Digressions&Impressions

On Hazony and Bourke on Burke and Frank S. Meyer, and the risks of Freedom

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Lodged inside Yoram Hazony's Conservatism: A Rediscovery is also a polemic against what came to be known as 'fusionism.' (Recall my series of posts on Hazony's book recall the first one here; here the second; here the third one; and the fourth.) I quote Hazony: "This alignment of liberals and conservatives was assembled, first and foremost, by William F. Buckley Jr., the young founder and editor of the conservative weekly, National Review. But its principal theoretician was his close associate, Frank Meyer, who was credited with having devised a “fusion” of liberalism and conservatism appropriate to conditions in America during the Cold War. That this “fusionism” was politically successful cannot be denied...Meyer’s fusion was also a version of Enlightenment liberalism." Chapter VI (section 5)

In fact, when Hazony turns to Meyer's (1962) in Defense of Freedom, Hazony is scathing: "Meyer’s book is devoted to repeated attacks on Edmund Burke, Russell Kirk, and other defenders of the Anglo-American conservative tradition. Among other things, Meyer accuses Burke of having inspired a standpoint characterized by “an organic view of society, by a subordination of the individual person to society, and therefore, by a denial that the freedom of the person is the decisive criterion of a good polity.”"

Intrigued by Hazony's characterization of Meyer (how could the architect of fusionism, which I think a historic mistake, be an Enlightenment liberal?), I decided to read Meyer (1909 – 1972). Vefore I get to what I want to say about Meyer today, I should note that Hazony subtly misrepresents Meyer here. Meyer is not a critic of Burke the conservative. He is, however, a critic of Kirk and other so-called 'new Conservatives' who have conflated Burke "the practical statesman," whose pronouncements were (to use Huntington's taxonomy [recall yesterday's post]) situational not a political philosophy, with an oracular prophet of a movement. According to Meyer, Burke could take for granted the worth of the (1688) constitution he defended.* That is, Meyer actually admires Burke. (This is not to deny that Meyer also disagrees with some of the late Burke's pronouncements on reason, but he tends to agree with Burke's underlying commitments on liberty.)

Meyer thinks that certain pronouncements of Burke, when treated as an eternal philosophy, lend themselves toward an organicist conception of society and a dangerous form of status quo bias, that what is, is right. As Hazony discerns (and Meyer acknowledges in a note) this is de facto a version of Strauss' criticism of the Burke Strauss found popular among American conservatives.

As an aside, if I am right about this then Richard Bourke’s characterization of recent conservatism (recall yesterday’s post) is misleading. For, our contemporary historical interest in twentieth century conservatism is due in large part to its political success in its ‘fusionist guise’ Stateside. (There is no interest in Kirk today other than as the partial trigger of fusionism.) By design, then, fusionism also rejects the very ‘Burke myth’ Bourke diagnoses from the start. How this could be so forgotten is, in fact, a very interesting question; but about that some other time.

Okay, with that as set up, let me turn, in conclusion, to the main point of today's digression. Meyer thinks reason is, then, required both as a grounds of criticism of any status quo and in the articulation of the means by which the proper end of society, virtue, must be pursued. (Meyer is in contemporary parlance, a certain kind of indirect liberal perfectionist.) In fact, he puts the point in the following way in a passage from 1964 that I find especially congenial: 

In the political and economic realm, however, these truths establish only the foundation for an understanding of the end of civil society and the function of the state. That end, to guarantee freedom, so that men may uncoercedly pursue virtue, can be achieved in different circumstances by different means. To the clarification of what these means are in specific circumstances, the conservative must apply his reason. The technological circumstances of the twentieth century demand above all the breaking up of power and the separation of centers of power within the economy itself, within the state itself, and between the state and the economy. Power of a magnitude never before dreamed of by men has been brought into being. While separation of power has always been essential to a good society, if those who possess it are to be preserved from corruption and those who do not are to be safeguarded from coercion, this has become a fateful necessity under the conditions of modern technology.--"Freedom, Tradition, Conservatism," Reprinted from What is Conservatism? (1964), p. 14 in Libertyfund edition of In Defense of Freedom and Related Essays. [Emphasis added.]

That is, we can describe Meyer's core insight that the pursuit of individual virtue requires negative freedom. But that effective negative freedom, or the freedom of choice worth having, also requires certain social conditions. And in particular, Meyer advocates the (legal) destruction of (to use Sam Bagg's felicitous phrase) concentrated powers (which prevent and curtail formal freedoms in all kinds of ways). Meyer here echoes what I take to be one of the true insights of ordo-liberalism of a generation before. (The ORDOs are more realistic, however, about how much state capacity this presupposes.)

Meyer repeatedly emphasizes that his own position requires fallible contextual judgment. Meyer recognizes that allying with conservatism often entails, I quote from the same page, being "associated with authoritarianism." In context, there is, in fact, a real difference between opposing the state's leviathan to defend the "principle of federalism that reserves to the states or to the people all power not confided to the national authority" before the break up of Jim Crow or after; to worry about sociological scientism in Brown vs Board of Education while agreeing with its verdict in the particular case (or to use such scientism to reject the verdict), etc. 

The previous paragraph is not written by a moralist. If one agrees with Meyer's framework it is worth recognizing that opposing concentrated power in the name of making the pursuit of private virtue as free and responsible agents possible is not sufficient by itself to guard against rather significant errors of moral and political judgment. For, one must also make reasoned, and fallible, judgments about the order in which these powers are tackled and by way of coalitions with those whose ends one only partially shares. What makes Meyer's philosophy especially notable, even tragic, is that his is a most articulate sensitivity toward the risk of such grave error as a feature of freedom, that is, ineliminable from the human condition.

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See pp. 61-62 and p. 10 of the Libertyfund edition of In Defense of Freedom and Related Essays.  (P. 10 is a reference to Meyer's 1955 essay, Collectivism Rebaptized."

Mediating between Strauss and Dewey: the forgotten radical liberal Arnold Kaufman

In this paper political theory is regarded as properly serving an instrumental function. This view is elaborated, then defended against the criticisms of Professor Leo Strauss...
Political theory should be a guide to action. The political philosopher should provide those who make policy with principles which will aid them in the attempt to cope with specific sociopolitical problems. Instrumental theories of this type should have two roughly distinguishable components: (1) an ultimate ideal; (2) intermediate ideals in their relation to specific policy recommendations.--Arnold S. Kaufman (1954) "The nature and function of political theory." The journal of philosophy 51.1: 5-22.

This post originates in my interest in finding critical engagements with Leo Strauss within analytic philosophy in the post-WWII era (triggered by (recall here; here; here; especially this one; here; and here) an invite by Sander Verhaegh). The topic intersects with my continuing reflection (recall here; here; here; here; here; here) on Katrina Forrester's In the Shadow of Justice, which convincingly shows that Rawls' Theory of Justice creates a kind of light-cone which does not allow us to discern events behind it. In fact, Forrester mentions Kaufman's work (in the 1960s) on civil disobedience, and treats Kaufman as "the New Left philosopher and intellectual founder of the “ teach-in.” (p. 52; see also p. 56; 61--in her footnotes she also alerts the reader to his views on Black reparations and participatory democracy.)

