Digressions&Impressions

On Tasioulas, Conceptual Inflation, and Public Reason

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

   

Friedman and Mill on the Art of Economics (with some J.N. 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."--Milton Friedman (1953) “The Methodology of Positive Economics” in Essays on Positive Economics, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, p. 5. [The ellipses are in Friedman. Hereafter: Friedman 1953][1]

According to Milton Friedman the art of economics is a system of rules for the attainment of a given end. Implied in Keynes’ definitions is a division within the art of economics into two: first, if the given ends follow from normative economics then the art of economics is the system that generates normative policy. This way of putting it stipulates that the art is – like a deductive logic – moral truth preserving from input to its output. The implied nature of the second part of this division within the art is left unclear. For, unless normative science is completed, it is possible, of course, that a given end is moral but not part of a body of systematized normative knowledge. In fact, when one starts musing on it, more combinations between given ends and the output of an art are possible (from a-moral ends to moral output; from a-moral ends to a-moral output, etc.) One can even entertain the possibility that an immoral given end (say, state enforced birth-control) may lead to welcome policy results. So, it is by no means obvious what the status of the output of the art is when the given ends do not follow directly from normative economics.

Much of Friedman essay is devoted to the nature and defense of the possibility of positive economics and, while less important, how it contrasts with normative economics. In fact, the art of economics seems so little pertinent to Friedman’s essay, that in a (1992) paper in the Journal of Economic Perspectives, David Colander comments, “Friedman placed Keynes' tripartite distinction in the open and then he lost it.” (p. 192)

But, as Colander notes, Friedman does address the art of economics at least once more in his 1953 essay. It is worth quoting the passage in full:

Normative economics and the art of economics, on the other hand, cannot be independent of positive economics. Any policy conclusion necessarily rests on a prediction about the consequences of doing one thing rather than another, a prediction that must be based-implicitly or explicitly-on positive economics. There is not, of course, a one-to-one relation between policy conclusions and the conclusions of positive economics; if there were, there would be no separate normative science. Two individuals may agree on the consequences of a particular piece of legislation. One may regard them as desirable on balance and so favor the legislation; the other, as undesirable and so oppose the legislation.

I venture the judgment, however, that currently in the Western world, and especially in the United States, differences about economic policy among disinterested citizens derive predominantly from different predictions about the economic consequences of taking action-differences that in principle can be eliminated by the progress of positive economics-rather than from fundamental differences in basic values, differences about which men can ultimately only fight. (Friedman 1953: 5)

Friedman treats 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.

This dependence claim can also be found in the relevant chapter of J.N. Keynes’ (1891) book, but he argues for it slightly differently (than Friedman does): “it is both possible and desirable to discuss [positive] economic uniformities independently of [normative] economic ideals, and without formulating economic precepts [of the art], although the converse cannot be affirmed.”[2] From this quote it is not quite clear in virtue of what the art is dependent on positive science, but Keynes claims elsewhere that the dependence is “logical…for we cannot satisfactorily lay down rules for practical guidance expect on the basis of knowledge of facts.”[3]

Of course the passage just quoted from J.N. Keynes is rather important: for Keynes consensus over facts is eminently possible, but elsewhere it may be “prevented by conflicting ideals, as well as by divergent views as to the actual and possible.” (Keynes 1891: 51.) And so, on Keynes’ view, conflict over given ends and disagreement over feasibility will prevent consensus over the art of economics according to Keynes.[4] A view like this – there is natural value conflict but relatively easy agreement over facts and theory -- we also find in Keynes’ colleague Sidgwick and a generation later in Robbins, and is used to argue for a disciplinary distinction between economics and ethics.[5]

By contrast, and strikingly, on Friedman’s picture, rather than disagreeing about the given ends that are the inputs of the art of economics, it is likely people will disagree about the outputs of the art. And that is because Friedman presupposes that in the context he is writing (“the Western world, and especially in the United States,”) there is kind of basic value unanimity over the given (major) ends while there is disagreement over what science predicts.

Because the main aim of Friedman’s essay is to explore “whether a suggested hypothesis or theory should be tentatively accepted as part of the "body of systematized knowledge concerning what is,"” (Friedman 1953: 3) while Friedman assumes consensus over the input of the art of economics and treats its output as dependent on empirical/positive science, he does not really pause to reflect on the contents of the art. Colander seems to think this is due to a lack of interest. But there may be a rather obvious reason for Friedman’s silence (which also points to an important difference with Colander).

If we reflect a bit on the form of the art of government, which (when we plug in Keynes’ definition as quoted by Friedman) just is a rule “for the attainment of a given end;” this is highly reminiscent of Robbins’ famous characterization of the nature of positive economics, which just is “a relationship between [given] ends and scarce means which have alternative uses.”[6] So, if in the context of consensus over given ends, one takes this relationship between ends and means to be known, as supplied by positive economics, then a fortiori there is no further fact of the matter that enters into the rule of the art of government.

That is to say, on Friedman’s account there is no substantive difference between positive and the art of economics. For the art of economics is then just a proper subset of its science restricted in scope by a more limited set of given ends and dependent on the development of the relevant positive science! So, for example, Friedman explicitly affirms “there is an underlying consensus on the objective of achieving a "living wage" for all, to use the ambiguous phrase so common in such discussions.” (Friedman 1953: 5.) And it is pretty clear he thinks there is a similar consensus over the importance of economic growth as one of the main “long run objectives.”(“Monetary and Fiscal Framework for Economic Stability” in Friedman 1953: 133. He tends to ignore disagreement over distribution!)

Colander does not offer the reconstruction of this second passage I have just given, but I suspect he does recognize something like the position I have ascribed to Friedman. Because he writes,

The problem with this statement is the inserted phrase, "differences that in principle can be eliminated by the progress of positive economics." This phrase assumes that policy conclusions flow directly from positive economics. However, as Keynes argued, the art of economics is contextual and as much dependent on non-economic political, social, institutional, and historical judgments as it is on economics. (Colander 1992: 197.)

I hedge my interpretation of Colander because he also claims that Friedman’s lost the art of economics. Whereas it is more accurate to say, as an interpretation of Friedman, that he differs in his understanding of what the content of the art of economics is from Keynes (and Colander), and that for Friedman [Thesis A] the art of economics just is a subset or extension of positive economics. Or to be more precise, in societies with a fundamental consensus over ends, the art of economics is a subset or modest extension of positive economics. Friedman tacitly denies there is a significant difference between applied economics and economic science.

I mention this for two reasons. First, Colander’s analysis has been influential on those that notice Friedman mentions an ‘art of economics. For example, while citing Colander, Thomas Mayer writes that “in stressing the positive–normative distinction Friedman furthered the unfortunate tendency to ignore a third category of economics, J. N. Keynes’s (1891) art of economics, that is the knowledge required to apply positive and normative economics in a way that results in successful policies.”[7] (Emphasis added.)

Second, Friedman's account of the art of economics matters because while it would be wrong or misleading to treat Friedman as a kind of rational choice theorist in the way familiar from Becker & Stigler 1977,[8] I want to suggest that by implying that [Thesis A] the art of economics just is a subset or extension of positive economics, Friedman does give voice here to – and now I am stipulating -- a distinctly and broadly agreed upon Chicago understanding of the art of economics as continuous with its (positive/empirical) science.[9]

An anticipation of Friedman's position can, indeed, be found in Keynes’ Scope an Method. When the “end at which the art of political economy aims” at is agreed upon (as Friedman stipulates, recall, is the case among disinterested citizens in the ‘Western world’) – say, “simply the increased production of wealth” – “its scope is certainly definite.” (Keynes 1891: 76.) And in such cases statements of positive science in the “indicative mood” can be transformed into statements “in the imperative.”[10] Colander is right to suggest that Keynes does not accept this position in his own voice because Keynes denies such unanimity over ends in the wider context of the passages I have just quoted. But the position does have an important earlier advocate: J.S. Mill.

In the final Chapter XII of (the final) Book VI of Mill’s Logic, after distinguishing between a science and art, Mill writes:

the reasons of a maxim of policy, or of any other rule of art, can be no other than the theorems of the corresponding science.

The relation in which rules of art stand to doctrines of science may be thus characterized. The art proposes to itself an end to be attained, defines the end, and hands it over to the science. The science receives it, considers it as a phenomenon or effect to be studied, and having investigated its causes and conditions, sends it back to art with a theorem of the combination of circumstances by which it could be produced. Art then examines these combinations of circumstances, and according as any of them are or are not in human power, pronounces the end attainable or not. The only one of the premises, therefore, which Art supplies, is the original major premise, which asserts that the attainment of the given end is desirable. Science then lends to Art the proposition (obtained by a series of inductions or of deductions) that the performance of certain actions will attain the end. From these premises Art concludes that the performance of these actions is desirable, and finding it also practicable, converts the theorem into a rule or precept.[11]

So, unlike Keynes (and Friedman), Mill includes the setting of ends within the art. But as it happens, the end (growing a nation wealthy) the art of political economy pursues is treated as given in the fifth essay of some Unsettled Questions. But anticipating Friedman, Mill treats the art and science as sharing content.[12] And while Friedman and Mill have slightly different conceptualizations of what an economic theory is and Mill surely should not, I think, be treated as a proto rational choice theorist, Mill, too, endorses [Thesis A]. (As an aside, while my argument for this conclusion is wholly distinct from Foucault’s, at a high level of generality the position echoes Foucault’s understanding of Chicago economics as a kind of radicalization of the radical-Benthamite tradition. ) 

Mindful of inductive risk, Mill is cautious to remind the reader that what I have called '[Thesis A]' presupposes a mature science. Imperfect or incomplete science will generate bad rules:  “If, in this imperfect state of the scientific theory, we attempt to frame a rule of art, we perform that operation prematurely.” (Mill 1882: 654) Of course, one may not know that one’s science is incomplete or one must act on imperfect knowledge. So, for “a wise practitioner, therefore, rules of conduct will only be considered as provisional.” (Idem) As an aside, for Mill, then, there is also no difference in kind in the art of political economy and the of government. In the Logic, in the very next paragraph, Mill goes on to offer a sketch of the art of political science.

