Digressions&Impressions

Rawlsian Minutiae, Mill, and Free Speech

First of all, it is important to recognize that the basic liberties must be assessed as a whole, as one system. That is, the worth of one liberty normally depends upon the specification of the other liberties, and this must be taken into account in framing a constitution and in legislation generally. While it is by and large true that a greater liberty is preferable, this holds primarily for the system of liberty as a whole, and not for each particular liberty. Clearly when the liberties are left unrestricted they collide with one another. To illustrate by an obvious example, certain rules of order are necessary for intelligent and profitable discussion. Without the acceptance of reasonable procedures of inquiry and debate, freedom of speech loses its value. It is essential in this case to distinguish between rules of order and rules restricting the content of speech. While rules of order limit our freedom, since we cannot speak whenever we please, they are required to gain the benefits of this liberty. Thus the delegates to a constitutional convention, or the members of the legislature, must decide how the various liberties are to be specified so as to yield the best total system of equal liberty. They have to balance one liberty against another. --John Rawls A Theory of Justice, p. 203. {Emphasis added--ES}

At one point, in his marvelous (1989) Hayek and Modern Liberalism, Chandran Kukathas quotes from Rawls' A Theory of Justice in order to illuminate the point that "conflicts among different pursuers of values are best regulated according to principles which respect (the right to) liberty." (p. 147) Kukathas quotes the part I have highlighted and italicized. I want to call this part Rawls' "ordered conception of free speech" stance. (One might also call it 'the rule governed conception of free speech' or the 'transcendental conception of free speech' etc.) And its that highlighted and italicized material that triggered this post.

While Rawls goes on to discuss Mill's On Liberty in the next sections (on freedom of conscience), he does not comment on the fact that the ordered conception of free speech is at variance with the more tumultuous conception of free speech that is usually ascribed to On Liberty. I put it like that because I don't want to perpetuate the error that Mill holds 'a free market in ideas that will lead to truth view' although the marketplace of ideas view is even more frequently (and, as Jill Gordon persuasively argues, mistakenly) attributed to Mill (recall this post); recall also see, for example, here; here,  and here.) 

One reason to call it Rawls' account an 'ordered conception' of speech is that the value he ascribes to it is articulated in functional terms. One might say that for Rawls the intelligibility of freedom of speech presupposes that it has a certain function namely to produce 'intelligent and profitable' speech (which he may have inherited from Knight--see the second picture). Leaving aside the elitist commitments on display here (and, if one wishes, the generosity toward profit if we read him over-literally), lots of emotionally significant expressive speech clearly is not like that even if it falls short of the vituperative speech that Mill worries about.  In fact, this contrast between expression and discussion is explicit  on p. 346 in Frank Knight's treatment of some such contrast, and is one of the heavily annotated passages in Rawls' copy of The Ethics of Competition.*

The following is from p. 352 in Knight:

Now, before I continue, I do not want to claim that Rawls thinks governments have very broad scope to regulate speech to make it 'intelligent and profitable' or to promote the ordered conception. He may well also believe that this would be imprudent or, that the enforcement of speech restrictions, would generate concerns about violations of other liberties (privacy, assembly, freedom of conscience, etc.). And he may also think that when the government regulates speech it really is interested in content and not order (and so cannot be trusted to get this right). In fact, in A Theory of Justice Rawls is by and large not that interested in freedom of speech. But one can see why the functional significance of the ordered conception lends itself well to the rather extensive speech restrictions (in selling financial instruments, in selling pharmaceuticals, in selling tobacco, etc. ) which are quite common in the contemporary administrative state (and often ignored in recent public debates over woke and freedom of speech).

As an aside, I don't mean to satirize the ordered conception of speech. It clearly has debts to Knight's and Buchanan's diverging conceptualizations of liberalism as involving "democracy as government by discussion" that was, as I have suggested above, have been familiar to Rawls. (I also think one can extract the ordered conception from Mill's writings on representation.) I am myself not immune to the pull of the ordered conception of speech in some contexts. For example, it informs my own views on academic freedom which fundamentally involves ordered speech of different kinds (in journals, the seminar room, etc.) I also tend to suspect (echoing Iris Marion Young) that advocates of deliberative democracy and (closer to Rawls' own heart) public reason tend to be (dangerously) enthralled by the ordered conception of speech.

Be that as it may, if one works with the revised (1990) edition of A Theory of Justice, the ordered conception is less pronounced. In fact, the passage is re-written in non trivial ways. Among the most significant changes, the revised version of the passage removes 'intelligent and profitable" and the distinction between rules of order and rules on content altogether:

First of all, one must keep in mind that the basic liberties are to be assessed as a whole, as one system. The worth of one such liberty normally depends upon the specification of the other liberties. Second, I assume that under reasonably favorable conditions there is always a way of defining these liberties so that the most central applications of each can be simultaneously secured and the most fundamental interests protected. Or at least that this is possible provided the two principles and their associated priorities are consistently adhered to. Finally, given such a specification of the basic liberties, it is assumed to be clear for the most part whether an institution or law actually restricts a basic liberty or merely regulates it. For example, certain rules of order are necessary for regulating discussion; without the acceptance of reasonable procedures of inquiry and debate, freedom of speech loses its value. On the other hand, a prohibition against holding or arguing for certain religious, moral, or political views is a restriction of liberty and must be judged accordingly. Thus as delegates in a constitutional convention, or as members of a legislature, the parties must decide how the various liberties are to be specified so as to give the best total system of liberty. They must note the distinction between regulation and restriction, but at many points they will have to balance one basic liberty against another; for example, freedom of speech against the right to a fair trial. The best arrangement of the several liberties depends upon the totality of limitations to which they are subject.--John Rawls A Theory of Justice, Revised edition, p. 178. {emphasis added--ES}

I suspect part of the change of wording is due to that it is easy to abuse a purported restriction on order as a restriction on content. For, while officially dropping the distinction, the revised version leans into denying the government any significant content restrictions, by adding the point that "a prohibition against holding or arguing for certain religious, moral, or political views is a restriction of liberty." But as the highlighted part suggests, even so, the crucial element of the ordered conception of speech does remain in the revised version.

Let me close with a sociological observation. Despite the fact that advocates of public reason and deliberative democracy, which lean heavily on conceptions of ordered speech, have thriving research programs (and the former is very indebted to Rawls), it is safe to say that Rawls' conception of freedom of speech has not been as influential as other parts of his project. I have three kinds of evidence for this claim: first, in Katrina Forrester's In the Shadow of Justice, freedom of speech barely figures. (Of course, civil disobedience does!) Second, the emphasized and italicized parts of the passages are quoted very rarely in the secondary literature (although I found it in a few dissertations especially). Third, it is my perception that in scholarly and more public intellectual discussions of free speech, Rawls' shadow has not, displaced Mill. Obviously my perception counts for nothing, but I would be amazed if data crunchers could show otherwise.

*PS After reading an earlier draft of the post, David M. Levy was kind enough to share some marking up of Rawls' personal copy of Knight's The Ethics of Competition (which has Knight's earliest use of 'government by discussion' as I learned from the paper by Ross Emmett linked above). The fact that Knight treats the rules of discussion as game is important evidence for Forrester's argument on the early Rawls' interest in what is now known as neoliberalism. For some other salient to the present post's passages see these pix:

 

From p. 343:

 

On Hayek, Entrepreneurs, Elites and Social Change [Guestpost by Erwin Dekker]

[This is an invited guest-post by Erwin Dekker.--ES]

The Austrian tradition in economics/political economy is known for its theory of entrepreneurship. In its Schumpeterian version the entrepreneur is a heroic character who can break routines, innovate, and persuade others to go along in their endeavor. The Mises and Kirzner version of the entrepreneur is a more mundane figure ‘alert’ to profit opportunities which are not yet exploited by others (recall here and here). Both versions of the entrepreneur emphasize the conscious and intentional nature of the innovative acts. Although the entrepreneur’s behavior cannot be captured in a simple maximization framework, it does fit within the teleological means-ends framework of human action which Mises (Hayek’s teacher) developed.

Intentionality fades slowly from Hayek’s later work. In the Constitution of Liberty (1960) he argues: “Humiliating to human pride as it may be, we must recognize that the advance and even the preservation of civilization are dependent upon a maximum of opportunity for accidents to happen” (29).[1] Hayek contrasts the ‘countless number of humble steps taken by anonymous persons in the course of doing familiar things’ with ‘major intellectual innovations which are explicitly realized’ (28). Change in his social philosophy is more a process of adaptation to changing circumstances than the result of human imagination or alert actions to improve the everyday run of things.

