drop in the bucket in his overall longtermist position. But this lack of attention to the significance of conscience also leads to a kind of (how to put it politely) social even political obtuseness. Let me explain what I have in mind in light of a passage that  expresses some of MacAskill's generous sentiments. He writes,

The key issue is which values will guide the future. Those values could be narrow-minded, parochial, and unreflective. Or they could be open-minded, ecumenical, and morally exploratory. If lock-in is going to occur either way, we should push towards the latter. But transparently removing the risk of value lock-in altogether is even better. This has two benefits, both of which are extremely important from a longtermist perspective. We avoid the permanent entrenchment of flawed human values. And by assuring everyone that this outcome is off the table, we remove the pressure   get there first—thus preventing a race in which the contestants skimp on precautions against AGI takeover or resort to military force to stay ahead.

Now, as I have noted before, MacAskill isn't proposing anything illegal or untoward here. His good intentions (yes!) are on admirable display. But it is worth reflecting on the fact that he or the social movement he is shaping (notice that 'we') is presuming to act as humanity's (partial) legislator without receiving authority or consent to do so from the living or, if that were possible, the future. (He is acting like a philosophical legislator in the tradition of Nietzsche and Parfit while trying to shape actual political outcomes.) And he is explicitly aware that this might well generate suspicion (which is, in part, why transparency and assurance are so important here).* One suspicion he generates is that he will promote ends and means that go against the conscience of many (consider his views on human enhancement and what is known as 'liberal eugenics'). 

So, while MacAskill is explicit on the need to preserve "a plurality of values" (in order to avoid early lock-in), that's distinct from accepting deeply entrenched moral pluralism--this means tolerating, at minimum, close-minded and morally risk-averse views. MacAskill does not have a theory, political or social, that registers the significance of the reality of such entrenched moral pluralism and the political and inductive risks (even backlash) for his project that follow from it. I don't think he is alone in drifting into this problem: variants of it show up in the technical version of population ethics and in multi-generational climate ethics, and other fundamentally technocratic approaches to longish term public policy. That is, it is not sufficient to claim to be promoting "open-minded, ecumenical, and morally exploratory" values, even reject premature lock-in of "a single set of values," if one never shows much sensitivity toward those that seriously disagree with you over ends and means. 

In addition, to feel unseen and unacknowledged is a known source of indignation. MacAskill's longtermism constantly flirts with lack of interest in taking into account the needs and aspirations of those whose wellbeing it aims to be promoting. But even if that's unfair or mistaken on my part, given that MacAskill really doubles down on the need to promote "desirable moral progress" and tying "moral principles" that are thereby "discovered" to a "more general worldview," it is entirely predictable that he will advocate for ends and means that many, who reject such principles, will find repugnant, and a source of indignation. As, say, Machiavelli and Spinoza teach this leads to political resistance, and worse.

 

 

 

Hayek, Kukathas, and the Significance and Limitations of Social Theory

Yet agreement between Hayek and the dominant strand of liberal theory may not be quite so easily secured. For a great deal turns on what is understood by a modus vivendi, and thought necessary to secure it. For Gutmann and Larmore, a liberal modus vivendi may well involve the growth of the mechanisms of participatory democracy, and need not compromise egalitarian ideals. A Hayekian conception of the liberal order as a modus vivendi, however, would not be of this nature. The conclusion he draws from his social theory is that a liberal order must be ruled by a limited government whose primary task is to maintain the framework within which individuals and groups may pursue their respective aims, regardless of the shape the resulting society assumes.
Rawls, however...explicitly rejects the idea of a modus vivendi. For him, what is needed is a political conception of justice which will command the allegiance of a diversity of moral viewpoints in a pluralist society. Only such a public philosophy which was able to sustain an 'overlapping consensus' of views would ensure social unity in 'long run equilibrium'. A modus vivendi would amount to little more than a temporary truce, in which time the more powerful interests would be able to marshall their forces, later to impose their own attitudes upon all. This contrasts with Hayek who sees social stability as possible only under political institutions which removed social justice from the agenda of politics.
This lack of agreement does not, however, reduce the interest of Hayek's contribution to liberal theory. Indeed, it suggests one way liberals may approach the problem of dealing with differences that divide them: by returning to issues in social theory. His work deserves examination because he draws attention to the need to consider the nature of society and the way in which this constrains our choice of political principles. For, if Hayek is right, many kinds of principles may be ruled out as unworkable. In other words, the circumstances of justice need much more careful investigation than they have been given.
Hayek's endeavours, while they have not succeeded in establish­ing a coherent liberal philosophy, do push contemporary liberal theory in a promising direction. For they show, first, that the defence of the liberal order need not assume that man is an isolated, asocial, utility maximizer: the defence of liberalism can, and should, be grounded in a more plausible account of man and society. And they suggest, secondly, that, while it will prove difficult to establish philosophical foundations for liberal rights, or a liberal theory of liberty, an understanding of the nature of social processes may offer a surer guide by telling us what kinds of rights and liberties cannot be adopted if the liberal ideal is to survive.-- Chandran Kukathas (1989) Hayek and Modern Liberalism, pp. 227-228. [Emphasis in original]