That Friedman appeals to the existence of (an idealized) ‘disinterested citizen’ as a theoretical posit may be surprising given that the rest of his paper argues for the legitimacy for positing firms that behave as if they are maximizing returns. (Friedman 1953: 21.) And since later Chicago economics became associated with a theory of rent-seeking, it might seem odd to see him posit a disinterested citizen. In addition, that the disinterested citizen agrees over values is by no means obvious if one thinks that modern society is intrinsically pluralist.

But it’s clear that in the 1940s and 50s, the idea circulated among Chicago economists with reference to J.N. Keynes. For example, in the context of a polemical exchange with Samuelson over the new welfare economics, Friedman’s friend, George J. Stigler wrote a decade earlier:

Talcott Parsons probably had economists in mind when he wrote: “For it is a fact that social existence depends to a large extent on a moral consensus of its members and that the penalty of its too radical breakdown is social extinction. This fact is one which the type of liberal whose theoretical background is essentially utilitarian is all too apt to ignore—with unfortunate practical as well as theoretical consequences.” At the level of economic policy, then, it is totally misleading to talk of ends as individual and random; 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.[13]

Parsons attributes the claim to Durkheim, who, on Parsons’ view, advocated “moral conformity.”[14] (To be sure with a minimal use of compulsion.) Even in the passage quoted by Stigler it’s clear that Parsons is contrasting Durkheim with a position one might associate with the liberal interpretation of Mill for whom increasing moral “diversity” is an “increase in happiness” not social instability.[15] So what follows may be a bit counter-intuitive because I  claim that in addition to both embracing [Thesis A] Friedman’s position is itself in in the ambit of Mill’s philosophy in more ways than one here.

To the best knowledge, J.N. Keynes would never posit the existence of a kind of value unanimity among citizens. But the ‘disinterested citizen’ that Friedman appeals to is an entity that is posited, as a normative ideal, in Mill’s Utilitarianism, where “as between his own happiness and that of others, utilitarianism requires him to be as strictly impartial as a disinterested and benevolent spectator.” In general, Mill praises disinterestedness.

In addition, Friedman clearly is presupposing a conception of progress such that in the ‘Western world’ there is a moral consensus and possibility for disinterestedness conception of citizenship. The implied contrast are communist states and less developed countries, of the sort that Mill infamously thought (temporarily) lacking in capacity for self-rule. I don’t mean to suggest Friedman agrees with Mill’s imperial policies. But Friedman does embrace a model of development. (Friedman 1953: 202.)

Now, ordinarily, among liberal interpreters, Mill is usually not associated with moral consensus. He is considered the great advocate of individuality, spontaneity, and authentic experiments in living that see moral conformism as oppressive. Nothing I say undermines that reading.[16]

But some conservative critics of Mill take him to be an advocate of a revisionary moral consensus to be propagated initially by the clerisy, and eventually adopted by the disinterested citizen.[17] The two interpretations of Mill are, incidentally, not necessarily in conflict with each other if the experiments in living are treated as a means toward the discovery of moral truth and so a new consensus. And I do not mean to suggest this interpretation is exclusive to conservatives. For example, late in life, Rawls seems to have understood Mill as advocating a “comprehensive philosophical and moral doctrine” that involved “a society united on a form of utilitarianism.”[18] I do not want to suggest that Friedman must be echoing Mill here. [19]

In the fifth essay of some Unsettled Questions, Mill contrasts sharply between the science and art of economics. And according to Mill,

These two ideas [of science and art] differ from one another as the understanding differs from the will, or as the indicative mood in grammar differs from the imperative. Science is a collection of truths; art, a body of rules, or directions for conduct. The language of science is, This is, or, This is not; This does, or does not, happen. The language of art is, Do this; Avoid that…An art would not be an art, unless it were founded upon a scientific knowledge of the properties of the subject-matter…Rules, therefore, for making a nation increase in wealth, are not a science, but they are the results of science. Political Economy does not of itself instruct how to make a nation rich; but whoever would be qualified to judge of the means of making a nation rich, must first be a political economist. The one deals in facts, the other in precepts. [20]

In context, with an appeal  to Adam Smith, the ends of political economy are taken as given (that is, growing a nation rich). This pretty much anticipates the material Friedman quoted from Keynes.

 

On Dutch War Crimes and Perry Anderson on Schmitt, Hayek, Strauss, and Oakeshot.

    After the debacle of the First World War, and the victory of Bolshevism in Russia, the old political world of landed rulers and limited electorates, modest budgets and stable currencies, had crumbled away. A new kind of mass enfranchisement and expectation gripped Europe, the arrival of a democracy capable of brushing aside, in the pursuit of security or equality, traditional barriers between the tasks of government and the affairs of business - a semi-oligarchic state and a still-hierarchic civil society. Where would popular sovereignty without social liability lead? Communism was, of course, the first and greatest danger. Fascism, which looked to some as if it might be an antidote, proved little better - indeed, in German guise at least, all but identical. But even when these were seen off, there was still the welfare state, a creeping version of the same disease. In the course of six decades, political judgements of this changing scene varied. Strauss and Oakeshott, scornful of liberalism before Hitler came to power, were more circumspect after the war; Hayek, who described himself as a classical liberal during the war, repudiated the term as compromised beyond recovery when he got to America; Schmitt, who never had any truck with liberalism, moved from Catholic authoritarianism to National Socialism, before ending as an informal doyen of the most respectable post-war constitutionalism. But beyond the discrepant local sympathies of these careers - with their splay of temporary identities: Conservative, Zionist, Nazi, Old Whig - they reflected a common theoretical calling....

    But the Stygian cap fits the collective effort of this cluster of thinkers. For these were indeed constructions designed to hold something back. What they all in the end sought to restrain was the risks of democracy - seen and feared through the prisms of their theories of law, as the abyss of its absence: to misterion tes anomias, the mystery of lawlessness.

Each put up their own barriers against the danger. The dichotomies which are the signature of their work - the esoteric and the exoteric, the civil and the managerial, the friend and the foe, the lawful and the legislative - are so many cordons. Their function is to hold popular sovereignty at bay. The different gifts displayed in this enterprise, whatever view is taken of it, were remarkable. For all his later tendency to textual dressage, Strauss's range and subtlety as a master of the canon of political philosophy had no equal in his generation. Schmitt's moral instability never impaired an extraordinary capacity to fuse conceptual insight and metaphoric imagination in lightning flashes of illumination around the state. Hayek could seem tactically ingenuous, but he fashioned a theoretical synthesis out of his epistemology and economics whose scope and strength has yet to be supplanted.
    Oakeshott was the literary artist in this gallery.--Perry Anderson (1992) "The Intransigent Right" in Spectrum: From Right to Left in the World of Ideas, p. 25-27 [HT Jonathan Kramnick]

The other day (recall here), I quoted the conclusion of Anderson's essay (which contrasts Rawls with the four horseman of the Intransigent Right) in order to introduce my digression on Katrina Forrester's In the Shadow of Justice. And before I turned to my serious engagement with Forrester, I made a snarky remark about Anderson's 'acrobatics' in order to lump Schmitt, Hayek, Strauss, and Oakeshot together. I don't plan to withdraw the remark here, but I do regret making it for two reasons: first, I wouldn't want to discourage  anyone from reading Anderson's essay, which is, in fact, very perceptive about these four thinkers and their relations. In fact, at times Anderson practices a kind of judicious, esoteric reading to reveal their core commitments. Along the way he draws on chapter 24 of Leviathan in illuminating ways.

As an aside, when Kramnick (a distinguished literary scholar) mentioned Anderson's essay to me he remarked (I am paraphrasing) that Anderson was more charitable of these four than Rawls (something characteristic of certain kind of Marxists more generally). The veracity of Kramnick's remark can be readily judged not just by comparing the quoted passages above with the paragraph I quoted from in my digression on Forrester, but also by reading his self-standing scornful essay, "Designing Consensus: John Rawls," primarily on Rawls' Political Liberalism.  Nothing like the praise of Hayek's "theoretical synthesis" can be found in Anderson about Rawls.

Second, while lumping people together with Schmitt is generally a sign that we're in the ambit of rhetorical delegitimation, it's not true (as I kind of implied) that these thinkers have nothing important in common. For, I agree with Anderson that the specter that haunts all of them, at a certain of level of abstraction is indeed "the risks of democracy," especially if that is understood in terms of "popular sovereignty." And this is not a trivial communality nor is it something that by itself deserves criticism.