Kaufman died, June 6, 1971, aged 44 when his airplane collided with a military jet while traveling. Oddly, his supervisor at Columbia, Charles Frankel, who in the 1960s served the LBJ administration that Kaufman was battling from the left, died a few years later in an armed robbery in his home in Bedford Hills. In fact, while at University of Michigan, Kaufman was at the center of things at the founding of SDS and the Port Huron Statement (as Tom Hayden acknowledges), and was, as Forrester hints, alongside Marshall Sahlins and Rapaport one of the Michigan faculty key to organizing the first teach-in on the Vietnam War. (Sahlins was the supervisor of Graeber, who in some respects, is the heir to Kaufman.) Later, while at UCLA, he was (despite their non-trivial political differences) one of the most outspoken defenders of Angela Davis' appointment at UCLA and freedom to teach.

The (1954) piece I quoted at the top of this post was published before Kaufman completed his dissertation (on Hobhouse). It situates itself between Dewey, who is the advocate of instrumental political theory (but of whom Kaufman is also critical), and Strauss, and also wishes to draw from both. (How Kaufman draws from Strauss I leave aside here.)

One might well wonder why I treat Kaufman as an 'analytic' philosopher. I have two reasons for this: first, the later work from the 1960s is very naturally read as analytic philosophy.* Second, the early work I discuss here bears the imprint of Ernest Nagel (who was then at Columbia) because it anticipates some of the methodological claims of Nagel's 1954 presidential address (while still advocating a more activist stance).

While, in this post I can only leave this second reason as a promissory note, it's worth noting what Kaufman's two main criticisms of Dewey are: first, on Kaufman's  view there ought be also "a concern with theory, with logical interrelatedness, with the generality of political principles which would be anathema for Dewey." (21) In particular (and this very much echoes Nagel), Kaufman claims (while drawing on the analogy between natural and social science), "there is considerable evidence that attention to conceptual adequacy, to logical interrelatedness, and to the connections between a verbal structure and the events it was designed to help human beings control, will yield a rich reward." (22) And second, Dewey's political theory is too "programmatic in character. His formulations were extremely abstract and he always shied from the difficult task of linking those views to the "concrete" situations of which he was so fond of talking." (22; Kaufman acknowledges, of course, that Dewey also acted quite nobly in concrete situations of which he talked.)

While an older generation of political theorists and intellectual historians is definitely familiar with Kaufman, and there is some scholarship on him, to the best of my knowledge analytic philosophy has completely forgotten him in the post Rawlsian era. For example, in Jo Wolff's authoritative and fascinating survey, "Analytic Political Philosophy" (in the OUP volume on the History of Analytic Philosophy), Kaufman goes unmentioned (presumably because he made no impact on those collected in the series in Philosophy, Politics and Society. This is a shame because Kaufman quite clearly anticipates and pioneers the revival of advocacy (which is an important theme in Wolff's article). 

Kaufman recognizes that Leo Strauss is a fierce critic of the instrumentalist stance.** (He quotes Strauss' Review of Dewey 's German Philosophy and Politics, in Social Research.) And pieces together from scattered remarks in Strauss' writing an argument against the instrumentalist approach. Kaufman writes this before the publication of Natural Right and History (but he is aware that it is about the appear and hopes that in it Strauss will spell out some of the details of the argument that Kaufman attributes to him (see note 17 on p. 19)). Here's Kaufman's reconstruction of Strauss' criticism of instrumentalism:

[Strauss] argues (1) that it is possible and necessary for the philosopher to search for an objective political philosophy; (2) but one cannot be objective unless he escapes the influence of opinion; and, finally, (3) the instrumentalist, because he regards himself as a guide to action instead of as a discoverer of an objective external order, is influenced by opinion. Therefore, the instrumentalist cannot be objective and is unable to embark on that investigation which alone constitutes political philosophy.
This is the skeleton of the argument. (16)

Let's call this reconstruction of Strauss's position the 'contamination argument.' In my view it's quite plausible to attribute something like this position to Strauss. A weakness in the contamination argument is that it's quite possible for somebody to hold an instrumentalist view of theory without oneself engaging in action, and so creates an instrumentalist theory for others to use from the ivory tower arm-chair. And it is not obvious that such a theorist is necessarily influenced by opinion even if, let's grant this for the sake of argument, she must take it into account in how to move from principles to successful policy. (I don't quite return to this below, but see my final paragraph.)

Kaufman recognizes that (1) is connected to Strauss' criticism of relativism (historicism, positivism, etc.) and the Weberian fact-value distinction. He treats (1) as common ground between him and Strauss, and even Dewey by claiming that "Dewey does believe we can discover moral truths, these truths are relative to specific conditions." (17) It's left unclear if Kaufman actually agrees with Dewey's style of relativism. (Strauss would reject Dewey's position as stable.)

Most of Kaufman's criticism focuses on (2) & (3), which he treats jointly. A key issue is what is meant by 'objective' and why it's impossible to attain for the instrumentalist theorist. And Kaufman settles on the view that according to Strauss "no one engaged in political activity is in a position, no matter how carefully he attempts to make his investigations impartial, to acquire an understanding or a knowledge of political fundamentals, to determine the nature of the best regime." (18) In Strauss' platonic terminology in the 'cave' no real knowledge is possible.+

At this point, Kaufman goes on the offensive because rather than trying to figure out what would make the contamination argument stick (if that's possible), he starts criticizing (not unfairly) the lack of specificity in Strauss' position who leaves underexplained how 'understanding or knowledge of political fundamentals [is] acquired.' And Kaufman concludes his argument that it is very unlikely that Strauss' method "is continuous with that of the empirical sciences. This constitutes a decisive objection to his underlying theory." (19: emphasis added. Along the way, Kaufman implies that Strauss has no adequate response to Mill's criticism of relying on nature as a standard of adequacy.) 

Kaufman here instantiates what I call "Newton's Challenge to Philosophy," that is to argue from the authority of science to some criticism of an opponent. But this begs the question against Strauss who does not recognize that authority in political philosophy.

In fact, Kaufman has many astute and telling criticism of the details of Strauss' philosophy (including on Strauss' better known criticism of the distinction between facts and values). Kaufman is at his best, in fact, when he channels Hume to point that nature sometimes is itself a source of ungrounded action (this is the argument that eludes Oppenheim when he discerns that Strauss is relying on the PSR (recall here; here)). It is a shame (if you were to care about such matters that) for the reception of Strauss, that to the best of my knowledge no sober debate about these criticism ensued subsequently because unlike many criticism of Strauss they go to the heart of Strauss' project. And unlike a later generation of analytic critics, there is no lazy dismissal.

As should be clear from my comments, I do not view Kaufman's response to the contamination argument as fully adequate. He basically claims not to understand some of its key terms (and does show that Strauss has not clarified them properly), and so ultimately sets it aside. This is unfortunate because Strauss' criticism of the instrumentalist position has been echoed in recent times by analytic philosophers who claim that, say, feminist philosophy (and other 'activist' philosophies) is not really philosophy. (In fact, many of Strauss' apparently substantive positions have been quietly adopted by analytic philosophers in later generations.) Such claims against the instrumentalist conception have been met by vigorous rebuttal from (say amongst others) Dotson and in a number of papers, Srinivasan. But the recent analytic critics rarely dare to put their criticism explicitly in the elitist terms of Strauss (and generally fail to reflect on the nature of political philosophy). This matters not because one must agree with Strauss' return to natural right (and the ancients), or  his elitism, but rather because the most realistic interpretations (and justification) of our imperfect liberal democracies (as one can find in the writings of, say, Hume, Smith, Madison, Kant, and, say, more recently, Arendt) crucially suppose that political life is indeed ruled by opinion and so, if the argument isn't met, that such contamination appears to be inevitable for democratic theorists (broadly conceived). 