It has always struck me as surprising that the most famous Austrian thinker is essentially silent on the theme of entrepreneurship. One plausible explanation is that Hayek was worried about a typical version of romantic individualism, which attributed too much uniqueness to the individual mind and will, as Eric has recently suggested here. A contributing factor is that Hayek was always more of an evolutionary thinker who emphasized the market process rather than the actions of individuals within such a market. His famous critique of the static nature of (perfect) competition in neoclassical models therefore does not blame it for lack of attention to entrepreneurship, but for its lack of attention to the dynamic interactive process of competition. More generally he emphasizes mutual adjustments rather than social change through intentional agency.

And yet, upon rereading the Constitution of Liberty for a recent weekend of the Adam Smith Fellowship program I could not help but being struck by the elitist nature of the theory of social change in Hayek. The key chapter in this regard appears to be the innocuously titled ‘The Common Sense of Progress’ (chapter 3), in which he first argues that the rich bear most of the costs of experimentation, because they are the first to buy new goods which come to the market, initially in limited quantities. Hayek, as is typical for him, does not dwell on examples or empirical substantiation, but at least up to this point we might understand this as a stylized empirical fact: new products are first offered to a small elite which adopts them, and if successful the product will be produced in larger quantities at lower costs, and become available to the middle classes.

But Hayek is aware of the fact that economic inequality in this way breeds social inequality, because: “most of what we strive for are things we want because others already have them” (45). The effects of which he calls cruel, but inevitable: “[in a] progressive society, some must lead, and others must follow” (45). To drive the point home as it were, he turns his more narrowly economic argument into a social argument, by suggesting that it is the rich who engage in experimentation with “new styles of living”, which over time will make these new styles ‘accessible to the poor’, without which the poor would advance much slower. It is important to see that we have moved here from a narrower argument about differences in purchasing power to a broader argument about the role of the rich in advancing society.

Hayek then develops this argument into the political realm by suggesting that a similar dynamic plays out among nations. Just like the poor in a given society benefit from the experiments in buying and living of the rich, so the populations of other countries benefit from the experiments in buying and living of those in leading countries. Both the British labor classes and the rest of the world benefitted from ‘a rich class with old traditions [which] demanded products of a quality and taste unsurpassed elsewhere’ (48). It is an argument that Tyler Cowen has occasionally made about the way in which European regulated welfare states benefit from innovation and permissiveness in the United States.

The flipside of the argument that the rich are those who experiment and therefore bear the costs of social change, is that it is only the rich which are truly free. An implication which would bring Hayek surprisingly close in outlook to Schumpeter, who believed that the masses were merely following rules and customs, while entrepreneurs were those who could psychologically break free from these everyday constraints and imagine better alternatives. One might suggest that such a reading is somewhat uncharitable, but Hayek himself asks the reader at the start of chapter eight ‘Employment and Independence’ to wonder whether the arguments he developed still holds in modern times: “in which a relatively larger part of the people, and most of those who counted in the forming opinion, were independent in the activities that gave them their livelihood” (118).[2]

One might expect Hayek to make the argument that rising living standards mean that more individuals are now in a position to engage in economic and social experimentation. Quite to the contrary he suggests that when the franchise was extended to workers, they quite naturally looked to limit the freedoms of the rich for they could not imagine what these were good for. There are moreover important sociological consequences of the fact that wage-laborers do not assume risks or personal initiatives: “A man who works under direction for a fixed salary or wage may be as conscientious, industrious, or intelligent as one who must constantly choose between alternatives; but he can hardly be as inventive or experimental” (120).

In what follows Hayek continues to systematically distinguish two classes in society, the dependent wage-laborers, and the men of independent means, who have ‘an indispensable role to play in any civilized society.’ They are of particular relevance beyond the market: “in the field of cultural amenities, in the fine arts, in education and research, in the preservation of natural beauty and historic treasures, and above all, in the propagation of new ideas in politics, morals, and religion” (125). So essential does Hayek consider the role of this social class, that if it did not exist, he suggest it might have to be created through a kind of lottery which would free a certain group of individuals to exercise true independence and freedom, although these individuals might lack the education and familiarity with wealth that the children of the rich have. In the absence of such a lottery, the merits of this social class provide an argument in favor of inheritance for Hayek.  

The Austrian tradition, Hayek included, is typically known for its emphasis on the heterogeneity of individuals. But in his theory of social change Hayek suggests that such heterogeneity is in fact largely limited to a small subset of individuals who are free of many of the (material) obligations that life in contemporary society brings with it. His own theory that changes come about through a response to changing circumstances which necessitate adjustments for individuals all over society is seemingly contradicted by his suggestion that only the rich are truly free to experiment. Hayek’s plea for the importance of local and contextual knowledge of time and place next to, or even above, general scientific knowledge, has strong democratic undertones, which completely disappear in the way he talks about the generation of new knowledge through market and social experimentation. This surprisingly makes Hayek theory of social change elitist in a way not too dissimilar from that of Joseph Schumpeter, Hayek even refers repeatedly to the rich as an avant-garde, a favorite metaphor of the maverick Schumpeter. Although, it must be said that Schumpeter, like John Stuart Mill before him, puts more emphasis on differences in character and energy between individuals, while Hayek stresses differences in material circumstances.

Another notable difference with John Stuart Mill is that the experiments in living which both he and Hayek discuss, have no intrinsic value for Hayek. In Mill they foster a spirit of individualism and turn human beings into a ‘noble and beautiful object of contemplation’. Hayek worries that such individualism might upset the social order and the process of coordination, but more importantly he is not at all concerned with the value that individuals might derive from experimentation and deviance, or how it might reinforce a liberal spirit.

If there is a real tension between the broader Hayekian tenets of dispersed knowledge, mutual adjustment, and process theory and his theory of social change, this implies that a Hayekian theory of social change is still to be developed. In my book on the Viennese Students of Civilization I noted similarities between the work of Norbert Elias, who essentially developed a trickle-down theory of social change through imitation of the superior ways of the aristocracy and that of some Austrian economists. Later social theorists, including sociologists originally inspired by Elias, have suggested social change originates from the fringes of society, where individuals have either less pressure to conform (and so the costs of deviant behavior are lower) or oppressed so that individuals stand relatively more to gain from experimentation and protest. Especially since Hayek is explicitly progressive on social liberal issues, he praises: “the abolition of slavery, penal and prison reforms, the prevention of cruelty to children or to animals, and a more humane treatment of the insane” (127).

This tension is also relevant for a political economic analysis of power in society. One might expect that those with independent means will primarily be interested in protecting the status quo, rather than changing it. Hayek admits that this class is more likely to produce ‘bons vivants than scholars and public servants’, but he never entertains that they might abuse their economic and social power to corrupt the political system in their favor. Whereas Schumpeter praised the rotation of elites in one of his characteristic metaphors which spoke of the elite as the top floor of a hotel which is always full, but always with different people. Hayek seems more concerned with the disappearance ‘of a cultural elite’ which resulted from the combined effects of inflation and taxation (129).  

Hayek’s own emphasis on heterogeneity and his plea for maximizing the chances for accidents to happen, could equally well be developed into a social theory which suggests that social change is more likely to occur when opposing groups or individuals with different values meet each other, and the necessity for mutual adjustment emerges. This is also what Mill concluded about the reason why pressures for social conformism have not led to social stagnation among the European family of nations. This was not due to the superior excellence in any one nation or class, but a result of: “their remarkable diversity of character and culture. Individuals, classes, nations, have been extremely unlike one another: they have struck out a great variety of paths, each leading to something valuable, their.” This is in line with more recent work in (cultural) economics which suggest that more social diversity is good for growth and  development.

Closer to Hayek’s own epistemological liberalism there is increasing attention in the philosophy of science for the benefits of cognitive diversity (see Ryan Muldoon's overview). Most importantly, it would take more seriously the stylized facts which Deborah Coen in her Vienna in the Age of Uncertainty made central to Viennese liberal thought: the increasing heterogeneity between all individuals in an increasingly complex society, spurred on by the division of labor and the resulting division of knowledge. I think with Mill that a liberal should find such heterogeneity on its own desirable, but it also supplies a better starting point for theorizing social change, than the one that Hayek provides.

Luxemberg vs Lenin and a comment on Hayek (and Wieser)

The history of the Russian labor movement suggests the doubtful value of such centralism. An all-powerful center, invested, as Lenin would have it, with the unlimited right to control and intervene, would be an absurdity if its authority applied only to technical questions, such as the administration of funds, the distribution of tasks among propagandists and agitators, the transportation and circulation of printed matter. The political purpose of an organ having such great powers only if those powers apply to the elaboration of a uniform plan of action, if the central organ assumes the initiative of a vast revolutionary act.