It's worth noting that anyone that worries about minority or civil rights and, say the respect for the kind of rights that are associated with human rights or a bill of rights, or the division of powers is ipse facto also worried about popular sovereignty and the risks of democracy. And there is widespread theoretical agreement that such rights ought to be respected. Yet, one problem that pollutes a lot of contemporary theorizing about democracy is that proponents of popular sovereignty, deliberative democracy, and (alas) public reason tend to take for granted, on some fundamental level, that these rights are respected, or that they are in accord -- I am now using the words of Rawls -- with "the most deep-seated convictions and traditions of a modern democratic state."*

Just yesterday, the Dutch government admitted, after commissioning a new formal historical study in 2017,  that the Netherlands had engaged in all kinds of war crimes toward innocent civilians and enemy combatants in what was Indonesia's war of independence (concluded in 1949). And subsequently these facts were covered it up, and for decades public opinion did not permit these facts to be aired (often under pressure of not especially large groups of veterans), or to be taught in history classes (not even by my teachers who were rather progressive by Dutch standards). This despite the steady drip of materials that suggested the official narrative was hopelessly flawed, and the accumulating evidence of the non-trivial trauma for those that actually witnessed and perpetrated the atrocities. The time it took to admit any of this formally, and to offer (modest) compensation to victims, is of biblical proportions: the generations that experienced had to die off first for a sober and truthful discussion to be possible.

A friend of popular sovereignty may well respond that the Dutch inability to acknowledge their war crimes just shows that our liberal democracy -- which tends to get incredibly high marks for democratic freedom --  is fatally shaped by our colonial heritage. I am by no means unsympathetic to the charge. But I see little reason to believe that popular sovereignty unmediated by parliamentary institutions will do much better (given that it public opinion never really wanted to know the truth).

My reason for mentioning the case is straightforward. From afar the entrenched, small liberal democracies of Scandinavia and the North Sea are often treated as and seem paragons of democratic virtue (with robust proportional representation and reasonably generous welfare states). But even these exhibit the non-trivial democratic risks and rights violations that ought to concern friends of popular sovereignty. (Google, "Compulsory sterilisation in Sweden" or "Denmark xenophobia.") While it's true that all these places have not abolished capitalism (on the contrary they also tend to do well in economic freedom rankings), they are kind of limit examples that illustrate that even in the best circumstances democracies may misfire greatly. 

To be sure, the claim in the previous paragraph does not require to accept the road to serfdom thesis. While I am not inclined to treat the road to serfdom thesis as an empirical prediction (spoiler: I think Hayek's work belongs in the genre philosophical prophecy), if one were to treat it as an empirical prediction then the small liberal democracies of Scandinavia and the North Sea have clearly falsified it. And while I am much less sanguine about the state and character of British liberal democracy, its current state also stands as a falsification of it 70+ years after the fact. 

The explicit or implicit theoretical denial of the risks of democracy and popular sovereignty strike me as instances of irresponsible theorizing. (When I am polite I call it 'democratic innocence.') And it is a peculiar feature of far left critics of those concerned with the risks of democracy and popular sovereignty, that they then have to treat Leninism and Stalinism as contingent perversions of the ideal  or, -- and now I am speaking of Anderson -- and criticize Rosa Luxemburg, who almost alone among the friends of popular sovereignty recognized its risk, for lacking a "theory of the conquest of power by the proletariat."**

The problem is, of course, that once one has diagnosed the risks of democracy and popular sovereignty it's very hard to avoid solutions that are inimical to democracy (as the example of Mill's Considerations on Representative Government shows). And it is no surprise that those who do emphasize the risks of democracy and popular sovereignty are often reactionaries of some sort or don't reject temporary despotism. But what follows from this is not that a true friend of democracy should wish away the risks of democracy and ignore the dangers of popular sovereignty in order to avoid being tainted by the charge of 'right-wingism.' Rather, it's incumbent to find ways of navigating these risks in ways in accord with if not the letter then the spirit of democracy. But about that some other time other time more.

 

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 George Stigler and the "Problem of the Negro"

The leaders of Negro thought in America have done the members of their race one substantial service and one much greater disservice. The service was to arouse discontent with the pace at which the social, political, and economic status of the Negro was rising. That the Negro has been becoming wealthier, better educated, more fully enfranchised, and less improperly treated by his white brethren is not seriously arguable. But the distance still to be covered is immense, and no man may say that the pace of 1940 or 1950 is the maximum that should be aimed at in raising the Negro's status.

Nor is the raising of discontent an easy or an uncourageous act. Long slumbering inequities become almost foreordained in their persistence, and a conscious and sustained and even dramatic challenge to the inequities is required. Nor will the leaders of the challenge, who disturb the comfortable flow of customary events, be treated with civility or respect—they are indeed deliberate trouble-makers.

For trouble is apparently the threshold of progress. A society does not respond quickly, or sometimes even at all, to calm rational arguments or to powerful ethical principles. The drama of personal injustice, the presence of devils (or at least of villains or prejudiced holders of privilege), full membership in the righteous, marching columns— these seem to be essential in any basic reform in the United States today (and perhaps in all countries always). So indignation must be produced, and remedies provided in catechism form.

Wrong Target

The great disservice of the leaders of Negro opinion was to direct the discontent at the white population. It was proper to demand political rights that only a majority could confer. It was proper to ask the white population to assist in the rise of the Negro—a small enough restitution for the unreversible [sic] mistakes of the past. Rut [sic] it was a terrible disservice to identify the white man as the main obstacle to the rise of the negro.

It was a disservice because it must lead to hatred, and hatred to violence, and violence to the retardation of the mounting compassion and assistance of the white mean. [sic] Could the stream of demonstrations, growing in size and in insolence, approved or at least tolerated by the political, intellectual, and religious leaders of the nation, have any other message for a semi-literate Negro teenager in a slum, than that evil prejudice of the white man was the fundamental cause of his low estate? Was he to be a metaphysician, distinguishing carefully the demonstration of the principle of the dignity of all men from the proposition that every inadequacy of his life was due to white opposition?

But the disservice was terrible for a more dreadful reason: it was false as a guide to improvement. The past is not for us to relive, and no amount of restitution for past injustice by the white man could solve the basic problem of the Negro in America. That problem is that on average he lacks a desire to improve himself, and lacks a willingness to discipline himself to this end. The task of our time has been to make the Negro discontented with himself, not with the white man.

Educational Needs

Consider education. It would be easy to vote a Ph.D. for every young Negro in America—such a handsome restitution for past denial of educational rights! Good educational facilities, better facilities than whites have, are indeed a moral responsibility of the community to the Negro. The real task, however, is not to provide good schools and good teachers, but to create an unquenchable thirst for knowledge in the Negro youth. Schools beyond any need can be built in a few years: the love of knowledge and the willingness to work hard and achieve it are the product of cultural evolution. The Negro leaders should be helping the emergence of this cultural tradition, when instead they are diverting Negro energies to better school buildings.

Inferior Workers

Consider employment. The Negro boy is excluded from many occupations by the varied barriers the prejudice can raise, and these must and will be struck down. But he is excluded from more occupations by his own inferiority as a orker, again on average. Lacking education, lacking a tenacity of purpose, lacking a willingness to work hard, he will not be an object of employers' competition. What leader of Negro thought is fostering the ancient virtues of diligence and honesty and loyalty? It is so much easier to seek quotas for Negroes,

Consider the Negro as a neighbor. He is frequently repelled and avoided by the white man, but is it only color prejudice? On the contrary, it is because the Negro family is, on average, a loose, morally lax, group, and brings with its presence a rapid rise in crime and vandalism. No statutes, no sermons, no demonstrations, will obtain for the Negro the liking and respect that sober virtues commend. And the leaders of Negro thought: they blame the crime and immorality upon the slums and the low income— as if individual responsibility could be bought with a thousand dolllars a year.

It is not easy or popular to place the Negro's discontent upon himself. People will insist upon speaking of the previous or present faults of the white community, which numerous and deplorable—and now unimportant to the Negro problem. People will denounce any talk of the Negro's cultural and economic inferiority as racism, thinking no doubt that to ignore the heritage of past ignorance and vice and folly of the white man and the black man will eliminate the heritage.

One would think that the lesson of the Jews in America would have been taken somewhat more to heart. The Jewish immigrants were on average poor. with meagre education. and confronted by a vast panoply of prejudice. They brought with them precisely the virtues that should be instilled in the Negro: a veneration and irrepressible desire for learning; frugality; and respect for the civilization of the western world. They have prospered amazingly, not only economically but educationally and socially and culturally, and in the process have enriched and adorned our society., They are in the rapid process of losing their identity—at the present pace in a few generations wee shall all have a little, but only a little Jewish blood.

The direction of the Negro's discontent to himself is an unthankful task. How much easier to march on the mayor than to teach industry to a boy: how much simpler to keep the children home to coerce the school board than to instill in them a love of art and literature and science. The task does not allot a large role to the prominent leaders, and calls for different traits. Knowledge is more valuable than anger, and love more valuable than generosity in the task that faces us.

