Digressions&Impressions

Long Covid Diaries: On Gaukroger (RIP), Jongbloed (RIP), and Margaritaville

[This post was first published at: digressions.impressions.substack here. To receive new posts and support my work  consider becoming a paid subscriber at <digressionsimpressions.substack.com>]

One of the great joys of academic life is that, if you are receptive to it, you meet interesting new people. These are generally also younger than you — any campus is a steep pyramid in which the young vastly outnumber you at any age — and so you can avoid the slow vanishing of landmarks and shared habits that are so characteristic of natural aging and decay.

I mention this because on Friday, while at a lunch to mark the bittersweet departure of my co-author Federica Russo who landed a professorship in Utrecht {and so reminded me of the persistent dysfunctionality of my home university], I met bright young scholars with inspiring projects in the philosophy department. (It was my first encounter with the department in almost four years.) I was also reminded that these long covid diaries are sometimes read by more distant acquaintances. (For my official "covid diaries" see here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here;  here; here; here;  here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here;  here;  here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here;  here; here; here; here; and here.)

As I walked home over the bustling Rokin I was in a reflective mood not just because of the lunch. Earlier that day I had visited the practice of my dad’s foot reflexology therapist, Dorine van Saanten-Daane, who had grown into one of his friends. She had invited me to visit shortly after his death (recall), in part to mourn together and in part for me to experience what her therapy was like. I resisted at first because while I mourned my dad I didn’t want to have to navigate her sense of bereavement. And then lockdowns and my long covid got in the way.

As an aside, many years ago (in 2018), a student came up to my after a seminar. She turned out to be a friend of one of the children of Dorine’s long-time business partners. My student informed me (after establishing I was indeed the same Eric Schliesser that wrote Adam Smith: Systematic Philosopher and Public Thinker) that my book was proudly on display next to some memorabilia of my father’s in the practice. Back in the day when I asked Dorine about it she informed she had bought it after my dad’s death because he was so proud of me.

I think I decided to take her up on her invitation because on Monday I had told my GP about a tremor I have in my hands. My wife (a surgeon) increasingly noticed it. While it doesn’t hinder me at all in daily life (and don’t have any fixity), I do have a tendency to spill ground espresso beans when I try to put them in my Mocha. My dad used to have it, too. I always assumed it was a kind of effect of trauma with a childhood in a concentration camp. But I now think it runs in the family. (My sister revealed hers on Friday.) It seems to have only started after the onset of long covid, so it may have been triggered by it in me.

So when I visited the practice on Friday morning I discretely checked for the presence of my book. (Didn’t see it.) But later during our session Dorine did show me a tasteful collage of pictures and drawings/memorabilia connected to my dad placed on her desk. (In my mind I called it a ‘shrine.’) After some catching up I did receive a foot reflexology session which was divine although I missed most of it because I slept through it.

As regular readers know, my sister taught me a modest meditation technique that almost unfailingly puts me to sleep. Luckily Dorine took it as a big compliment seeing in it my trust and receptivity toward her. I suspected my sleep also had to do with the fact that I had been sleeping badly again because of my return to Amsterdam and the impending start of the academic year on Tuesday, my life had become more demanding with more socializing, multitasking, more meetings, and also more triggers of modest anxiety and organizational decision-making.

On the Rokin, as I was thinking of the invisible threads that still connected me to my dad’s life, I decided to write a post about Jan Jongbloed (1940-2023) an icon of my youth. Jongbloed’s passing didn’t go completely unnoticed, but it wasn’t a major event. Yet, Jongbloed was the goalkeeper in the two lost finals of 74 and 78. Unusually, even then, he played without gloves and he anticipated the ‘modern’ goalkeeper who is very much as much as the last defender as the first link in attack. He had incredible reflexes, was fearless, and had a sense of showmanship by making his saves look spectacular. (Go check it out on youtube.)

Jongbloed’s international career was incredibly long-lasting but erratic. He was never thought of as the best keeper of his era, and never played for a ‘big’ club. I saw Jongbloed play in for FC Amsterdam in a relatively empty Olympic stadium in one of the first professional matches I ever witnessed. (I believe we were taken there with the youth teams of AFC, where I played.) FC Amsterdam (then a relatively new creation that has united the professional activities of many of Amsterdam’s traditional neighborhood clubs) was, then, the other Amsterdam team. I liked listening to interviews of him because of his independence, and he spoke in the typical Amsterdam accent that was already disappearing when I was kid. FC Amsterdam soon relegated and folded.

When I was home I called my GP because I had not received a referral yet. As regular readers know, in England since May I get semi-regular botox shots in my neck in order to combat the side effects of migraine. I would like to get those in Amsterdam so I can reduce the number of visits to London while I am teaching. One of the most frustrating features of a ‘new chronic illness’ are the recurring, emotionally and physically exhausting efforts of having to get care when you are most vulnerable even after it’s been established it’s useful for you (and you are willing to pay out of pocket). In general, I don’t have libertarian sympathies, but the system of rationing and rules that structure all modern health systems does remind me of the enduring germ of truth in that philosophy.

As an aside, the initial impact of botox was spectacular. For about six weeks all my migraine related symptoms including cognitive fatigue and recurring tinnitus disappeared altogether. Unfortunately, in the second week of July, I got a modest flu on holiday and then about three weeks, the symptoms returned including the headaches. But since the second week of August, things have improved again. I do get bouts of cognitive fatigue (which is the first phase of migraine according to the neurologists at NHS’ long covid clinic in London), but I usually spot it before the headaches start and by meditating and modest rest/pause I don’t go through the next cycle of headaches. I want to continue with the botox, or at least give it a few more chances, because if I can avoid the headaches my quality of life is massively better.

The next morning I arose to news Jimmy Buffett died. I had never heard of Buffett when I stepped on Tufts’ Medford campus in the Fall of 1989. But several of my dorm-mates were from small towns in Massachusetts and Parrot Heads, and I tagged along to Great Woods to see and hear him. I loved the tailgating — a new experience — and (as we say now) the vibes. (Undoubtedly the smell of thousands of spliffs reminded me a bit of Amsterdam.)

During my sixteen years stateside, I endlessly listened to Songs You Know By Heart, especially after I got my convertible with my first pay-check (and mom and grandma’s help). I eat sliced mango nearly every day, and I always get a chuckle, then, humming a few bars from Last Mango in Paris. In fact, Come Monday (a surprisingly subtle ballad—’subtle’ one should not overuse around Buffett,), is one of my favorite songs.

In it there is lyric that goes,

Remember that night in Montana
When we said there'd be no room for doubt

Which unfailingly reminds me of my own road trip during the Fall of 1993, and uttered some such words myself in Missoula. I honor the memory of that night (the romance didn’t last), in part, by using ‘nescio’ as my email handle (and also the pen-name of one of my favorite writers).

This is all set up because I just received word from Helen Irving that Stephen Gaukroger (1950-1923) just died. I had my last lunch with Stephen outside at the Wells Tavern in Hampstead a few days before he was diagnosed with an aggressive brain tumor. Because it was my turn to treat, he had come up the hill down from Belsize Park where he and Helen owned an apartment. During our lunch he was unaware of his tumor, but in between academic gossip and talking about our work we did discuss his health because several other serious conditions required treatment after his Summer travel plans. I did share a sense of foreboding with my wife because I had noticed he was not planning any new major projects (see below).

I tend to think of Stephen as one of the great scholar of seventeenth century natural philosophy. His work on Descartes and Bacon helped inaugurate and participate in ‘the contextual turn’ of the study of history and philosophy of science. Because he was in distant Sydney, my first meeting with him was relatively late in my academic development. I suspect we first met at a HOPOS event about twenty years ago. But we first got to know each other at a small workshop Dana Jalobeanu had organized in Bucharest while I was in Leiden (so around 2007 or so). It was a consequential event for me because I first met several of my future PhD students, but also spent a long time talking with Stephen about the Leibniz and Huygens relationship while we were waiting for a delayed flight at the gate.

Not long after, my department was undergoing a merger and foreseeable budget cuts and Stephen invited me to apply for a position at the department he was building at Aberdeen alongside Catherine Wilson. This itself was a memorable trip because I first met the late M.A. (‘Sandy’) Stewart, who had retired but picked me up at the B&B I was staying at and we promptly got lost driving around an Aberdeen suburb looking for a fish restaurant. It was a tremendous opportunity, and I gave one of my best job talks ever. My better half couldn’t imagine living and being happy in Aberdeen (which she found too grey), and so I went to Gent and commuted for six hard year.

I got to know Stephen more personally only relatively recently in July 2016 when I arrived early for my first visit to Sydney because I was co-organizing the Hume Society event at the university. Stephen and Helen lived right near campus and I was invited to their lovely home filled with art. That Brexit Summer my family moved to London, and since we saw each other quite regularly on their visits to Belsize.

I knew Stephen primarily as a mild-mannered gentleman scholar who was touchingly in love with Helen whose achievements and impact he admired and he was incredibly proud of their daughter, Cressida (an accomplished Hume scholar in addition to her many other literary talents). In all my interactions with him you could tell he felt incredibly blessed with his life, his travels with Helen, and his career.

In formal retirement he has been incredibly productive, including a major series of enormous works, The Emergence of a Scientific Culture: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1210-1685; The Collapse of Mechanism and the Rise of Sensibility: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1680-1760; The Natural and the Human: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1739-1841; Civilization and the Culture of Science: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1795-1935 all with Oxford University Press. This was a man who didn’t only write about the work ethic, but also instantiated it. Over lunch at the Wells, he admitted that this huge project was a way to stay busy while satisfying his curiosity. A ‘bit like my blogging’ I said, and we both laughed heartily.

I sometimes envied Stephen not so much for his ability to complete books, but for his un-flappable nature and his general sunny disposition. However, this did not prevent him from having strong opinions. One of his last academic interventions was a polemical review in TLS. And while I increasingly believe that most polemics are unfruitful (and so unnecessary), his review had gratified my greatly (about that, perhaps, some other time). We discussed it, and Stephen told me with a relish wholly unexpected by me of how he was galvanized into writing it, and he was not at all perturbed even pleased by the polemical reactions it generated. I saw a glimpse of more fiery elements in him previously unknown to me. I will miss him, his mentorship, and our regular meals and talks. I have made a mental note to read his The Failures of Philosophy later this Fall.

On Tuesday classes start, including a new lecture course that I should be preparing. My occupational physician taught me that I should not compare my health on a day to day basis, but over longer stretches. Compared to this day two years ago and even last year, I am massively better despite being down from the glorious symptom-free heights of June. I am a bit nervous about teaching two new courses in a rather full load of three courses (one semester long, two half-semesters) this Fall. I am a bit sad that these diaries have not concluded yet.