But what has been the experience of the Russian socialist movement up to now? The most important and fruitful changes in its tactical policy during the last ten years have not been the inventions of several leaders and even less so of any central organizational organs. They have always been the spontaneous product of the movement in ferment. This was true during the first stage of the proletarian movement in Russia, which began with the spontaneous general strike of St. Petersburg in 1896, an event that marks the inception of an epoch of economic struggle by the Russian working people. It was no less true during the following period, introduced by the spontaneous street demonstrations of St. Petersburg students in March, 1901. The general strike of Rostov-on-Don, in 1903, marking the next great tactical turn in the Russian proletarian movement, was also a spontaneous act. “All by itself,” the strike expanded into political demonstrations, street agitation, great outdoor meetings, which the most optimistic revolutionist would not have dreamed of several years before.

Our cause made great gains in these events. However, the initiative and conscious leadership of the Social Democratic organizations played an insignificant role in this development. It is true that these organizations were not specifically prepared for such happenings. However, the unimportant part played by the revolutionists cannot be explained by this fact. Neither can it be attributed to the absence of an all-powerful central party apparatus similar to what is asked for by Lenin. The existence of such a guiding center would have probably increased the disorder of the local committees by emphasizing the difference between the eager attack of the mass and the prudent position of the Social Democracy. The same phenomenon – the insignificant part played by the initiative of central party organs in the elaboration of actual tactical policy – can be observed today in Germany and other countries. In general, the tactical policy of the Social Democracy is not something that may be “invented.” It is the product of a series of great creative acts of the often spontaneous class struggle seeking its way forward.--Rosa Luxemburg (1904) "Revolutionary Socialist Organization," part 1.

It is well known that despite their mutual admiration, and their common rejection of reformist/gradualist social democracy ('Bersteinism,') Lenin and Luxemburg also had some important disagreements. The quoted passage is from Luxemburg's response to Lenin's (1904) One Step Forward, Two Steps Back, and shows familiarity with Lenin's (1902) What is to be Done? In these works Lenin had advocated for an all powerful central party apparatus, as Luxemburg suggests. This apparatus was supposed to be secret (to avoid capture by the police) and constituted by an elite group of professional revolutionaries. (Lenin is also very critical of an exclusive, trade unionist focus on economic issues.) Lenin's argument appeals to the benefits of the division of labor among professional revolutionaries to the development of a professional cadre with different kind of specializations (agitators, propagandists, theoreticians, etc.) It is worth noting that the demand for secrecy is an effect of the Russian context (it being an autocratic police-state with few liberties of association), but the focus on professionalism seems less context sensitive for Lenin (nothing that follows hinges this, I hope). 

Luxemburg's intervention on the side of the spontaneous activity is notable not just because she risks being seen to side here, in part, with those gradualists she ordinarily condemns, but also because it appears she rejects the advantages of the division of labor to the revolution. In particular, Lenin's vanguardism solves a kind of knowledge problem for the proletariat which, while being exploited, lacks access to the intellectual tools to plan and organize a revolution. (It's short on human capital one may say.) Because I am not a Marxist, I hope the next part of this sentence is not treated as thinly-disguised-polemic, but it strikes me that Lenin is right to think that his view is well grounded in Marxist-Leninist writings (despite their criticisms of the division of labor under capitalism).* 

As an aside -- this may be more fairly construed as more polemical, but it is meant to be factual observation --, vanguardism does introduce an important tension into Marxism from a purely theoretical point of view. For, one of the key claims on behalf of Marxism, very clearly annunciated in the Communist Manifesto, is that it promises rule by the majority against the minority. And one need not be an Elite theorist to recognize how rare that it is. (The aristocratic element in liberal democracy -- elections to representative bodies -- secures (to be sure, legitimate) minority rule over a majority.) Vanguardism is a clear break with the idea of majority rule, which is why it is promised to be provisional. Of course, the non-trivial risk is that once in power the vanguard becomes a (new) species of elite rule.

So, Luxemburg's attack on the Leninist counterfactual ("The existence of such a guiding center would have probably increased the disorder of the local committees") is not merely an invention over a tactical debate, but also addresses a principled issue for Marxism. And here I want to call attention to two epistemic features of her position that are meant to respond to Lenin's solution to the knowledge problem for a revolutionary proletariat. First, she argues that central coordination does not increase unity and effectiveness, but is likely to cause disorder. And she attributes this to difference of positional or situated perspective which results inevitably in different stances (prudence vs enthusiasm), which itself undermines common agency. Of course, this is not a very convincing response to Lenin because the very enthusiasm of the masses is not sufficient to make a revolution (and often is directed at only local improvement without wider political regard). This is why Luxemburg's second point, the rejection of top-down policy, is significant.

Second, I read her as suggesting that many local struggles are each occasions of learning, trials that may in their very spontaneity and so novelty lead to new discoveries: where conflict induced necessity  generates "great creative acts." Each local trial of strength between the proletariat and the authorities and/or capital provides a feedback mechanism from which to learn in which (the revolutionary consciousness of) the working class is trained. And, in particular, over time this will create a critical mass of "the existence of a large contingent of workers educated in the class struggle" (presumably capable of revolutionary politics). So, from her perspective the temptation of vanguardism is understandable, but with patience (and class struggle) avoidable. 

By contrast, Lenin is quite clear that he thinks this is bunk--that a central clearinghouse is needed to integrate lessons learned and to provide the necessary expertise, to coordinate, and to educate. So, I am not suggesting Luxemburg wins this argument. In fact, with the benefit of hindsight we can see that he was right that vanguardism could achieve real power. But at the same time, Luxemburg was prescient in discerning that such vanguardism would inevitably lead to rule of a minority over a majority (as she notes "the self-discipline of the Social Democracy is not merely the replacement of the authority of bourgeois rulers with the authority of a socialist central committee.")

Now, what I want to note, in conclusion, is that Luxemburg's position on the spontaneous, bottom up education by the proletariat through local struggle is structurally analogous to (recall)the view that Michael Polanyi and then, more famously, Hayek develop in the 1930s on the way learning occurs in markets and the generation of spontaneous order. To be sure, knowledge about the spontaneous order generating features of markets pre-date Luxemburg, so I am not suggesting she influenced their development of the concept, which was already familiar. (And Polanyi is surely influenced by the way 'spontaneous' is used in chemistry and physics of the nineteenth century.) But anyone familiar with debates among Marxists at the start of the twentieth century, will be quickly struck by how important and intense the debate over revolutionary spontaneity is. This debate died circa 1920.

Hayek (1899 – 1992) and Michael Polanyi  (1891 – 1976) came to maturity in the aftermath of this debate. While Polanyi never seems to have flirted with social democracy (and was not especially educated in economics), Hayek was clearly (and un-controversially) influenced by Wieser and charmed by Wieser's 'Fabian socialist' tendencies as a student. The Fabians were the standard-bearers of social democratic gradualism (which is at times compatible, of course, with left liberalism). So, it's worth exploring to what degree Wieser and the young Hayek were themselves enmeshed in, or at least aware of, the debates over the epistemic merits of spontaneous proletarian action. 

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Ortega y Gasset (and Lerner, even Burnham) vs Schmitt: a note on political theory of the 1930s,

    Restrictions, standards, courtesy, indirect methods, justice, reason! Why were all these invented, why all these complications created? They are all summed up in the word civilisation, which, through the underlying notion of civis, the citizen, reveals its real origin. By means of all these there is an attempt to make possible the city, the community, common life. Hence, if we look into all these constituents of civilisation just enumerated, we shall find the same con1mon basis. All, in fact, presuppose the radical progressive desire on the part of each individual to take others into consideration. Civilisation is before all, the will to live in common. A man is uncivilised, barbarian in the degree in which he does not take others into account. Barbarism is the tendency to disassociation. Accordingly, all barbarous epochs have been times of human scattering, of the pullulation of tiny groups, separate from and hostile to one another.
   The political doctrine which has represented the loftiest endeavour towards common life is liberal democracy. It carries to the extreme the determination to have consideration for one's neighbour and is the prototype of "indirect action." Liberalism is that principle of political rights, according to which the public authority, in spite of being all-powerful, limits itself and attempts, even at its own expense, to leave room in the State over which it rules for those to live who neither think nor feel as it does, that is to say as do the stronger, the majority. Liberalism-it is well to recall this to-day-is the supreme form of generosity; it is the right which the majority concedes to minorities and hence it is the noblest cry that has ever resounded in this planet. It announces the determination to share existence with the enemy; more than that, with an enemy ,which is weak. It was incredible that the human species should have arrived at so noble an attitude, so paradoxical, so refined, so acrobatic, so antinatural. Hence, it is not to be wondered at that this same humanity should soon appear anxious to get rid of it. It is a discipline too difficult and complex to take firm root on earth.
    Share our existence with the enemy! Govern with the opposition! Is not such a form of tenderness beginning to seem incomprehensible? Nothing indicates more clearly the characteristics of the day that the fact there are so few countries where an opposition exists.--José Ortega y Gasset (1932) The Revolt of the Masses (anonymous translator), p. 75-77. [HT Jeffrey Bernstein]

Regular readers know I am not a fan of the use of a barbarism/civilization contrast in social theory and political life because it facilitates the domination of the barbarians by the self-proclaimed civilized. It is pretty clear that for Ortega y Gasset the barbarous are in a Hobbesian state of nature, and so one may well suspect that he advocates their submission to a civilizing authority. And many humane critics of liberalism are eager, not wholly unfairly, to tie it to the evils of imperialism and colonialism. Even so, I want to convince you there is something important in this passage.