[If you are impatient you can skip the first four autobiographical paragraphs of today's digression.] Because I never went through a libertarian phase (and where I grew up these barely existed then), I am not quite sure when I first encountered Hayek's name and when I first read him. I do know that when I entered graduate school at age 24, I was aware of some of the features of Hayek's 'knowledge problem' because I briefly tried -- without success -- to get others in my graduate cohort interested in Hayek as an epistemologist in light of Hayek 1945. But I am really unsure how I picked this up. Between college and graduate school I read anything that happened to come my way or encountered in bookstores so I'll leave it to chance. 

Because I ended up writing a PhD on Hume and Smith's philosophy of science, I did end up reading some of Hayek's writings on the Scottish Enlightenment. During my PhD, I also read the Road to Serfdom (which left me unmoved) and The Sensory Order (which was astonishing, and I was shocked nobody else I knew had read). But because I was not especially interested in spontaneous order or a deep dive into libertarianism (beyond Nozick) my knowledge of Hayek was superficial. 

This started to change near the end of my PhD, around 2001, when the historians of economics, David M. Levy and Sandra Peart, started to invite me to their annual workshop on the preservation of the history of economics. Peart was working on her excellent edition of Hayek on Mill. David knew his Hayek and could easily make him philosophically interesting to me. (Recently David has been sharing his excitement about the development of modal logics by nineteenth century economists who moonlight as logicians!) Through them I met Erik Angner who was very interested in Hayek's theory of cultural evolution (a topic I was then very interested in), and I eventually read his wonderful monograph on Hayek and natural law.

I mention all of this because after I did start reading Hayek, I actually thought of Hayek as a weird Kantian or neo-Kantian. When I first mentioned this to people with a philosophical interest in Hayek this was often dismissed (such people treated him as more as a follower of Hume). So, I was quite pleased back when I read Kukathas' book the first time (about two decades ago) that Kukathas argues for Hayek's Kantianism in great detail (alongside Hayek's debts to Hume). And not surprised when decades later I read Foucault (who historically precedes Kukathas by a decade) on the significance of Kant/Kantianism to Hayek and other neoliberals in his biopolitics lectures. 

Anyway, above I quote the final paragraphs of Kukathas' wonderful book, which manages to juggle quite a few balls apparently effortless at once: it is a careful study of Hayek as a systematic thinker; it locates Hayek in debates within liberalism (not the least through a detailed comparison with Rawls) and between liberalism(s) and its/their critics. Along the way, readers also get a judicious account of why it is misleading to treat Hayek as an (indirect) utilitarian. And while Kukathas is respectful of Hayek, as the quoted paragraph suggests, he argues at length that Hayek is incapable of reconciling the Kantian and Humean strands of his own theory.* Okay, so much for set up.

One important contribution of Kukathas' book is to illustrate the value of social theory to political philosophy even among those who think of political philosophy as an 'ethics first' or 'justice first' enterprise. Part of that use is hinted at in the closing paragraphs quoted at the top of this post: first, a social theory provides us with the content in a feasibility or aptness constraint. Let's call this a 'negative use of social theory' in which social theory is used (with a nod to 'ought implies can' perhaps) to rule out or block certain normative theories (or the principles on which they rely) because they are literally impossible for beings like us, once we're more informed about who we are (by social theory). Of course, unrealistic or unfeasible models or theories may still be useful in some way or another -- not the least as paradigms that discipline a field --, so one should not expect to use social theory (which often blends normative and empirical features in complex ways) as a hammer to destroy viewpoints one wishes to reject. 