But I visited campus earlier in the week. I saw all the students on orientation boasting to each other in their nervousness; met with the tutors, Anna and Aris, who will co-teach one of my lecture courses, and had dinner with my exciting new colleague, Kevin Pham. Come Tuesday I start my lecture on Hobbes’s social contract with a discussion of excerpts from Plato’s Crito and Manegold’s Ad Gebehardum liber, and I am so excited to invite my students along on intellectual discovery to explore jointly the roots and nature of concepts that are authoritative today. Maybe the connections we’ll forge will develop in enduring conversations between us or among them, or play an unexpected role in their lives.

• This first appeared at: <On How to Teach Old Books, Burnyeat vs Strauss, Part II (substack.com)>a reader supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Fontenelle Hybridized, Human extinction, and Spinozism

[I am phasing out D&I at typepad. This post was first published at: digressions.impressions.substack here. To receive new posts and support my work  consider becoming a paid subscriber at <digressionsimpressions.substack.com>]

A few days ago I was showing off the antiquarian books in my library to the distinguished philosopher of physics and scholar of early modern natural philosophy, Katherine Brading, she made herself comfortable and started reading my copy of one (!) of the translations of Fontenelle's (1686) Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes (known as Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds). The title-page of my copy announces it is a "new translation from the last edition of the French with great additions extracted from the best modern authors, on many curious and entertaining subjects" (and also proudly announced a glossary for technical terms). The book is dated 1760 and the translator as "A Gentleman of the Inner-Temple." There is also a second 1767 edition of this translation.

Google.books has a scan of this edition from the British Library. Somewhat oddly, despite this prominent location, this translation is omitted when people discuss translations of Fontenelle's Entretiens. So, for example, Wikipedia states: "The first English translation was published in Dublin by Sir William Donville or Domville in 1687, followed by another translation by Aphra Behn in 1688, under the title A Discovery of New Worlds and a third by John Glanvill later in 1688." In the translator's preface of recent translation (p. xlviii), H.A. Hargraves includes these three, and mentions a fourth (1715) by William Gardiner. But seems unfamiliar with this fifth, 1760 translation. There is also a sixth (1803) English translation, as Wikipedia notes, by Elizabeth Gunning that (Wikipedia omits this) includes La Lande's notes.* (The 1803 edition also gives a nice overview of French 17th editions of the work.)

In The Great Chain of Being (1936), Lovejoy exhibits familiarity with all of these, except with 'my' 1760 and the translation by Donville. And he is confident enough to claim that the 1715 by Gardiner is largely plagiarized from Glanvill's (p. 348, note 57 in the 1966 Harvard University press edition circulayed in the UK by OUP). Lovejoy acknowledges his debt to the early polymath and Newton scholar, D. Brewster's More Worlds than One. Brewster seems also unfamiliar with the 1760 translation. (Brewster was also a fine scientist!) I indirectly return to Lovejoy’s interests at the end <hint>.

My friend Helen de Cruz, plausibly treats Fontenelle's work as an early contribution to hard science fiction (that is, a speculative genre that is constrained by scientific knowledge). Often commentators treat the book also as popularization of then recent primarily Cartesian science and cosmology. In both cases the fact that the new science supports the real possibility of alien life forms is part of the recurring interest. In his introduction to the 1803 edition, Lalande gives a history of respectable/scientific speculation on extraterrestrials, and shows ample evidence this can be found all over eighteenth century natural philosophy. Fontenelle's work attracts the attention, in addition, of scholars interested in the role of learned women because the narrator's interlocuter in the book is a woman and the role of women translators of the book.

However, and this is key to what follows, when Fontenelle's book appeared it was arguably also the first book that pulled together a century’s worth of astronomical observations to put these into a coherent framework/narrative provided by the new science, in a wide sense, to be read fruitfully by natural philosophers and the educated public alike. In this latter learned 'Enlightenment' genre the book risked being quickly out of date, first surpassed by the mathematically challenging Principia of Newton and then in the more accessible Cosmotheoros written by Newton's great rival Huygens (and posthumously published by Huygens' brother Constantijn). (I showed Brading my copy of the first edition of the English translation of it, too.) But Fontenelle updated his editions to keep his book in the Enlightenment genre.* And I assume -- I need to check this carefully -- that the 1760 translation is based on the revised 1742 edition (which appeared in Fontenelle's Œuvres complètes). Fontenelle died aged nearly 100, in 1757!

At some point (ca 1700), one may well think that further interest in Fontenelle's work would by antiquarian. However, both the 1760 translation as well as the 1803 updated translation, hybridize Fontenelle's original work with a great deal of additions that reflect new scientific findings (as well as some refutations of Fontenelle's earlier speculations). This can be readily ascertained by the fact that the fifth and sixth English translation are much larger than the original or the modern (1990) English translation (mentioned above) by H.A. Hargreaves, which appeared in a pleasant, slim paperback with University of California Press, and that I used in one of the first undergraduate courses I ever taught back in the 1990s at The University of Chicago. (This 1990 edition is a translation of the first edition and so lacks the sixth evening dialogue that Fontenelle added to his 1687 edition..)

The 1803 edition and translation really are conceived as a kind of popularization (Lalande is explicit on this). But the additions of English translation of 1760 are of a different kind. These consider a wide variety of topics and new findings, and so the 1760 translation (based as it claims to be on Fontenelle's own 1742 edition) is very much in the spirit of the original Enlightenment sense of the work. It competes, in fact, with the ambitious kind of works now shunted aside as 'natural religion' (associated with names like Derham, Nieuwentijt) and works that are now slotted into the pre-history of biology like Buffon. I return to this below. One very nice feature of the 1760 translation is that all the translator’s additions are listed, descriptively, in a table of contents (and, thereby, also reveal many of the translator's non Fontenelle/Huygens/Newton sources, including Boerhaave, Desaguliers, Gravesande, Lovett, etc.).**

I am unsure who the 1760 translator -- "a gentleman of the Inner-temple" — is. But one of the additions by tthe1760 translator has attracted modest scholarly attention. In a footnote (14) to a recent paper by Huib Zuidervaart and Tiemen Cocquyt, they speculate on the following.

Intriguing is the fact – unnoticed so far – that in 1760 a text was published devoted to the optics of the human eye and the properties of light concerning colours, written by “a gentleman of the Inner Temple.” Chester Moor Hall frequently added the phrase “of the Inner Temple” to his family name, for instance in various book subscription lists, so the text (an appendix to a new English translation of a famous French cosmology book by Fontenelle) could be his. See Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds by M. de Fontenelle. A New Translation from the Latest Edition of the French with Great Additions, on Many Curious and Entertaining Subjects by a Gentleman of the Inner Temple (London: R. Whity a.o., 1760), pp. 239–263.

Their paper, "The Early Development of the Achromatic Telescope Revisited," is very much worth reading because it involves priority disputes, court cases, deception, lies of omission, etc.+ These page-numbers (pp. 239-263) are, in fact, part of the translator's addition to the fourth evening. The addition starts on p. 216 with an account of fire. Then a brief digression on dilation. And then on p. 228 starts the material on the "inflexions of the rays of light" with six definitions that lead into the text briefly described by Zuidervaart and Cocquyt (and which I consider an integral part of)!

As an aside, the history of the Inner-Temple itself originated "when a contingent of knights of the Military Order of the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem moved from the Old Temple in Holborn (later Southampton House) to a larger site between Fleet Street and the banks of the River Thames." Some readers may well wonder if they have landed on Justin Smith-Ruiu’s Hinternet, but no I am not going to lead you to templar knights. The Inner-Temple was later an inn and law school, amongst many other social functions. 

Despite the many bewildering range of additions, the main point of the 1760 edition is actually not hard to discern, especially if one is familiar with eighteenth century cosmology and natural religion. Or so I claim next.

At first sight the 1760 translation ends with the optimistic cosmic economy of nature familiar of the closing paragraphs of the first edition of the Principia: the universe is teaming with life, and comets bring the necessary building and replenishing materials of life (and even suns) to other solar systems (pp. 385-401, "Of Comets.") So, I first thought this book is a kind of Newtonian, deist providential domestication of Fontenelle's more skeptical spinozism. "Of Comets" is added, as a kind of appendix, beyond the translator's additions to the sixth evening.

However, I suspect this is a deceptive ruse. The main part of the book — we are very deep into the translator's additions to the sixth evening — nearly concludes with a short section "of chance." (In the table of contents this is listed as "of chance, applicable to what Mr. Fontenelle mentions in his work.") The translator here denies, in his own words, the so-called 'doctrine of chance' or Epicureanism. So far so good.

Now, during the eighteenth century the doctrine of chance is opposed to doctrine of order. This doctrine of order, is sub-divided between the equally heretical Spinozist doctrine of necessity which creates order immanently, and the ordered doctrine (which comes in deist and theist varieties). This is no surprise because the whole book assumes that nature has order (and often seems to appeal to various versions of the PSR). In fact, our translator goes on to claim that:

Every reasonable perfon will allow that this World, that the Universe, that every thing, we fee or know of which is great or good, was at firft formed, and is yet fupported, by a great and omnipotent Being, which we call GOD: a Being whofe attributes man knows little of, and can only judge concerning from his works, which we fee, and which when compared to what we may guefs of, Worlds unnumbered that float fufpended over our heads, in immenfe unbounded fpace are scarce any thing; therefore, as we know but little of the works of the DEITY, we can know but little of their Author it is therefore impoffible to form an adequate idea of him: here even imagination fails us, and we can only fay, he is great beyond our utmost comprehenfion. This we can judge of him with certainty; we know fufficient to anfwer all our purpofes, and therefore confequently to convince us Chance is a chimera without foundation, and that there is not any fuch thing in Nature. It is felf-evident, and does not require a demonftration: it is like an intuitive truth, as evident to our reafon as that 2 and 2 makes 4. (pp. 378-379--spelling left unmodernized)

This may seem, at first blush, a relatively orthodox Newtonian inductive claim in favor of a cautious species of deism. But extrapolating from the argument of the General scholium and reminding us of the immensity of the university, and our lack of ignorance of it, the translator basically argues we really have almost no inkling of God at all. (And this goes well beyond Newton's own view that we lack knowledge of his inner substance.) In fact, all we can really know of this god is that his existence denies the reality of chance, and so -- despite all the providential language -- Spinozism is slid back in. (This is not a surprise because Fontenelle's own work slides, despite regularly evoking deism, into Spinozism at various points.)