Not unlike James Burnham (recall here; here), Ortega y Gasset accepts the diagnosis of the Italian Elite school that in political life necessarily some minorities rule. And because of his relentless cultural and meritocratic elitism, Ortega y Gasset is an unlikely friend of democracy. But while no martyr to the ill-fated Spanish republic, he served, I think, it with honor (see for some hints to the contrary here). In fact, alongside his friend Johan Huizinga, he was one of the people invited to the Lippmann Colloquium in 1938, although both declined to attend.*

That it is constitutive of liberal democracy to permit systematic opposition to authority is, of course,  a cliché by now. Theoretically it originates in eighteenth century British parliamentary life and its classical theorists are Hume and Burke (writing as a Whig).  It is generally articulated in terms of a loyal opposition or party competition with the opposition being a government in waiting. In parliamentary systems the leader of the opposition is granted all kinds of privileges including not infrequently considerable access to state secrets. In some Presidential systems, the opposition can even be in control of the government or major legislative chambers. 

Okay, with that in place I want to make two observations on Ortega y Gasset's approach. First, as the relentless repetition of 'enemy' suggests, he is clearly responding to an argument or position we now associate primarily with Carl Schmitt. I can't prove that Ortega y Gasset read  the (1927) journal article version of Schmitt's "The Concept of the Political" (published in Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, 58(1), pp. 1–33). But since Ortega y Gassett was partially educated at Berlin and Marburg, he certainly knew German well. But I leave this to the specialists.

And Ortega y Gasset is quite clear that the enemy remains an enemy within some political unities. So, his defense of liberalism, which relies on some Christian tropes, does not require that the opposition is treated as (agonistic) friends (or -- if one takes Schmitt's self-revisionism at face value -- as foes). In fact, he is quite adamant that a liberal state can constitute a radical pluralism with a majority and a minority people 'who neither think nor feel as it does.' In my view he anticipates Popper here (recall). 

Now, one may well wonder how this is supposed to work beyond bald assertion. And I don't think Ortega y Gasset has all that much to say about it other than stating it as a (rare) fact. (One may well suggest that some linguistically and religiously diverse federations  -- canonically Switzerland -- provide some evidence for the kind of forbearance that Ortega y Gasset has in mind.) So, that's disappointing. But near the end of Revolt of the Masses, he does offer a kind of historical explanation of the possibility of living with the enemy. And here he anticipates an observation by Foucault (recall in Birth of Biopolitics): that the European state system, which provides the context for the development of nation-states, actually taught Europeans to accommodate themselves to, and even trade regularly with, enemies, and recognize at least fellow Europeans  as fundamentally equal (pp. 177-178). This is a remarkably optimistic point to take from the wreckage of the first world war. 

But I think Ortega y Gasset is right that there is an important line between forbearance to a domestic enemy and allow for some kind of common life, and a desire to crush enemies. And within liberalism this line should not be crossed.** And this gets me to the second point. Given Ortega y Gasset's rhetoric I quoted one must think that that the view I have attributed to him is kind of idiosyncratic, a foolish high minded aristocratic liberalism whose time has passed. But this point is actually more common in the 1930s across the political specter. 

Take, for example, Max Lerner, a self-described liberal collectivist, who in It is Later than you Think: the need for a militant democracy (1939) writes eloquently in favor of the "majority principle" and defends the utility of (at least some) demagogues, and who treats defenses of 'minority rights' as thinly disguised efforts to promote "oligarchical rule." He advocates collective planning, technocracy, and explicitly rejects separation of powers. His "insurance against tyranny must be placed...squarely on the party system." (233ff) The necessity of an "opposition" must be cherished. (237 with positive claims about British parliamentary practices.) And he thinks that only collectivist planning can allow for a functional true opposition system.

And, again, moving to another angle of the political spectrum, James Burnham who (having left his Trotsky-ism behind) is an adamant and eloquent critic of liberalism. In re-founding modern conservatism,  he argues, in a book that draws heavily on the Italian Elite school, The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom (1943) that liberty involves "above all...the existence of a public opposition to the governing elite....it is the only effective check on the power of the governing elite." (223) For him, "the existence of an opposition means a cleavage in the ruling class." In fact, for Burnham opposition need not be only party opposition--what a free society requires is a clash of social forces to generate what I called (recall), in my own reading of Machiavelli, 'creative turbulence" (recall also this post on Popper). This, too, requires a certain forbearance against those that one may well see as the enemy.+ 

Okay, when confronted with one-party totalitarian states and calls for direct action, very different theorists in the 1930s discerned that it is crucial to maintain a more than merely formal mechanism of internal opposition. And this provides us, I  think, with a useful heuristic when looking at contemporary political movements and parties and leadership-cults that self re-present as defenders of freedom and liberty (often speaking in the name of the people against corrupt elites). Do they actually recognize a place for opposition to their future rule? If not, they are mortal enemies of liberty. 

 

 

 

On the Implosion of Liberal Democracy in 1940, and the Roots of the European Union (Burnham, Pt 1)

Only the hopelessly naïve can imagine that France fell so swiftly because of the mere mechanical strength of the Nazi war machine that might have been sufficient in a longer run, but not to destroy a great nation with a colossal military establishment in a few weeks. France collapsed so swiftly because its people had no heart for the war as every observer had remarked, even through the censorship, from the beginning of the war. And they had no heart for the war because the bourgeois ideologies by which they were appealed to no longer had power to move their hearts. Men are prepared to be heroes for very foolish and unworthy ideals; but they must at least believe in those ideals.

Nowhere is the impotence of bourgeois ideologies more apparent than among the youth, and the coming world, after all, will be the youth's world. The abject failure of voluntary military enlistment in Britain and this country tells its own story to all who wish to listen. It is underlined in reverse by the hundreds of distinguished adult voices which during 1940 began reproaching the American youth for "indifference," "unwillingness to sacrifice," "lack of ideals." How right these reproaches are! And how little effect they have!--James Burnham (1941) The Managerial Revolution: What is Happening in the World, pp. 35-36 (New York John Day).

Matthew Rose's A World After Liberalism: Philosophers of the Radical Right, alerted me to the significance of Burnham as "a central figure in the history of American Conservatism" (118). And since Alex Aragona, who is no conservative at all, recently mentioned The Managerial Revolution in favorable terms to me, I decided it was time to read Burnham's three major works, The Suicide of the West: An Essay on the Meaning and Destiny of Liberalism (1964), The Machiavellians: the Defenders of Freedom (1943), and The Managerial Revolution, in reverse order. Unfortunately, while The Suicide of the West is the most accessible of the three, and of continued interest because it develops major political tropes that still structure political debate, it's also a work that defends civilizational (and racial) hierarchy and its racism (and homophobia, etc.) is intrinsic to the argument. (The racism is not 'scientific,' but primarily cultural in character.) The Machiavellians, by contrast, reads Machiavelli as republican defender of freedom and builds on it a concise, but important introduction to the Italian Elite school (recall). While the claims about civilizational hierarchy are undoubtedly lurking in the background, The Machiavellians deserves a place in the small cannon of twentieth century conservative and realist political theory; it offers a sensible alternative to liberalism without ending up in Schmitt's camp (no small feat). And I expect to return to it.

The passage I quoted above introduces a subsidiary theme that runs through the Managerial Revolution. Before I get to that let me offer a superfical summary of this book, which made Burnham -- then an ex-Trotskyite philosopher at NYU -- famous. The book is primarily diagnostic in character. And in light of his later works we can see that it diagnoses a major trend in order to warn the public against it. While Burnham is scathing of liberals like Hayek and Lippmann, in many ways his diagnosis (and the genre) is very similar: what they call "collectivism" is unfolding in the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, and the New Deal America and this will empower what he calls 'managers' everywhere. Socialism and Capitalism are both doomed, and instead there will be mega-states in which those (managerial) technocrats, whose major role is to coordinate production (and distribution), will become the dominant class.