The leaders of Negro opinion are benevolent men, caught in the belief that the only arm of social improvement is the state. The Africans are poor and ignorant? Out with colonialism! The American Negro ids a lesser citizen? To the barricades! No—to the home and church and school.--G.J. Stigler (1965)* "The Problem of the Negro" New Guard, [HT Calvin Ter Beek via Brad deLong]

I am unsure when I first decided to try to face squarely the racist and eugenic elements in the authors I study. I do know that in the late 1990s, it was David M. Levy and Sandra Peart that repeatedly alerted me (and others) to the significance of these themes for the (joint and separate) history of economics and history of philosophy and that how this history is handled also matters to the future of these disciplines (and their interactions). So, alerted I increasingly started to notice eugenic and racialized themes in places I least expected when I was still a PhD student (e.g., Berkeley's Querist; young Neurath; Voltaire; Hume and Montesquieu; etc.) Over the years I have tried to alert my readers to these sordid facts and their conceptual and philosophical significance. 

Prompted by a chance encounter with Nathaniel Adam Tobias Coleman, I have also come to see that universities today struggle to own up to their eugenic past and ongoing eugenic commitments (recall here; here; here; here). I don't think that struggle is a contingent matter. By this I do not mean that universities today are primarily still interested in advancing racialized or cultural hierarchy -- although undoubtedly some faculty don't see why this would be problematic --, but rather that in the very ideas of bildung and emancipation, improvement of humans is baked in. This shows up in all kinds of ways in the  efforts of bio-medicine-technology at human enhancement. I don't need to remind my audience how frequent universities tie themselves in knots over their inability to convey a consistent approach to academic freedom and, say, minimum respect for all.

Even so, I was really shocked by Stigler's essay. (Stigler won a Nobel in economics in 1982.) I have frequently blogged and published in scholarly journals about Stigler and been reading him on and off for about twenty five years now. This is not a coincidence. Levy was one of George Stigler's few PhD students in the history of economics. And his son, Stephen Stigler (an eminent historian of statistics) was on faculty at Chicago. I remember my nervousness and pride when I took on the father's interpretation of Adam Smith in front of the very kind son (who since has given me permission to work with his father's archives and even checked his library on my behalf once). 

As an aside, I was in the audience, when Stephen Stigler presented a version of his interpretation of the debate between Pigou and Pearson to Chicago's philosophy department. The debate is of interest because of the way they handled what came known as the amalgamation or Simpson's paradox. But the background is the scientific status of eugenic ideas. Only later did I realize how much of modern statistics was developed to enhance or make rigorous eugenic reasoning. For a while I was very fond of Pigou until I realized how immersed in eugenics he really was, too.

Okay, let's turn to Stigler troubling piece. First, he starts by acknowledging that "calm rational arguments" and the enunciation of "powerful ethical principles" have little impact on public opinion and tend to be impotent in generating welcome, even necessary reform. Echoing Machiavelli, he recognizes

that dramatic challenge and turbulence may be required to prompt social reform. And Stigler here anticipates his later, more famous claim (that helped him win the Nobel) that to influence policy one must understand (recall) “the political forces which confine and direct policy.” Stigler clearly believes, with Madison, that politics is the realm of opinion. This is also evident in (the title of) his essays, in which he reflects on the relationship between economics and politics, The Economist as Preacher, and Other Essays.

But it does not follow that there is no method in the political madness. In fact, in one of his most famous papers, he explicitly rejects the then popular idea "that the political process defies rational explanation: "politics" is an imponderable, a constantly and unpredictably shifting mixture of forces of the most diverse nature, comprehending acts of great moral virtue (the emancipation of slaves) and of the most vulgar venality..."' (Note the example.)

Unlike other critics of the civil rights movement, Stigler is, thus, not tempted by tone-policing. Anticipating contemporary philosophers (who (recall) draw on Lorde; and here; here), he thinks indignation in public life may not just be fully justified, but also instrumentally necessary to produce reform. And, in fact, his idea of politics is not idealized at all. He fully expects that the "courageous" leaders of the civil rights movement will not be treated with "civility or respect." Given that he recognizes this, his use of "insolence" is odd to say the least.

But despite this stance, Stigler's attitude toward civil rights leader is not just unsympathetic, it's contemptuous (note the repeated "disservice"). This is all the more remarkable because Stigler does not deny that it is true that "the white man" is an "obstacle to the rise of the negro." Rather, he demands from the subordinated that they do not offend the sensitivities of the majority because it "must lead to hatred, and hatred to violence, and violence to the retardation of the mounting compassion and assistance." And the contempt here is not just for the civil rights leaders and their followers, but also for the non elite white majority. For it is assumed that their response to the truth must be hatred and violence. It does not occur to Stigler to explore that hatred and violence may be engineered by local white elites who fear that their power will be undermined. (This would fit his rent-seeking view of politics.)

At this point, I need to note something. Stigler's economics was, despite the clear political preference for free markets, in this period data-driven. His studies of monopoly and even the sociology of knowledge are data rich. His style of economics, especially in the 1940s-1960s, was neither like the highly mathematical work that was dominating general equilibrium modeling nor like the back of the envelope calculations of consumer surplus pioneered by his Chicago colleague Harberger. It was also little like the work he later did with Becker. So with that in mind, we can see how things go really off-rails, when Stigler notes that "no amount of restitution for past injustice by the white man could solve the basic problem of the Negro in America. That problem is that on average he lacks a desire to improve himself, and lacks a willingness to discipline himself to this end." 

First, as one of the pre-eminent historians of economics of his generation, Stigler was familiar with both Adam Smith's denunciations of slavery, and the 19th century debates in political economy over how to use compensation principles to rectify injustices.** So, it is astonishing that he takes for granted that restitution would not contribute greatly (let alone) solve the basic problem.

Second, and undeniably racist, he makes gross generalizations without any evidence about the psychological disposition of a whole population ("on average). Since Adam Smith is Stigler's hero, it is worth noting that for Smith it is axiomatic that there is "uniform, constant, and uninterrupted effort of every man to better his condition, the principle from which public and national, as well as private opulence is originally derived." And as I have noted elsewhere this is part of Smith's anti-hierarchical conception of human nature.

Third, since in the very period African-Americans were subject to violence while trying to access education, it is appalling to read Stigler assert that "The real task, however, is not to provide good schools and good teachers, but to create an unquenchable thirst for knowledge in the Negro youth." And no less appalling are the fact free claims that "the Negro family is, on average, a loose, morally lax, group." And so on. Whatever merit, if any, Stigler's underlying economic criticism of the solutions pursued by the leaders of the civil rights movement might have had, it is completely overshadowed by his willingness to engage in racialized stereotyping and victim blaming.+

Let me close. I was sincerely shocked when I read Stigler's essay. I want to explain why. This shock is, in part, because I intend to understand Chicago economics as opposed to the state-centric eugenics tendency they loath in Keynes (and Pigou). And, in part, because I understand them as heirs to the cosmopolitan and anti-racist tendencies evident in the founders of neoliberalism--many of them outspokenly antiracist (even if their modern critics tend to overlook this or very grudgingly acknowledge this). 

I am by no means an uncritical admire of Stigler in my own work. Despite admiring some of his sociology of knowledge, I have long argued he is partially response for the abuse of Kuhnian ideas as a means to silence alternative viewpoints in science. But because of his fondness of pithy phrases and institutional centrality, I have often used his writings (in this blog and my scholarship) to illustrate or illuminate debates within economics or in the philosophy of economics.  But this does not get to heart of the matter.

Stigler was (recall) centrally involved in articulating, the Kalven report, one of the most thoughtful reports on the mission of higher education and the role of academic freedom in it. (I have critically discussed this report in a number of blog posts.) This is somebody that clearly took his task as an educator seriously, and he wrote non trivially on the economics of education. Yet, when given the opportunity to educate the "Young Americans for Freedom" (The New Guard was its house organ, and the organization was influenced by  of William F. Buckley, Jr.), he pandered not their best instincts, but to their worst prejudices. 

Models, Politics, Populations, and Public Science in times of Pandemic (V); On Marc Lipsitch and Synthetic Science

I share Medawar’s pragmatic vision of scientific reasoning. Scientists must resist the temptation to excessive skepticism: the kind that says no evidence is ever quite good enough. Instead they should keep their eyes open for any kind of information that can help them solve problems. Deciding, on principle, to reject some kinds of information outright, or to consider only particular kinds of studies, is counterproductive. Instead of succumbing to what Medawar calls “habitual disbelief,” the scientist should pursue all possible inputs that can sharpen one’s understanding, test one’s preconceptions, suggest novel hypotheses, and identify previously unrecognized inconsistencies and limitations in one’s view of a problem....If the COVID-19 crisis has revealed two “competing” ways of thinking in distinct scientific traditions, it is not between two philosophies of science or two philosophies of evidence so much as between two philosophies of action....

This is not to deny that there are different and valuable perspectives on epidemiology. Like any other field, there are many specialties and subspecialties. They have different methods for how they study the world, how they analyze data, and how they filter new information. No one person can keep up with the flood of scientific information in even one field, and specialization is necessary for progress: different scientists need to use different approaches given their skills, interests, and resources. But specialization should not lead to sects—in this case, a group of scientists who accept only certain kinds of evidence and too rigidly adhere to a philosophy of non-interventionism....

Infectious disease epidemiologists must embrace diverse forms of evidence by the very nature of their subject. We study a wide range of questions: how and under what conditions infectious diseases are transmitted, how pathogens change genetically as they spread among populations and across regions, how those changes affect our health, and how our immune systems protect us and, sometimes, make us vulnerable to severe illness when immune responses get out of control. We also seek to understand what kinds of control measures are most effective in limiting transmission. To understand these issues for even one type of disease—say, coronavirus diseases—requires drawing on a wide range of methodologies and disciplines....