And in case one misses it, in the very next, and formally the last of the translator's explicit additions to Fontenelle's sixth evening, the "modern discoveries concerning the fixed stars," the translator immediately teaches his readers that it is the astronomical consensus that the cosmos is teeming with new stars and stars that go extinct. And then, after a book that has celebrated a universe teeming with life on innumerable planets, this book closes with the following chilling, even shocking line: "It is no ways improbable, that these Stars loft their brightnefs by a prodigious number of spots, which intirely covered, and as it were, overwhelmed them. In what dismal condition must their Planets remain, who have nothing but the dim and twinkling rays of the Fixed Stars to enlighten them." (383) And so, in conclusion, we come face to face with the mass extinction of aliens, and (by implication) the possibility of a very cold death of our own species (if we can't figure our interstellar flight).

• This first appeared at: <A Mysterious Translator, Fontenelle Hybridized, Human extinction, oh and the PSR (substack.com)> a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

---

*In the preface to her translation Hargreaves notes that the 1708, 1714, The 1724  (seventh), and the 1742 are all expanded editions (p. xli). There is a 1966 critical edition by Calame, which should be consulted by scholars.

**That the 1760 is very much a new hybridized book not of the late seventeenth century but of the middle of the eighteenth century, is, for example, ignored by F.J Tipler in his "A Brief History of the Extraterrestrial Intelligence Concept published in the prestigious" Quarterly Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society (1981). Based on Lovejoy, Tipler asserts (correctly) that Fontenelle's Entretiens was a bestseller and "was translated at least three times into English" (p. 127). In fact, Tipler's quotes from Fontenelle are derived from the 1760 translation (and luckily only material already present in the first)!

+If the 1760 translation is indeed by Moor Hall, it would be nice to figure out which translation he repeatedly criticized in his introduction. 

 

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.

 

 

Pufendorf and Locke on Tacit Consent (in language and money)

But that the Nature of Discourse may be more throughly understood, it must first be known, that there is a two-fold Obligation respecting Discourse, whether exprest with the Voice, or written in Characters. The first is, that those who make use of the same Language, are obliged to apply such certain Words to such certain Things, according as Custom has made them to signify in each Language. For since neither any Words nor any particular Strokes form’d into Letters can naturally denote any certain Thing (otherwise all Languages and Characters for writing would be the same; and hence the Use of the Tongue would be to no purpose if every Man might call every Thing by what Name he pleas’d;) it is absolutely necessary among those who speak the same Language, that there be a tacit Agreement among them, that this certain Thing shall be so, or so call’d, and not otherwise. So that unless an uniform Application of Words be agreed upon, ’twill be impossible for one Man to gather the Meaning of another from his Talk. By virtue then of this tacit Compact, every Man is bound in his common Discourse to apply his Words to that Sense, which agrees with the receiv’d Signification thereof in that Language: From whence also it follows, that albeit a Man’s Sentiments may differ from what he expresses in Words, yet in the Affairs of Human Life he must be look’d upon as intending what he says, tho’, as was said, perhaps his inward Meaning be the clear contrary. For since we cannot be inform’d of another’s Mind otherwise than by outward Signs, all Use of Discourse would be to no purpose, if by mental Reservations, which any Man may form as he lists, it might be in his power to elude what he had declar’d by Signs usually accepted to that end.--Pufendorf, Samuel and Barbeyrac, Jean. The Whole Duty of Man According to the Law of Nature (1673, 2003). Liberty Fund, 1673.  pp. 120-121

As regular readers know I have been directed toward Pufendorf's account of tacit consent because of my reading of Martin Lenz's entertaining and stimulating Socializing Minds (recall this post, especially; but also this one). Lenz (pp. 138-139) explicitly quotes the passage above, and notes four key anticipations of Locke in Pufendorf:

• • the characterisation of language as the great instrument of society,
  • the anti-naturalist conventionalism and the argument that if language were naturally significant, there would be just one language
  • the use of customary outward signs for inward meaning
  • the tacit agreement that binds everyone to apply words in accordance with the received use (receptus usus).--Socializing Minds, p. 138

Lenz is surely right about this, and I accept his contention that Locke's account of the conventionality of language (especially at Essay 3.2.8 and 3.11.11) is inspired by Pufendorf's  De Officio hominis civis, or at least that it would have evoked it to contemporary readers then.

So, this raises the question to what degree what I call recall 'the Humean template' for analyzing convention is already present in Pufendorf. The elements of the Humean template are: (i) a sense of common interest (i*) felt in each person's breast; (ii) and it (that is, (i)) observed in others; (iii), this fact (the existence of (i&ii) creates collaboration; (iv) the collaboration is structured in non-trivial ways; (v) and this has good consequences or positive externalities for society. (I avoid the language of 'utility' to avoid issues pertaining to utilitarianism.) And (vi) a Humean convention is contrasted with practices founded in promises and in practice regulated by formal governmental law. In addition, (vii), the process (i-iii) need not be verbalized at all. It can be entirely tacit. And I argued (recall) that Locke articulates the Humean template at Essay 2.28.10 in the context of describing how moral terms are structurally the same in each language even though they can refer to locally different moral behaviors and characters/character-traits. (And that we can also find (recall) the template in the Second Treatise, paragraph 50 in his account of the value off money.)

If we then look at the quoted passage from De Officio, we can read that Pufendorf treats the convention in terms of an existing "custom." And while this is fully compatible with the elements of the Humean template, we are left without an account how the custom could arrise. That's to say while Pufendorf makes, as Lenz notes, the obligatory character of the convention quite clear, he leaves its origin quite mysterious. For, earlier, Pufendorf defines custom as "the frequent Repetition of Actions of the same kind does also incline the Will to do certain Things" (pp. 34-35). But why linguistic practices get repeated in particular patterns is simply contingent now. 

This absence of a mechanism of how tacit consent arises is actually notable when Pufendorf explicitly treats of the practice:

Consent is usually made known by outward Signs, as, by Speaking, Writing, a Nod, or the like; tho’ sometimes it may also be plainly intimated without any of them, according to the Nature of the thing and other Circumstances. So Silence in some Cases, and attended with some Circumstances, passes for a Sign expressing Consent. To this may be attributed those tacit Contracts, where we give not our formal Consent by the Signs generally made use of among Men; but the Nature of the Business, and other Circumstances make it fairly supposable. Thus frequently in the principal Contract, which is express, another is included which is tacit, the Nature of the Case so requiring: And it is usual, in most Covenants that are made, that some tacit Exceptions and imply’d Conditions must of necessity be understood.--pp. 111-112

Pufendorf is undoubtedly correct that even in explicit covenants lots of tacit exceptions and implied conditions are presupposed and understood. (In a later passage he treats as plainly resulting "from the Nature of the Thing." (p. 127)) That there is often a social scaffolding on which a formal contract is built is pretty much a shared insight of all critics of Hobbes. But how we should think of the character and sources of this 'necessity' is left opaque in Pufendorf.

I don't mean to suggest Pufendorf never has a mechanism when he is discussing custom. So, for example, when it comes to price formation of prices in the market place (so called vulgar prices) he writes the following. 

But the Vulgar Price, which is not fix’d by the Laws, admits of a certain Latitude, within the Compass whereof more or less may be, and often is, either taken or given, according to the Agreement of the Persons dealing; which yet for the most part, goes according to the Custom of the Market. Where commonly there is Regard had to the Trouble and Charges which the Tradesmen generally are at, in the bringing home and managing their Commodities, and also after what manner they are bought or sold, whether by Wholesale or Retail. Sometimes also on a sudden the Common Price is alter’d by reason of the Plenty or Scarcity of Buyers, Money, or the Commodity. For the Scarcity of Buyers and of Money, (which on any particular Account may happen) and the Plenty of the Commodity, may be a Means of diminishing the Price thereof. On the other hand, the Plenty of Buyers and of Money, and the Scarcity of the Commodity, inhanses the same. Thus as the Value of a Commodity is lessen’d, if it wants a Buyer, so the Price is augmented when the Possessor is solicited to sell what otherwise he would not have parted with. Lastly, it is likewise to be regarded, whether the Person offers ready Money, or desires Time for Payment; for Allowance of Time is Part of the Price.--pp. 143-144

Here it is quite clear that the customary price itself reflects underlying costs and even disutility of production and procurement ("the Trouble and Charges which the Tradesmen generally are at, in the bringing home and managing their Commodities") and also reflects supply/demand conditions ("plenty or scarcity"/"plenty of buyers...wants a buyer") in the market-place as well as what we would call inflation, but in Pufendorf's time is felt in terms of the availability of coins [say because the local gold/silver/copper value of coins has made it attractive to melt them down or export them], or "ready money." Interestingly enough buying on credit ("time for payment") is not treated as pure equivalent for buying with coin, presumably not just in virtue of the delay ("allowance of time"), but also the implied risk.  Here Pufendorf has a relatively clear account of the mechanism by which the vulgar price can change, but again, he has no account of how it can become customary (except that conditions  of change are not operative).

I have not done an exhaustive survey of Pufendorf. (You go read, Of the Law of Nature and Nations: Eight Books!--Seriously, I welcome suggestions.) But Locke deserves some credit for recognizing that Pufendorf's account of convention and tacit contract left too much unexplained. And while I have not defended the adequacy of the Humean template, the fact that Locke adopts it in non-trivial ways is no small advance over Pufendorf's analysis.

Lenz's Contact Problem with some reflections on Condorcet and Rousseau

Especially early modern explanations seem to construe the mind as something that is tucked away in a body and thus inaccessible by other minds. If this is correct, how could we even begin to think of a way that my thoughts influence yours? Are there ways of transmission or other modes of influence between different minds? I would like to call this the contact problem. Intersubjective explanations, it seems, must specify ways in which one mind can affect another mind. As I will argue, at least some early modern philosophers addressed this problem and provided intersubjective accounts of the mind. What is more, they relied on different models of intersubjectivity. To present three different but crucial explanatory models, I will focus on Spinoza, Locke and Hume: Spinoza will be shown to opt for a metaphysical model, Locke as resorting to a linguistic model and Hume as relying on a medical model that combines assumptions about contagion and sympathy.
Before we take a brief look at these models, let us take a step back and look at the contact problem again. Taking human minds as individual units hidden inside a body suggests that a direct contact between minds is impossible. I can tell you what I think, but in doing so, it’s not my thought that is transmitted. Getting at the thought seems to require an inference on the part of the listener. By contrast, if I endorse a view of the mind that takes mental states to be ingrained in behaviour, such that my mental states are not hidden but part of behavioural patterns, then my mind does seem to be more directly accessible. It seems, then, that the contact problem poses an enormous obstacle for the former but not for the latter view of the mind. On this assumption, intersubjective explanations work well in a behavioural view of the mind but not on what has been called “mentalism”. Martin Lenz (2022) Socializing Minds: Intersubjectivity in Early Modern Philosophy (Oxford University Press), pp, 93-4 (emphases in original)*

I have to admit that when I first started to read Lenz's very entertaining Socializing Minds, I was a bit dubious about the so-called contact problem. It seemed to me, and sometimes still seems to me, an artifact of behaviorialism and some of Ryle's more dubious historiographic moves (which, alas, he was not immune to). But because Lenz's book is so much fun -- it mixes contemporary insights with very erudite and clearly written history of philosophy in refreshing ways easily moving between Avoerrism and memes-- I decided to revise my view. Reflecting on the contact problem is generative and so (by my lights) cannot be a mere artifact (which are sterile).