Okay, now back to the quoted text. This is meant to illustrate Burnham's idea that by the end of the crisis of the 1930s, the young have given up on liberal democracy in the face of mass unemployment, negative growth, and terror by Fascists and Soviets alike. And importantly, Burnham claims that this was not just the case in Nazi Germany (where social democrats and communists basically folded in 1933), but also in the more established liberal democracies in which he also notably includes various attempts at popular fronts (e.g., France and Spain). On his view, by the end of the 1930s, true socialism had been tried in the first few years after the 1917 October revolution and had been transformed into managerialism by the time of Lenin's death. And in "a large number countries-Germany, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Austria, England, Australia, New Zealand, Spain, France-the reformist Marxist parties have administered the governments, and have uniformly failed to introduce socialism or make any genuine step toward socialism." (54)

One reason why managerialism is the way of the future, on this account, is that "we know, without waiting for the future, that managerial economy
can do away with mass unemployment or reduce it to a negligible minimum. This was done, by managerial methods, in Russia and Germany at the same time that England, France, and the United States proved incapable of doing it by capitalist methods." (133) He also clearly thinks managerialism will develop better "fighting machines" too (134). And while Burnham is careful not to endorse the violent methods of really existing managerialism, it is pretty clear he treats those (and the world wars) as transitional phenomena and as birth-pains of a new world order (akin to the wars that gave rise to bourgeois-capitalist civilization at the end of feudalism). As he puts it, "as has happened in the other comparable historical transitions, managerial society does away with the representative political institution of the old society, not merely because a new type of institution is technically better for the new society, but precisely because the old institution represents the old society; it becomes despised and hated, and the resentment of the masses is turned against it (look at France in the early summer of 1940); psychologically, ideologically, it is not suited for the new rule." (149; see also: "The masses in France could not be stirred to enthusiasm for a war for "democracy" (that is, capitalism). They rejoiced at Munich. They were passive when the war started, and all through the war. They did not have the will to fight....It is incredible that the defeat should have been so swift unless we admit, what is undeniably true, that the masses in France did not want to fight the war. They did not want to because the capitalist slogans no longer could move them." (189-190))

My present interest here is neither to defend or criticize Burnham's main thesis, but to call attention to his treatment of the significance of the collapse of France in the 1940s, which as my citations show, runs through the book (despite, compared to the elaborate analysis of developments in Russia and Germany, general lack of interest in offering a careful treatment of the French situation). For as it happens the French collapse also imperils the future of the British empire and prefigures European federation:

From the war of 1939 are coming at least two more of the major political leaps toward managerial society : first, the political consolidation of the European Continent, which involves also the smashing of England's hold on the Continent ; and, second, the breakup of the British Empire, chief political representative of capitalist world society. Though it is not yet understood in this country, both of these steps were assured when France surrendered in June, 1940. The dominant position of capitalist England has always depended upon its acting as middleman between the European Continent and the rest of the world, including most prominently its own great Empire. From this dependence followed the "balance of power" policy which England has been compelled to uphold during the entire capitalist era. This policy demands that no single nation shall dominate the European Continent; or, rather, that England shall dominate the Continent through balancing Continental nations against each other. England's domination can be achieved in no other way, since its comparatively meager national resources and its small population make impossible direct domination through its own force. But the balance of power on the Continent is possible only when the Continent is divided up into a number of genuinely sovereign and powerful states. Such a division ended, for all time, when France surrendered. Consequently, whatever happens during the remainder of the present war, whether or not Hitler's regime is overthrown, whether or not new revolts take place, the old system is finished, and England can never again be dominant in Europe or the controlling political center of a vast world empire. (177-178)

In a famous (1946) essay, "Second Thoughts on James Burnham." George Orwell had a lot of fun showing that many of Burnham's predictions turned out to be falsified. (The essay is the preface to my paperback edition of The Managerial Revolution.) And, in fact, Orwell makes fun of the passage that I quoted at the top of the post (and some of the other passages I have mentioned). But Orwell grudgingly admires Burnham's attempt to "plot the course of the ‘managerial revolution’ accurately on a world scale" and this clearly influenced, as is well known, his treatment of the inner party and the global competition of three world states portrayed in 1984. 

But in 1946, in victory, Orwell refuses to acknowledge what Burnham got right: that with the collapse of the European balance of power, the British approach to a concert of Europe -- which, with a nod to Foucault (recall), goes back to Hume's era and writings -- is finished. As an aside, in June 1940, with French resistance to Germany collapsing (and after the Dunkirk withdrawal), there was briefly a window for a "Franco-British Union" offered by the British cabinet (Wikipedia has a brief overview of the story). And so while Burnham's analysis may be thought fanciful, it's not unlikely that Churchill saw matters in the same way.

For Burnham, capitalist liberal democracy, the balance of power in Europe, and the success of British imperialism are all inter-related. And so with the first in retreat and the second collapsed, the third has no future. While it certainly had dawned on the British governing class by 1941 that they were going to be overshadowed by the Americans, as subsequent history proved, it took them at least to the (1956) Suez fiasco to fully realize that their imperial days were over.* 

However, what it means for the "old system" to be finished means in Europe, is that Europe will be an integrated industrial economy (under German leadership):

This phase, the consolidation of the European base, was completed with France's surrender. It is completed irreversibly and can no longer be undone whatever the outcome of the succeeding phases of the war, which are really other wars. This consolidation, fundamental to the world politics of managerial society, is not going to be dissolved, not even if the present German regime is utterly defeated. In fact, no one expects it to be, not even the English statesmen. The day of a Europe carved into a score of sovereign states is over; if the states remain, they will be little more than administrative units in a larger collectivity. Any attempt to re-divide Europe would collapse, not in the twenty years it took the Versailles system to collapse, but in twenty months. (246; emphases added.)

That is to say, that for Burnham it's obvious that the days of independent European states, who had ruled the world for a few centuries, are over. Given the new political and economic realities, Europe would have to develop into a continental wide integrated, industrial area (akin to the United States of America) in what he calls a "European super-state". (247) From his perspective Nazi-Germany was merely accelerating that which had become inevitable. What Burnham ends up missing is that this would occur eventually much slower under American guidance with European states reduced to satellites (in the manner of Canada, in his account). I leave it for another time to evaluate how the partial vitality of capitalist liberal democracy was so underestimated.

Even so, we might say that on Burnham's account that the (real possibility of a) technocratic European Union was born with French surrender in 1940.* One might be have to be a Kojève to see in this the cunning of history. 

 

 

On Orphaned Papers: Haldane and the Fate of Scientific Eugenics

This paper was submitted to the Annals with an accompanying letter to the Editor, Professor Lionel Penrose, dated 17 February 1960. It has lain as item 136 of the Penrose Papers in the Manuscripts and Rare Books section of University College Library until recently brought to our notice by Dr K. R. Dronamraju, to whom we wish to express our thanks. We would also like to thank Naomi Mitchison for permission to publish this interesting manuscript of her brother’s. Lastly we gratefully acknowledge the assistance of Ms G. M. Furlong, curator of Manuscripts and Rare Books in the library of University College London. J.B.S. HALDANE (1996), "The negative heritability of neonatal jaundice,"Annals of Human Genetics, 60: 3-5. [HT: David Haig]

By an 'orphaned paper' I mean to refer to a paper accepted for publication in a volume quietly abandoned by the editor and, after years of ambiguity, it becomes unseemly to ask about its fate. Often there is no malice involved in such cases. Editors are humans, after all, and their professional activities may be interrupted for all kinds of (generally sad) reasons. Sometimes journals or presses fold or transition away from existing projects. A recent discussion on social media suggests that having some papers orphaned like this is not altogether unfamiliar to senior scholars.

My advice to younger scholars is not to show infinite patience and to pull your paper and resubmit it with an eye toward tenure clocks (and to archive it at a relevant site). And, this is why I use the language of 'orphan'; because orphans need not die still-born, and may get adopted and find all kinds of lovely homes and have lives that enrich us all. 

Haldane's paper was never orphaned in the technical sense.  For, there is no evidence it was accepted for publication when it was received by Penrose initially. (I return to this below.) Even so, I understand why Prof. Haig thought it a nice example of the phenomenon given the clear family resemblance to it. 

J.B.S. Haldane (1892 –1964), was a famous scientist and public intellectual in his day. For example, as I noted a few months ago, he was one of Ernest Nagel's targets as an anti-exemplar of "malicious" (Marxist) philosophy of science. The quoted passage at the top of  this post is, as should be clear, an editorial note attached to the paper. The paper was submitted while Haldane was at the Indian Statistical Institute, Calcutta (for background see here). Perhaps he thought the paper got lost in the mail or he moved on to other topics. 

The paper itself has been noticed after publication including by philosophers. So, for example, Peter Godfrey-Smith (65) cites it the make the important point that parents and off-spring may be "anti-correlated." (See also Sober, who credits learning about it from Godfrey-Smith.) More about this below.