Kaufman himself falls in the wide gap between Marxism and Rawlsianism (even its leftist incarnation). With the demise of the New Left and the lack of students to take up his program it is no surprise that he left little mark on post Rawlsian philosophy. Yet, many of his papers from the 1960s have, given that they are the product of immersion in political activism, a sense of freshness and immediacy that I hope to share with you in later digressions. While I do not share in his politics or even his philosophic sensibility, one cannot help but be saddened that his life and career were interrupted just as he was developing his own systematic conception of what a liberal philosophy might be. To be continued.

On Freeman's Review of Forrester's In the Shadow of Justice, pt 1

Katrina Forrester's book is an engaging history of John Rawls's intellectual development and the outpouring of work in political philosophy his ideas have engendered. She focuses on the evolution of Rawls's theory of justice and the historical conditions from which it purportedly grew in the late 1940s and early 1950s. She discusses the responses of Rawls's notable critics and reviews alternative positions by significant philosophers and political theorists of the era. These include Brian Barry, Charles Beitz, G.A. Cohen, Ronald Dworkin, Robert Goodin, H.L.A. Hart, Thomas Nagel, Robert Nozick, Susan Okin, Onora O'Neill, Derek Parfit, T.M. Scanlon, Amartya Sen, Peter Singer, Judith Shklar, Charles Taylor, Judith Thomson, Michael Walzer, Bernard Williams, and other leading figures. Forrester concisely summarizes their core ideas and discusses how their work responds to or is critical of the left-liberal position Rawls advocated, liberal egalitarianism. The book provides a significant summary, with few distortions, of the philosophers' ideas it reviews, and is a notable contribution to the history of ideas.

The development and critical response to liberal egalitarian theories of justice has been a central concern within political philosophy since Rawls's Theory of Justice. This is the "shadow of justice" Forrester invokes in her book's title. Her primary thesis is that for the past fifty years, Rawls and the liberal egalitarianism he inspired have defined the intellectual environment of political philosophy, coloring the work of political philosophers of all persuasions. Rawls's shadow also defines the terms of engagement that must be adhered to by political theorists who reject justice as the proper place to begin, or even end, discussions in political philosophy and theory. "The Rawlsian framework came to act as a constraint on what kind of theorizing could be done and what kind of politics could be imagined." (p. 275)--Samuel Freeman reviewing Katrina Forrester's In the Shadow of Justice: Postwar Liberalism and the Remaking of Political Philosophy, Princeton University Press, 2019 at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.

When back in the day I first read Samuel Freeman's review of Forrester's In the Shadow of Justice, I was a bit puzzled by it. If the thesis of the book was really, as he reported, that [A] "The Rawlsian framework came to act as a constraint on what kind of theorizing could be done and what kind of politics could be imagined," why, from Section II onward, which starts with the observation that "We are in a period of heightened criticism of Rawls's views," did he spend most of the review defending Rawls' theory from criticisms? For the thesis attributed to Forrester [A] is a thesis in the sociology of knowledge or the historical epistemology of philosophy. It's an empirical (with an accompanying modal) claim orthogonal to criticisms of Rawls' views.

Taken as reported, and at face value, [A] is akin to, neither strictly analogous or identical I hasten to add, the claim that [B] in economics Koopmans, Marschak, Arrow, or Debreu got economists to use convex analysis and that this acted as a formal constrain on what kind of economy could be imagined, or at least the vocabulary in which one must speak in order to advance in professional economics.  [A-B] are claims about professional frameworks -- oh damn you Kuhn, I almost wrote 'paradigm' [Forrester uses "philosophical paradigm" [xx].* And while claims like [A-B] are never innocent -- they might well function in unmasking projects or limit theorems -- by themselves they cannot do the work of criticizing claims discussed within the framework or even about the framework.  Yet most of Freeman's review is a defense of the framework (and some of its specific commitments).

From the review I could not infer how Forrester's argument was supposed to work or what it really is. And when I re-read the review, I noticed that most of Freeman's references to Forrester's book where from the start and end of the book. (I now know they are nearly all from her preface and epilogue.) I left it at that. 

Well, that's not quite true. As regular readers know, back at NewAPPS I have blogged a bit about Rawls' annotations in his books (recall here;) and so knew he had read Robbins and Knight carefully (recall also here), and so back in 2015 I had some fun pointing to Rawls' esotericism in The Theory of Justice (really, go read the post). And yes, I lectured and blogged more about Rawls (especially on Knightian uncertainty and how his lectures on history shaped our perception of the past and present (recall), but except for contextualizing Rawls a bit in this essay (here), I held off on doing scholarship on him. Meanwhile, ever since I heard about a historicizing Rawls conference (2017) at Oxford that culminated in this special issue of Modern Intellectual History, edited by Sophie Smith, Teresa Bejan, and Annette Zimmermann, and with the appearance of Forrester's book, I knew that my time to pontificate about Rawls was up. There were now legitimate experts out there who had put the the pearls I had briefly touched but had put away in a safe, to work in important scholarship. (Not my first academic blunder.)

But then I read Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò's fascinating review of Forrester's In the Shadow of Justice, in The Nation (here), which prompted a response from me (recall here). That review (which does not mention Freeman's review) attributes to Forrester a mechanism that might support an inference from [A] to a conclusion worth attacking by Freeman: [X] "By redirecting us from both history and sociology and premising justice on abstract game theory, Rawls’s book and its liberal vision of justice ended up promoting a political philosophy that was ill-equipped for the era of sustained academic and popular attention to historical injustice." But from Táíwò's review it's unclear if that claim [X] is in Forrester or Táíwò. [X] could at least explain why the constraint(s) mentioned in [A] would be taken as a criticism of the framework.  But as I noted in my response to Táíwò, Rawls' work had been (repeatedly) used to tackle historical injustice at least in journal articles.

Now, in reading Táíwò's review I had come under the impression that Forrester's book is a kind of intellectual biography. (He doesn't say this, but a lot of the material he discusses is presented in terms of Rawls' biography.) And in going back to Freeman's review after reading and blogging about Táíwò's, I realized that I could not triangulate from both reviews what Forrester's book was about. And since I felt a bit guilty in blogging about Táíwò's review without having read the book, I read the awe-inspiring book over break and even 'life-tweeted' my impressions by chapter. 