I have to admit that I don't understand why inference is thought to be a barrier to contact -- the contact problem seems to be rather the no unmediated contact problem --, but obviously for the contact problem to have real bite, by inference here (in this context) is meant something like 'not truth preserving' inference or distorting. And clearly it's true that many if not most early modern philosophers thought that language and other mechanisms of social contact are distorting of reality (and don't do full justice to our ideas of it). Lenz shows that despite this commitment, Spinoza, Locke, and Hume have different kinds of theories in which our minds are, de facto, dependant on other minds, although -- he may disagree with this -- the effect is that in interacting with others the vulnerability to embracing the false remains. (Perhaps, in Locke the vulnerability is also simultaneously the grounds for possibility of reaching some truths. About that some other time.)

Anyway, that the no contact problem seems so much an artificat of behavioralism made me wonder if one couldn't generate it in an alternative framework. This made me consider whether there are circumstances in which no contact is desirable. I immediately thought of Condorcet's Jury theorem which, formally, requires that voters do not communicate with each other and make up their own minds on a decision problem. Without such independence the result that (with rather weak assumptions about human nature) more folk do better than fewer would be unsurprising (and not so unsettling to the elitist and hierarchical mindset).+ Of course, the formation of Rousseau's general will also requires such independence.

Now, while Rousseau's account of the general will has non-trivial formal similarity with Condorcet's jury theorem -- and I would be amazed if it didn't shape Condorcet's thinking --, it is worth signaling that the nature of their independence pushes in different directions: (i) and skating over many interpretive disputes, in Rousseau's general will set up, independence is really designed to create a kind of impartiality not tainted by self-interest (and irrelevant personality features). And this is why this kind of independence is compatible with a kind of representative agent approach (familiar from, and perhaps an ultimate source of, Rawls' original position).

A representative agent approach would undermine the force of the Condorcet jury theorem; in it independence is really about a kind of authenticity of one's judgment. Other minds are corrupting (because they undermine independence). Now, I don't mean to deny that the previous two sentences are things Rousseau himself might say. I am just trying to track a conceptual distinction. (To be sure I think both directions have roots in Spinoza's debts to stoicism--but about that in a future post.) 

That is, the no contact problem is no problem in two contexts: first, one requires or needs authentic judgments that give each of us weight. That is, if one takes democracy seriously. (And lurking here are also protestant ideas about conscience that I have not touched upon above.) Second, one is dealing with a decision problem that is best handled by an impartial agent that represents (the true interests of us) all. That is, if one takes a certain species of objectivity/impartiality seriously. Put like that the two sources of the desirability of no contact seem to be a feature and not a bug of a certain conception of modern political life. And so, to put it as a serious joke, Wittgenstein and Ryle are untimely.

 

Foucault on Hume on Interest and (Adaptive) Preference

What English empiricism introduces...and doubtless for the first time in Western philosophy, is a subject...who appears in the form of a subject of individual choices which are both irreducible and non-transferable....

Second, this type of choice is non-transferable. I do not mean that it is non-transferable in the sense that one choice could not be replaced by another. You could perfectly well say that if you prefer health to illness, you may also prefer illness to health, and then choose illness. It is also clear that you may perfectly well say: I prefer to be ill and that someone else is not. But, in any case, on what basis will this substitution of one choice for another be made? It will be made on the basis of my own preference and on the basis of the fact that I would find someone else being ill more painful, for example, than being ill myself. In the end the principle of my choice really will be my own feeling of painful or not painful, of pain and pleasure. There is Hume’s famous aphorism which says: If I am given the choice between cutting my little finger and the death of someone else, even if I am forced to cut my little finger, nothing can force me to think that cutting my little finger is preferable to the death of someone else.
So, these are irreducible choices which are non-transferable in relation to the subject. This principle of an irreducible, non-transferable, atomistic individual choice which is unconditionally referred to the subject himself is what is called interest.--Michel Foucault, 28 March 1979, The Birth of Biopolitics, pp. 271-272. 

This is the third of my recent posts on Foucault's reading of Hume in The Birth of Biopolitics (recall here; and here). In the first paragraph of the quoted passage I have removed Foucault's reference to Locke as the world-historical origin of English empiricism as the fount of Utilitarianism. Foucault is almost certainly inspired by Élie Halévy's classic (1901-1904) The Growth of Philosophic Radicalism, which I now know Foucault studied. (We have some of Foucault's note-taking on volume 2 [see here].) I have also removed Foucault's taxonomy of different kinds of approaches to identify a subject in 'Western philosophy.' Here I am also skipping Foucault's treatment of Appendix 1, “Concerning Moral Sentiment” to Hume's (1751) An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, which illustrates  what it is for a choice to be irreducible in empiricism, according to Foucault. I do so not because these topics are uninteresting (on the contrary, they are too interesting), but because I want to focus on Foucault's analysis of Hume's account of the non-transferability of choices. (I am unfamiliar with other work on this topic so feel free to share your suggestions.)

In the paragraph I skipped Foucault had shown that for an empiricist (like Locke and Hume) "The painful or non-painful nature of the thing is in itself a reason for the choice beyond which you cannot go." (p. 272. This is irreducibility of choice, or what Foucault calls "the regressive end point in the analysis.") While a lot can be said about this, let's stipulate it's true for the sake of argument. But for what follows, you need to keep in mind that at bottom the agency of an empiricist subject consists in choices that are ground in (the desire for) pleasure or the aversion to pain. And according to Foucault this is what creates a subject with an interest (as a kind of characterization of agency.) That's a big claim, but I am interested here in the details. 

The non-transferability principle is cashed out by Foucault in terms of the fact that preferences are one’s own and that another has no fundamentally no access to them. Foucault really uses the modern (somewhat technical) language of ‘preference’ on p. 272. (It's also there in the French: "À partir de ma préférence à moi et à partir du fait que je trouverai plus pénible, par exemple, de savoir qu'un autre est malade que de l'être moi-même." Naissance de la biopolitique, p. 276.) While Hume certainly has ‘preference’ in his vocabulary, in Hume it generally means something like ‘favoring’ a particular outcome or state of affairs (which is also the use one can find in Ricardo). In Hume 'preference' is not used a technical term to track what is motivationally foundational. In my view it is only in Bentham that the use of 'preference' starts to obtain it's technical, familiar sense. (Something one might pick up from Halévy, who emphasizes Bentham's self-preference principle in various contexts but not in Hume i think.)

I mention this not to castigate Foucault's anachronism. But to remind ourselves that the treatment of Hume in the eleventh lecture follows on Foucault's better known analysis of Becker and Stigler (1977) for who (famously/infamously) hold "the hypothesis of stable and uniform preferences." While I have  no evidence that Foucault read Becker & Stigler (1977, although we know he read papers/works by both), it figures prominently in a fascinating book by Henri Lepage Tomorrow, Capitalism: The Economics of Economic Freedom [first published in French as Demain le Capitalisme in 1978.) As the editors of Birth of Biopolitics note several times (but not in context), Foucault almost certainly read Lepage ahead of his lectures (sadly I have been unable to find any annotations by Foucault on Lepage). I mention this because the stability of preferences in Becker & Stigler (1977) is highlighted by Lepage in his account of human capital more generally (see p. 165 of the English translation). And human capital had been central to the previous lecture of Birth of Biopolitics.

In fact, and as a kind of aside, the 11th lecture is used to tie two major narrative threads in Birth of Biopolitics together: first, Foucault provides a historical eighteenth century framework for his own account of the development of utilitarianism from Bentham to Stigler/Becker. This framework has the shape of a donut in whose hole one can discern the shadow of Halévy's classic The Growth of Philosophic Radicalism. (Basically Foucault skips the heart of Halévy's narrative, and only changes the origin and terminus ad quem of philosophical radicalism/Utilitarianism.) Second, Foucault had claimed that this radical tradition is one of two traditions within liberalism that has an account of liberty. Strikingly, in the material I ommitted, Foucault alludes to this. (I return to that another time, too.)  Now, Foucault does not claim that for Hume preferences are stable. But Foucault's anachronism here alerts us to Hume's role in these two threads. This is exactly made explicit by a passage shortly after the one quoted above:

What I think is fundamental in English empiricist philosophy— which I am treating completely superficially—is that it reveals something
which absolutely did not exist before. This is the idea of a subject of interest, by which I mean a subject as the source of interest, the starting point of an interest, or the site of a mechanism of interests. For sure, there is a series of discussions on the mechanism of interest itself and what may activate it: is it self-preservation, is it the body or the soul, or is it sympathy? But this is not what is important. What is important is the appearance of interest for the first time as a form of both immediately and absolutely subjective will.
I think the problem and that which gets the problematic of homo oeconomicus underway is whether this subject of interest or form of will called interest can be considered as the same type of will as the juridical will or as capable of being connected to the juridical will. (273)

Be that as it may, in the present context 'non-transferable,' thus, refers to the brute fact that we cannot fundamentally feel another's pain or let them feel ours. Even sympathy's role is, as Foucault stipulates, a mechanism "to activate" or shape what we feel and thereby our interests not a means to share or trade one's feelings. Pleasures and pains are not portable from one subject to another. Even Adam Smith, who has a much more capacious understanding of the power of sympathy will grant this point. (For him mutual sympathy requires mutial modulation of our original feelings.) Now, as I mentioned above the point of the analysis is to connect Hume to the development of the formal features of homo oeconomicus as found in the radical tradition. Somewhat peculiarly, in Birth of Biopolitics Foucault shows no interest in Hume's economic writings (including a highly salient essay called "Of Interest.")

Now, the textual support that Foucault offers for all of this is rather fascinating (and that's what I'll end on today). As the editors of Birth of Biopolitics, who recognize in Hume's "famous aphorism" a reference to Treatise 2.3.3.6, and then (as I noted before) quote Hume: “Where a passion is neither founded on false supposition, nor chuses means insufficient for the end, the understanding can neither justify nor condemn it. ’Tis not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger.” This is indeed a famous aphorism (one that clearly exercised Hume's friend Smith at The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 3.3.4, 136–7.)