An interesting fact about the recipient of the paper, Lionel Penrose, is that he changed the title of his chair from "Professor of Eugenics" (1945-1963) to "Professor of Human Heredity." The wikipedia entry also notes that "the "long delay" in changing this name was due to "legal problems" associated with the original donation from Francis Galton and described how Penrose simply ignored the "eugenics" element of his job title." This raises interesting questions about whether Penrose (who is the father of Roger Penrose) should have accepted the Chair in the first place (although he surely deserves our gratitude for his stance and the name change).* Be that as it may, it also tells us that UCL could have confronted its own entanglement with eugenics more forcefully already over half a century ago (rather than being shamed into incomplete and imperfect action (recall) by Dr. Nathaniel Adam Tobias Coleman, and others recently). 

Haldane himself clearly remained interested in eugenics. I won't attempt here to summarize seriously his views, in part because they seem to have shifted over time. He was a critic of racial eugenics of his age, because he clearly thought much of it unscientific. It is not entirely clear to me if he would have welcomed a scientifically sound racial eugenics.

And at the core of the posthumously published paper, he makes clear the connection between eugenics and his own paper:

This example will, I hope, act as a warning against the assumption that where a character is mainly determined genetically it will be more frequent in the progeny of those who manifest it than in the progeny of those who do not. This assumption is taken for granted in popular expositions of Darwinism and of eugenics. It is doubtless more often true than false. But the case here considered is not trivial. (5)

This made me wonder whether Penrose prevented publication because he wanted to downplay the association between Darwinism, human genetics, and eugenics in the mid 1960s. (One interesting fact is that no referee reports are mentioned; this makes me suspect the paper was not sent out to referees.)

So, I checked some of the works on Haldane by Dr K. R. Dronamraju, who found the paper in the archives (for more on him see here). According to him "Haldane and Penrose enjoyed a lifelong friendship that was both cordial and mutually beneficial" (Popularizing Science: The Life and Work of JBS Haldane (2017) Oxford: Oxford University Press, 249). He also emphasizes that they agreed on eugenics, "They were opposed to the sterilization of mentally defective individuals that was advocated by some eugenic groups. Both shared the belief that the science of human genetics was still in its infancy and could not justify such far-reaching decisions." (250) Oddly, he does not offer any evidence for this claim, so it is hard to say if this was always the case. Unfortunately, after an imperfect search, I have been unable to find discussion of the 1996 paper by Dronamraju anywhere. So, I view my speculation as ungrounded in evidence. 

Haldane's warning that such cases of anti-correlation are not trivial has not, as Hirsch notes by quoting the same posthumously published passage by Haldane I have just quoted, been heard by those who wish to turn eugenics into a mature science. Hirsch is scathing about the inability to confront the limitations of heritability analysis by even the most scientifically serious (and not racist) eugenicists. Hirsch's heart seems to be in the right place, but I have to admit that I feel decidedly ambivalent about the very project of improving scientific eugenics even when purged from its racialist tendencies.+

I wonder, not for the first time, if everything that advances science should be published while recognizing, with a shudder, that apparently I am willing to contemplate not treating the 'rights' of all 'orphans' alike.

 

Le Bon vs Condorcet

If the individuals of a crowd confined themselves to putting in common the ordinary qualities of which each of them has his share, there would merely result the striking of an average, and not, as we have said is actually the case, the creation of new characteristics. How is it that these new characteristics are created? This is what we are now to investigate.
    Different causes determine the appearance of these characteristics peculiar to crowds, and not possessed by isolated individuals. The first is that the individual forming part of a crowd acquires, solely from numerical considerations, a sentiment of invincible power which allows him to yield to instincts which, had he been alone, he would perforce have kept under restraint. He will be the less disposed to check himself from the consideration that, a crowd being anonymous, and in consequence irresponsible, the sentiment of responsibility which always controls individuals disappears entirely.
   The second cause, which is contagion, also intervenes to determine the manifestation in crowds of their special characteristics, and at the same time the trend they are to take. Contagion is a phenomenon of which it is easy to establish the presence, but that it is not easy to explain. It must be classed among those phenomena of a hypnotic order, which we shall shortly study. In a crowd every sentiment and act is contagious, and contagious to such a degree that an individual readily sacrifices his personal interest to the collective interest. This is an aptitude very contrary to his nature, and of which a man is scarcely capable, except when he makes part of a crowd.
   A third cause, and by far the most important, determines in the individuals of a crowd special characteristics which are quite contrary at times to those presented by the isolated individual. I allude to that suggestibility of which, moreover, the contagion mentioned above is neither more nor less than an effect.
   To understand this phenomenon it is necessary to bear in mind certain recent physiological discoveries. We know to-day that by various processes an individual may be brought into such a condition that, having entirely lost his conscious personality, he obeys all the suggestions of the operator who has deprived him of it, and commits acts in utter contradiction with his character and habits. The most careful observations seem to prove that an individual immersed for some length of time in a crowd in action soon finds himself—either in consequence of the magnetic influence given out by the crowd, or from some other cause of which we are ignorant—in a special state, which much resembles the state of fascination in which the hypnotised individual finds himself in the hands of the hypnotiser. The activity of the brain being paralysed in the case of the hypnotised subject, the latter becomes the slave of all the unconscious activities of his spinal cord, which the hypnotiser directs at will. The conscious personality has entirely vanished; will and discernment are lost. All feelings and thoughts are bent in the direction determined by the hypnotiser.
   Such also is approximately the state of the individual forming part of a psychological crowd. He is no longer conscious of his acts. In his case, as in the case of the hypnotised subject, at the same time that certain faculties are destroyed, others may be brought to a high degree of exaltation. Under the influence of a suggestion, he will undertake the accomplishment of certain acts with irresistible impetuosity. This impetuosity is the more irresistible in the case of crowds than in that of the hypnotised subject, from the fact that, the suggestion being the same for all the individuals of the crowd, it gains in strength by reciprocity.
The individualities in the crowd who might possess a personality sufficiently strong to resist the suggestion are too few in number to struggle against the current. At the utmost, they may be able to attempt a diversion by means of different suggestions. It is in this way, for instance, that a happy expression, an image opportunely evoked, have occasionally deterred crowds from the most bloodthirsty acts.
   We see, then, that the disappearance of the conscious personality, the predominance of the unconscious personality, the turning of feelings and ideas in an identical direction by means of suggestion and contagion, the tendency to immediately transform the suggested ideas into acts; these, we see, are the principal characteristics of the individual forming part of a crowd. He is no longer himself, but has become an automaton who has ceased to be guided by his will.
   Moreover, by the mere fact that he forms part of an organised crowd, a man descends several rungs in the ladder of civilisation. Isolated, he may be a cultivated individual; in a crowd, he is a barbarian—that is, a creature acting by instinct. He possesses the spontaneity, the violence, the ferocity, and also the enthusiasm and heroism of primitive beings, whom he further tends to resemble by the facility with which he allows himself to be impressed by words and images—which would be entirely without action on each of the isolated individuals composing the crowd—and to be induced to commit acts contrary to his most obvious interests and his best-known habits. An individual in a crowd is a grain of sand amid other grains of sand, which the wind stirs up at will.
   It is for these reasons that juries are seen to deliver verdicts of which each individual juror would disapprove, that parliamentary assemblies adopt laws and measures of which each of their members would disapprove in his own person.--Gustave Le Bon (1986 [1895] [Psychologie des Foules] The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, pp. 6-8 (translation of second edition published by Dover)

The (1785) Condorcet Jury theorem tells us that with modest assumptions, the rule of more is better and, thereby, vindicates democracy from the verdict of history by all the learned. A century later, near the end of his book, Le Bon  admits that "the parliamentary system represents the ideal of all modern civilised peoples. The system is the expression of the idea, psychologically erroneous, but generally admitted, that a large gathering of men is much more capable than a small number of coming to a wise and independent decision on a given subject." (123) While the official theme of Le Bon's book is to offer an explanation of the functioning of crowds qua crowds, there are two sub-themes in his argument: first, how come the psychologically erroneous idea persists as a civilizational dogma (that is, Le Bon gives us a theory of the rise and fall of civilizations and institutions)?; second, why does the Jury Theorem fail so often in practice, despite the fact that it should function as a self-fulling prophecy given that people widely expect it to succeed?+ Lurking in the second sub-theme is an account of why institutions fail in different places despite the pull of incentives, and why demagogues may succeed.

Le Bon is no friend of democracy. But in this book he has little interest in offering a replacement for democracy because he accepts Tocqueville's claim that in an era of equality men have "an almost limitless confidence in the judgments of the public." In fact, he quite clearly argues that limiting the franchise to a meritocratic sub-set (a la Mill or Brennan) won't improve matters. Because for him once in a crowd, even widely diverging people behave similarly and lose a lot of the characteristics that give them their individuality.* In a crowd "men always tend to the same [low] level.....with regard to social problems... mean are substantially, equally ignorant."