The upshot is that, done well, epidemiology synthesizes many branches of science using many methods, approaches, and forms of evidence. No one can be expert in all of these specialties, and few can even be conversant in all of them. But a scientist should be open to learning about all of these kinds of evidence and more.--Marc Lipsitch (May 12, 2020) "Good Science is Good Science" The Boston Review. [HT Matt Lord]

(This is the fifth in a series of posts (see the first here inspired by Phillipe Lemoine; and, inspired by Stegenga, the second and third.)

Sometimes I notice the English heritage plaque commemorating Sir Peter Medawar on Downshire Hill, and I am reminded of the joys of reading the belles lettres of urbane scientists who, through their attention to detail, and highly specialized knowledge, open gates to inviting, untrodden paths meandering in nature's library and our location in it. The essays collected in Medawar's The Uniqueness of the Individual are among the greatest in the genre.  

Unlike Kuhn's image of scientists as unreflective puzzle solvers, Medawar developed a strong interest in philosophy, even a philosophy of science that emphasized the creativity of working science.* Because his philosophy of science seems to have been developed under the influence of a philosopher (Popper) I find this work less stimulating.** Although I take a professional interest in the way in which philosophical ideas play a role in (what I call) the image(s) of science -- (recall these posts on Hume, Williamson, Spinoza), within science and public pronouncements of scientists (and aggregators or what Polanyi called 'influentials'). An image of science is a list of characteristics that function as short-hand for representing science when these characteristics are used in debates where one side (or more) appeals to the (epistemic) authority of science to settle debate.

The passages quoted from Lipsitch, an epidemiologist, are a response to an essay by Jonathan Fuller itself a rare philosophical intervention in unfolding scientific and public policy controversy (which I discussed in the fourth post in this series). Lipsitch gives us a glimpse, from under the hood, of a species of (what in honor of Jacob Stegenga I call) policy apt, fast science. This species involves the synthesis of many different kinds of sciences and different kinds of evidence. And Lipsitch self-consciously presents his discipline as synthetic in this fashion.

As it happens, despite the increasing significance of ecology and climate science, there is not more sustained reflection, philosophical or popular, on synthetic disciplines in science.+ In addition to the integration of specialist knowledge from the special sciences it requires non-trivial judgments about the ways these hang together. When these connecting links are subject to experiment and statistical techniques, the integration may itself be a scientific discipline; when these links involve leaps of the imagination or conceptual creativity the integration may be more likened to philosophy (what I call synthetic philosophy). Of course, the dividing line between science and philosophy may be blurry or a matter of sociology of the academy.

When there is time to integrate, one aims to develop the techniques that allow one to stress test the links (models, techniques, experiments, concepts, etc.) constitutive of a synthetic science. But as Lipsitch describes, when such time is absent, a lot of the integration occurs almost heroically on the fly.++ This is so even if the underlying (special) sciences are robust and well understood. Lipsitch describes how good judgment across multiple forms of evidence is required. Presumably this also involves comparing features of COVID-19 to better understood diseases and mechanisms.

It follows from Lipsitch's account of the practice of infectious disease epidemiologists that their synthetic science involves lots of judgment calls that can generate plausible disagreements among even the most informed experts. This matters in a policy context because it means that one is not in the realm of constrained choice -- characteristic of applied ethics and decision theory ; in constrained choice areas, and as Ellsberg taught the intermediary contexts (characterized by constaints and uncertainty), experts can have considerable understanding of possible consequences of policy and one may even evaluate them in light of ends one may wish to pursue or avoid. 

But in the context of fast, synthetic science that aims to be policy apt -- "decisions are urgent and must be made with the evidence we’ve got" -- we should expect lots of controversy: legitimate second guessing of both the judgments internal to infectious disease epidemiology as well as the judgments about how to pursue policy (even if there were consensus about ends/values). From that vantage point it is to be welcomed that Lipsitch engages in critical dialogue with learned critics.

But there is a more important moral lurking here. As I noticed last week (recall this post on Ernest Nagel), it is a deeply ingrained way of thinking about the role of science in public policy that it supplies the decision-makers and public with authoritative, univocal answers to decisions. And when the scientific community does not spontaneously supplies such unicity, the impulse has been to create mechanisms of consensus generation (through surveys, panels, boards, special issues, etc.). The impulse is natural both (a) when one fears that diversity of voices will make space for political arbitrage or even to allow slick operators to sideline  knowledge altogether or (b) thinks that univocalness allows for the benefits of social coordination to materialize.  But premature (that is not stress-tested) consensus generation is also fraught with risks because it also means the authority of a particular synthetic science rests on fragile foundations.*** Thanks to Eric Winsberg I have been alert to the (reputational) risks to science as such that accompany this.

So, the moral is this. Lipsitch rightly calls for a philosophy of action in the context of fast, policy apt synthetic science. In my view, informed by Medawar's embrace of human diversity within (imaginative) science tempered by responsibility and obligations, such action will be better constrained once science and society learn to be comfortable with an image of science that permits listening to and speaking with multiplicity of informed voices. 

 

On (Lippmann and) Ignorant Voters

The hypothesis, which seems to me the most fertile, is that news and truth are not the same thing, and must be clearly distinguished. The function of news is to signalize an event, the function of truth is to bring to light the hidden facts, to set them into relation with each other, and make a picture of reality on which men can act....For the troubles of the press, like the troubles of representative government, be it territorial or functional, like the troubles of industry, be it capitalist, cooperative, or communist, go back to a common source: to the failure of self-governing people to transcend their casual experience and their prejudice, by inventing, creating, and organizing a machinery of knowledge. It is because they are compelled to act without a reliable picture of the world, that governments, schools, newspapers and churches make such small headway against the more obvious failings of democracy, against violent prejudice, apathy, preference for the curious trivial as against the dull important, and the hunger for sideshows and three legged calves. This is the primary defect of popular government, a defect inherent in its traditions, and all its other defects can, I believe, be traced to this one.--Walter Lippmann (1922) Public Opinion (Chapter 24, 228-230) 

As regular readers know, I think reflection on Walter Lippmann is important in present circumstances. He is one of the intellectual architects (recall) of what I call the second-wave of liberalism (1945-2008), which has been imploding during the last decade, and even was the proximate cause of the development of what came to be known as neo-liberalism. More subtly, his conception of the good society, which hearkens back to the (attractive) kind of liberalism of Adam Smith and Sophie de Grouchy, rejects both state neutrality and state-craft as soul-craft; the good society is one that has many morally salient characteristics (the people are flourishing and can lead lives of their own choosing without fear or coercion). To attain the good society, not unlike a medieval cathedral, is a multi-generational, collective project. There is a sense in which this is a religious project. But, probably unlike the cathedral, the path and the outcome of the good society is, due to the uncertainty generating conditions of modern life, full of surprises. 

One reason to return to Lippmann (not in order to agree -- he also has (recall) serious weaknesses --) is that, as  JohnDewey emphasizes, he understands the problem of voter ignorance not, as anti-democrats do, as a problem of other (not-so-smart or gripped by ideology) voters, but as a structural feature of the human condition. One need not agree with all of Lippmann's ways of articulating the situation, to see that the (Platonic) cave is the human condition in mass society. And to overcome such ignorance, here he anticipates Hanna Arendt, is a rare achievement to be found in, or (perhaps its better to say) produced by, a few institutions:  the law and science.

As an aside, Lippmann, who knew the press from within, is adamant that the press is even during the best of times and ownership structures not that kind of institution capable of reliable generating truth.* And, in fact, he claims that, when the press is conducive, it is often relying on the rule-following features of the administrative state. Importantly, his skepticism about the press' truth-conducive-ness does not entail that the press has no positive contributions to make to democratic life. (If he thought that, his life would be self-undermining in a very obvious ways.)

I do not think Lippmann's answer to the problem of voter ignorance is successful, but it was (judging by what happened next) very influential; and if not influential, at least prophetic. It is possible that by Lippmann's own standards his solution would be deemed successful because Lippmann's aspirations were (again noted by Dewey) were more ameliorative than utopian.  Lippmann's proposal has three central features: first, is to advocate for an expansion of the (meritocratic) bureaucratic state and infuse it with what he calls 'technical knowledge' that he associates with "statisticians, accountants, auditors, industrial counsellors, engineers of many species, scientific managers, personnel administrators, research men, "scientists," and sometimes just as plain private secretaries." (234) He thinks such technical knowledge can also be turned into an "experimental social science." (237)  The point, for Lippmann, is not that such technicians will run the show, but rather that they become embedded (as "permanent intelligence section") in all government apparatuses (nationally and locally). For, by definition, a technician is not the decision maker.+

A key second feature of his proposal is that there will be a permanent circulation of college graduates from universities, perhaps even a privileged 'national university' (247) recruited from government staff, into government; and technical, government bureaucrats returning regularly to train and teach at universities. This intellectual flow of human capital would itself (in part) constitute "political science" and, in turn, would "associated with politics in America."+ (In 1922 economics was not yet seen as the future queen of the social sciences.) Lippmann optimistically assumes that all of this can be done transparently and openly (246).  The third, key feature is to insist that any political decision must be channeled through a procedure that will involve the bringing to bear of technical expertise on a problem (e.g., 255). 