But while Foucault gets the spirit of Hume's remarks at Treatise 2.3.3.6 right, he is not slavishly following the text of Hume. In Hume the famous aphorism, is introduced to argue that feelings are, in a certain sense, beyond rational scrutiny. However, I use in a 'certain sence' because they are not wholly beyond scrutiny as Hume explicitly notes. For they are often accompanied by judgments and these may well be scrutinized and found wanting. And, more interesting for present purposes, as the quote eveals, when the feeling itself is triggered by "false suppositions" say in cases of adaptive preferences or wishful thinking (or simply bad epistemic luck), or, when it is action guiding and it "chuses means insufficient for the end" and so leads to failures of instrumental rationality. 

Because in the context of 2.3.3.6, Hume is talking about passions more generally and not just about the bedrocks of pain and pleasure, I don't think Foucault really is misunderstanding Hume's general point. But it is a shame that he does not dwell on the specifics because, as I note, 2.3.3.6 is rather important for Hume's ideas on thinking on the contexts in which even a picture that takes preferences as irreducible and non-transferable, one need not treat them as merely given, nor beyond all critical scrutiny. That is to say, Foucault comes incredibly close, but somehow misses, that were the radical tradition and Utilitarianism more Humaen from the start some enduring problems internal to it could at least be diagnosed.

An Alternative to the Marxist-Liberal Debate, Belloc and The Servile State (pt 1)

A peasantry eager to purchase might have gradually extended their holdings at the expense of the demesne land, and to the distribution of property, which was already fairly complete, there might have been added another excellent element, namely, the more equal possession of that property. But any such process of gradual buying by the small man from the great, such as would seem natural to the temper of us European people, and such as has since taken place nearly everywhere in countries which were left free to act upon their popular instincts, was interrupted in this country by an artificial revolution of the most violent kind. This artificial revolution consisted in the seizing of the monastic lands by the Crown.
It is important to grasp clearly the nature of this operation, for the whole economic future of England was to flow from it.
Of the demesne lands, and the power of local administration which they carried with them (a very important feature, as we shall see later), rather more than a quarter were in the hands of the Church ; the Church was therefore the “Lord” of something over 25 per cent., say 28 per cent., or perhaps nearly 30 per cent., of English agricultural communities, and the overseers of a like proportion of all English agricultural produce. The Church was further the absolute owner in practice of something like 30 per cent, of the demesne land in the villages, and the receiver of something like 30 per cent, of the customary dues, etc., paid by the maller owners to the greater. All this economic power lay until 1535 in the hands of Cathedral Chapters, communities of monks and nuns, educational establishments conducted by the clergy, and so forth.
When the Monastic lands were confiscated by Henry VIII., not the whole of this vast economic influence was suddenly extinguished. The secular clergy remained endowed, and most of the educational establishments, though looted, retained some revenue; but though the whole 30 per cent, did not suffer confiscation, something well over 20 per cent, did, and the revolution effected by this vast operation was by far the most complete, the most sudden, and the most momentous of any that has taken place in the economic history of any European people.
It was at first intended to retain this great mass of the means of production in the hands of the Crown: that must be clearly remembered by any student of the fortunes of England, and by all who marvel at the contrast between the old England and the new.
Had that intention been firmly maintained, the English State and its government would have been the most powerful in Europe.
The Executive (which in those days meant the King) would have had a greater opportunity for crushing the resistance of the wealthy, for backing its political power with economic power, and for ordering the social life of its subjects than any other executive in Christendom.
Had Henry VIII. and his successors kept the land thus confiscated, the power of the French Monarchy, at which we are astonished, would have been nothing to the power of the English.
The King of England would have had in his own hands an instrument of control of the most absolute sort. He would presumably have used it, as a strong central government always does, for the weakening of the wealthier classes, and to the indirect advantage of the mass of the people. At any rate, it would have been a very different England indeed from the England we know, if the King had held fast to his own after the dissolution of the monasteries.
Now it is precisely here that the capital point in this great revolution appears. The King failed to keep the lands he had seized. That class of large landowners which already existed and controlled, as I have said, anything from a quarter to a third of the agricultural values of England, were too strong for the monarchy. They insisted upon land being granted to themselves, sometimes freely, sometimes for ridiculously small sums, and they were strong enough in Parliament, and through the local administrative power they had, to see that their demands were satisfied. Nothing that the Crown let go ever went back to the Crown, and year after year more and more of what had once been the monastic land became the absolute possession of the large land-owners...Hilaire Belloc (1912 [2nd edition] The Servile State, Chapter IV ("How the Distributive State Failed")

Hayek mentions The Servile State in The Road to Serfdom., and so I was curious about the connection. (I had never heard Beloc before.) The book is very brief and written in an engaging style, and it's full of stimulating observations. It's a bit peculiar I had never chanced upon it before because it is quite clearly one of the founding texts of what shortly thereafter came to be known as property owning democracy. (I was pleased to find Ben Jackson claim this a decade ago, too here.) In addition, Belloc does really anticipate a road to serfdom thesis (although surely does not originate it--it's in Tocqueville and probably earlier), but it's clearly not Hayek's (or Mises') version (Edward McPhail has a lovely paper explaining that it here). I intend to blog a bit about in the future -- not the least because of his description of biopolitics and his analysis of corporate welfare state.

But today, I want to do a more lighthearted piece. As is well known Marxists and Liberals have a fierce debate over the origin of capitalism (which on the liberal side is treated as the origin of mercantilism to which liberalism is a response.) On the Marxist side -- recall (here) my digression on Meiksins Wood and Adam Smith (and this follow up) --, capitalism emerges when term-limit leases are introduced in agriculture and the price of these leases are determined by an estimation by surveyors of the value of that land after improvement in light of prevailing, or at the least the abstract perception of prevailing, market conditions. And this, in turn, sets a landgrab in motion in which enclosures are forced on a politically weak rural population who live out a kind of natural communism. And this violence generates the 'productivity of property,' which gets capitalism going (which liberals will call Mercantilism).

As an aside, some Liberals have a tendency to treat the 'productivity of property' in consequentialist fashion as unequivocally a good thing. The other day, for example, I noticed that in The Constitution of Liberty (1960), Hayek mentions, in passing (while discussing mid twentieth century agriculture), that "there can be little question that the consolidation of dispersed holdings inherited in Europe from the Middle Ages or the enclosures of the commons in England were necessary legislative measures to make improvements by individual efforts possible." (p. 488-489 [Hamowy edition]; emphasis added). It's the kind of passage that gives critics and even friends of Hayek pause--he clearly thinks that some transitionary violence can be justified for the end it serves (but will not dwell on it).

Okay, if we turn to Belloc, he posits a kind of golden age (he calls it an "excellent state of affairs"): the distributed state: in which property was very widely distributed and guilds and country customs conspired to keep income and property inequality to a relative minimum. And the first quoted paragraph above gives his very schematic model for the natural course of events of the evolution of the distributed state. It's not a pure counterfactual (as in Smith's natural course in Book 3 of Wealth of Nations) because Belloc also suggests this natural evolution happened in France. (That's an odd claim, but let's ignore it.) But in England this natural evolution was interrupted by an artificial revolution: Henry VIII's landgrab of the monasteries.

Now, because of the weakness of the sixteenth century English royal family, the landgrab ends up reinforcing and creating a more durable oligarchy with a weak monarchy and a more powerless rural population.* Belloc tells what happens next:

All over England men who already held in virtually absolute property from one-quarter to one-third of the soil and the ploughs and the barns of a village, became possessed in a very few years of a further great section of the means of production, which turned the scale wholly in their favour. They added to that third a new and extra-fifth. They became at a blow the owners of half the land! In many centres of capital importance they had come to own more than half the land. They were in many districts not only the unquestioned superiors, but the economic masters of the rest of the community. They could buy to the greatest advantage.

The world-historical significance of this is as follows meant that before the industrial revolution, England was already an oligarchic state. 

Take, as a starting-point for what followed, the date 1700. By that time more than half of the English were dispossessed of capital and of land. Not one man in two, even if you reckon the very small owners, inhabited a house of which he was the secure possessor, or tilled land from which he could not be turned off.
Such a proportion may seem to us to-day a wonderfully free arrangement, and certainly if nearly one-half of our population were possessed of the means of production, we should be in a very different situation from that in which we find ourselves. But the point to seize is that, though the bad business was very far from completion in or about the year 1700, yet by that date England had already become Capitalist. She had already permitted a vast section of her population to become proletarian, and it is this and not the so-called “Industrial Revolution,” a later thing, which accounts for the terrible social condition in which we find ourselves to-day.

Now, I want to offer four observations about Belloc's story. First, it is an unintended consequence explanation: in which structural forces (pre-existing social arrangements and webs of local corruption) and historical contingency (Henry VIII's rupture with Rome) conspire to upend English economic development.

Second, in so far enclosures figure into his story, they are a late nineteenth century development in which oligarchic capitalism is performing a mopping up operation and they figure in tales of futile resistance by the old and their fathers. 

Third, in Belloc's account there never really was an early revolution in the productivity of property as an engine of history. Rather, it's the application of technology by entrenched wealthy landowners (who also become industrialists).

Fourth, and finally, Belloc is no liberal. But his origin story is a natural one to embrace by liberals who, while distancing themselves from capitalists as a class, want to explain why due to initial conditions capitalism turned mercantile (in which violence was part of its DNA), as (say) Röpke argues. And such liberals might wish to suggest that in so far as there were original sins of capitalism, they were performed by a capricious monarch. Of course, such liberals are scarce on the ground.

Hayek, Colonialism, Kantian Perpetual Peace, and a bit of Foucault

It is true that with the formation of such regional federations the possibility of war between the different blocs still remains, and that to reduce this risk as much as possible we must rely on a larger and looser association. My point is that the need for some association of those countries which are more similar in their civilisation, outlook, and standards. While we must aim at preventing future wars as much as possible, we must not believe that we can at one stroke create a permanent organisation which will make all war in any part of the world entirely impossible. We should not only not succeed in such an attempt, but we should thereby probably spoil our chances of achieving success in a more limited sphere. As is true with respect to other great evils, the measures by which war might be made altogether impossible for the future may well be worse than even war itself If we can reduce the risk of friction likely to lead to war, this is probably all we can reasonably hope to achieve.--Hayek (1944 [2001] The Road to Serfdom (Routledge), pp. 243-244

The quoted material are the final paragraph of the final chapter of The Road to Serfdom before Hayek's brief conclusion. It helps explain why, for example, in his account of neoliberalism in The Birth of Biopolitics, Foucault spends so much time on the history of European federalism with special attention  to Kant (recall here; here).

