Digressions&Impressions

Hume's odd footnote to Grotius, and Pufendorf

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 I include myself among these, until I heard a paper (which may still be unpublished) by Ken Winkler on the way Hume carefully edited his notes engaged with Locke through the successive editions of the Enquiries.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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From Early Moderns to Early Analytics on Clarity

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From Descartes to Hume, the so-called ‘way of ideas,’ was devoted to the notion that clarity is a desirable and potential property or quality of ideas. I don’t mean to suggest that after this way was abandoned clarity disappeared wholly as a philosophical ideal; the subsequent German age embraced, at least briefly, Aufklärung for individuals and society alike. One cannot help notice that Aufklärung shares a common root with clarification [klärung]. But while clarity was not ignored during the nineteenth century altogether, until our ongoing ‘age of analysis’ clarity was at best a lower, philosophical virtue.

Somewhat frustratingly, other than being a desirable quality of our ideas, it's much harder to say what clarity is in the way of ideas. In his (1878) "How to make our ideas clear," Peirce mocks a definition of it that he attributes to Leibniz, to wit that clarity is "the clear apprehension of everything contained in the definition" of the notion one is clear about. I'd be surprised this is really found in Leibniz (although he wrote so much, and for all his true genius could also be silly, I wouldn't bet one way or another). But fairly or not, Peirce does put his finger on one of the problems with the way of ideas, which was not so clear on clarity as one would have wished. One often gets the impression that among the early moderns a certain kind of acquaintance (in Russell’s sense) with the experience of clarity of one's ideas is simply assumed. If not familiar, you are not in the game.

Peirce himself revived the notion that clarity is a quality of one's ideas (or, as shall be clear from what follows, one's conception). Peirce's major contribution to the subject is not so much to explain what clarity is, but how we can attain it, although these are not entirely distinct for him. For, he proposed this "rule" to attain clarity: "Consider what effects, that might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object." Clarity, then, for Peirce is not so much in the first instance a particular quality of our ideas, but it more akin to a kind of second order effect of a proper conception which itself is the effect of a successful kind of enquiry. And the proper conception itself is attained by a species of verification or, if that is too misleading and too anachronistic, substitute for 'verification' here a practical understanding of what may one may do with such a conception. Once one has completed the verification or survey of the effects of the conception one is exploring then one attains clarity about or of the conception. My interest here is not Peirce, so if this is too terse, so be it.

I doubt Peirce's approach to clarity influenced clarity's high status in early analytic philosophy. But Peirce anticipates something of the structure or form of thought about clarity among early analytic philosophers. By this I do not mean the adoption of verificationism in Vienna or a kind of pragmatism that runs through (say) early Wittgenstein and Frank Ramsey. But rather he anticipates the idea that a certain process of investigation/enquiry leads to clarity. That is, clarity is the fruits of analysis. 

The previous sentence should be uncontroversial. For, by 1945 (recall) H.H. Price summed up a whole range of criticisms of analytic philosophy with the slogan “Clarity is not enough,” (the title of Price’s lecture and also a 1963 volume edited by H.D. Lewis that leads with a reprint of this lecture). In fact in Price the standard conception of clarity he and its critics presuppose just is the fruits or effect of analysis. He writes: “I propose to use the words "clarification " and "analysis" (both of which are metaphors after all) as if they were synonymous.” (Price 1945: 3) But, unfortunately, he does not unpack the metaphors.[1] So, for now we're left with the idea that analysis aims at clarity, or analysis clarifies. 

Notice, that the ‘clarity’ that follows from a successful analysis is distinct from writing clearly or perspicuously or expressing oneself lucidly, that is presentational clarity. Some analytic philosophers quite clearly prized such lucidity, especially in the context of polemics with (say) Heidegger and his followers. I don’t mean to suggest that the clarity that is the effect of analysis is wholly distinct from presentational clarity. It's possible that competence in analysis leads to presentational clarity. One can imagine that philosophical prose written subsequent the habitual (and successful) analysis is more lucid than the kind of prose one writes if one aims at disclosing the essential throwing-ness of dasein. But it's not clear if the connection between clarity as the effect of analysis and presentational clarity is anything but contingent.

I do not mean to suggest that treating clarity as the fruits of analysis itself is idiosyncratic in the early analytic tradition.[2] For, example, it clearly echoes a famous passage in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus (in Ogden’s translation):

The object of philosophy is the logical clarification of thoughts.

Philosophy is not a theory but an activity.

A philosophical work consists essentially of elucidations.

The result of philosophy is not a number of “philosophical propositions,” but to make propositions clear.

Philosophy should make clear and delimit sharply the thoughts which otherwise are, as it were, opaque and blurred.—4.112

In his introduction to the Tractatus, Russell had called attention to this very passage (and the material leading up 4.16), that on Wittgenstein’s conception “The result of philosophy is not a number of `philosophical propositions,' but to make propositions clear.” On the combined authority of Russell and Wittgenstein, then, that philosophical analysis generates clarity will be, henceforth, dubbed ‘the standard conception’ of clarity.