As an aside, Lippmann's account is clearly distinct from the (later) Hayekian narrative, which sees the rise of the bureaucratic, technocratic state as a consequence of the experience of (mobilization and) war-planning during WWI. Lippmann, by contrast, thinks that the rise of the technician in the great society is itself the consequence "of blind natural selection" (234); complex organizations faced with complex decision environments started to require technical expertise merely to help integrate the flow of data and to structure decision-making for the executive. One discerns in Lippmann that the problem of big data is a nineteenth century problem, and that to overcome it even in competitive markets, requires the rise of expertise within organizations.

Now, Lippmann is not unaware that there is a real risk the technocrats will quickly run the show and displace elected officials and electorate. His response to this is to insist on a stark distinction between executive and technical functions and to aim to align incentives between them properly. [242]+ Only this can keep the technician's disinterestedness in place. If such a distinction were to be maintained in practice, and an esprit de corps among the technical class could be cultivated, then his hope that there will be circumstances in which the presence of a class of technicians can even abolish partisanship would not be comical. I don't mean to suggest that Lippmann's proposal is impractical: it very much reflects reality inside important elements of the governance of the EU and the US Federal government. As Dewey discerned, Lippmann proposes what became a tool, even an effective technique of governance one that has undoubtedly helped reduce the catastrophic mistakes all political agents can make.**

I used the word 'comical.' Perhaps that's unfortunate.  For Lippmann's weakness is the weakness of much of twentieth century liberalism. We can discern in Lippmann a tendency toward consensus and de-politicization in thinking about politics. In his (1937) Good Society, he demands that politicians combine, in spirit, the temperament of a legislator and a judge (who is impartial, fair, temperate, etc.) As the earlier Public Opinion teaches, that aspiration would only be possible in reality if political life is not governed by opinion. But if that were possible, we wouldn't (recall) need democracy at all. 

 

 

Le Guin (and William James) on Sacrifice; on Political Aesthetics and Truthful Ideology

They all know it is there, all the people of Omelas. Some of them have come to see it, others are content merely to know it is there. They all know that it has to be there. Some of them understand why, and some do not, but they all understand that their happiness, the beauty of their city, the tenderness of their friendships, the health of their children, the wisdom of their scholars, the skill of their makers, even the abundance of their harvest and the kindly weathers of their skies, depend wholly on this child's abominable misery.

This is usually explained to children when they are between eight and twelve, whenever they seem capable of understanding; and most of those who come to see the child are young people, though often enough an adult comes, or comes back, to see the child. No matter how well the matter has been explained to them, these young spectators are always shocked and sickened at the sight. They feel disgust, which they had thought themselves superior to. They feel anger, outrage, impotence, despite all the explanations. They would like to do something for the child. But there is nothing they can do. If the child were brought up into the sunlight out of that vile place, if it were cleaned and fed and comforted, that would be a good thing, indeed; but if it were done, in that day and hour all the prosperity and beauty and delight of Omelas would wither and be destroyed. Those are the terms. To exchange all the goodness and grace of every life in Omelas for that single, small improvement: to throw away the happiness of thousands for the chance of happiness of one: that would be to let guilt within the walls indeed.

The terms are strict and absolute; there may not even be a kind word spoken to the child.

Often the young people go home in tears, or in a tearless rage, when they have seen the child and faced this terrible paradox. They may brood over it for weeks or years. But as time goes on they begin to realize that even if the child could be released, it would not get much good of its freedom: a little vague pleasure of warmth and food, no real doubt, but little more. It is too degraded and imbecile to know any real joy. It has been afraid too long ever to be free of fear. Its habits are too uncouth for it to respond to humane treatment. Indeed, after so long it would probably be wretched without walls about it to protect it, and darkness for its eyes, and its own excrement to sit in. Their tears at the bitter injustice dry when they begin to perceive the terrible justice of reality, and to accept it. Yet it is their tears and anger, the trying of their generosity and the acceptance of their helplessness, which are perhaps the true source of the splendor of their lives. Theirs is no vapid, irresponsible happiness. They know that they, like the child, are not free. They know compassion. It is the existence of the child, and their knowledge of its existence, that makes possible the nobility of their architecture, the poignancy of their music, the profundity of their science. It is because of the child that they are so gentle with children. They know that if the wretched one were not there sniveling in the dark, the other one, the flute-player, could make no joyful music as the young riders line up in their beauty for the race in the sunlight of the first morning of summer.--Ursula K. Le Guin, "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas"

The narrator of this "fable" -- Le Guin hesitates calling it that  -- at times situates her (his?) own description in the history of utopian thought: she contrasts the citizens of Omelas with the "bland utopians" (of More). Le Guin, who takes categorization  of her fiction rather seriously (in the playful way in which the serious is properly addressed) may be right to insist it is not a utopia because the narrator also admits not knowing "the rules and laws of their society." But it is possible that we learn more than the narrator realizes (as is often the case in the best utopian writings). Rules and laws are intrinsic to utopian reflection, when considered as a species of (what I call) Socratic political theory [recall here and here]. One might easily be confused about  this point because the narrator describes Omelas as "happy" (without being "stupid" or "naive and happy children") in a way that is often associated with utopian thought.

In order to show that they are genuinely happy, the narrator claims that the Omelasians (the Omelians?) are (i) capable of distinguishing and discriminating among "what is necessary, what is neither necessary nor destructive, and what is destructive."  And (ii) they have  chosen to live beyond necessity and allow technology that is "neither necessary nor destructive," but simultaneously to reject the (potentially) destructive kind. That is to say, Omelas is a society with metaphysics (or philosophy) and capable of taking, what we would call, inductive risk seriously. (In some respects -- especially the fact that there is a religion without priests -- it is like the true city of Plato's Republic.) Some other time I hope to reflect a bit more carefully on the logic of modality in which necessity and destructiveness are contraries.* (One would also like to know more about how they apply their knowledge.)

Above, I have quoted the central element of the story, or a necessary ingredient, that is supposed to make the 'joy' and the 'city' believable.** This reveals that a criterion for a happy city is some trade-off or some discordant element.  This element is a sacrifice.+ The happiness of the city is founded in a contract (James calls it a "bargain") which has three clear terms: (a) a miserable child; (b) no talking to the child; (c) "the happiness" of the citizens of Omelas.  Before one complains that this contract is obviously invalid say on the Hobbesian ground that the child is thrown back into the state of nature (really worse--she is deprived her use of reason), it is worth noting that from the perspective of the contracting parties the child is a mere externality. This is true of all contracts in which beyond the contracting parties and the arbiter/sovereign who enforces it, there are always parties who are effected by the contract, but not included (as contracting parties or in its language). The contract would be invalid if the sacrificed child were itself one of the contracting parties. But as Hobbes reminds us (recall), in the state of nature mothers have supreme dominion over their children and can dispose them at will (on my interpretation this justifies right to abortion in his view). This right need not be given up in the bargain. So this is a legitimate contract.

It is tempting to discuss here the question if it is a moral contract. If the child were spoken to -- and so readmitted to community, and so made part of the contract -- its objections and pleas would have to be taken into account. But today I am going to resist the casuistry (although I am quietly relying on your eagerness to do it yourself), and the familiar debates between consequentialists and deontological perspectives, we would have to enter into.[1] For prior to the question of morality, there are two, all too easily ignored, issues that are explicitly raised in the fable. One is a question (with a nod to Hannah Arendt [recall my valedictorian pieces at NewAPPS, here and here]) connected to politics of aesthetics: "the treason of artists," which is a "refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain." One of the narrator's points on this issue is that modern artists self-limit in such a a way such that a skill has been lost (or at least 'almost lost')++ that is, the skill to represent joy and happiness without, simultaneously, thereby turning it in a moral tale or a political message. As such artists are incapable of conveying the full richness of human life. (This is something Coetzee also worries about.) The narrative situation of the fable is made complex because our narrator ends up performing what she decries. Part of the issue then is to what degree there is space for non-acceptable and non-believable art. That is to say, by bringing in the question of acceptance and belief, the narrator obliquely reminds us that her art is not isolated, but itself part of a larger political community; our expectations and standards are implicated in her representation.

I emphasize the obliqueness of this issue because, second, the representation of Omelas shows how an ideology that is grounded in the truth, in a society in which philosophy and knowledge exist, is possible.  For, everybody in Omelas (above a certain age) knows of the child sacrifice performed there. (Perhaps, this is even a fourth publicity requirement in the contract!) There is no noble lie here. And it is this knowledge that grounds a lot of the best features of the activities that bring (let's stipulate) true glory to Omelas ("nobility of their architecture, the poignancy of their music, the profundity of their science.") That is, this is a society in which its best activities do not require -- something familiar to us -- the effacement of the ugly foundations of flourishing. This is, indeed, a "responsible happiness." (How this connects to "barbarism" -- the narrator introduces the contrast -- is actually a tricky matter, but we can't do everything at once.)

Even so, I insist that their self-understanding is a form of ideology. By 'ideology' I mean (without pretending to have offered an analysis or to be at all precise) a discourse that (i) justifies a status quo -- in which some are subjugated (made miserable, exploited, etc.) -- and (ii) which prevents from conceiving alternatives to the status quo. Only (i) is necessary for something to be an ideology, but (ii) is an important function. This (i-ii) is precisely what happens when the children begin to realize that even if the child could be released, it would not get much good of its freedom." What they say is (let's stipulate) all true, but it ends up justifying continued misery for the child. 