The book is difficult to summarize, but Forrester is admirably clear about its main aim: [I] "the book is about the politics of political philosophy and the political implications of conceptual choices." (xxi) Notice that Rawls is not mentioned in [I]. (The whole paragraph that explains [I] does not mention Rawls!) So, strictly speaking the thesis of the book is not about Rawls or his framework at all. Rather, Rawls is an example of [I] or is supposed to illustrate it [I]. Now, if one were to quote [I] out of context it would be puzzlingly ahistorical. The politics of political philosophy has shifted as philosophy has shifted sites and ages. We will never know exactly the circumstances of how Speusippus ended up succeeding Plato and not, say, Aristotle, and it is hard for us to grasp fully if this had effects on the important conceptual choices in the way political philosophy was pursued in (say) Hellenistic times, but we can know that it is institutionally different from the far-reaching effects (as Forrester shows) of the founding of Philosophy and Public Affairs by a then relatively close-knit group connected to (a reading group known as) Society for Ethical and Legal Philosophy (SELF). So, we cannot take [I] at face value like that. But in context it is pretty clear what she means; the first words of the book -- "political philosophy in the English speaking-world today" -- supply the required context that makes precise the implied reference of [I].

It should be noted that it is by no means obvious one needs to discuss the politics of philosophy in order to discuss the political implications of conceptual choices. One can, for example, discuss inductive risk of a scientific theory without discussing the way science is organized. But plenty of philosophers of science (myself included) have discussed the two alongside each other. So, I understand the pull to do so. Implied in [I] is a non-trivial and controversial causal assumption that [a] the structure of academic discussion (at least in political philosophy), or at least the way such structure shapes the content of what is taken to be authoritative, has some downstream effects on the way the content of academic discussion is taken up in political life. And while I called it a causal assumption, one might equally suspect that lurking in [I] there is a more normative claim [b] that (a) political philosophy [worth having] ought to guide politics in some sense (and in a good way).  And, in fact, in Forrester's book [b] or something close to it is attributed to Stuart Hampshire (in his critique of utilitarianism, 82 & 242), and Alisdair MacIntyre (p. 82), and at times she is clearly tempted by it herself. 

In the book, the political implications of conceptual choices are primarily or perhaps I should say most recurringly investigated through left-leaning Oxford philosophers (many of whom influenced Rawls and, in turn, were influenced by him) and their aspirations to shape the British Labor party's politics. But is not limited to that, we also get a number of American case studies about how Rawlsian ideas were taken up in areas of applied and global ethics (but oddly not Norman Daniels' attempt to shape Hilary Clinton's healthcare plan along Rawlsian lines). We also learn how these fields came to be known as 'applied' (see, for example, 73).

As an aside, and briefly returning to my remarks on Táíwò's review, 'historical injustice' is indeed one of the cases Forrester discusses. But her argument is that it was Nozick who put historical injustice on the agenda for Rawlsians. For, the need for reparations' for historical injustice(s) falls out rather neatly from his argument because original ownership matters a lot to Nozick (see Forrester's pp. 130-135). And by using Bedau, who stands in as a 'left-liberal' (but whose intellectual formation precedes Rawls' main works), as a kind of guide to the debate, she helps explain why it took so long for Rawlsians to really develop an account of historical injustice (perhaps still insufficiently so to Táíwò). To put it as a joke: Rawlsians had to be invented first before an approach to historical injustice could be articulated by them.

In its arguments, Freeman's review ignores the politics of political philosophy. And so fails in the minimal requirements of reviewing; it does not accurately convey what the book is about. It is not a work in the "history of ideas" as he claims. By this I mean it is neither the history ideas in the technical sense of Arthur Lovejoy (and now barely practiced), the history of tracing unit-ideas (we would say, Memes) through different historical epochs (recall), nor is the presumably  more informal sense that Freeman intends by the the phrase, that is, a work of tracing influence or, as he implies, the evolution of a debate.

I do not mean to imply that Freeman's review isn't shaped by the politics of political philosophy. Note that in the first paragraph Freeman lists an alphabetized group of names he treats both as "significant philosophers and political theorists" and "leading figures." Those honorifics suggest we are not far from today's politics of political philosophy. But his first paragraph fails to convey how when Forrester is practicing history -- which to repeat is in the service of an a-historical claim [I] -- she does it.  

As I noted, Forrester's method, when she is practicing something like history of ideas (in the informal sense--it's more common to call it 'contextual history of philosophy' or 'history of political thought'), is to use a privileged well informed contemporary of Rawls to shed light on how Rawls transforms the debates within political philosophy and even establishes a new vocabulary or register for the field. And while some of the names Freeman mentions are, of course, important to her story, her methodological strategy is not to focus on the all-stars in depth. Rather she uses particular guides, most notable she uses Brian Barry for this very purposes. Not infrequently (but not as prominently as Barry) she uses Hugo Bedau (who is clearly not significant enough for Freeman to be listed among the leading figures). When she focuses on her Oxford theme, she uses Richard Titmuss' work to fascinating effect (and David Miller's). And as I hinted above, Stuart Hampshire shows up throughout the book for such illuminating purposes too. 

Because I have run on long as is, let me note one other aspect of how she understands [I]. She does not treat the politics of academic disciplines as autonomous. By this I mean, that she sometimes suggests that academic influence is itself a consequence of larger social forces. The most explicit example of this is after noting the malleability of communitarianism, her claim that "communitarianism...became influential within political theory because it did not seriously threaten the assumptions of the postwar liberal order." (257; emphasis added). The fuller significance of this is, and it is another way in which 'shadow' in the title of the book functions (and Freeman almost gets this right), is that in Forrester's analysis political theory as distinct from political philosophy becomes constituted, at least for a while, as a field that is un-Rawlsian.

Here she leaves hanging what the source of this status quo bias is (is it ideology, subtle disciplinary pressure from political scientists on appointments, is it funding sources within universities, etc.)? While she is very interested in themes like journal capture, and the way centers promote fields, Forrester is relatively quiet on such mechanisms. But I'll postpone my own more substantive criticisms of the book until I engage with more of the actual argument of the book (and perhaps I'll also return (eventually) to Freeman's effort to refute some of the claims of the epilogue). To be continued.

On Being On To Something

Professor Kenneth Arrow died on February 21, 2017, at the age of 95. He was widely regarded (along with Paul Samuelson, John Hicks and possibly --- depending on tastes --- John Maynard Keynes, Milton Friedman and Gary Becker) as one of the greatest economists of the 20th century. He also happened to be my favorite economist of all time.    

Professor Dipak Banerjee, my teacher, introduced me to Kenneth Arrow in 1974, who appeared (much in the manner of Hindu god[esses]s for whom my mother had special reverence) in the form of a small yellow paperback. I acquired Social Choice and Individual Values from Dasgupta and Co. of College Street, and still have it. I was a first year undergraduate. That little book was a repository of the most profound logical thought. I had never seen anyone distill what appeared to be an abstract question in political economy into a theoretical device that cut sharply, and cut deep.

What was the question? Briefly, it was well known from the so-called Condorcet paradox that majority voting could produce nasty cycles in choices, even when the individual preferences involved in that voting process were perfectly reasonable.  That led to the question: was there any political system that could “reasonably” aggregate individual preferences? Now think about the question for a second: we know what majority voting is, but there is in principle an infinity of other systems. How could one ever formulate such a problem, let alone attempt to answer it? The very formulation — as axioms placed on an abstract mapping that connected individual preferences to their social counterpart — was sheer genius. But the apparatus was not only beautiful: it could also speak. It argued that under the minimal desiderata placed on the aggregator, there was no way of putting together individual preferences into a satisfactory social ordering; one that was cycle-free.