That certain kinds of regional federations can reduce the risk of war among member states and even between federations is a Kantian idea familiar from Perpetual Peace--a book Hayek quotes in (the later) The Constitution of Liberty (but surely familiar from the many allusions and references to it in Mises work). The Kantianism, with its emphasis on gradual growth of commercial republics, is even more explicit in the sentences preceding this final paragraph quoted above:

I believe that these considerations still hold and that a degree of co-operation could be achieved between, say, the British Empire and the nations of Western Europe and probably the United States which would not be possible on a world scale. The comparatively close association which a Federal Union represents will not at first be practicable beyond perhaps even as narrow a region as part of Western Europe, though it may be possible gradually to extend it. (p. 243)

I do not mean to suggest the sources are exclusively Kantian. Lurking in these comments are also the Smithian ideal of a transatlantic federation articulated in the Wealth of Nations, and an ideal revived in the context of (and now I quote Hayek again) "the propaganda for the "Federal Union"" (p. 239) which produced "the flood of federalist publications which in recent years has descended on us" (p. 239 n 1). For an overview of what Hayek may have in mind (and a lot more), I warmly recommend (recall; and here) The Emergence of Globalism: Visions of World Order in Britain and The United States by Or Rosenboim. (I return to this below.)

The Kantianism is not superficial in The Road to Serfdom. There is a huge emphasis on the significance of a Rechtstaat (see, especially, chapter 6) and its Kantian provenance recognized (see p. 85). And, in fact, politically, Hayek defends in The Road to Serfdom what Kant would have called a 'commercial republic.' It is no surprise, then, that in the Birth of Biopolitics, Foucault traces a lineage from Kant to the ordoliberals and Hayek. (The only awkwardness is that Foucault, while not blind to the Scottish sources on Kant, also treats Kant, not unreasonably, as inspired by Rousseau, whereas Hayek has a tendency to treat Rousseau as the source of bad/French rationalism.)

There is also a hint of Mill in these passages because Hayek seems to be presupposing a kind of civilization evolution or development ("more similar in their civilisation, outlook, and standards.") He clearly thinks it would be bad to have a federation that included the Soviet Union, and perhaps much of the former Austrian-Hungarian empire (not all of it foreseeably in the Soviet sphere in 1944). The question is to what degree this also includes Mill's ideas about civilizational superiority.

Now, because of the inclusion of the "British Empire" it is natural to read Hayek  here in light of the his then recent, and recently much discussed, Hayek (1939) "The Economic Conditions of Interstate Federalism." In that essay, Hayek explicitly wishes to keep out socialist countries from the more Atlantic oriented federation. In addition (recall), I have argued that in it (the 1939 essay), Hayek's remarks are naturally read as endorsing continued colonial rule by the federation. So, it is natural to read The Road to Serfdom as echoing this position. And through the founding of the EU, many projects of European federation explicitly or tacitly assumed continued European rule over its colonies (and market access to its dominions).

But there is clear evidence that on the question of colonialism and even (although more ambigiously) racial hierarchy, Hayek's views did evolve non-trivially. This becomes clear in light of two (successive) footnotes earlier in the chapter. I quote and discuss them separately. Both notes are meant to support and illustrate an argument against global planning lead by (an enlightened) Great Britain. There is no doubt that Hayek's main target is global planning (and other forms of 'collectivism'). The first note reads as follows:

The experience in the colonial sphere, of this country as much as of any other, has amply shown that even the mild forms of planning which we know as colonial development involve, whether we wish it or not, the imposition of certain values and ideals on those whom we try to assist. It is, indeed, this experience which has made even the most internationally minded of colonial experts so very sceptical of the practicability of an "international" administration of colonies. (pp. 229-230)

Hayek acknowledges at least two important claims: first, even if a good faith effort is made to assist and develop colonized economies, this is experienced as an "imposition of certain values and ideals on" the colonized by the colonized. Of course, in practice there also was wholescale plunder and unequal privileges. Mises, is (recall) much more outspokenly critical of colonialism. Mises is, not unlike Smith, a fierce critic of the violent extension of liberal society. And Mises has no fondness at all for the idea for the civilizational mission of European colonialism and imperial projects. I mention Mises' (1927) Liberalism 124-125, with its really outspoken critique of colonialism because Mises ends up defending (alas) some kind of role for the league of nations to secure property rights in former colonies (by way of a mandate system).

And, so second, it looks like Hayek now accepts the sceptical position of the practicability of an "international" administration of colonies of the sort that Mises might have favored in a qualified way. So, Hayek goes beyond the position of Mises. And that's not strange because Hayek is a critic of the League of Nations and its expansive ambitions; that is, in fact, the main message of the second to final page of the chapter (p. 243) In 1944 Hayek clearly rejects something like a mandate/trust system. And so, this note both explicitly rejects the settler, colonial enterprise and the trust/mandate enterprise. (I don't mean to suggest that Hayek advocates removal of settlers from places like Australia, New Zealand, Canada, etc.)

The placing of the note also suggests that Hayek thought that colonialism is as bad as what Nazi-Germany tried to impose with their "highly immoral" Grossraumwirtschaft on their European sphere of influence (229). And since that is in line of the main argument of the book, Hayek's note actually hints at an implication of the argument that is not a mere aside. If anything, while Hayek's rhetoric is certainly very cautious about the future of the British empire, I think it's pretty clear he now thinks it's immoral and probably doomed.

In fact, the second note is attached to a claim to an argument that is intended to attack the idea that "idealistic and unselfish" (230) planning by the British on a global scale is a desirable possibility. This note reads as follows:

If anyone should still fail to see the difficulties, or cherish the belief that with a little good will they can all be overcome, it will help if he tries to follow the implications of central direction of economic activity applied on a world scale. Can there be much doubt that this would mean a more or less conscious endeavour to secure the dominance of the white man, and would rightly be so regarded by all other races? Till I find a sane person who seriously believes that the European races will voluntarily submit to their standard of life and rate of progress being determined by a World Parliament, I cannot regard such plans as anything but absurd. But this does unfortunately not preclude that particular measures, which could be justified only if the principle of world direction were a feasible ideal, are seriously advocated. (p. 230)

Hayek clearly recognizes that most attempts to impose an Enlightened plan on others are in bad faith (primarily designed to secure advantages to European industry), and will certainly be regarded as such by the colonized world. 

I don't mean to ignore the fact that Hayek casts his argument here in racial terms such that the majority principle (and non-Europeans will outnumber Europeans), which might well disadvantage Europeans, is rejected on a global scale not just from obvious self-interest, but also from a kind of racial consciousness. I think Hayek's intention here is to call attention to such racial and racist consciousness among European populations not to advocate for it (although I completely grant that others may reject this.)

And so while one may well suspect that Hayek's rejection of a world state with planning powers has racist motives or is at least shaped by awareness of the significance of racist views,  the actual position in the footnote, and the previous one, is inimical to colonialism and imperialism that goes well beyond his earlier view. 

And, if anything, this understates Hayek's position. The broader context of the chapter is a defense of the viability and significance of "small countries" (his favorite examples are Holland and Switzerland). He is explicit that "we shall all be the gainers if we can create a world fit for small states to live in." (242) These two notes suggest that he is at peace with the possibility of a decolonized world of small states.

I do not mean to suggest that Hayek wishes to promote a decolonialization without constraints. For, he foresees a global order shaped by the rule of law as the Western states understand it. In Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism, Quinn Slobodian has shown how Hayek and Mises, and the ordoliberals, embraced the idea of a global legal order to defend markets (recall here; here). That's clearly right. But I think this understates how the market order is itself a bulwark to preserve the rechtstaat (and human rights) for these neoliberals. Either way, and in in fact, lurking in this material is the ideal of a pax Americana, for Hayek writes "the great opportunity we shall have at the end of this war is that the great victorious powers, by themselves first submitting to a system of rules which they have the power to enforce, may at the same time acquire the moral right to impose the same rules upon others." (242, emphasis added) 

Hayek does not spell out if this moral right then implies, say, Hume's position who (I  think) clearly advocates the violent extension of the rule of law (as a civilizational enterprise), or if this moral right should be understood more as a duty that cannot be denied once the victors of the war are called upon by their present imperial subjects to secure the fruits of law's empire into their independent future. Either way, Hayek's turn away from colonial empire is not a turn away from civilizational, that is, law-governed, supremacy.

 

 

Tocqueville, Physiocratic Despotism, and Foucault (and Coleridge and Adam Smith), EP XXXXII

About the middle of the [eighteenth] century, a class of writers devoted their attention to administrative questions; they had many points in common, and were hence distinguished by the general name of economists or physiocrats. They are less conspicuous in history than the philosophers; they exercised a less direct influence in causing the Revolution, but still I think its true nature can best be studied in their writings. The philosophers confined themselves, for the most part, to abstract and general theories on the subject of government; the economists dealt in theories, but also deigned to notice facts. The former furnished ideal, the latter practical schemes of reform. They assailed alternately all the institutions which the Revolution abolished; not one of them found favor in their eyes. All those, on the other hand, which are credited especially to the Revolution, were announced beforehand and warmly lauded by them: it is not easy to mention one whose substantial features are not to be found in some of their writings.

Their books, moreover, breathe that democratic and revolutionary spirit with which we are so familiar. They hate, not certain specific privileges, but all distinctions of classes; they would insist upon equality of rights in the midst of slavery. Obstacles they regard as only fit to be trampled on. They respect neither contracts nor private rights; indeed, they hardly recognize individual rights at all in their absorbing devotion to the public good. Yet they were quiet, peaceable men, of respectable character, honest magistrates, able administrators; they were carried away by the peculiar spirit of their task.

Their contempt for the past was unbounded. “The nation,” said Letronne, “is governed on wrong principles; every thing seems to have been left to chance.” Starting from this idea, they set to work to demand the demolition of every institution, however old and time-honored, which seemed to mar the symmetry of their plans. Forty years before the Constituent Assembly divided France into departments, one of the economists suggested the alteration of all existing territorial divisions and of the names of all the provinces.

They conceived all the social and administrative reforms effected by the Revolution before the idea of free institutions had once flashed upon their mind. They were in favor of the removal of all restrictions upon the sale and conveyance of produce and merchandise. But of political liberty they took no thought; and when it first occurred to them they rejected the idea. Most of them were strongly opposed to deliberative assemblies, to local and subordinate authorities, and to the various checks which have been established from time to time in free countries to counterbalance the supreme government. “The system of counterpoises,” said Quesnay, “is a fatal feature in governments.” A friend of his was satisfied that “the system of counterpoises was the fruit of chimerical speculations.”

The only safeguard against despotism which they proposed was public education; for, as Quesnay said, “Despotism is impossible in an enlightened nation.” “Mankind,” says one of his disciples, “have invented a host of fruitless contrivances to obviate the evils arising from abuses of power by governments, but they have generally neglected the only one that could really be of service, namely, a general permanent system of public education in the essence of justice and natural order.” Such was the literary nonsense they wanted to substitute in the place of political guarantees.