Before I confront the announced subject of this post, I need to be clear about some of his population assumptions. Le Bon works with a contrast between barbarism and civilization. And once in a crowd otherwise civilized people are likely to become barbaric. Despite Le Bon's racism, all kinds of people can become civilized. (Throughout the book, he treats Islam as one of the great civilizations.) Le Bon also works with a racial theory. And it does important work for him because for him races have deep-seated commitments that help explain how people qua people respond differently to stimuli and incentives.

I actually think that what Le Bon calls a 'race,' is (for students) better translated by 'nation.' For, while Le Bon is undoubtedly casually racist (and sexist) in our modern sense (and clearly admires Anglo-Saxons over his own Latins), his race theory turns out to be primarily sociological: that is, a race is constituted by shared history, shared dogmatic commitments, and shared practices (including language). So, Le Bon's 'race' is not far removed from Renan's 'nation.' And crucially the biological stock of a race is never pure according to Le Bon. (This is because for him barbarism, which is always prior to civilization, is always a period of mixing.) And somewhat surprisingly -- given his reactionary mindset -- when explaining crowds no race escapes being barbaric in the crowd.

The brilliance of Condorcet's proof resides, in part, in the fact that (a) he assumes very modest voter competence. All that is needed (recall) is better than chance odds for getting things right. Let's call this average intelligence. Unlike modern students of Condorcet, who recognize that the conditions of (b) independence and (c) lack of communication, may often be violated, Le Bon thinks this (a) is the weak part of Condorcet's proof. For  while Le Bon accepts Condorcet's assumption that in a crowd we are (d) sincere, Le Bon thinks that once we become part of a crowd (and for him juries are also crowds) in our sincerity our competence reduces below such average. We become as it were for him hypnotized automatons. 

To be sure, Le bon thinks that in a crowd we stop acting independently in large part because through the mechanism of contagious sympathy, we end up being suggestible by the same influences. Group diversity, which might give a crowd intellectual strength, evaporates for Le Bon and we become homogeneous, hypnotized automatons in a crowd.  And while the Stoic sage is homogeneous with other Stoic sage in his philosophical virtue, crowds act like one in pursuit of one idol or another.

One may well wonder if the shared feeling of invincibility is really the triggering cause of crowd-like phenomena, and to what degree hypnosis is really the best physiological explanation and explanatory analogy for crowd behavior. I am here not to defend Le Bon. But I do note it is no objection to Le Bon's theory that some crowds get it right or produced fine political outcomes. Le Bon explicitly admits that crowds may well be heroic or help found great civilizations (etc.). If you are fond of great strikes or mass protests, Le Bon is happy to admit that these shape history.

Rather the key point is that friends of Condorcet's jury theorem assume methodological individualism: that being within a jury/crowd baseline competence is not reduced or at least not so reduced as to fall under average. And Le Bon points out this commitment (a) needs to be earned if, as is not wholly implausible, cognitive characteristics are changed when in large company (subject to polarization, group loyalty, sense of justice, etc.).

One way to put this is that in practice, the assumptions of independence and lack of communication secure the modest competence the Jury Theorem relies on. Le Bon's point is recognized by many procedural interventions/norms that prevent a group of deciding individuals to act as crowds.** That is to say, deliberative democrats are, in a way, Le Bon's true heirs. 

 

 

 

Popper, Foucault, The Art of Leadership, the Liberalism of Fear, and the Birth of Biopolitics

[I] f we approach political theory from a different angle, then we find that far from solving any fundamental problems, we have merely skipped over them, by assuming that the question ‘Who should rule?’ is fundamental. For even those who share this assumption of Plato’s admit that political rulers are not always sufficiently ‘good’ or ‘wise’ (we need not worry about the precise meaning of these terms), and that it is not at all easy to get a government on whose goodness and wisdom one can implicitly rely. If that is granted, then we must ask whether political thought should not face from the beginning the possibility of bad government; whether we should not prepare for the worst leaders, and hope for the best. But this leads to a new approach to the problem of politics, for it forces us to replace the question: Who should rule? by the new 2 question: How can we so organize political institutions that bad or incompetent rulers can be prevented from doing too much damage?--Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, chapter 7, p. 115 (emphasis in original)

One of the oddities of Foucault's Birth of Biopolitics, is the near-total absence of Popper. It's odd for three reasons: first, Popper's Open Society is explicitly framed as a response to Lippmann's The Good Society. Since Foucault takes the (1938 Paris) Colloquium on the book as a foundational moment for neo-liberalism, the Open Society is part of the larger sweep of events Foucault is interrogating. Second, it is quite clear that for Popper Plato treats medicine as a political art in order to shape and enhance the population (p. 131ff, chapter 8); so lodged in the Open Society is itself a series of critical reflections on biopolitics and its history. Third, as the passage above reveals, Popper explicitly discusses, in a sense, the art of government, which as we have seen is one of the main themes of the The Birth of Biopolitics.

If we go to the (rather long) footnote attached on the new question, we read the following (in part):

Similar ideas have been expressed by J. S. Mill; thus he writes in his Logic (1st edn, p. 557 f.): ‘Although the actions of rulers are by no means wholly determined by their selfish interests, it is as security against those selfish interests that constitutional checks are required.’ Similarly he writes in The Subjection of Women (p. 251 of the Everyman edition; italics mine): ‘Who doubts that there may be great goodness, and great happiness and great affection, under the absolute government of a good man? Meanwhile laws and institutions require to be adapted, not to good men, but to bad.’ Much as I agree with the sentence in italics, I feel that the admission contained in the first part of the sentence is not really called for. (Cp. especially note 25 (3) to this chapter.) A similar admission may be found in an excellent passage of his Representative Government (1861; see especially p. 49) where Mill combats the Platonic ideal of the philosopher king because, especially if his rule should be a benevolent one , it will involve the ‘abdication’ of the ordinary citizen’s will, and ability, to judge a policy.--Open Society, 579-580

I was pleased to see Popper pick up (recall here; and here) on Mill's argument in Representative Government, but surprised he calls it 'new.' For, it seems to me central (recall) to Hume's (and Montesquieu's) argument against (what Quentin Skinner calls) neoroman liberty and the physiocratic tendency toward benevolent despotism. And while I think in Mill's and Hume's hands the intentions is to further a liberal political life, the underlying ideas can be traced back to Livy and Polybius (and, perhaps, the Hebrew Bible (as Mill suggests).

It strikes me there are two insights coupled in this art of government of (to nod ahead (recall) to Shklar [and here; here]) the liberalism of fear. First, this is emphasized by Hume, to ensure there are sufficient countervailing forces against the executive such that the executive can never hope to dominate society, while remaining effective enough to do her job (defend against foreign enemies and govern the state bureaucracy, faithfully execute the laws). It  is insufficiently appreciated how important this element is. From this perspective, the American fondness -- despite regurgitating at nauseam separation of powers in civics classes --  for an imperial presidency simply feeds the potential of tyranny. The whole tenor of twentieth century practice has been, in this sense, generating the conditions for the success of the eventual rise of illiberal governance.

Second, how to organize institutions such that the downside risk of incompetent, self-interested, or malicious rulers is minimized. It is one of the more amazing, even perverse features of twentieth century intellectual life that the very idea of an open society has become synonymous with risk taking entrepreneurship. Underneath it is an enormous aversion to certain forms of political risk, the possibility of awful government.

What is new, and I think this is, in fact, Popper's seminal contribution (although there are plenty of Schumpeterian premonitions), is to argue that this second point not just from risk aversion, but to argue it also from an analysis of why all the mechanisms designed to prevent bad leadership from arising, for the purposes of a society capable of adapting to changing needs,* are incapable of being sufficiently failure proof. It is this part of the Open Society that is capable of irritating the instructors of mankind and the peddlers of technologies of management. Because he points out that their whole program of meritocratic leadership education is self-contradictory; it leads to mediocrity and is incapable of generating "the spirit of criticism... intellectual independence" (127; this connects up to the heart of Popper's philosophy of science). 

It is an open question how successful Popper's particular argument is against political programs of leadership selection that are illiberal but not meritocratic. But I return to that some other time. Let me wrap up with three observations. First, the two elements of the art of government of the liberalism of fear are not its whole art (see here for a lot more). As Foucault recognizes when he is discussing the ORDOs, one of  their key political arguments of embracing market based competition as a permanent process is to help prevent the rise of overbearing powers. So, here markets are designed to secure the existence of such countervailing powers. (There is a thought like this in Milton Friedman, too.) Obviously, this gives rise to new challenges of preventing monopoly and rent-seeking behavior which may require an executive that opens the door toward more malice (and so the cycle continues). 