Now, the story shows that two alternatives in play are (i) continue to agree to terms of the social contract, or (ii) quietly leave town (that's the closing "incredible" paragraph of the story) and end one's complicity with known misery from which one benefits.  One may grant that releasing a child after such degradation may cause as much wretchedness as staying in confinement because she would be released into a collapsing society. But it is notable that they do not seriously contemplate ending the practice when this child dies. That is, in virtue of accurately describing the world they inhabit, they do not prepare for an alternative, communal future path, beyond Omelas.***  

 

 

 

 

On Dotson on Lorde and Livable Philosophy (I)

In a 1979 interview with Adrienne Rich, Rich questions Lorde about a set of positions she puts forth in her 1977 article, “Poetry is not a Luxury”. Lorde’s position reads, “The white fathers told us: I think, therefore I am. The Black mother within each of us – the poet – whispers in our dreams: I feel, therefore I can be free” (Lorde 1984, 38). Rich asks Lorde to respond to the criticism that she is, here, simply restating an old set of stereotypes of “the rational white male and the emotional dark female” (Lorde 1984, 100). Lorde’s response is fascinating. One would expect her to defend herself against the charge that she is espousing the belief that only white males are properly rational and only “dark females” are properly emotional. Instead she responds by dissolving the critique:

I have heard that accusation, that I’m contributing to the stereotype, that I’m saying the province of intelligence and rationality belongs to the white male. But if you’re traveling a road that begins nowhere and ends nowhere, the ownership of the road is meaningless. If you have no land out of which the road comes, no place that road goes to, geographically, no goal, then the existence of that road is totally meaningless. Leaving rationality to white men is like leaving him a piece of that road that begins nowhere and ends nowhere. (1984, 100)

According to Lorde, there is something meaningless about the concept of Rationality. The understanding of the human practice of exercising reason held in Rationality, for Lorde, has no origin, no destination, and no goal. It does not have a specifiable locale and as such it has no use. Now, is she saying that all rationality is meaningless, in general? No, because Lorde will go onto explain:

Rationality is not unnecessary…it serves feeling. It serves to get from this place to that place. But if you don’t honor those places, then the road is meaningless. Too often, that’s what happens with the worship of rationality and that circular, academic, analytic thinking. (1984, 100)

Lorde appears to challenge whether the concept of Rationality is useful given that it is a concept of a human practice, not the practice of being rational or exercising reason. The practice of rationality always has a location. There is a where-from and a where-to for every attempt to be rational. Honoring the place and space of given instances of reason is what affords rationality meaning. Hence, attempts to render reason abstract, without  appeal  to  space  and  place  are,  on  Lorde’s  account,  meaningless.  So  an assumption of ownership over such a concept amounts to an inconsequential claim.

A way to defend the value of concepts of human practice, like Rationality, could follow from understanding conceptual thinking as a way to address contemporary problems. By addressing problems in the world, philosophy can help to guide human behavior. For Lorde, this response is contingent on a certain approach to the world and living. It conceives of living as if it presented itself as a set of problems to be solved. Lorde, on my reading, observes limitations to this particular worldview. She writes:

When we view our living in the european mode, only as problems to be solved, we rely solely upon our ideas to make us free, for these were what the white fathers told us were precious. But as we come more into touch with our own ancient and original non-european view of living as a situation to be experienced and interacted with, we learned more and more to cherish our feelings, and to respect those hidden and deep sources of our power from whence true knowledge and, therefore, lasting action comes. (Lorde 1984, 37)

Lorde, here, sees a clear connection between a particular worldview and the reliance upon ideas. Regardless of whether her designation of “european” and “non-european” is correct, taking living “as a problem to be solved” leads one to both believe in and rely upon ideas in a certain way. It would behoove us to try to articulate what a problem/solution conception of living might entail. There are at least three commitments. The first would concern valuing the activity of discovering problems. The second would concern placing a value on analyzing these problems in order to determine possible solutions. And the third commitment would concern articulating solutions to the problems. It is not clear where, according to a problem/solution approach to living and its three commitments, one need ever act upon a solution. Uncovering ideas alone is presumed to have revolutionary force. All that is needed to change the world is to think of a solution. It is not clear, for Lorde, how this orientation for living, the creation of ideas in the form of problems and/or solutions, can ever make demands upon our actions by itself. The question here is the following: how precisely will discovering, determining, and articulating problems and/or solutions make demands upon our actions?

Lorde, here, seems to be suspicious of how ideas and conceptual thinking can make demands on our actions. More precisely, because conceptual thinking can and does make errors, the process of finding problems and solutions is infinitely regressive. For example, the above question of ‘How will discovering, determining, and articulating problems/solutions make demands on our actions,’ if taken as a problem that needs to be solved, will produce answers which themselves are problems to be solved. One can lose herself/himself in the process of finding problems and offering solutions….In fact, the problem/solution model, or the criticism/rival theory model, by itself, may be a means of suspending action indefinitely. As a result, Lorde demonstrates that relying solely on ideas and concepts does not make demands on our actions, but rather must be combined with some other form of human activity, i.e. poetry, that translates theory into action (Lorde 1984, Lorde 2009). As a result, she is not outright rejecting philosophical thinking, as she understands it, but rather observing its limitations.—Kristie Dotson “(2012) “How is This Paper Philosophy? (21-23).

I have already noted that Amia Srinivasan [(recall) on anger in politics], and, in her famous (2012) paper, Kristie Dotson draw on Audre Lorde. In my earlier post I focused on Lorde's political economy. Today, I follow in Dotson's footsteps and begin to sketch the outlines that I discern in Lorde's contribution to a philosophy worth having. Before I get to that I first retrace some of Dotson's steps, all the while allowing that the very exercise I engage in also runs the risk of domesticating Lorde's (and Dotson's) ideas into an academic, analytic non-thought.*

Inspired by Lorde, Dotson treats the puzzle-solving approach of professional philosophy (and a certain kind of academic thought more generally) as a species of intellectual escapism: there is no intrinsic pull from solved puzzle to world-changing-activity. As we all know, the solved puzzle leads to the successor puzzle (or a re-conceptualization of the original puzzle). But otherwise, on this image philosophy is inert and leaves everything alone. Few conceptions of philosophy fully embrace this consequence, because (recall) as Graham Priest expertly shows in his criticism of Wittgenstein’s (quietist) meta-philosophy, it would entail rejecting as 'philosophy' both the many decision points in ordinary life where we are called on to engage in philosophical reasoning as well the occasions where science and philosophy seem to (ahh) shade into each other. So, while one can recognize the permanent temptation of philosophy-as-inert-escapism, it cannot survive scrutiny. Notice that this is so even if one embraces the status quo.

But despite the widespread rejection of philosophy as inert, and widespread lip-service to the relevance of philosophical theorizing to a whole range of epistemic and normative applications, few philosophical programs really internalize what it would take to conceive of philosophy not on the model of a nighttime astronomer calculating the retrograde motions of distant planets. That is to say, there is, as Dotson implies, a kind of bad faith in embracing the puzzle solving model and simultaneously insisting on the social relevance of one’s philosophy. Often such a stance presupposes a kind of magical though that within the intellectual division of labor, there are other intellectuals and institutions that know (by way of mysterious action at a mental/social distance) what to do with the solutions gifted by the ‘core’ philosophers/theorists and to do so in a responsible and life-affirming way.

Now, in the passages that Dotson quotes, we can find an alternative vision. For in it, feeling grounds the possibility of freedom ("I feel, therefore I can be free.” ) Before I suggest something about the nature of this freedom, it’s important to be clear on two modes of life Lorde rejects here in our gendered material hierarchy: (i) the life of pure thought exemplified by stunted men who become robot-like masters, who (ii) use subordinated females as sites of displaced (pure) feeling ("men who are afraid to feel must keep women around to do their feeling"). Neither (i-ii) are free. So, Lorde is not saying that to feel is to be free. For acting, say, from fear is itself not sufficient to be free (even if one appears to be the boss in various ways). So, here Lorde suggests that high status and control does not equate freedom.

In addition, Lorde associates the philosophical thought that is produced by our gendered status quo with false knowledge. (I am treating Lorde as a philosophical prophet, who re-animates a known distinction between true and false knowledge. If one's training makes one stumbles over ‘false knowledge,” (how could knowledge be false?) one can use ‘inauthentic knowledge.’) Now Dotson emphasizes, correctly, that false knowledge is inert. We may say it, requires the engineer to be animated.**

So, true knowledge is subservient to our feelings. It would be tempting her to jump to the finish line and assert that true knowledge just means to be guided into action (with to use Dotson’s phrase, ‘applicable insights’) in order to change the world for the better in such a way such that our feelings can be at home in them; philosophy then becomes the embrace of ‘the livable future’ (without, as Dotson emphasizes, tying this to a single method and canon).

But it’s notable that Lorde claims that true knowledge produces 'lasting actions.' Again, it’s important to recognize that what’s being rejected here is not just inert philosophy (= no action) and, as Dotson emphasizes, philosophy from the vantage point of eternity (that is temporally and spatially un-situated), but also rejects an image of philosophy Lorde associates with limited (short) action; this kind of theorizing (which results in short action) Lorde understands in terms of a kind of instrumental rationality which changes the world without being grounded in a conception of freedom worth having.+ For, Lorde seems to conceive instrumental rationality, mere want satisfaction, as always draining, a running down of resources. A system in which instrumental rationality is hypostasized feeds on a diet of novelty which covers, as it were, the way we are all being dis-empowered.