Arrow had received the Nobel Prize just two years before this encounter with him. He was just 51 years old, by far the youngest Laureate then (or since) in Economics. I ran off to the National Library in Calcutta to dig out the Nobel citation, excitedly anticipating a homage to my beloved Impossibility Theorem. Yet oddly, the The Nobel citation mentions Arrow’s monumental theorem only at the very end, and almost in passing. It focused instead on Arrow’s (and Hicks’s) contributions to general equilibrium theory:

“[Arrow] provided the basis for a radical reformulation of the traditional equilibrium theory. Through this reformulation, which was based on the mathematical theory of convex sets, the general equilibrium theory gained both in generality and in simplicity… The model presented in this paper became the starting point for the major part of further research in this field. Among Arrow's many important contributions should also be mentioned his development of the theory of uncertainty and its incorporation within the frame of general equilibrium theory and, furthermore, his analysis of the possibilities for decentralized decisions in a society where the price system is fixed by the central authority… As perhaps the most important of Arrow's many contributions to welfare theory appears his ‘possibility theorem,’ according to which it is impossible to construct a social welfare function out of individual preference functions.”

This was disappointing as far as my current passion was concerned. But it was also exhilarating: because there was more! (Later, I realized just how much more.) Back I went to Professor Banerjee. I wanted to know why general equilibrium was not just a question of several equations in the same number of unknowns, and what all this was about “the mathematical theory of convex sets.” In response, Dipak-babu helpfully produced another small tome by Gerard Debreu. This was based on the work with Arrow. Though certainly more mainstream this time in its questions, the techniques went way over my 17-year old head....

As a graduate student, reading all this in late 70s and early 80s, I viewed Arrow as a thinker who could both ask the deepest questions in economic and political philosophy, and at the same  time use mathematical arguments with ease and utility to answer them to a substantive degree. This was someone who could put past accomplishments into perspective, leave them behind, and seek to look beyond to newer and more difficult concerns. Such were the nature of his forays into questions of incomplete information, pervasive externalities, increasing returns and interpersonal equity. There was just one word for it: inspirational. The inevitable reaction was not long in coming: I wanted to be like Ken Arrow. Surprise surprise, that was not destined to happen. But something else did: I had the immense good fortune to become his colleague at Stanford.

I was at Stanford on a job flyout, at the very beginning of 1982. I had been warned about the meeting with Arrow. Apparently, all I had to do was tell him the assumptions of my model and then, before I could get any further, he would proceed to tell me all the results that could conceivably be proved from those assumptions. This was unnerving news. But nothing of the sort happened.

I walked into his office. It was small and cluttered, full of books that went up high. It had a vertical rather than horizontal feel. Arrow himself gave the opposite impression. He was shorter than I had expected, strong, rooted to the ground. The man seemed to be in constant motion. He was both brisk and welcoming. He was wearing brightly colored suspenders, and there was an immense bicycle helmet on his desk. (I did not then realize that these, along with the perennially flipped pencil at seminars, would be an intrinsic part of my later memory of him.) I began talking about my work. It was a bit of an out-of-body experience; I could see myself talking to him. Arrow listened very closely. There was an intensity of gaze that never wavered, except when he would start speculating, during which he would look up at the ceiling and back to me. He asked questions non-stop. He talked very fast, the words tripping over one another, the tone uneven, the sentences clearly struggling to keep up with the flow of thoughts. He didn’t exactly anticipate my results. But after 15 minutes, I had a second eerie sensation: that I was talking to someone who  had thought about my problem for a very long time. This was a weird feeling that I came to associate with Arrow over the next few years.

....

Less enthusiasm was shown [by Arrow] towards the neo-Ricardians. Once I had mustered up enough courage, I would talk with Arrow with complete freedom, and before long I had told him that I had once spent an entire day with Piero Sraffa at Cambridge, and that he had given  me a signed copy of his book ...I told [Arrow] that I admired the book for its apparent demonstration that the distribution of income across labor income and profit could not be fully pinned down by economics — that some reference to the political system was needed. Arrow looked at me with a mix of irritation and pity: “I’ll get you out of that soon enough.” And of course he did convince me that Production of Commodities By Means of Commodities had an extra degree of freedom in it that generated a fake indeterminacy, though I still harbor a sneaking suspicion that Sraffa was on to something.--Debraj Ray "Kenneth Arrow, 1921-2017"

Of the quick, first round of obituaries of Arrow, the one by Ray, himself a leading economist (recall that I have remarked on his criticism of Piketty), stands out for its excellence mixing intellectual, psychological, and sociological observations on the significance and nature of Arrow's scholarly life as seen by professional economists today. It's worth reading in full (including the stuff on the scale and content of some of Arrow's many contributions to economics as well as Arrow's relationship to socialism) not the least for acquiring a flavor of the anecdotes that circulate around Arrow's life. One other reason why I quote so much of it -- despite some names and issues being obscure to philosophers -- is that Ray's manner of evaluation is so familiar to us professional philosophers (genius; deepest questions; out-of-body experience; intensity of gaze; talking to someone who  had thought about my problem for a very long time, etc.) They reminded me of the tenor of the recent remarks about Derek Parfit (who, to be sure, published much less than Arrow and was probably slightly less central to the disciplinary formation in philosophy than Arrow was in economics).

In the final sentence of the quoted paragraph (which is not the end of the obituary), Ray allows himself one very modest reservation: "I still harbor a sneaking suspicion that Sraffa was on to something." Now, in context, Ray is remarking on the fact that Arrow (then already very famous) "was teaching History of Economic Thought" and that among the history covered Arrow favored Cournot.* Ray is reporting on a series of exchanges with Arrow some time in the early 1980s (so more than thirty years ago). Even then Sraffa's work was not setting the agenda and conceptual framework for professional economics (in the way that Samuelson and Arrow did and to some extent still do). Even if we allow historical distortion, Arrow's irritation at the interest of his younger, talented colleague in a by then discarded project is notable.+

As an aside, as it happens in 1991,** Arrow published (inter alia) about Sraffa's role in the (Marxist leaning) reception of Ricardo, which influenced the way Keynes was assimilated, especially at Cambridge (and especially by Joan Robinson). In the paper, "Ricardo's Work as Viewed by Later Economists," Arrow self-describes himself as "a practicing theorist, not a scholar in the history of economic thought." Yet, Arrow shows great command over the historical material and the history of Ricardo reception.** One criticism of Sraffa by Arrow is that Sraffa is "indifferent to [Ricardo's] the full employment hypothesis, though one would have thought a position on this question to be basic to the formulation of a coherent model." Another (more implicit) criticism of Sraffa is that "the possibility of diminishing returns was dropped by Marx and equally by Sraffa and Joan Robinson."