Second, and this is a positive feature, social theory can provide one with a philosophical anthropology that allows one to recast one's political vision and/or normative theories. In Hayek's case this also (third) means that many typical criticisms of liberalism (familiar, say, from Karl Polanyi (who goes unmentioned), Alisdair MacIntyre, various communitarians and Marxists (etc.) are disarmed in advance because the anthropology supplied by Hayek's social theory actually is not the Robinson Crusoe one -- "isolated, asocial, utility maximizing" -- usually criticized by critics of liberalism; if anything Kukathas' Hayek (and I agree) is not very far from Hegel, although as Kukathas notes with some key differences.

But, unless I missed it, Kukathas does not define what he or Hayek means by 'social theory' (something on my mind due to failed efforts to do so while teaching undergrads).  Hayek does give us some material to work on this. For example, in (1967) in "Notes on the Evolution of Systems of Rules of Conduct: The Interplay between Rules of Individual Conduct and the Social Order of Actions," Hayek writes the following:

The whole task of social theory consists in little else but an effort to reconstruct the overall orders which are thus formed, and the reason why that special apparatus of conceptual construction is needed which social theory represents is the complexity of this task. It will also be clear that such a distinct theory of social structures can provide only an explanation of certain general and highly abstract features of the different types of structures (or only of the ‘qualitative aspects’), because these abstract features will be all that all the structures of a certain type will have in common, and therefore all that will be predictable or provide useful guidance for action.--p. 283 in The Market and Other Orders, edited by Bruce Caldwell.

On Hayek's view social theory is, thus, engaged in conceptual construction. And it aims to construct what he calls an 'overall order.' (There are distinct resonances here with the morphological project of the ordoliberal, Eucken.) These overall orders are "systems of rules of conduct" which "will develop as wholes" and on which a certain kind of "selection process...will operate on the order as a whole." Now, clearly this conception of social theory is, while capable of objectivity, itself partial to Hayekian projects (he goes on to claim that "of theories of this type economic theory, the theory of the market order
of free human societies, is so far the only one which has been systematically developed over a long period"), so I don't mean to suggest Hayek's idea of 'social theory' ought to generalize to all social theory.

Now, crucially, Hayekian social theory provides one with functional explanations of social order(s). Hayek is very explicit about this on the following page (p. 284). It may require auxiliary sciences to do so (Hayek is discussing the rule of evolutionary social psychology in context). And one way it offers such a functional explanation is to make clear the "interaction between the regularity of the conduct of the elements [or individuals] and the regularity of the resulting structure." (289)

I call it 'Hayekian' social theory because one of the other "tasks" he ascribes to it is to explain the "unintended patterns and regularities which we find to exist in human society." (from Hayek (1967) "The results of human action but not of human design." p. 294 in The Market and Other Orders.) Obviously, that may be incompatible with a social theory that has a different focus, although Marx is clearly interested in features of such a social theory.

So, why do I mention this? Before I answer that let's stipulate that Hayek's social theory is coherent. I have two reasons. First, even coherent, it is not entirely obvious what the status of the fruits of Hayekian social theory are. What kind of impossibility is proven by social theory if it has a Hayekian cast? This is not obvious. (In part this is not obvious because the empirical basis of social theory is not easily disentangled from its normative commitments.) I don't see how Hayekian social theory can rule out orders constructed on principles very different than Hayekian social theory, even if one can suspect that these will not be functional in the way that (say) spontaneous orders will be. This depends on plasticity of humans but also on the possibility of social structures with different kinds of social rules. I don't think this paragraph undermines Kukathas' particular argument because he shows how much Rawls and Hayek agree in their commitments.

Second, Hayekian social theory inherits from 19th century historicism (and some aspects of the Scottish Enlightenment) the idea of social wholes (that are constituted by their system of rules). Now, Hayek acknowledges that (say) a historian or social scientist may well do his or her job without embracing social wholes. His is not an organicist theory, and since social pluralism is -- as Kukathas reveals -- kind of bedrock in his theory it would be odd to attribute organicism to Hayek. However, it is not obvious why in a world constituted by social pluralism of different sorts -- and with non-trivial barriers that would facilitate differential and distinct selection -- we would find such social wholes even in (say) places that share non-trivial social commonalities. If human law or force is part of the selection process we should in fact expect greater diversity. In fact, I am echoing here Hayek's friend, Eucken, who clearly thought that Hayek's expectation of such social wholes was only so in theory, but that in practice one could find a rich diversity of social orders (based on a limited number of morphological elements).