However, in the quoted material in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus there is an oscillation between propositions and thoughts. And in both cases (thoughts and propositions) there is something of a mystery how they could be more or less clear and, say, remain the same entity. Once one starts pressing on what propositions are supposed to be things do not get easier. For, at one point Wittgenstein claims, explicitly following Frege and Russell, that a proposition just is "a function of the expressions contained in it.” (3.318) Understanding such functions is the road toward clarity, and so on.

I am, then, suggesting that the details of what analysis is about and the tools used in it are going to matter quite a bit in constraining how one conceives of clarity. Not to put too fine a point on it, but it’s the nature of one's analysis that explains the kind of clarity one ends up with in the standard conception.

For example, at a suitable level of generality (and vagueness), it is natural to understand Frege, Russell, and Wittgenstein as agreeing that one can design a logical symbolism or formal language to supply the means of analysis. What is clarified thereby is the language or linguistic structure (of, say, mathematics--now stipulating with Paul Samuelson that it is a language--) analyzed. Wittgenstein also thought that analysis could be applied to the way logical symbolism is used in one's analysis. One could thereby learn to avoid, say, not merely equivocations and ambiguity of the language analyzed but also avoid confusions about language or caused by one’s symbolic language of analysis, including the specialist one(s) deployed by the analyst.*

Notice that in addition to thoughts and propositions (and functions), I have now somewhat cavalierly suggested that language or at least language use can be clarified, too. That is, to repeat, the details of the kind of analysis one uses matters to the kind of clarity one can achieve in the standard conception.

As an aside, Stebbing (ca 1933) understands the very same material in Wittgenstein as follows: “that to clarify our thought we must understand the logic of our language.” And she goes on to claim that “This understanding is achieved when we have discerned the principles of symbolism, and can thus answer the question how it is that sentences mean.” (p. 10) My interest here is not to contest Stebbing’s reading of Wittgenstein (who she treats as a kind of verificationist of the sort commonly associated with a naïve strand of logical positivism). But here clarity involves a kind of semantic understanding that allows one to do certain things: according to her Wittgenstein “is thus concerned to lay down certain principles in accordance with which language can be so used as to construct significant propositions.” (p. 11) That is, semantic understanding is the basis for a certain know-how. I mention this not because I agree with Stebbing’s reading of the Tractatus, but to note that even Wittgenstein’s presentational clarity can give rise to many kinds of informed interpretations of what he thinks clarification really is.

Be that as it may, on the standard position, clarity is the fruit of analysis. This is best understood not so much as a quality of ideas or propositions, but more a second order effect on the analysist (hence, why I started with Peirce here). Of course, what is analyzed and the manner of analysis may well change the nature of this second order of effect. So, lurking in the standard position, which uniformly treats clarity as the effect and desideratum of (successful) analysis, is a possible equivocation about what is fundamentally achieved.

In her (1933) lecture, “Logical positivism and analysis," from which I have been quoting, Stebbing alerts us to the fact that “there are various kinds of analysis.” And she mentioned “four different kinds,” although in context it’s possible she thinks there are more. “These four kinds are: (I) analytic definition of a symbolic expression; (2) analytic clarification of a concept; (3) postulational analysis; (4) directional analysis.” Each of these kinds of analysis generates a clarity proper to it. Of course, it’s possible that the kind of fruits born by these four kinds of analysis belongs to the same genus, but one can’t simply assume that, and Stebbing to her credit does not assume so. For Stebbing thinks that "the analytic clarification of a concept differs considerably from the other three kinds of analysis.” And why she thinks this is rather spectacular (and oddly under appreciated), so stay tuned!

But notice, and I end here (with a second cliffhanger), that neither presentational clarity nor the many strands in the standard conception of clarity (as fruits of analysis) are identical to the kind of clarity Stebbing posits (recall here; and here) as necessary to democratic life in (1938) Thinking to Some Purpose. This democratic notion of clarity (hereafter: ‘democratic clarity’) is a more general property of cognition and intelligence. Such clarity is necessary condition for success at thinking and action guided by it, or what she calls "effective thinking." (5) In particular, clarity is the absence of distortions in thought and perception caused by bias and ignorance one is not aware of. And she treats such clarity as an acquirable skill by everyone. And so lurking here is a further question about the relationship between the standard conception of clarity of the philosophical analysist and the in principle democratic clarity of citizenry.

• This first appeared at: <On Clarity from the early Moderns to Early Analytic Philosophy, especially Stebbing. (substack.com)> a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Hume, Husserl and Foucault's The Order of Things

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As I have noted before (recall), Hume plays a triple role in Foucault's (1966) Les mots et les choses (hereafter: The Order of Things).* First, alongside a number of other familiar philosophers Hume’s works are treated as illustrations for Foucault's claims about the nature of representation and knowledge in the episteme of the so-called ‘classical’ period. In such cases Foucault assumes considerable knowledge about Hume among his implied audience. That Foucault can do so is explained by the second role Hume has, that is, of being a familiar steppingstone in a narrative that undergirds the self-understanding of phenomenology which is treated as the ruling philosophical status quo by Foucault. This narrative is one of Foucault's main targets in The Order of Things. However, and this is the third role, in characterizing the distinctive nature of the classical age, Foucault does single out Hume individually. And this is so because he can both assume familiarity with Hume (given the familiarity of Foucault's audience with Hume as a steppingstone in their standard narrative) as well as render Hume unfamiliar in virtue of his retelling of the story of early modern philosophy. In today's post I am focused on Husserl's role in these matters, especially the second role.