To return to my main point. Ray reports his own "sneaking suspicion that Sraffa was on to something" despite being exposed to (presumably conclusive) proof that Sraffa's attempted formal "demonstration that the distribution of income across labor income and profit could not be fully pinned down by economics" was incoherent or unsupported. Lurking in the background is not just the question of the role of politics in determining economic outcomes, but also the question of disciplinary autonomy and closure. One would have liked to hear more about Ray's suspicions here -- Ray is the editor of the American Economic Review so he plays a non-trivial role (among many others) as gate-keeper and standard setter in the profession.++ 

But leaving aside the question of Arrow's criticism of Sraffa, I think the phenomena that Ray puts his finger on is more widespread (and also prevalent in philosophy): often the technically superior person will refute a theory Y -- and let's stipulate these are not straw-man versions of Y --, and [this matters] will do so in ways such that new recruits will not drift toward Y or variants of Y, and yet the insight (u) that gave rise to Y may not have been adequately handled.*** This is due to the fact that the relationship between (u) and Y is not a tight mapping. Much formalization in economics (recall my piece on the criticism of Harberger by MA. Khan) and all explication (recall my post on Leitgeb, Carnap, and Tarski) have some degrees of freedom and judgment about the way in which a would be Y captures (u), especially if (u) is interesting. After the refutation of Y, the partisan of (u) is often told to keep quiet until she can offer a successor to Y  that is not prone to the fatal flaws exposed of Y (by technically superior person). [This is even so in circumstances where Y could handle stuff in ways that no other present theory does, as in cases of Kuhn loss (recall).]

If (u) is something non-trivial, even important, it can be problematic that a discipline avoids working on developing successors or replacements of Y. And so, ideally, one would wish that the refutation of Y would be accompanied by some theoretical articulation that does justice to the significance of (u). [Notice that this is true of formal and non-formal theories of Y.] But currently the incentives and norms of many disciplines work against this and we are not encouraged to reflect on how this might be improved.

 

On Meaning More Than Is Intended (on Plantinga, Hazony, and Prophecy)

[T]he principal author of the Bible—the entire Bible—is God himself. Of course each of the books of the Bible has a human author as well; still, the principal author is God. This impels us to treat the whole more like a unified communication than a miscellany of ancient books…. [T]he fact that the principal author of the Bible is God himself means that one can’t always determine the meaning of a given passage by discovering what the human author had in mind…. [W]e can’t just assume that what the Lord intends to teach is identical with what the human author had in mind; the latter may not so much as have thought of what is, in fact, the teaching of the passage in question.[6][--Alvin Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief]

[In Warranted Christian Belief,] Plantinga thus moves from the identification of Scripture as revelation—that is, as a communication from God—to the view that the entire corpus of biblical works, both Jewish and Christian, are to be viewed as essentially a “unified communication” since they have only one “principal author,” which is God himself. The fact that the different works in the biblical corpus were written over a period of many centuries, often arguing with one another and seeking to advance points of view that are at odds even on central issues, is not something that Plantinga is unaware of.[7] But he deals with this problem by proposing that what the biblical authors—Moses or Jeremiah, say—believed to be God’s word to them is not always “in fact, the teaching of the passage in question.” Indeed, the “meaning of a given passage,” which is “what the Lord intends to teach,” may well be something that Moses or Jeremiah “may not have so much as thought of.” For this reason, we may be seeking in vain for the biblical teaching if we are trying to “determine the meaning of a given passage by discovering what the human author had in mind.”

...

Now, this view—and similar views that one finds among Jewish writers[10]—works systematically to undermine the possibility of what I have been calling the philosophy of Hebrew Scripture. For on the view that I have proposed, what should be of interest to us when we take up the study of the Bible is precisely “what the human author had in mind” (or, if this is deemed impossible, then what the human final editor had in mind) in creating the text that we now have before us. Indeed, the whole aim of my book was to persuade readers that we should be at least as concerned to reconstruct what Isaiah or Jeremiah “had in mind” as we are to reconstruct what Parmenides or Plato “had in mind.” This, I suggest, is because Isaiah and Jeremiah were towering figures in the history of ideas, whose works deserve our respect and consideration. We should wish to recapture the unique ways in which they understood God, man’s nature, and the moral and political realm. We should wish to properly assess the impact and influence of their ideas, and to seek the relevance of their insights to our own lives and world today. And we should desire this not a whit less than in the case of the early Greek philosophers who came centuries after them, upon whom academic scholarship has lavished such a prodigious intellectual effort--Yoram Hazony, Jerusalem Letters: What is Revelation? [Recall also Friday's post.]

I have already noted that Hazony's position is in a certain limited respect not far removed from Spinoza. They both allow that the Hebrew Bible can be taken to express a unified point of view ultimately rooted in the intentions of the "human final editor." For Hazony this editor has allowed an unfolding of different political and moral perspectives in a search for a politics grounded in ethics as well as a shining through of the presence of distinctive (even philosophical) individual voices (e.g., Isaiah, Jeremiah, etc.) [see also this].+ Leaving aside Hazony's views on the nature of revelation, his insistence that the Hebrew Bible has a unity and integrity of its own puts him on a collision course with Christian (and Islamic) teachings that insist that its (that is, the Hebrew Bible's) meaning/teaching is (re-)shaped by a larger unity of which it is thought to be a part.

At first sight Hazony's interpretive stance on inferring meaning from authorial intent echoes Quentin Skinner's (1969) hermeneutics, although Hazony is more willing than Skinner originally was to extract enduring lessons from the original meaning of the text. But Hazony's position is a bit unstable because he cannot fully object to Plantinga's principle that a Biblical passage's teaching may transcend what the author of the passage had in mind because even the Hebrew Bible is sometimes based on and contains bits of texts whose authors' intentions are almost certainly left opaque (e.g., the Book of Jashar (recall); the Book of the Wars of the Lord, etc.). Even Hazony allows that the meaning and aim of the Hebrew Bible as a whole can transcend at least some of the intentions of some of the authors of some of its texts; according to him the whole is an "artful compendium," which includes diverging, more parochial "viewpoints." (Hazony, p. 41) So his disagreement with Plantinga is not wholly about hermeneutics nor only about the status of a purported distinction between reason and revelation, but also about what counts as the proper unity (for teaching/meaning purposes): the Hebrew Bible as such or the "entire Bible."* (For Plantinga on such unity, see p. 385.) Obviously, there are connections among the disagreements between Plantinga and Hazony because one may be tempted (as Plantinga seems to be) to treat revelation as a source of authority in settling what counts as the proper unity.

While I have considerable affinity with Hazony's enterprise, I have already noted that I am doubtful that, as is, he has the resources to insist that the Hebrew Bible is the sole proper unity to which the texts that compose it belong. Moreover, against a critic, who insists that the whole Bible has a “principal author” who “is God,” it is not sufficient to show that such a critic’s views are not in accord with the manifest (or inferred) teaching of the Hebrew Bible (as Hazony does, for example, with Swinburne’s account of revelation).** For, even if one denies the existence of such a principal author or the identification of the principal author with God, if the Hebrew Bible can be included in (if not superseded by) a larger unity, then Hazony's arguments, even if they exhibit -- as I think they do -- the philosophical fruits of the Hebrew Bible, do not wholly succeed against the critic (yet). 

It is, thus, always possible that a later text can incorporate an earlier text into a larger, shared unity and thereby change the meaning and significance of the earlier text (even if for various purposes we can still try to study, for example, the earlier text on its own terms); such a new unity is not inevitable, of course, and it may be contested. That is to say, I agree with Plantinga (as well as the mathematical economists Khan and Schlee) that a text can say more than its (human) author intended to say; this principle forms the basis for what I call "philosophical prophecy."