Second, within neoliberalism there is an internal dynamic (which is the theme of Foucault's Birth of Biopolitics) such that a focus on the market and the technologies of generating the right sort of agents (with human capital, entrepreneurial, productive etc.) in it start to predominate over other streams of thought that focus on how to develop such adaptive institutions that simultaneously give us the fruits of decent enough government and do not open the door to the generation of tyranny. Once the market is viewed as the antonym of the state in neoliberal thought, this disastrous forgetting of Popper's key insight seems almost inevitable.

Third, and in some sense entirely unrelated, and in another sense absolutely central, Popper concludes his argument on this point with what he calls a "result of some importance:"

Institutions for the selection of the outstanding can hardly be devised. Institutional selection may work quite well for such purposes as Plato had in mind, namely for arresting change. But it will never work well if we demand more than that, for it will always tend to eliminate initiative and originality, and, more generally, qualities which are unusual and unexpected. This is not a criticism of political institutionalism. It only reaffirms what has been said before, that we should always prepare for the worst leaders, although we should try, of course, to get the best. But it is a criticism of the tendency to burden institutions, especially educational institutions, with the impossible task of selecting the best. This should never be made their task. This tendency transforms our educational system into a race-course, and turns a course of studies into a hurdle-race. Instead of encouraging the student to devote himself to his studies for the sake of studying, instead of encouraging in him a real love for his subject and for inquiry, he is encouraged to study for the sake of his personal career; he is led to acquire only such knowledge as is serviceable in getting him over the hurdles which he must clear for the sake of his advancement. In other words, even in the field of science, our methods of selection are based upon an appeal to personal ambition of a somewhat crude form. (It is a natural reaction to this appeal if the eager student is looked upon with suspicion by his colleagues.) The impossible demand for an institutional selection of intellectual leaders endangers the very life not only of science, but of intelligence. Open Society, 128

For those who followed my recent exchange with Zena Hitz (see here for her fascinating twitter response), it will not surprised that I point out that Hitz's concerns are themselves not new. Even if we wince, perhaps, at Popper's gendered way of expressing the point that the very institutions of education are corrupted by worldly advancement (and Popper argues this goes back to Plato). 

Models, Politics, Populations, and Public Science in times of Pandemic (IV); on Ernest Nagel and the role of Philosophy of Science

In the midst of actual and impending disaster, men are inclined to listen to any voice speaking with sufficient authority; and during periods of social crisis, when rational methods of inquiry supply no immediate solutions for pressing problems, spokesmen for institu­tional and philosophic theologies find a ready audience for a sys­tematic disparagement of the achievements of empirical science. Ideas which the advance of knowledge had partially driven under­ground during periods of fair social weather, are then insolently proclaimed as panaceas for public and private ills. The assured methods of scientific control and understanding, because they effect no wholesale resolution of problems and because they yield no con­clusions beyond the possibility of error and correction, are then declared to be unsuitable guides for rational living.
The mounting economic and political tensions of our own age have not failed to produce a literature of this type. From various quarters-from men of science, historians of ideas, as well as out­spoken representatives of theological systems-there has come a flood of criticism of modern science and of the secular naturalism which has accompanied its growth. The criticism has been neither uniform nor consistent. But the common objective of much of it has been the limitation of the authority of science, and the institution of methods other than those of controlled experimentation for dis­covering the natures and values of things. Many recent evaluations of science have thus had an obviously malicious intent; and the pres­ent essay will seek to determine briefly to what extent, in the case of several influential types of philosophies of science, good sense has been sacrificed to such malice.--Ernest Nagel (1943) "Malicious Philosophies of Science" Partisan Review (10), jan-feb, reprinted in Sovereign Reason, (1054), p. 18.*

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

I return (recall) to Nagel's brilliantly titled piece because Nagel is explicitly committed to defending the "authority of science," perhaps even unlimited authority of science in a time when it is under attack. In this piece from which I quoted Nagel does not define science, but inter alia he associates it with "controlled experimentation" and methods that allow "the possibility of error and correction" and "objective measures ((33)when discussing well-being). In addition, he clearly believes that science is often a "painfully slow road" (31), which is why there will be circumstances "where rational methods of inquiry supply no immediate solutions for pressing problems."  This entails that sometimes some questions will have to be answered with appeal to "brute facts" when theoretical resources have bottomed out (29). 

I was reminded of Nagel's piece because of the discussion in Stegenga's essay  "Fast Science and the Philosophy of Science" (first published at Auxiliary Hypothesis BJPS and then Dailynous). In it contemporary anxieties about the role of philosophy of science are explored with a wide variety of leading practitioners. At one point Stegena notes:

Many philosophers of science are concerned with the demise in public trust of science, evident in debates about teaching intelligent design in classrooms or in mistrust of climate science. Conversely, many philosophers of science are concerned about excessive trust in particular domains of science, exemplified by, say, unreliable research on pharmaceuticals.  Of course, it is perfectly consistent to hold that science is the best means to learn about our world, while also criticizing sloppy science. 

One further, underlying anxiety we philosophers of science have is to what degree is the authority of the fast, policy apt sciences worth defending.  As Jonathan Fuller puts it in a very thoughtful and illuminating essay, "The normal process of scientific scrutiny and peer review has given way to a fast track from research offices to media headlines and policy panels." Yet this fast science now lend(s) authority to policies with far-reaching consequences pursued by many governments. So, for example, I sense in my sometime co-author, Eric Winsberg, a concern that doubling down on this fast, policy apt science, will risk discrediting the authority of science down stream.  

Now, Nagel's essay is superb at discrediting the attempts by those who wish to argue for the  limitation of the authority of science. (He engages Gilson, Whitehead, Knight, Blanchard, Maritain, Balfour, etc.) Many of their arguments are familiar, and so his essay remains worth re-reading. And since Nagel is the great champion (within pragmatism) of scientific philosophy, his defense of the authority of science comes as no surprise. But if one happens to be reading Nagel in circumstances not entirely unlike the ones he diagnoses in the first sentence of the quoted passage, one is also left with an unexpected conundrum. Let me explain.

By Nagel's explicit lights, there will be circumstances in which slow science cannot offer "immediate solutions for pressing problems." Simultaneously, Nagel's position presupposes there is no such thing as fast science that does offer reliable solutions for urgent problems. To put this in terms of Kofi Bright and Bradley, "We are going to have to respond to COVID19 in absence of the sort of knowledge we should ideally prefer when making rational decisions of great social import." (I quote them because they represent the most accessible and pertinent example of the stance of a scientific philosopher today.)

That is to say, Nagel does not confront the circumstances in which the authority of science is imperfect (and known to be so), and where appealing to it may risk its further authority when it is needed and can be relied upon (again).  Jonathan Fuller's answer to these circumstances is that even so we must rely on imperfect science, all the while trying to "combine theory with evidence and make use of diverse data while demanding data of increasingly higher quality," but keep a "critical" attitude. Kofi Bright and Bradley advocate disciplined decision making, but with heroic awareness of the "responsibility of hard choices" and the possibility even inevitability of "tragedy." Neither Fuller nor Kofi Bright/Bradley really answer Winsberg's question whether relying on flawed science now is worth the risk if it undermines future credibility.

Now, one may think that 'given that we must choose, we may as well choose while relying on an imperfect instrument instead of no instrument. And if we live another day, and need to rebuild the authority of that instrument, we'll fight that battle then.' Perhaps, Winsberg's concern is overblown. 

Of course, it need not be true that an flawed imperfect** instrument is better than no instrument. Sometimes when imperfect means flawed then imperfect instruments can be worse than no instruments. There are, for example, a small sample of airplane crashes where if the pilot hadn't been so trained up, or reliant, on the instruments good sense could have saved the passengers. And if one knows one is in those circumstances then it is foolish to stick with imperfect tools.

The problem is that Nagel's version of scientific philosophy can't really acknowledge the possibility of the equivalent to good sense in my example in the previous paragraph. That's a problem with his philosophy of science.+

As an aside, it is pretty clear what works when a pandemic is about to develop, and Taiwan, New Zealand, and South Korea have all shown how to execute it in ways that are sensitive to scientific authority and respectful of political and civil liberties. The problem elsewhere is there is no obvious good sense once that moment has passed and so one is stuck with the imperfections of fast, policy apt science.

Let me close, Nagel is very disciplined about recognizing that there occasions when the authority of science also means one has no answers. I think, then, he would urge caution rather than relying on fast science. It would be nice to be able to say in such circumstances, let's gather more evidence first before we act. My own view is that, more often than not, we should be willing to delay until we have authoritative guide in science. But, of course, no action can also carry a cost, and there are times where this stance is also foolish. 

But if we must choose -- be it in the heroic-tragic mode of Kofi Bright and & Bradley or in the critical mode of Fuller (these are sometimes compatible) --, then I don't see why philosophy of science can't allow that one is guided by "mystery;" to pick an example that exercises Nagel, say, with the thought that "God is" her "own cause" (29) and, while choosing, embrace one's fate joyfully with prayer, or without.