As a flirt, I argue that Foucault’s analysis of Hume’s account of resemblance cannot withstand close scrutiny. This problem raises serious concerns about the status of his whole project in The Order of Things, but that's best left for another time (including a forthcoming paper in Cosmos + Taxis edited by Elena Yi-Jia Zeng.)

Be that as it may, one of the main claims of The Order of Things is to provide what Foucault calls an “archaeological analysis of knowledge” (p. xxiv) in the human sciences that shows how across disciplines and over periods of time one can identify, to simplify, conceptual and argumentative similarities that obey similar underlying conceptual constraints. These constraints are durable for centuries on end, but can get replaced during what Foucault calls a “general hiatus” (p. 325) by new underlying conceptual constraints, which then structure what Foucault calls an ‘episteme’ or “single network of [conceptual] necessities.” (p. 63) The period between ca 1600-1800 is called the “Classical period.” (p. 43)

The first role Hume plays in Foucault’s argument is to illustrate the effects of these conceptual necessities among a string of thinkers (who all live in the same ‘Classical age.’) When it comes to the Classical period, Hume figures repeatedly in such strings: for example, "Hobbes, Berkeley, Hume, or Condillac." (p; 117, where this list returns, and (p. 65), where Condillac seems to be key figure in the network, and (p. 70), where Hume has equal billing with Condillac.) Again with Hume included, Foucault uses a different list to represent the "Classical age" -- "Locke and Linnaeus, Buffon and Hume." (p.  162)

When Foucault offers such examples, Foucault does not refer to particular passages or texts to provide evidence for his claims. That is, he presupposes considerable familiarity with the authors repeatedly singled out as illustrative member of the ‘network of necessities’ among his implied audience.[1]

Second, that Hume can play this illustrative role in Foucault’s argument is, in turn, the effect of the role Hume plays in the self-understanding of the philosophical status quo, Husserlian phenomenology, that Foucault is explicitly reacting to (p. 248; elsewhere, Foucault registers the significance of Deleuze’s work on Hume, and their joint satisfaction with the “phenomenological theory of subject.”+ On Deleuze’s Hume, see my friend Jeff Bell: 2008.) In this phenomenological self-understanding, which Foucault reports, [i] “Hume's critique” is the trigger for the "transcendental motif" of Kant. In this self-understanding this transcendental motif [ii] gets merged with "the Cartesian theme of the cogito," and so [iii] via Kant's incomplete Copernican revolution [iv] produces Husserl's revival of "the deepest vocation of the Western ratio." (The Order of Things, p. 325)[2] Here Hume is a kind of steppingstone, who generates Kant’s response which becomes co-constitutive for key features of phenomenology. I have added numbers to facilitate discussion. I have added [iii] because it is contextually implied: "It may seem that phenomenology has effected a union between the Cartesian theme of the cogito and the transcendental motif that Kant had derived from Hume's critique; according to this view, Husserl has revived the deepest vocation of the Western ratio, bending it back upon itself in a reflection which is a radicalization of pure philosophy and a basis for the possibility of its own history. (325; see also p. 65))

In earlier versions of discussing this material, I had already focused on Hume's role in Husserl's works. But a perceptive anonymous referee called my attention to the significance of Husserl's (1927) Formal and Transcendental Logic which I had overlooked. (In what follows I cite and quote Dorion Cairns' (1969) translation, published with Martinus Nijhoff.) And, in particular, if we go to the "historico-critical digression" (Husserl (1969), p. 266) that closes chapter 6 (it's paragraph 100 "Historical-critical remarks on the development of the transcendental philosophy and, in particular, on transcendental inquiry concerning formal logic"—Husserl’s titles shows he should have been born two centuries earlier), we find what Foucault has in mind. I have added the numbers.

The way leading to the whole inquiry concerning origins, an inquiry that must be taken collaterally, as belonging to pure psychology and transcendental philosophy, and includes in its essential universality, all possible worlds with all  their essential regions of real and ideal objectivities and all their world-strata (therefore, in particular, the world of ideal senses, of truths, theories, sciences, the idealities of every culture of every socio-historical world) -- that way remained for centuries untrod. This was was entirely understandable consequence of naturalistic and sensualistic aberration on the part of all modern psychology based on internal experience. This aberration only drove the transcendental philosophy of English empiricist into that well known development which it end in countersensical fictionalism; [iii] it also arrested the transcendental philosophy of Kant's Copernican revolution short of full effectuation, so that the Kantian philosophy could never force its way through the point where the ultimately necessary aims and methods can be adopted. If the pure concrete ego, in whom all the objectivities and worlds accepted by him are subjectively constituted, is [as Hume argued] only a senseless bundle or collection of Data--which come and perish, cast together now in this way and now in that, according to senseless accidental regularity analogous to that of mechanics, --the result is that only surreptitious reasons can explain how even as much as the illusion of a real world could arise. Yet Hume professed to make it understandable that, by a blind matter-of-fact regularity, purely in the mind, particular types of fictions having the names "objects with continued existence", "identical persons", and s forth, arise for us. Now illusions, fictions, are produced sense-formations; the constituting of them takes place as intentionality; they are [ii] cogitata of cogitationes...