 

 

What is the History of Philosophy?

If history of philosophy is about anything, it is about understanding historical texts accurately…The first goal is to understand the texts, which might be an end in itself (as it is for me) or might be a step towards doing something else afterward, like playing around with the ideas on one's own, comparing them to other ideas from history, etc. -Peter Adamson

I believe that the fundamental purpose of the history of philosophy (which is continuous with the fundamental purpose of history more generally) is to accurately capture what philosophers of the past were trying to say. If that's not what the history of philosophy is, then I am ready to be corrected. - Sam Rickless

Rickless, an important scholar, turns the history of philosophy fundamentally into inferring intentions of authors. The published texts are means to this end, but obviously one can also draw on unpublished material and other sources of evidence (biography, letters, etc.). We can't always trust what authors say about this, of course, they may be deluded about their intentions or they may deliberately or playfully mystify. They sometimes may discover their own intentions in the process of writing—texts and arguments take on a life of their own, or -- if one dislikes the anthropomorphism in that -- have an internal logic constrained by form and genre (etc.). For example, I did not set out to write on depression in graduate school last week; rather I think (now after the fact) I wanted to capture a vague sense of disconnect and empathy with younger scholars at a conference and, more romantically, try to convey some long-distance encouragement (etc.). But while writing in a tightly constrained format (a blog with a certain voice, history, and trajectory, etc.) I found a form in which to make some such point while simultaneously being (especially after I settled on a particular headline) about something else. Even if a future historian of philosophy were interested in my writings, they would not be very interested in capturing the canonical intentions of that particular blog, or even the whole as of yet indefinite series of Digressions that I know will follow. This is not to deny I have insanely ambitious ambitions for these blogs—to change our philosophical culture, to touch the hearts of some and draw them into a philosophical life, to promote projects I think noble, to showcase Schliesser's ideas, to redefine how we understand what philosophy can be, to hit the ball out of the philosophical park with an essay a day, etc. But the interest, if any, in these Impressions is not the ways they reveal the self-fashioning of an author, but rather their sporadic effects on others and what they reveal about our profession in my times. (I return to this below.)

Adamson, in responding to my post, offers us a subtly different goal than Rickless's for the history of philosophy: it's about understanding texts. (Neither comments on this difference.) Author's intentions may play a privileged role in Adamson's enterprise, but what matters is capturing meanings. The benefit of this approach is that one need not infer to invisible attitudes, but can resolutely stick with the textual evidence. But the moment you start putting pressure on this idea things start to unravel. What exactly is the textual meaning that needs to be understood, and whose understanding are we to privilege? Now, in a famous (1969) article, Quentin Skinner, tried to settle this with an appeal to a counterfactual, privileged observer. To folk interested in learning from sophisticated explorations of this issue I wholeheartedly recommend the papers by Mogens Lærke, Justin Smith, Julie Klein, Ursula Goldenbaum (in this volume). They all offer ways to avoid Skinner's mysterious counterfactuals while using means to stabilize and fix the meaning of a text in time and over time such that (alas, competing) understanding is possible. For some texts this is a very fruitful enterprise.

But there are philosophical authors (paradigmatically I am thinking of Plato, Nietzsche (recall)), who self-consciously may well want (a) affective responses from their readers and (b) may intend different audiences to discern different things in their texts. (Note that with Nietzsche we are in decent position to get at his intentions, with Plato not so.) The way I like to put it is that they expect different readers' souls to disclose different features of the text. A historian of philosophy setting out to get at the meaning of the text will miss this feature. In fairness, Adamson's approach does not rule out an understanding of these texts that can account for (a) and (b), but by sharply separating the understanding of a text from its effects and from doing something with it, he puts himself in a bad position to grasp all the features of a text. (That is to say, his rules are self-defeating.) For, one need not be a pragmatist to understand that often we only understand all the systematic entailments of a text by applying some or its all ideas to new (or old) problems. It's only after reading Rocknak (proto-Transcendental), Baxter (analytical metaphysics), and Bell's (Deleuzian) Hume that it becomes visible that Hume, for whom the law of non-contradiction does quite a bit of work, is simultaneously willing to bracket, when doing metaphysics, self-identity (or A=A).* Of course, this understanding can be contested (probably by all three just named authors), but the key is that the understanding of a text is a hard-won result by way of application. For a lot of folk the denial of self-identity is itself a sign of philosophical incompetence or lack of intelligibility, etc., so it would never be a starting point.

On Rules for the History of Philosophy...or a defense of methodological anachronism

The distinguished historian of philosophy, Peter Adamson (from "without any gaps" fame; the podcasts are a big hit), has articulated "some guidelines encapsulating what I see as good practice in studying the history of philosophy" (quoted from rule 1) on his blog. He is up to the ninth rule as I write this. The rules themselves are an "open-ended encouragement to strive for an ideal which is not practically reachable" (see rule 4; see also rule 8). I very much like this feature of the rules because it encourages us to think of our practice as an open-ended process (and puts the idea of a gapless history in nice perspective). There is a further worthy feature of the rules that is never stated explicitly, but a kind of animating principle behind them: to treat the authors we are studying as serious thinkers in their own right--a judgment that vindicates, in part, earlier readers; for, "any text that has survived to get into your hands has already been through a process of selection by earlier readers," (rule 2).

Before I get to a more principled qualm about his rules, I want to offer one immanent criticism of the first rule: "It's possible for the same idea to appear independently more than once." Yes, this is possible and undoubtedly occurs, and it might generate interesting questions about the conceptual possibility space available to certain philosophers such that 'forced moves' get rediscovered--I call such forced moves: social-conceptual-necessitation. (Having said that, I thought his example of Al-Ghazali and Hume on causation especially poorly chosen; (a) we know that Malebranche was almost certainly familiar with Al-Ghazali through discussions in Aquinas and Suarez [I apologize for forgetting where I first read this!], and Hume certainly knew his Malebranche; (b) until Dario Perinetti has completed his study of the La Fleche library we don't really know what Hume (and Descartes) might have read in his most formative period.) But while I am no fan of a certain kind of lineage-tracing popular among historians of ideas, this rule also has the likely tendency to discourage inquisitiveness. In particular it is very tempting to assume that 'great' thinkers didn't read or read little--some philosophers (Descartes, Spinoza, Carnap, Lewis, etc.) even play with a recurring Meme along these lines.* But we need/ought not trust their self-presentation in these matters. We miss moves in an author if we are unaware of her interlocutors. My concern is not just a matter of getting the context right (cf. rule 4); we literally do not notice if some options/alternatives are quietly foreclosed. It matters, for example, that Spinoza had More's Utopia in his library (and almost certainly read Bacon's New Atlantis); this means he was almost certainly aware of alternative ways to think about, say, gender relations and ways to organize religious-theological pluralism in society (as well as property relations, Biblical hermeneutics, etc.) even if he never went back to Plato. Aware of this, we might upon re-reading Spinoza notice that he has developed resources to reject those alternatives or we might start to see cracks in his edifice (etc.).  [Below I return to rule 1!]