Letronne bitterly deplores the government’s neglect of the rural districts, and describes them as having no roads, no industry, no intellectual progress; but he never seems to have imagined that they would have been better regulated if their affairs had been intrusted to the people themselves.

Even Turgot, with all his peculiar breadth of view and rare genius, was but little fonder than they of political liberty. He had no taste for it till late in life, when public opinion pointed in that direction. Like the economists, he conceived that the best of all political guarantees was public education afforded by the state; but he desired it to be conducted in a particular spirit, and according to a particular plan. His confidence in this intellectual course of medicine—or, as a contemporary styled it, this “educational mechanism on fixed principles”—was unbounded. “I will venture to answer,” said he to the king, in a memorial on the subject, “that in ten years the nation will be so thoroughly altered that you shall not recognize it; and that, in point of enlightenment, morality, loyalty, and patriotism, it will surpass every other nation in the world. Children now ten years old will then be men, trained in ideas of love for their country, submissive to authority from conviction, not from fear, charitable to their fellow-countrymen, habituated to obey and to respect the voice of justice.”

It was so long since political liberty had flourished in France that its conditions and effects had been well-nigh forgotten. More than this, its shapeless relics, and the institutions which seemed to have been framed to take its place, rather aroused prejudice against it. Most of the surviving state assemblies exhibited the spirit as well as the forms of the Middle Ages, and hindered instead of assisting social progress. The Parliaments, which were the only substitutes for political bodies, could not arrest the mischief done by government, and often impeded it when it desired to do good.

The economists did not think it possible to use these old institutions as instruments for the accomplishment of the Revolution, nor did they approve the idea of intrusting the business to the nation as sovereign; they doubted the feasibility of effecting so elaborate and intricate a reform by the aid of a popular movement. Their designs, they thought, could be best and most easily accomplished by the crown itself.

The royal power had not taken its rise in the Middle Ages, and bore no mediæval stamp. They discovered in it good as well as bad points. It shared their proclivity for leveling all ranks, and making all laws uniform. It detested as heartily as they did the old institutions which had grown out of the feudal system, or which favored oligarchy. It was the best organized, the greatest and strongest government machine in Europe. Its existence seemed to them a very fortunate accident; they would have called it providential had it been the fashion then as now to allude to Providence on all possible occasions. Letronne observes that “France is much more happily situated than England; for here reforms that will change the whole state of the country can be accomplished in a moment, whereas in England similar measures are always exposed to be defeated by party strife.”

Their idea, then, was not to destroy, but to convert the absolute monarchy. “The state must govern according to the laws of natural order (règles de l’ordre essentiel),” says Mercier de la Rivière; “on these conditions it should be absolute.” “Let the state,” said another, “understand its duty thoroughly; this secured, it should be untrammeled.” All of them, from Quesnay to Abbé Bodeau, were of the same mind.

They were not satisfied with using the royal power to effect social reforms; they partly borrowed from it the idea of the future government they proposed to establish. The one was to be, in some measure, a copy of the other.

The state, said the economists, must not only govern, it must shape the nation. It must form the mind of citizens conformably to a preconceived model. It is its duty to fill their minds with such opinions and their hearts with such feelings as it may judge necessary. In fact, there are no limits either to its rights or its powers. It must transform as well as reform its subjects; perhaps even create new subjects, if it thinks fit. “The state,” says Bodeau, “moulds men into whatever shape it pleases.” That sentence expresses the gist of the whole system. --Tocqueville, The Old Regime and Revolution. Book II, CHAPTER XV: How the French Sought Reform Before Liberties (translation from 1856)

Near the end of Foucault's first lecture of the Birth Of Biopolitics (10 January, 1979), he remarks about the physiocrats being "the first political economy." And he adds that they "concluded that political power must be power without external limitation, without counterbalance, and without any bounds other than arising from itself, and this what they called despotism." The editors of his edition add a note here to P.P.F.J.H. Le Mercier de La Rivière, L’Ordre naturel et essentiel des sociétés politiques (published without the author’s name, London: Jean Nourse, and Paris: Desaint, 1767) ch. 24: “Du despotisme legal.” Foucault goes on to lecture "Despotism is an economic government, but an economic government which not hemmed in and whose boundaries are not drawn by anything but an economy which it has itself defined and which it completely controls." (p. 14) As I have noted elsewhere (recall here; and here) Foucault treats the physiocrats as a kind of exemplary temptation toward despotism within the development of economics, including some branches of liberal economics.

Adam Smith was a respectful critic of physiocracy. And to the best of my knowledge he does not single them out as especially tending towards despotism.  Since he is not shy about calling mercantilists dangerous warmongers, and he explicitly calls political rule by merchant run companies 'despotical,' (WN 4.7.c.104, p. 638), this got me reflecting a bit on Foucault's characterization, and its source(s). I don't think this is an eighteenth century view of physiocrac. (I am open to suggestions otherwise!)

To be sure, Smith strongly implies that France in his day -- then at least shaped by if not sometimes governed by physiocrats and their followers -- is a mild form of despotism, so in context he may well be thinking of them. But he writes so in the context of discussion of ecclesiastic privileges (in Book V of the Wealth of Nations) not in the context of his treatment of physiocracy in Book IV.* I also don't think that a fondness for despotism is something that one immediately notices about most physiocrats, although once one is alerted to it it jumps out at you.

As it happens, Smith tends to treat most physiocrats as rather derivative from Quesnay. But he does praise Le Mercier de La Rivière as being the best of the lot ("the most distinct and best connected account of this doctrine is to be found in a little book written by Mr. Mercier de la Riviere,  sometime Intendant of Martinico, intitled, The natural and essential Order of Political Societies." (WN 4.9.38, p. 679. A book Smith owned in French, as the editors of the Glasgow edition note.) As Smith recognizes, Le Mercier de La Rivière was a colonial administrator.

Interestingly enough, Coleridge, in his Essays entitled The Friend, explicitly connects physiocracy to despotism, and he singles out Le Mercier de La Rivière (see here), the "simplicity" of his theory "promised the readiest and most commodious machine for despotism." (Essay IV) This work dates I think from 1812. Since he is writing while Boneparte is emperor the concern with despotism is a living one. I am inclined to think that Coleridge may even be the original source of connecting physiocracy with despotism. But I leave that for others to explore.

It's pretty likely, however, that Tocqueville inspired the characterization we find in Foucault. (When I say that I don't mean to deny that Foucault would have read the sources he mentions himself; I tend to think that even when he is manifestly relying on another authority he will have read the underling sources.) And the reasons I say that are four-fold.

First, when Foucault introduces the physiocrats for the first time, he explicitly links them to despotism and reminds the audience [vous savez] that this is common ground (recall: "The first political economy was, of course, that of the physiocrats, and you know that from the very start of their economic analysis the physiocrats...and this is what they called despotism.") And while this can be a rhetorical affect, I think it's also a way of alluding to work with presumed canonical status. It's, of course, not obvious everyone in the audience would have recognized that Foucault is alluding to Tocqueville's L'Ancien Régime et la Révolution. After all, the very erudite editors of Foucault's Birth of Biopolitics don't mention it, and just last week (recall) I read a reputable scholar (Behrent) denying that Foucault was "inspired by the political liberalism of Benjamin Constant, Alexis de Tocqueville, or Francois Guizot, whom other intellectuals were busily dusting off at the time." But this at least suggests that Tocqueville was in the Parisian air in the late 70s.

Second, Tocqueville suggests that while the physiocrats were relatively obscure their writings reveal the true nature of the Revolution. He very explicitly and at length links physiocratic despotism with the idea of public enlightenment. And this Foucault echoes in the third lecture, when he treats the "physiocratic conception of enlightened despotism" (emphasis added, 24 January, 1979, p. 24) as the main exemplar of "governmental naturalism." 

In fact that the physiocrats exhibit a kind governmental naturalism is even more explicit in Tocqueville's French: "Ils sont, il est vrai, tre s­favorablcs au libre echange des denrees, au laisser-faire ou au laisser-passer dans le commerce et dans l'in­dustrie" (emphasis in original; the English translation that They were in favor of the removal of all restrictions upon the sale and conveyance of produce and merchandise is not so eloquent in comparison).

Third, Tocqueville attributes the governmental naturalism explicitly to Mercier de La Rivière  (“The state must govern according to the laws of natural order (règles de l’ordre essentiel)"; the French is in the English translation. And, in turn, Tocqueville emphasizes the significance of the absence of counterbalances.

Finally, Tocqueville anticipates Foucault in identifying the complex, reflexive nature about the relationship between future model, which is supposed to shape (as of yet not existing) social reality and the underlying existing social reality as a source for the the model. (Recall: "They were not satisfied with using the royal power to effect social reforms; they partly borrowed from it the idea of the future government they proposed to establish. The one was to be, in some measure, a copy of the other. The state, said the economists, must not only govern, it must shape the nation. It must form the mind of citizens conformably to a preconceived model.") Admittedly, Foucault doesn't say this about the physiocrats, but he posits it as a general property of governmental practice at the start of the first lecture, "I tried to locate the emergence of a particular type of rationality in governmental practice, a type of rationality that would enable the way of governing to be modeled on something called the state which, in relation to this governmental practice, to this calculation of governmental practice, plays the role both of a given—since one only governs a state that is already there, one only governs within the framework of a state—but also, at the same time, as an objective to be constructed. (pp, 3-4).

To sum up, I think Foucault is treating Tocqueville's characterization of the physiocrats as common ground between his audience and himself. And while it is surely possible that he and Tocqueville were struck by the same issues in physiocracy, I think it's also highly plausible that Tocqueville directed Foucault's attention in these sources. 

 

 

On Foucault and the Anxiety of the Left; pt.1: 'Economic Liberalism'

What both Foucault's critics and his defenders have failed to consider is a deep affinity between Foucault's thought and neoliberalism: a shared suspicion of the state. Foucault's antistatism was, in the first instance, theoretical. He famously complained that “in political thought and analysis, the king's head has still not been cut off.” What he meant was that political theorists too often understand power on the model of the state, viewing it as flowing top-down from a transcendent authority, rather than as a force disseminated across the social space through complex and open-ended relations, involving a wide range of actors and institutions. This position was a logical consequence of Foucault's antihumanism: the main fallacy of state-based models of politics is that they anthropomorphize power by viewing it as the conscious expression of a will. The theoretical antistatism implicit in Foucault's thought required, however, a specific configuration of circumstances to be actualized. In the 1970s, however, Foucault's theoretical antistatism became increasingly normative: his claim that we should abandon the state as our model for understanding power evolved, in other words, into an argument that the state should cease to be the primary focus of engaging in politics. The context in which this shift occurred is both significant and underappreciated. The economic crisis that struck France in 1973, accompanied by the implosion of the statist assumptions that had driven the country's remarkable postwar growth, suddenly made economic liberalism far more relevant to public discourse than it had been for decades. Spurred by these events, Foucault seems to have recognized the affinity between his theoretical objection to state-based conceptions of power and the economic liberalism that was the subject of contemporary debates. The onset of prolonged economic malaise in the early 1970s, I argue, proves to be as critical a factor in the intellectual transformations of the 1970s as antitotalitarianism or the so-called “death of Marx.”