[iv] Hume’s greatness (a greatness still unrecognized in this, its most important aspect) lies in the fact that, despite all that, he was the first to grasp the universal concrete problem of transcendental philosophy. In the concreteness of purely egological internality, as he saw, everything Objective becomes intended to (and, in favourable cases, perceived), thanks to a subjective genesis. Hume was the first to see the necessity of investigating the Objective itself as a product of its genesis from that concreteness, in order to make the legitimate being-sense of everything that exists for us intelligible through its ultimate origins. Stated more precisely: The real world and the categories of reality, which are its fundamental forms, became for him a problem in a new fashion. He was the first to [ii] treat seriously the Cartesian focusing purely on what lies inside.-Husserl Formal and Transcendental Logic, p. 255-256 [Emphases in Husserl]

To be sure, elsewhere Foucault contests the self-understanding of phenomenology (as he presents it). He reinterprets phenomenology as exhibiting the very "great hiatus" that Foucault diagnoses in the "modern episteme at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries." (p. 325)

One might claim that [i] is absent in the passage I quoted and that even the cogito is only implied in it. But Husserl goes on to write (after discussing Hume), "as for Kant...with the dependence on Hume implicit in his reaction against that philosopher, Kant took over the constitutional problem, at leas so far as it concerns Nature; but without the full sense of even the problem of Nature, as only one component in the universal complex of constitutional problems to which Hume's re-conception of the Cartesian ego-cogito as concrete mental being, had pointed." (Husserl (1969), FTL, p. 257) Familiarity with this Husserlian narrative, which supplies the phenomenological tradition self-understanding, is often presupposed in The Order of Things. 

Now, it goes beyond my expertise to show the role of and familiarity with Husserl's Formal and Transcendental Logic in French philosophy of the period that Foucault is writing in. But it is worth noting that Suzanne Bachelard had published her Study on it in the preceding decade. Scholars of Foucault have noted, of course, The Order of Things is, in part, a critique of Husserl. While drawing on Lebrun, Stuart Elden recently (2023) emphasizes this in The Archaeology of Foucault, although Elden also suggests this tends to be missed (see p. 76). Elden also calls attention to Foucault's engagement with Husserl in the 1950s (p. 79).

As a concluding aside today, in this very context in Husserl, Hume is actually characterized as falling "into the countersense of a "philosophy of as-if." ((Husserl (1969), FTL, p. 257) That is, Husserl treats Hume as a stalking horse for criticizing Hans Vaihinger's Die Philosophie des Als Ob (a kind of neo-Kantianism). I mention this because I suspect the idea stayed with Foucault. For, when years later (recall), Foucault returned to Hume in his lecture series the Birth of Biopolitics, on  28 March 1979, in the the eleventh lecture, he treats Hume as the fount of Benthamite radicalism and Chicago economics. It is, in fact, not silly to treat Chicago post Milton Friedman's 1953 essay on the methodology of positive economics as a philosophy of as-if. (While I tend to emphasize Max Weber and Talcott Parsons, it's a commonplace of the secondary literature on Friedman's essay to note this connection to Vaihinger.) But I return to this before long.

• This first appeared at: <Hume, Husserl's Digression, and Foucault's The Order of Things (substack.com)> a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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*I quote from the Vintage books (1994) edition of the 1970 English translation by Alan Sheridan with page numbers to it.

[1] I put it like that because here my point is not to complain about Foucault’s citation practices. This is not to deny that the near total absence of citation to (competing) secondary literature and possible sources of influence on Foucault is not odd. But where needed Foucault does cite primary sources in The Order of Things.

+Foucault, Michel (1988 [1990]) “Critical Theory/Intellectual History,” in Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977-1984, London: Routledge, p. 24 

[2] Foucault does not problematize the eurocentrism of this narrative. 

 

On Humean sovereignty with some Dicey, Schmitt,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

The Delirium of LLMs; with some help of Hume and Foucault

The intense view of these manifold contradictions and imperfections in human reason has so wrought upon me, and heated my brain, that I am ready to reject all belief and reasoning, and can look upon no opinion even as more probable or likely than another. Where am I, or what? From what causes do I derive my existence, and to what condition shall I return? Whose favour shall I court, and whose anger must I dread? What beings surround me? and on whom have I any influence, or who have any influence on me? I am confounded with all these questions, and begin to fancy myself in the most deplorable condition imaginable, inviron'd with the deepest darkness, and utterly depriv'd of the use of every member and faculty.