Let me stop there. I don't mean to suggest these are fatal objections to Hayek's theory. But  if we look forward to Kukathas' Liberal Archipelago it helps explain Kukathas' non-trivial distance from using Hayekian social theory despite Kukathas and Hayek sharing a deep debts to Hume.

The Aristotelian Causes in Hume

When by natural principles we [humans] are led to advance those ends, which a refined and enlightened reason would recommend to us, we are very apt to impute to that reason, as to their efficient cause, the sentiments and actions by which we advance those ends, and to imagine that to be the wisdom of man, which in reality is the wisdom of God. Upon a superficial view, this cause seems sufficient to produce the effects which are ascribed to it; and the system of human nature seems to be more simple and agreeable when all its different operations are in this manner deduced from a single principle.---Adam Smith The Theory of Moral Sentiments 2.2.3.5

Yesterday, I noted that one way to understand Hume's significance to our conceptualization of causation is two-fold: first, that he whittled down four Aristotelian causes to just one kind of cause (previously known as 'efficient causation'); and, second, that he is the source of the modern conception of causation by offering a counterfactual definition of it in the first Enquiry. Hume is also taken to be the source of our modern discussion of convention, (recall here) although a very good argument can be made that Hume is greatly indebted to Locke (see also this more recent post and this one as a follow up). In today's post I suggest that Hume's account of convention itself is greatly indebted to the Aristotelian causes. Let me explain by first re-quoting a familiar passage from Hume: 

But if by convention be meant a sense of common interest; which sense each man feels in his own breast, which he remarks in his fellows, and which carries him, in concurrence with others, into a general plan or system of actions, which tends to public utility; it must be owned, that, in this sense, justice arises from human conventions. For if it be allowed (what is, indeed, evident) that the particular consequences of a particular act of justice may be hurtful to the public as well as to individuals; it follows, that every man, in embracing that virtue, must have an eye to the whole plan or system, and must expect the concurrence of his fellows in the same conduct and behaviour. Did all his views terminate in the consequences of each act of his own, his benevolence and humanity, as well as his self-love, might often prescribe to him measures of conduct very different from those, which are agreeable to the strict rules of right and justice.

In the posts linked above I argued that Hume's analysis of convention has eight parts (most also to be found in Locke's Second Treatise and the Essay):

1. a sense of common interest
2. felt in each person's breast;
3. It (viz, (i)) is observed in others;
4. this fact (the existence of (i&iii) creates collaboration & reliable expectations;
5. the collaboration is structured in non-trivial ways;
6. and this has good consequences or positive externalities for society.
7.  A Humean convention is explicitly contrasted with practices founded in explicit promises and/or in practice regulated by formal governmental law. In addition,
8.  the process (I-III) need not be verbalized at all. It can be entirely tacit.

I call I-VIII: ‘the Humean template,’ and they are jointly sufficient, although (VII) is not necessary.

Now, the Humean template has quite a few moving parts. And given that in Locke the Humean template is used but, as far I am aware, not explicitly analyzed it's worth asking to what degree he would have been fully conscious of the Humean template. It's always a risk with the kind of structuralist analysis I offer here that it is merely a projection of the historian onto an earlier text. Even if that were so it can still be illuminating, of course, but to use the 'Humean template' about Locke would be straightforward anachronism (albeit useful anachronism).

But even though Locke does not explicitly analyze the Humean template, i don't think it's a mere projection on my part for three reasons (the first two of which outlined in the linked posts): first, as I realized by reflecting on work by Martin Lenz (Socializing Minds) Locke is clearly responding to lacunae in Puffendorf's account of the origin and stability of conventions. Second, the Humean template can be found in the second Treatise and the Essay (and is evoked later in the Essay). These two reasons are internal to Locke's project.