Even so, the rules are problematic, especially because they come with the weighty authority  of an emiment and popular scholar. Leaving aside the fact that Adamson seems to be ignorant of the methodological discussions among other historians of philosophy of the last few years, Adamson never recognizes that there are alternative ways to study the history of philosophy in which some of the vices he recognizes may well be necessary virtues. I'll pick one example: Adamson is extremely concerned to have the historian avoid anachronism (see rule 4, 7, 8, 9). As it happens I have more tolerance for the kind of un-selfconscious anachronism that trained historians of philosophy are taught to reject; such un-selfconscious anachronistic readings of a text can, but need not, be interesting on their own terms ('what axioms in S4 or S5 would Spinoza or Leibniz reject?' can be hugely illuminating both to our understanding of Spinoza or a time-slice of Leibniz and to the modern student of modal logic). But that's not what I have in mind in defending here.

They Never Sleep

Like a great many articles published in our journals, some of these essays adopt a variation of what Jonathan Bennett promoted as "the collegial approach" to the history of philosophy. In this approach we treat the Great Ones as our contemporaries and hold them accountable in the same way as we would our colleagues. The special variation often employed today is to take it as given that the Great Ones can be defended against any alleged confusions, incoherencies, or lapses. As a result, we publish many essays and articles that cleverly defend the Great Ones against problems and objections that not only never entered their heads, but probably could never have entered their heads, given their time and place and the normal constraints operating on any human being trying to do philosophy. In truth, no one can think things through as thoroughly as many of us would like to believe. Sometimes, even a Spinoza or a Leibniz nods. It is an odd thing to do, these daring rescues of the Great Ones. I sometimes wonder whether, as we read and interpret, we ought to recall more frequently the familiar limits of history and human capacity.--Charlie Huenemann [emphases added--ES].

I disagree with my friend Huenemann.

First, a situational claim. Those of us that are trained as analytical philosophers are skilled puzzle solvers and conceptual slicers & dicers.  Our very best are also amazing at thinking many moves and counter-moves deep. But we are not trained as systematic philosophers ([recall my post on Thomas Nagel] although I am open to the idea that this is changing with the rise of analytical metaphysics). In particular, we are not trained to discern systematic trade-offs and the way fundamental constraints interact with each other. So, what may seem to us to require an impossible skill in another, may well just be a limitation that is a consequence of our perspective (which has its own virtues).

Second, it is of great instrumental value to try to figure out what a very good philosopher would say to an objection. When I was starting out in the profession -- and in the thrall of extreme antiquarianism --, I would frown on, even ridicule papers that would pose to, say, Descartes, 'what if he rejects P' (whereby P is anachronistic, etc.).  But the fact is such exercises can be very fruitful: one often learns, thereby, unsuspected features of another philosopher's position that mortal you had overlooked on earlier readings. With luck, one even starts to find evidence that some textual evidence that historical predecessor to P was, in fact, reflected on by (say) Descartes (in correspondence, or in the Passions of the Soul, etc.).*

There is a further way in which such an exercise is very fruitful: one learns to develop a systematic sensitivity. I know this may sound as special pleading on  behalf of the history of philosophy, but I believe one reason to expose advanced students of philosophy (folk like you and me) to the history of philosophy is to help think in critical conversation with systematic thinkers. (Alan Nelson has defended such a view.) Not all historically important philosophers were systematic thinkers. But even some of the most persistent anti-systematic-philosophers [i.e., my own philosophical ancestors] have to become adept at recognising the moves of the enemy.

On Keynes, Chicago Economics, and Social Engineering

"It is quite another thing to conclude that therefore ends of good policy are beyond the realm of scientific discussion. For surely the primary requisite of a working social system is a consensus on ends. The individual members of society must agree upon the major ends which that society is to seek. If any large share of the population actively disagrees with the society's ends, and in particular if it believes that the system is unfair by the group's criteria, the social system will surely disintegrate, probably with violence.

This is almost axiomatic in modern social theory…

At the level of economic policy, then, it is totally misleading to talk of ends as individual and random [as new welfare theorists do—ES]; they are fundamentally collective and organized.

If this conclusion be accepted, and accept it we must, the economist may properly exceed the narrow confines of economic analysis. He may cultivate a second discipline, the determination of the ends of his society particularly relevant to economic policy. This discipline might be called, following J.N. Keynes, applied ethics.7

7 See his Scope and Method of Political Economy (4^th edition: London 1930) especially chap. II. I did not realize how neglected this excellent book has become until, when I recently referred to it, several friends expressed surprise that I did not know Keynes's middle name was Maynard! –GJ Stigler (1943) "The New Welfare Economics" American Economics Review, 33(2): 357-8.

At the very start of his famous (1953) methodology paper, Milton Friedman calls attention to a three-fold distinction he inherits from the logician-economist, J.N. Keynes (yes, father of that more famous philosopher-economist, J.M. Keynes): "In his admirable book on The Scope and Method of Political Economy, John Neville Keynes distinguishes among "a positive science ... a body of systematized knowledge concerning what is; a normative or regulative science...[,] a body of systematized knowledge discussing criteria of what ought to be...[,]an art... [,] a system of rules for the attainment of a given end"; comments that "confusion between them is common and has been the source of many mischievous errors"; and urges the importance of "recognizing a distinct positive science of political economy."* Friedman admits that he is primarily interested in articulating the nature and methodology of positive economics, and along the way he wishes to argue that "positive economics is in principle independent of any particular ethical position or normative judgments." (By contrast, according to Friedman normative economics presupposes positive economics.) In what follows, I accept these distinctions by stipulation.

Neither Stigler nor Friedman, follow Keynes slavishly (recall this post, too). In particular, in the passage quoted at the top of this post, Stigler offers a world-historical innovation over Keynes that will have far-reaching consequences in economics and the way it understands itself as a policy science. In Keynes, "applied ethics" (that is, normative or regulative economics) is the business of philosophers not economists. And one of the main reasons it is the business of philosophers (and not economists) is that Keynes does not expect consensus over the ends of society to emerge. As he writes, "There is a further reason why a positive science of political economy should receive distinct and independent recognition. With the advance of knowledge, it may be possible to come to a general agreement in regard to what is or what may be in the economic world, sooner than any similar agreement is attainable in regard to the rules by which economics of individuals and communities should be guided. The former requires only that there as to the facts; the latter may be prevented by conflicting ideals." (50-51) So, Keynes's proposed strategy is to remove (applied) ethics as much as possible from economics so that economics can quickly hasten to become a mature (in a proto-Kuhnian sense) science.

On 'History as Historians' do it?

There is a kind of low-level gripe one hears among so-called 'contextual' historians of philosophy that have found a home in professional philosophy departments. These 'contextualists' are often trained in HPS programs or are inspired by the so-called Cambridge school of intellectual history associated with names such as Quentin Skinner and John Pocock (neither at Cambridge now). The gripe goes something like this: professional philosophers that do history of philosophy are not really doing history as historians understand this.* Now, there is a sense in which the gripe is trivially true: whenever professional philosophers produce 'history of philosophy' -- and this has astonishing diversity in methods and products -- it is almost never intended to meet the standards of professional historians; if they are not writing for each other, such historians of philosophy in philosophy departments write for fellow philosophers.  But the gripe is also based on some very dubious commitments. I offer five considerations to substantiate the claim in the previous sentence.