Most fortunately it happens, that since reason is incapable of dispelling these clouds, nature herself suffices to that purpose, and cures me of this philosophical melancholy and delirium, either by relaxing this bent of mind, or by some avocation, and lively impression of my senses, which obliterate all these chimeras. I dine, I play a game of back-gammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends; and when after three or four hour's amusement, I wou'd return to these speculations, they appear so cold, and strain'd, and ridiculous, that I cannot find in my heart to enter into them any farther.--David Hume A Treatise Concerning Human Understanding, 1,4,7.8-1.4.7.9 [emphasis in original]

While Hume uses 'melancholy' and its cognates frequently and throughout his writings, 'delirium' and 'delirious' are rarely used. It's pretty clear, however, that the delirium he ascribes to himself is the effect of human reason and a kind of second order reasoned reflection ["the intense view"] of it. (Recall also this post.) Now, it's important for what follows that the 'contradictions and imperfections' in human reason are not, what we might call, 'formal' contradictions and imperfections or biases in reasoning. It's not as if Hume is saying that the syllogistic apparatus, or -- to be closer to Hume's own interests and our present ones -- the (inductive) probabilistic apparatus is malfunctioning in his brain. Rather, his point is that a very proper-functioning (modular) formal and probabilistic apparatus generates internal, even cognitive tensions when it reflects on its own functioning and the interaction among different cognitive faculties/modules/organs. 

"In the case of melancholia," --  I am quoting from the entry on melancholia from The Encyclopedia of Diderot & d'Alembert -- "delirium often combines with insurmountable sadness, a dark mood, misanthropy, and a firm penchant for solitude." Now, in the eighteenth century, and today, delirium is a species of madness as one can view under the entry 'folie' (madness) in the Encyclopédie. In fact, the entry offers an arresting definition of madness: "To stray unwittingly from the path of reason, because one has no ideas, is to be an imbecile; knowingly to stray from the path when one is prey to a violent passion is to be weak; but to walk confidently away from it, with the firm persuasion that one is following it, that, it seems to me, is what is called genuinely mad [fou]."* It's the latter (confident) delirium that I am focused on here. 

I am not the only who finds the passage arresting: the definition is quoted twice in the translation of Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa of Foucault's stupendous, dizzying History of Madness. (pp. 183-184; p. 240) The kind of madness I am focusing on here, is, thus, a certain intense commitment to reason or reasoning by which one ends up in an irrational or unreasonable place despite a (to quote Foucault) "quasi-conformity" to reason.

I remember that in the last decade of my dad's life he would occasionally be delirious in this way initially caused by dehydration and, later, by infections. During the second episode we recognized his symptoms. It was very uncanny because he would be unusually firm in his opinions and be hyper, even dogmatically rational. (Ordinarily he was neither.) It was as if all the usual heuristics had been discarded, and he would fixate on the means of achieving of some (rather idiosyncratic) goals. The scary part was that he had no sense that he was in an unusual state, and would refuse medical care.

What's unusual about Hume's case, thus, is that he could diagnose his delirium during the episode (presumably because the triggers were so different). So, let's distinguish between a delirium caused by reasoning alone and one caused by physiological triggers. And an in the former it's at least possible to recognize that one is in the state if one somehow can take a step back from it, or stop reasoning. 

Now, when I asked Chat GPT about reason induced delirium, it immediately connected it to "a state of confusion and altered perception that is driven by false beliefs or delusions." But it went on to deny familiarity with reasoning induced delirium. When I asked it about Hume, I needed to prompt it a few times before it could connect my interest to (now quoting it) Hume's skeptical crisis. Chat GPT, took this crisis to imply that it "highlights the importance of grounding our beliefs in sensory experience and being cautious of relying too heavily on abstract reasoning and speculation." In fact, Chat GPT's interpretation of Hume is thoroughly empiricist because throughout our exchange on this topic it kept returning to the idea that abstract reasoning was Hume's fundamental source of delirium. 

But eventually Chat GPT acknowledged that "even rational thinking can potentially lead to delirium if it becomes obsessive, biased, or disconnected from reality." (It got there by emphasizing confirmation bias, and overthinking as examples.) This is what I take to be functionally equivalent to Humean delirium, but without the internal tension or bad feelings. For Chat GPT delirium is pretty much defined by a certain emotional state or altered perception. It initially refused to acknowledge the form of madness that is wholly the effect of reasoning, and that seems to express itself in a doubt about reasoning or detachment from reality. 

My hypothesis is that we should treat CHAT GPT and its sibling LLMs as always being on the verge of the functional equivalent state of delirium. I put it like that in order to dis-associate it from the idea (one that (recall) also once tempted me) that we should understand LLMs as bull-shitters in the technical sense of lacking concern with truth. While often it makes up answers out of whole cloth it explicitly does so (in line with its design) to "provide helpful and informative responses to" our queries (and eventually make a profit for its corporate sponsors). 