Thus Foucault did indeed have a liberal moment – but it was inspired not by the political liberalism of Benjamin Constant, Alexis de Tocqueville, or François Guizot, whom other intellectuals were busily dusting off at the time, but by economic liberals like Adam Smith, Wilhelm Röpke, and the Chicago School. In his 1978 and 1979 lectures, the antistatism latent in Foucault's theory of power was nurtured by the resurgence of neoliberal ideas that the 1973 economic crisis precipitated. In this climate, Foucault found economic liberalism to be intellectually appealing for two crucial reasons. First, at a juncture when he, like a number of his contemporaries, was attempting to free French intellectual life from the headlock of revolutionary leftism (or gauchisme), economic liberalism proved to be a potent theoretical weapon for bludgeoning the Left's authoritarian proclivities. Second, Foucault could endorse economic liberalism because, unlike its political counterpart, it did not require him to embrace philosophical humanism – the outlook that Foucault had, from the outset of his career, contested with all the energy that his intellectual skills could muster. The theoretical condition of possibility of Foucault's neoliberal moment was his insight that economic liberalism is, essentially, a liberalism without humanism. The limitation of state power that defines the practice of economic liberalism does not occur, Foucault maintained, when “subjects” are recognized as having “rights.” Of such hypotheses it has no need. Rather, economic liberalism justifies itself on the basis of its greater efficiency: it is a practice that arises when power realizes that it has an interest as power in limiting power. Far from being grounds for denouncing it, this is precisely why Foucault found economic liberalism so appealing: it offered a compelling terrain upon which his practical aspiration for freedom might merge with his theoretical conviction that power is constitutive of all human relationships.--Michael C. Behrent (2016 [2014]) "Liberalism without Humanism: Michel Foucault and the Freemarket Creed, 1976-1979." in Foucault and Neoliberalism, edited b Daniel Zamora & Michael C. Behrent, pp. 29-31. [The paper was first published in 2009.]

It is fair to say that Zamora and Behrent's volume set off an anxious debate on 'the Left' on how to evaluate late Foucault's work. My interest here is not to save Foucault for 'the Left;' but I want to engage some of the more important contributions of that debate because some of its terms prevent, I think, an adequate appreciation of Foucault's position. The problems I want to call attention to are present in Behrent's essay.

But before I get to that, I want to avoid some misunderstanding. I like, even admire Behrent's attempt to situate Foucault's thought in political and activist developments of the 1970s in France and its political economy (including stagflation, and debates over the electoral alliance between communists and socialists). So, if you are  not familiar with his paper, do read it!

In addition, in the passage quoted above, Behrent notes an important oddity in Foucault's treatment of liberalism in the Birth of Biopolitics; Foucault seems to skip the French, nineteenth century liberal tradition, including its leading lights, Constant, Tocqueville, and Guizot. (We know that Foucault was quite familiar with Tocqueville, especially.) This apparent omission matters because it entails that Foucault's treatment of the 'radical' tradition --  utilitarianism -- is biased toward Bentham and Robbins (and later Becker), and away from J.S. Mill (who was shaped by Tocqueville and Constant, especially) and who is never mentioned in the Birth of Biopolitics (nor is Sidgwick). 

Unfortunately, Behrent ends up misunderstanding the significance of this because he treats the omission as instantiating a distinction between political and economic liberalism with political liberalism committed to (philosophical) humanism and economic liberalism not. To be sure, I don't mean to deny that Foucault's engagement with liberalism exhibits anti-humanist tendencies, but Behrent's presentation ends up conflating a number of issues. 

First, the distinction between political and economic liberalism is Behrent's not Foucault's. Unfortunately, it is orthogonal to Foucault's own distinction between (recall 17 January 1979, lecture 2  The Birth of Biopolitics. p. 42) (i) an "axiomatic, juridico-deductive approach" which starts from law (and which Foucault associates with Rousseau). That is a republican-contractual approach. and (ii) "The other approach does not start from law but from governmental practice itself...and tries to analyze it in terms of the de facto limits that can be set to this governmentality." This (ii) Foucault associates with English radicalism, that is utilitarianism. And according to Foucault (i) and (ii) are two traditions of conceptualizing freedom in liberalism. That is to say, while Constant is not mentioned Foucault is actually engaged in a polemic with him.

I have quoted Foucault to make clear that in Foucault's hands (ii) is also a political form of liberalism (it's focused on governmental practice, after all). Moreover, as Behrent belatedly recognizes, it is kind of odd to slot Röpke, and Ordoliberalism generally, into a non-political or economic liberalism. And so Behrent introduces a further ad hoc claim (about the status of law in liberal thought) that ends up undermining his own distinction between political and economic liberalism:  

the Ordoliberals were not, however, crude free-marketeers. Their beliefs boil down to a single crucial insight: everything that neoclassical economics says about the free market's virtues is true; the problem, however, is that competition is a quasi-mathematical ideal, not an empirical reality. For competition to work its magic, it must first be jump-started by the state. Specifically, the state needs a robust legal framework, one that allows marketplace competition to approximate its ideal form (though like the utilitarians, it should be noted, the Ordoliberals conceived of law as a political tool, not as the state's metaphysical foundation). What seems to have intrigued Foucault about Ordoliberalism is that it confirmed his intuition that economic liberalism should be thought of as a political and not merely an economic system. Behrent "Liberalism without Humanism," p. 49

To save his distinction between economic and political liberalism, Behrent introduces a further distinction between those that treat the law "as the state's metaphysical foundation" (that is, "political liberals") and those that treat it merely as a political tool (that is, "economic liberals").

Unfortunately, we're now slipping furth away Foucault's own understanding. For, first, Foucault doesn't treat "axiomatic, juridico-deductive approach" as treating the law as a metaphysical foundation for the state--he actually thinks that in so far as law is derived from anything, it's revolutionary violence (or war). But let's stipulate for the sake of argument that Behrent is correct about this.

More important for present purposes, second, it it is quite clear that Foucault treats the "axiomatic, juridico-deductive approach" as leading into Kantianism and he understands Ordoliberalism (plausibly) as itself explicitly a species of Kantianism, but one shaped by the influence of phenomenology (recall especially lecture 5). For, in fact, when Foucault treats of ordoliberalism, they are represented as recognizing explicitly (recall my treatment of lecture 4, 31 January 1979, The Birth of Biopolitics)  that "a state which violates the basic freedoms, the essential rights of citizens, is no longer representative of its citizens." That is to say, the ordoliberals constitute the state in terms of its capacity and willingness to respect citizens' rights. (It is no surprise that James Buchanan, who is a contractualist, admired the Ordoliberals.) So, while Behrent is right to claim that the law is also a tool for Ordoliberals (in particular a means to help battle the effects of concentrated power), Behrent's distinction between economic and political liberalism mischaracterizes them (as an interpretation of Foucault and of their self-understanding). 

As an aside, Behrent's distinctions make a total hash of Röpke's political philosophy. For, Röpke himself is a big fan of Tocqueville (their mutual overlap can be characterized as a kind of 'aristocratic liberalism'). And while Foucault doesn't mention it, it would have been odd if he had missed it.

Now, above I noted that I am open to Behrent's idea that Foucault's attraction to neoliberalism, if it is one, might be found in a kind of shared anti-humanism. The problem with Behrent's way of articulating this insight is that Foucault is quite clear that the Ordos are humanists (this is actually evident from the titles of Röpke's books alone: Civitas Humana; Mass und Mitte; Humane Economy.) Crucially, Foucault explicitly treats and recognizes the Vitalpolitik and Gesellschaftspolitik  of Ordoliberalism as enmeshed in humanism, I quote (recall) lecture 10 (21 March, 1979) of The Birth of Biopolitics: for the Ordos, "The individual’s life must be lodged, not within a framework of a big enterprise like the firm or, if it comes to it, the state, but within the framework of a multiplicity of diverse enterprises connected up to and entangled with each other, enterprises which are in some way ready to hand for the individual, sufficiently limited in their scale for the individual’s actions, decisions, and choices to have meaningful and perceptible effects, and numerous enough for him not to be dependent on one alone." (p. 241, emphasis added; there is an echo of Heidegger here, but without his anti-humanism!)

As an important aside, while Foucault clearly admires Ordoliberalism, Behrent misses that Foucault treats the French uptake of their ideas as a "radicalization" (lecture 8, p. 207; in context Foucault is discussing Giscard and Barre). And so Behrent misses, I think, how Foucault is criticizing how Giscard and Barre have applied ordoliberal (and Austrian) ideas in France. But about that another time more.

Now, as I have noted before, inscribed in the Birth of Biopolitics, is a natural history of the changing conceptions of homo oeconomicus: (i) in the Smithian period he is the man of exchange (224) or with explicit reference to Hume (as an exemplar of English empiricism) "the subject of interest" (273); in the (ii) classical period starting with Ricardo he is man the consumer in terms of satisfaction/pursuit of needs (p. 225);+ (iii) in the neoliberal period, especially in the (recall) ORDO senses, "he is the man of enterprise and production." (147, lecture 6). And (iv) at Chicago he is also "an entrepreneur," but now, especially, "an entrepreneur of himself," who develops and produces/maintains his own human capital as a source of earnings (226), even a possible earning stream into the future (230), and (crucially for present purposes) "reacts to reality in a nonrandom way." (p. 269, 28 March 1979).* 

Now, of these only Becker (iv), perhaps, may be slotted into a kind of philosophical antihumanism in Foucault's hands (recall this post). (I return to that some time.) But in so far as there is a tradition of economic liberalism as constructed by Behrent, it is not constituted by philosophical antihumanism in Foucault's presentation (or, I would add, in 'reality'). And so this means that in so far as we're trying to explain Foucault's attraction, if any, to neoliberalism something has gone off the rails. And this is, I have argued, because Behrent mistakenly treats "economic liberalism" as a kind term that somehow combines Smith, Röpke, and Becker whereas Foucault does not. It doesn't follow from this, of course, that 'the Left's anxiety' about Foucault's seeming attraction to neoliberalism is itself mistaken. To be continued.