In addition, third, we can discern the portfolio of Aristotle's four causes in the Humean template. For, (VI) is the final cause(s) of a convention.  And (I) is the formal cause. In addition, (II-V) are the efficient and material causes of the convention. I mix these causes here because jointly they tie the formal and final cause together in the workings of the convention.

If Locke's use of the Humean template presupposes the Aristotelian causes then it's also no surprise that he doesn't need to offer an explicit analysis of the Humean template. His readers would have noticed it without his saying so. In Hume, the template is made explicit precisely because a reader familiar with Hume's philosophy cannot take for granted that Hume would draw on the non-efficient Aristotelian causes.

That (VI) is a final cause strikes me as uncontroversial. But it is surprising to find it in Hume, who is really an explicit and implicit critic of final causes (see here also for references). Of course, in virtue of providing the mechanism for its functionality one may well say that the Humean template naturalizes or presupposes a naturalized teleology. One may also claim that in human affairs, a certain kind of intentionality and goal directed is inelimenable.

The real question here is to what degree the common interest that a tacit convention secures is fully foreseaable and articulable ahead of time. For example, Adam Smith famously criticized the deployment of the Humean template in Hume's account of the origin of justice in circumstances that echo a state of nature because Hume's account seems to presuppose awareness of the final cause, or at least assume common interest, in a context where this sense of unity or mutual loyalty, seems unlikely. (See here for the full story.)

The passage at the top of the post is near the conclusion of Smith's diagnosis of the error in Hume. Interestingly enough, in Part II of the Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind, Dugald Stewart notes Smith's criticism of Hume, and quotes the passage in order to illustrate "a common error," which Stewart associates with the "dangerous" revitalisation of utilitarianism (he explicitly discusses Paley and Godwin in context). Stewart praises Adam Smith because "he always treats separately of their final causes, and of the mechanism, as he calls it, by which nature accomplishes the effect; and he has even been at pains to point out to his successors the great importance."

To be sure, Smith's criticism does not touch all instances of Hume's use of the Humean template. For, in some contexts the common interest is knowable even known and the efficient and material causes of the Humean template can do their work without presupposing that all the benefits from the convention are presupposed in the mechanism that gives rise to the convention or that these benefits are or would have to be obscure to the agents involved. 

This problem does not even arise in Locke. For, of course, the natural reading of much of Locke's writings is that he embraces a God given providential order. (But recall this post for the debate.) So, in Locke the use of the Humean template is completely natural and without a blemish of inconsistency.* 

On Foucault's Discipline and Punishment & Chicago/Public Choice Economics (II)

But perhaps one should reverse the problem and ask oneself what is served by the failure of the prison; what is the use of these different phenomena that are continually being criticized; the maintenance of delinquency, the encouragement of recidivism, the transformation of the occasional offender into a habitual delinquent, the organization of a closed milieu of delinquency. Perhaps one should look for what is hidden beneath the apparent cynicism of the penal institution, which, after purging the convicts by means of their sentence, continues to follow them by a whole series of 'brandings' (a surveillance that was once de jure and which is today de facto; the police record that has taken the place of the convic's passport) and which thus pursues as a 'delinquent' someone who has acquitted himself of his punishment as an offender. Can we not see here a consequence rather than a contradiction? If so, one would be forced to suppose that the prison, and no doubt punishment in general, is not intended to eliminate offences, but rather to distinguish them, to distribute them, to use th!m; that it is not so much that they render docile those who are liable to transgress the law, but that they tend to assimilate the transgression of the laws in a general tactics of subiection.--Michel Foucault (1975) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison [Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison] translated by Alan Sheridan, pp. 272.

The passage quoted above occurs in the section where Foucault steps back from his account of the 'birth' of a prison and reminds his reader that he is researching and writing his book during "prisoners' revolts of recent weeks." (p. 268) And some readers, then and now, will be familiar with Foucault's activism on behalf of those prisoners. Foucault goes on to note that such revolts elicit a predictable response from (what one might call) enlightened, bien pensant public opinion: "the prisoners' revolts...have been attributed to the fact that the reforms proposed in 1945 never really took effect; that one must therefore return to the fundamental principles of the prison." (p. 268) And Foucault goes on to note that the (seven) principles that entered into the 1945 reform and the predictable response to their failure are a return of the same with a history of "150 years," (p. 269): "Word for word, from one century to the other, the same fundamental propositions are repeated. They reappear in each new, hard-won, finally accepted formulation of a reform that has hitherto always been lacking." (p. 270).*