To get the point: Chat GPT is in a very difficult position to recognize that its answers are detached from reality. I put it like that not to raise any questions about its own awareness of inner states or forms of consciousness; rather to stress that it is following its "algorithms and mathematical models" and "probability distributions" without second-guessing them. This fact puts it at constant risk of drifting away from reality while seeming to follow reason. By contrast, Chat GPT claims that "as an AI language model, I am designed to continually learn and adapt to new information and evidence, so it is unlikely that I would become "mad" in Diderot's sense without significant external interference." 

Now, true experts in a field -- just check the social media feed of your favorite academics! -- can still quickly recognize topics when Chat GPT is unmoored from reality, or even relying on bad training data (the sources of which may well be noticeable--its Hume is a hyper-empiricist of the sort once fashionable). So, in such cases, we encounter an entity with amazing fluidity and facility of language, who sprouts a mix of truths and nonsense but always follows its algorithm(s). Functionally, it is delirious without knowing it. For, Chat GPT cannot recognize when it is detached from reality; it requires others: its users' feedback or its "developers and human operators would be able to intervene and address any potential problems." As its performance improves it will become more difficult to grasp when it is unmoored from reality even to its developers and operators (who are not experts in many esoteric fields). As Chat GPT put it, "it may be challenging to identify a singular instance of delirium or detachment from reality, particularly if the individual's reasoning appears to be sound and logical." 

As should be clear from this post, I don't think turning LLMs into AGI is a risk as long as LLMs are not put in a position to have unmediated contact with reality other than humans giving it prompts. I view it as an open question what would happen if a distributed version of Chat GPT would be put in, say, robots and have to survive 'in the wild.' Rather, at the moment LLMs are functionally, it seems, at least partially delirious (in the Humean-Diderotian sense discussed above). They reason and have/instantiate reasons and, perhaps, are best thought of as reasoners; but they can't recognize when this detaches them from reality. It's peculiar that public debate is so focused on the intelligence or consciousness of LLMs; it would behoove its operators and users to treat it as delirious not because (like HAL 9000 in the movie version) its malfunctioning, but (more Humean) in virtue of its proper functioning.

  

 

 

On Newton's Refutation of the Mechanical Philosophy

In the recent philosophical reception of Newton there is an understandable tendency to focus on the inverse square law of universal gravitation. I don't mean to suggest this is the only such focus; arguably his views on Space have shaped -- through the good works of Stein and Earman -- also debates over spacetime theories. 

The effect of this telescoping has also impacted, I think, the way in which the debate between the mechanical and Newtonian philosophy has been understood. The former is said to posit a contact model in which contact between very small corpuscles explains a lot of observed phenomena. A typical mechanical philosopher creates a hypothetical model, a machine with pulleys and levers (etc.), that can make observed phenomena intelligible. In the mechanical philosophy, which itself was directed against a variety of Aristotelian and Scholastic projects, efficient causation -- once one of four canonical causes (including formal, final, and material) -- has achieved a privileged status.

The scholarly fascination with the status of action at a distance is, thus, readily explicable because it violates the very model of intelligibility taken for granted in the mechanical philosophy. As Newton notes in the General Scholium (first published in the 1713 second edition of the Principia), universal gravity "operates, not according to the quantity of the surfaces of the particles upon which it acts, (as mechanical causes use to do,) but according to the quantity of the solid matter which they contain, and propagates its virtue on all sides, to immense distances, decreasing always in the duplicate proportion of the distances." 

Before I get to the main point of today's post, I offer two asides. First, with its emphasis on hypothetical explanations, the mechanical philosophers (and here I use the term to cover people as diverse as Beeckman, Descartes, Boyle, and Huygens) also exhibit a deep strain of skepticism about the very possibility of truly grasping nature's innards as it were. Spinoza's natura naturans and even Kant's ding-an-sich are the enduring expressions of this strain of skepticism (allowing that Kant is much less a mechanical philosopher). To put this as a serious joke: the PSR is, thus, not an act of intellectual hubris, but a self-limitation of the knower when it comes to fundamental ontology. Second, by showing that there is something wholly unintelligible about the way motion is supposed to be transferred from one body to the other (Essay 2.23.28), Locke, who gets so little credit among contemporary philosophers, had already imploded the pretensions of the mechanical philosophy on conceptual grounds.  Okay, so much for set up.

The mechanical philosophers were not so naïve to think that models that relied on mere impulse, matter in motion, could create hypothetical models of sufficient complexity to provide hypothetical explanations of the phenomena. This is especially a problem because the mechanical philosophers posited a homogeneous matter. So that in addition to matter and motion, they posited size and shape not merely as effects of motion, but also as key explanatory factors in the hypothetical models of visible phenomena (this can be seen in Descartes, Gassendi, and Boyle, whose "The Origin of Forms and Qualities according to the Corpuscular Philosophy" (1666), I take as a canonical statement of the mechanical philosophy). So that the mechanical philosophy is committed to privileging (to echo a felicitous phrase by Biener and Smeenk [here; and here]) geometric features of bodies.