That is to say, we can understand Lorde as claiming that false knowledge, the one that is consequent of (inert) puzzle solving, which understands itself and presents itself as operating on the plane of eternity – ‘a road that begins nowhere and ends nowhere’ (and hence offers no action) -- but that actually mimics the puzzle solving approach of instrumental rationality, which merely expends and run-downs resources as being incapable of being self-sustaining. It seems, then, that true freedom for Lorde is to be engaged in a self-sustaining activity with recall) others that shapes the world in ways that provides livable spaces not by effacing the past – Lorde thinks historical memory is central to any life worth having --, but by creating a (for lack of a better word) palimpsest in which the past remains ever-present.  

To be an activity that is self-sustaining (i.e., one that instantiates long action) requires, according to Lorde, to be grounded in empowering feelings and in activities that through interactions with differentiated and possibly disagreeing others (recall) generate joy all the while being engaged in the kind of activity that challenges the status quo. It's an open question if such a joyful philosophy should migrate out of the university, but that's for another occasion. Here I mark that while it's possible that such shared joy is not sufficient for creating lasting action, it seems to be necessary.

 

 

 

 

On The Scruton vs Williamson exchange in TLS

Although a good semantic account of “I” is not sufficient for understanding the nature of self-consciousness, it may still be necessary. To take one of Scruton’s examples, brilliantly suggestive though Hegel’s discussion of the first person in The Phenomenology of Spirit is, it is plausible that it involves a confusion between what Kaplan distinguished as char­acter and content, as Alberto Voltolini has argued forcefully. Roughly, the character of “I” is the general rule that, as used in a given context with its standard meaning in English, “I” refers to its user in that context. That rule is constant across contexts. By contrast, the content of “I” varies across contexts; as used in a given context, it is the referent of “I” in that context, the very person who uses it. You and I use the word “I” with the same character but different contents. The distinction may seem elementary once made, yet numerous discussions go wrong because they neglect it. In particular, abstract talk of “the I” tends to muddle just that point.--Timothy Williamson, November 3, TLS, p. 18. [HT Leiterreports]

Tim Crane introduces a somewhat dour and dispiriting exchange between Roger Scruton and Tim Williamson on the nature of philosophy with the (vaguely Sellarsian) claims that [A] "Philosophy aims to outline the most general nature of things -- and if you understand "things" in the most general possible sense to, then philosophy is one of the "things" that philosophy aims to outline. " He then adds that this "inevitably means that philosophers will tend to disagree about the nature of philosophy." Crane thinks that philosophical disagreement is always a possible consequence of this understanding of philosophy in light of the genuine possibility that even the "best method" is open to challenge.*

 

It is a dispiriting exchange because very little is said in it that could not have been said at most moments during the twentieth century by some articulate protagonist writing in the aftermath of some version of the parting of ways. A different kind of spirit than me, would, perhaps, be dispirited because the previous sentence entails a lack of progress. Because I am mostly indifferent to the very idea of philosophical progress (although excited by technical innovation), that's not the source of my response. Let me explain a bit more fully before I return to the passage quoted at the top of this post.

 

Most of the exchange, Williamson refuses to show his hand. Rather, he has great fun at poking holes in the presuppositions and lack of clarity of Scruton's position (on the nature of the meaning of 'empirical world;' 'humanities' and 'science'); Scruton's sloppy terminology and the absurdities it commits him to (about various disciplinary practices inside and outside the humanities and science) are effectively ridiculed by Williamson throughout. I find witnessing such expert demolition dispiriting, too.

 

In fact, in his first response to Scruton, Williamson's makes no assertion about the nature of philosophy at all! He hints that he agrees with "making distinctions;" that one should focus on "easier cases and analyse them more deeply before building up to harder cases later;" and that philosophers (like Grice, Reichenbach, and Kaplan) have contributed to "science" and "scientific theorizing." In fact, in his third response, Williamson is careful to avoid conflating philosophy's contribution to science from philosophy itself. There such "contributions" are treated not as intrinsic to philosophy, but as one of the (extrinsic) things that "also" happens.

 

As an aside, against the textual evidence, in his introduction, Crane insists -- by quoting Williamson's "easier cases and analyse them more deeply before building up to harder cases later;" -- that Williamson here "epitomizes" the approach of "what is generally known as analytic philosophy." That may well be so for Williamson (and analytic philosophy), but in context Williamson is defending the fact that "mathematical decision theory" is an example of the possibility of "scientific study of points of view." That's not a claim about the nature of philosophy, but a method. Of course, it's possible that philosophy could be reduced to method, but that's not Williamson's position.

 

Rather, in his exchange with Scrution, Williamson seems to understand philosophy as a "discipline" (without telling us here what that is) with its "own questions" and "theories" with its "own ways of answering its questions" (including "thought experiments" and "mathematically rigorous formal models")** that "concern all possible instances of their subject matter, not just those that happen to have evolved in our species or on our planet." So, Williamson's understanding of philosophy is intrinsically about a species of generality not far removed from Crane's claim [A] about the nature of philosophy. (This is further evidence that Williamson does not treat contributing to science as really central to philosophy because some of the contributions he praises are really specific to our planet.) It would have been useful if Williamson had been asked to show his hand earlier in the exchange because then Scruton could have used the evident lacunae in Williamson's approach to articulate his own stance.

 

It's not that Scruton does not deserve being made fun of -- he does write [in the  context of explaining that melodies are musical objects that belong to purely intentional realm and so could never be studied scientifically], 'no sounds could arise from the depths as the E-flat major arpeggio rises from the depths at the start of the Das Rheingold' --; the problem here is not just the dated example (and the logical triviality of the claim), but rather that he fails to notice that he is using it as example of "sounds...we as self-conscious beings hear them, under [particular, intentional] concepts" while simply assuming that his readers share his concepts; these days the prelude sounds like something you may hear as background noise while getting a deep tissue massage.*

Williamson's potshots at Scruton are a shame because Scruton also says some important things worth reflecting on.+ But I want to leave those aside (including a curious criticism of Foucault), and close with a reflection on the central philosophical disagreement between Scruton and Williamson that Williamson purports to settle in the passage quoted above. Throughout the exchange, Scruton tries to defend philosophy's role in articulating (what he at one point calls) the "standpoint from which self-conscious beings address the world, what Hegel called the Fursichsein....philosophy as the seamstress of the Lebenswelt" For, somewhat surprisingly, nothing Williamson says really undermines the viability of such a project. If anything, he can be taken to be saying that such a project requires, first, the long and proper development of the careful tools and distinctions of analytic philosophy: "Although a good semantic account of “I” is not sufficient for understanding the nature of self-consciousness, it may still be necessary." (Here, one may well suspect that Williamson himself is close to Carnap's position in the Aufbau.) So, somewhat peculiarly, while Williamson destroys Scruton in the exchange, he leaves his project standing (without, of course, drawing attention to this fact).

 

Now, one may object to the judgment at the end of the preceding paragraph and point to the paragraph quoted above. In it, strikingly, Williamson's appeals to authority. What's peculiar of Williamson's strategy in the quoted passage is (a) beside the fact that he refers to an otherwise obscure paper [although Voltolini deserves wider readership], that here, seemingly en passant, Williamson calls us back (b) to one of the central debates between Russell and Bradley that go into the founding myths of analytic philosophy in which the technically superior Russell philosophically destroys the out of date Hegelians. Given that legend, it is worth nothing (c) that while Voltolini is clearly on Russell's side, he actually shows that Russell's philosophy could not do the job it set out -- destroy Hegelian metaphysics -- because even on the limited question of the thesis of indexical reference to discrete objects, Russell's philosophy lacked the proper resources. [It had to await Kaplan.]

 

But Voltolini's argument is peculiar because (d) the very distinction between character and content [which  is used by Kaplan to offer a good semantic account of "I"] is, to use a Kaplan style phrase, foreshadowed by Bradley himself in defense of the (neo-)Hegelian position (Voltolini himself quotes a passage from Bradley's Logic; I could also point to several passages in Appearance and Reality), although one may grant that it is not exactly Kaplan's version of it. I call this 'peculiar' because, again as (e) Voltolini correctly notes, Voltolini's Kaplan-style-rational-reconstruction of Hegel is not theoretically neutral. [In fact, and this is an aside, (f) Voltolini acknowledges -- but then fails to develop! -- that Bradley has further resources [cough, cough, his famous regress argument] to defend his Hegelian theory against the metaphysical thesis of discrete individuals.]

 

This lack of neutrality matters (if we return to the debate between early analytic and the neo Hegelians), because Kaplan's semantic approach, with its commitment to content presupposing context, actually requires the intelligibility of discrete individuals (in some sense or another) when applied to the Russell-Bradley debate by Voltolini. [For Kaplan assumes our ability to manipulate the conceptual apparatus of direct reference.] So, while one can admire Kaplan's achievement, even hold it up as an exemplar of the kind of contribution one may wish to aspire to, it is peculiar to trot it out as somehow providing useful evidence of muddled thinking in Hegel or Bradley (or Scruton).+

 

My dispiriting suspicion, and this gets me to the point today, is that Williamson probably knows that his appeals to Voltolini and Kaplan and the excursion into muddled confusions -- are a non-sequitur; he will get away with it because why would anybody who cares about the technical issues and, more important, cares for the health of philosophy be willing to come to Scruton's defense?****