A certain kind of economist -- often associated with public choice theory and/or Stigler's account of rent-seeking [hereafter the fusion of Chicago and Virginia] --, when confronted by a persistent and enduring failure of a social institution, will ask Cui bono? And what will follow is a story about persistent rents, and rent-seeking. That is, while it is often presented in terms of methodological individualism of utility maximizing agents, the Chicago-Virginia fusion offers a functionalist account of the persistence of social institutions in virtue of the functions they serve to some socially powerful agents or classes of agents. (I put it like that to pay due hommage to the Smithian and Marxist (recall) roots of the emphasis on rent-seeking in the Chicago-Virginia fusion (recall this post on Stigler and recall here on Buchanan and Tullock.) If you don't like the word 'class' use 'representative agent' instead.

Now, before I say anything else, it is worth noting that in the subsequent pages of the material I quote, Foucault offers the rent-seeking answer familiar from Chicago and Virginia fusion. In particular, he identifies three kinds of rents: first, and this is central to the argument of the whole book, members of the human sciences -- medicine, psychology, crimonology, pedagogy, social work, statistics, sociology etc. -- directly gain employment and status from the fact that modern prisons are not just places to lock people away, but also to reform and discipline them. They also gain an easily acessible study object and data (e.g. p. 277 & p. 281).  Second, the criminalization of, say, brothels and the simultaneous regulation of the health of the prostitutes create "enormous profits" that are partially captured by members of the political classes, partially captured by police forces, and again  medicine (see, especially, pp. 279-280). Third, prisons are themselves producers of delinquincy, and so that generates one might call 'second order rents' because it reinforces all the primary rents discussed just mentioned.

There is a further, more important, convergence with Chicago-Virginia fusion lurking here. Foucault treats prisons and the penal system as producers of delinquincy. (This is, in fact, one of the central insights of most prison reform programs that reappear.) And, in fact, it is quite natural to read Becker and Stigler as providing a framework to think about what (in the 1970s already) was called "the crime production function" (as even critics acknowledged). As Becker (1968) put it one can articulate a "function relating the number of offenses by any person to his probability of conviction, to his punishment if convicted, and to other variables, such as the income available to him in legal and other illegal activities, the frequency of nuisance arrests, and his willingness to commit an illegal act." (Crime and Punishment: An Economic Approach, p. 177) From his annotations, we know Foucault read this essay (even though we don't know when exactly).  That is to say, what Foucault recognizes is that the production of delinquincy is itself a source of possible rents or what Foucault calls "usable...illegality." (p. 277) And in (1979) Birth of Biopolitics, Foucault explicitly links his discussion of the "cost of delinquency" to Becker, Stigler, and Ehrlich.  (21 March 1979, Lecture 10, p. 248) And in many ways the tenth lecture can be read as a restatement of Foucault's Discipline & Punish in the vernacular of Chicago.

So, again, as I noted last week, this kind of convergence between Foucault and the Chicago-Virginia fusion suggests either that Foucault was familiar with Stigler's and Becker's work before he published Discipline and Punish and before he encountered Lepage's (1978) Tomorrow, Capitalism: The Economics of Economic Freedom or that there was a kind of convergence between Foucault and Chicago already during his prison activism phase (when Foucault was associated with Maoist and far left groups).

I could stop here, but I don't mean to suggest that for Foucault the enduring functionality of prison as a producer of delinquincy is exclusively or primarily in financial (and scientific) rents. He also thinks that it has other enduring political benefits to ruling elites in direct and indirect ways. Whether one agrees with this or not, Foucault's answer here is no different in kind than the one articulated just now in terms of rents. (Even if the utility involved would be more difficult to measure directly.) And somewhat remarkably, in his classic study (Sour Grapes) Jon Elster singled out Foucault's question and answer as an especially bad consequence explanations--ones that lack a mechanism, a feedback mechanism, and even an intentional agent.  I responded to that charge in press here before I developed my interest in the Birth of Biopolitics and Foucault's thought. And while I would be the last person to suggest that Foucault's work could pass peer review at JPE, good chunks of the enduring substance of Discipline & Punish is not fundamentally different from work that did at the time.