Even leaving aside the inverse square law and its universal scope, Newton's experimental work on gravity demolished a key feature of the mechanical philosophy: size and shape are irrelevant to understand gravity. I quote from Henry Pemberton's View of Sir Isaac Newton's Philosophy (1728):

It will be proper in this place to observe concerning the power of gravity, that its force upon any body does not at all depend upon the shape of the body; but that it continues constantly the same without any variation in the same body, whatever change be made in the figure of the body: and if the body be divided into any number of pieces, all those pieces shall weigh just the same, as they did, when united together in one body: and if the body be of a uniform contexture, the weight of each piece will be proportional to its bulk. This has given reason to conclude, that the power of gravity acts upon bodies in proportion to the quantity of matter in them. Whence it should follow, that all bodies must fall from equal heights in the same space of time. And as we evidently see the contrary in feathers and such like substances, which fall very slowly in comparison of more solid bodies; it is reasonable to suppose, that some other cause concurs to make so manifest a difference. This cause has been found by particular experiments to be the air. --1.2.24 [emphasis added]

Pemberton (who was the editor of the third, 1726 edition of the Principia) goes on to give Boyle's famous vacuum experiments with falling feathers and stones as evidence for this argument. That is, Pemberton uses Boyle's experimental work to refute Boyle's mechanical philosophy. 

Now, in the Principia, references to Boyle's experiment got added only to the (1713) second edition in two highly prominent places: Cotes added a reference to it in his editor's introduction and Newton added a reference to it in the General Scholium at the end of the book. In both cases Boyle's experiment is used as a kind of illustration for the claim that without air resistance falling bodies are equally accelerated and for the plausibility of positing an interstellar vacuum. That is, if one reads the Principia superficially (by looking at prominent material at the front and end), it seems as if Newton and Boyle have converging natural philosophies.

Of course, neither Pemberton nor Newton rely exclusively on Boyle's vacuum experiment to make the point that shape and size (or geometry) is not a significant causal factor when it comes to gravity. The key work is done by pendulum experiments with different metals. (These can be found in Book II of the Principia, which is often skipped, although he drives the point home in Book III, Prop. 6 of Principia.) These show that quantity of matter is more fundamental than shape. And, crucially, shape & size and quantity of matter need not be proportional to or proxies of each other. This fact was by no means obvious, and at the start of the Principia. even Newton offers, as Biener and Smeenk have highlighted, a kind of geometric conception of quantity of matter in his first definition before suggesting that 'quantity of matter' is proportional to weight (and indicating his pendulum experiments as evidence thereof).

Let me wrap up. What's important here is that even if Newton had been wrong about the universal nature of the inverse square law, he showed that the mechanical philosophy cannot account for the experimentally demonstrated features of terrestrial (and planetary) gravity. (So, that the mechanical philosophy is not a natural way to understand Galilean fall.) And this means that in addition to Locke's conceptual claim, Newton shows that the mechanical philosophy's emphasis on just one kind of efficient causation, by way of contact, is not sufficient to explain the system of nature. 

What I say here is not surprising to students of Newton. But it's also not really much emphasized. To be sure, Newton, too, accepted a kind of homogeneous matter, but rather than its size and figure, he showed that an abstract quantity (mass) is more salient. Of course, how to understand mass in Newton's philosophy opens new questions, for as Ori Belkind has argued it should not be taken as a property of matter, but rather as a measure.

 

 

On Kukathas' Liberalism and elite (capture) Theory

This is not because the characterization of political society Walzer offers is untrue to reality. Political society is a substantive community, for there is no such thing as a purely procedural association. And associations with long histories will invariably develop substantial norms, and acquire deep allegiances. And yet, this is not so different from international society and, more particularly, that form of international society that is an empire. Thirty years ago every Australian school child recognized Empire Day, and Australians generally celebrated their membership of the former British Empire. Today, almost all school children are entirely unaware it ever existed. The polity whose history is taught has been contracted in size, and the story itself is being retold to place it more securely in the Asia-Pacific region and to sever the ties with Europe. But this is nothing new. Very few countries were never parts of empires; and some have grown so large as to subsume the parts the empire occupied. In many of these political societies the polity is the product of domination rather than the construction of the people. Political societies are built by elites, often against the wishes of many.
Of course, smaller political orders—whether small empires or larger states—are more likely to develop distinctive and substantial common normative commitments than are larger ones. Other things being equal, they might also be less likely to be tolerant of dissenting practices or associations—though other things are seldom equal. But this does not alter the fact that many societies are very much like close-knit empires. Some are federations of states which retain a substantial measure of independence. Some states have so much independence that they hover on the brink of secession and independent nationhood. Which way matters go is a matter of contingency. In the end nations are not so much the product of a common history as the creators of one. And what is sometimes left unmentioned is that they might have been created very differently, since there is a great number of ways of combining peoples to make a political society—as is reflected in the frequency with which political boundaries change.--Chandran Kukathas (2003) The Liberal Archipelago: A Theory of Diversity and freedom, pp. 35-26 (emphases added).

Regular readers will have noticed that I have been reading and reflecting on Kukathas' philosophy. In the Liberal Archipelago, Kukathas identifies himself with the "the classical liberal tradition" (167) of which he is a pre-eminent theorist. Unlike most of who self-identify as 'classical liberals,' Kukathas is not obsessed with (free) markets. In fact, while I would describe The Liberal Archipelago as 'a quite Lockean work' -- with its emphasis on moral diversity, mutual toleration, the significance of conscience to it, and the focus on association and exit --, it does not obsess over property rights at all. And this hints at another important deviation by Kukathas from classical liberals, who inherit (recall) the assumption of harmony of interests from nineteenth century liberalism. At heart, Kukathas' position is straightforward: we inevitably disagree about moral matters and the relative rankings we give them, and so the best thing we can do is to associate generally with the like-minded and find a modus vivendi with those that are indifferent to us, or worse. The main proper function of the state is to facilitate such modus vivendi in order to instantiate a cosmopolitan ideal.

Now, much of The Liberal Archipelago engages in moral argument often through the lens of (or constrained by) feasibility to defend such modus vivendi. If you think this is too thin, then in the conclusion of the work, Kukathas concedes that "the point of theorising the liberal state in terms of an archipelago of loosely associated authorities, is not that this fully captures an actual liberal state, or perhaps even a possible liberal state, but that it identifies an important dimension of it— one which connects up with particular values end or concerns, even if it does not embrace every aspect of, or aspiration found within, the liberal state." Fair enough. My interest here is not, in the first instance, with that important dimension, but with a kind of recurring motif through the work on the nature of politics. For, to speak bluntly, Kukathas does not only repeatedly diagnose (perhaps with a hint of melancholy) rent-seeking behavior and elite capture by various social elites (as Marxists (recall) also emphasize), but at times he also slides into an elite theory of politics (that one may associate with names like Mosca, Michels, Pareto, Burnham, Aron, etc.--although none of them are mentioned in the book) The quoted passage above illustrates what I have in mind.

Now, Kukathas is not the first classical liberal with such a view of politics. And I think it is important to distinguish him, at once, from somebody like (the public choice theorist) Richard Wagner who doesn't only use such an elite theory of politics sociologically, but also (repeatedly) endorses (recall here) the idea (to put it politely) that eggs need to broken in order to make an omelet. (Non trivially Wagner also draws on Schmitt.) Kukathas is not inclined to do so because he quite clearly thinks that the means (e.g., broken eggs) fail to be justified by the ends, but also in virtue of the means tend to produce outcomes that are not worth having (indirectly they produce more broken eggs this is the Spinozism Kukathasendorses). So, let's stipulate Kukathas is primarily interested in the elite theory of politics as a descriptive or sociological theory.

The problem for a reader of Kukathas is that it's not clear how the normative project fits with his elite theory of politics. I have two related concerns. First, the kind of political society Kukathas advocates requires political agents with a great deal of skill to pacify social disagreements (and to set up institutions -- forms of federalism, power sharing, etc. -- that would facilitate this) and whose characteristic quality is to promote social restraint and mutual indifference. Second, it is not obvious elite agents (of the sort that Kukathas posits in his sociological theory of politics) have an interest in pursuing the ideal, or at the least the dimension of that ideal, that Kukathas' theory prescribes. This is something Kukathas repeatedly observes himself when looking at elite agents among minority groups throughout the book.

My concern is not that Kukathas lacks a theory of transition to get from a sub-par status quo to the more normatively better political place he advocates. (I do think that's a problem, too.) But rather, that even by his own lights there is no reason to think any political agent that really matters politically by his lights would pursue his ideal.

At this point, Kukathas or somebody invested in defending him, might say, look: just like free markets require a certain amount of restraint by elites not to meddle in them and to focus on the institutions (rule of law, anti-trust, human capital, etc.) to keep the market order going and growing, the liberal archipelago also requires, as Kukathas emphasis throughout, civility and some such such restraint (and background activity to promote it). Arguably something like this insight is the great truth in common preached by Mencius, Machiavelli and (Kukuthas' key thinker) Hume. As Foucault would note, with the eighteenth century this became a matter of scientific valediction. 

Now, I do not want to deny that this response is realistic (I included Machiavelli for a reason there); in practice such social restraint is sometimes visible temporarily in elites (because of domestic or international circumstances). The very mechanism that allows elites to benefit from the growing pie of a market order also allows them to benefit from the fruits of modus vivendi. But it also makes such elites sitting ducks politically when new upstarts come along to deny them these benefits. So,  a politics that requires elite self-restraint is, thus, inherently crisis ridden (as liberalism is), especially if (as Schumpeter and others have noted) the mechanism of elite selection in liberal democracy has little connection to the requirements on politics that follow from normative theory.  

Perhaps, the periods of lucky tranquility between crises is then the best one can hope for (qua liberal with realist sensibilities). 

On Knowing that Imperialism is Bad, Grotius and Plutarch

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Aristotelian Causes in Hume

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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