Digressions&Impressions

Weber, Bellamy, and Burnham on Power and Truth

In contrast to these older forms, modern bureaucracy has one characteristic which makes its inescapability much more definite: rational specialization and training. The Chinese mandarin was not a specialist but a gentleman with a literary and humanistic education. The Egyptian, Late Roman or Byzantine official was much more of a bureaucrat in our sense of the word. But compared to the modern tasks, his were infinitely simple and limited; his attitude was in part tradition-bound, in part patriarchally, that means, irrationally oriented. Like the businessman of the past, he was a pure empiricist. The modern official receives a professional training, which unavoidably increases, corresponding to the rational technology of modern life. . . . Whenever the modern specialized official comes to predominate, his power proves practically indestructible since the whole organization of elementary want satisfaction has been tailored to his mode of operation. A progressive elimination of private capitalism is theoretically conceivable. . . . What would be the practical result? The destruction of the steel frame of modern industrial work? No! The abolition of private capitalism would simply mean that the management of the nationalized or socialized enterprises would become bureaucratic. Are the daily working conditions of the salaried employees and the workers in the state-owned Prussian mines and railroads perceptibly different from those in big business enterprises? In truth, there is even less freedom since every struggle against a state bureaucracy is hopeless and since, in principle, nobody can appeal to an agency which would be interested in limiting it, contrary to what is possible in relation to a private enterprise. That would be the whole difference.

State bureaucracy would rule alone. The private and public bureaucracies which now work next to, and potentially against, each other and hence check one another to a degree would be merged into a single hierarchy. This would be similar to the situation in ancient Egypt, but it would occur in a much more rational and inescapable form.--Max Weber (1917) excerpted in State and Society: A Reader in Comparative Political Sociology, edited by R. Bendix, p. 301-302.

Richard Bellamy partially quotes the passage on p, 193 in his excellent (1992) Liberalism and Modern Society: A Historical Argument in his chapter on Max Weber. (Recall my more critical post here.) While Bellamy's book is not obscure it is somewhat unfairly rarely mentioned in the contemporary revival of so-called 'political realism.' The chapter on Weber and the critique of late twentieth century what he calls "neutralist liberalism" are both very nicely done and repay close reading. My favorite feature of Bellamy's book -- and the aspect that has not lost any significance at all -- is Bellamy's close attention to liberal thought in the context where survival of liberalism cannot be taken for granted (something true, I hasten to add, of liberalism everywhere and at all times).

Bellamy quotes the passage from Weber in the context of explaining Weber's views on the significance of the balancing of counter-veiling bureaucracies in industry and state in the service of Weber's larger argument against a fully planned economy. And it shows how prescient Weber was relative to Marxist revolutions to come. But also, that after the first world war, as well as the development of the cartelization of the German economy (something Lenin had also commented on), Europeans had already sufficient experience with the nature of (at least partially) planned economies to understand some of its structural political and economic weaknesses. I return to that below.

It is kind of amusing - in light of the recurring tendency in our philosophical self-understanding to treat empiricism as something noble and sophisticated --  that Weber identifies 'pure empiricism' with a kind of irrational orientation toward reality to be contrasted with a (modern) skilled control over one's environment in the context of the advanced division of labor (and rule-following). To what degree his comparative account of bureaucracy can survive scholarly scrutiny I leave to others. But it is important to see that for Weber modernity is characterized by the omni-presence of bureaucratic organization. It is an interesting question to what degree modern information technologies allow for a de-skilling of the bureaucracy (in the private and public sectors). 

Now, in the quoted passage, Weber clearly anticipates Burnham's thesis defended in the Managerial Revolution (and in a different way, Galbraith). I don't recall Burnham crediting Weber. I don't mean to suggest that Burnham plagiarized Weber; it's pretty clear that they were both familiar with Mosca, Pareto, and Michels (who work through related ideas). But Weber turns their diagnoses into an argument for maintaining the market as a site of countervailing powers. And this anticipates the ORDO-liberals' emphasis that while power in the marketplace is dangerous (and certainly to be guarded against) it can also be a partial check on state power (even if it also increases danger of rent-seeking). I don't think these passages suggest that Weber 'idealized capitalist relations to a certain extent' (a partial concession Bellamy makes to a criticism by Marcuse) because Weber's analysis relies on a kind of 'least bad' style argument.

Thus, Weber grasps -- and again this makes his analysis all the more salient today -- that relatively unchallenged and unaccountable rule by technically sophisticated administrators can itself be a species of despotism (which anticipates, again, the Hayekian attack on Saint Simonism as much as it does Graeber & Wengrow). And part of the despotic nature of pure rule by the technically sophisticated bureaucrat is that she does so in the name of, and drawing on, rationality. And it is incredibly difficult to oppose reason without looking and becoming irrational. (This is all the worse if the reason the bureaucrat is instantiating understands itself as ethical.) Again, this is all quite prescient.

Interestingly enough, Weber does not slide into conservatism (away from liberalism) and the valorization of elite rule (familiar from Burnham and his followers), but rather -- as Bellamy emphasizes --, into thinking about the ways in which institutions and procedures can redistribute power and to allow for at least a "plurality of competing values in society" (Bellamy 1992: 216). That is, such plurality of competing values is both an effect of the advanced division of labor and competing interests and, in turn, a means to check any ideal from becoming an oppressive ideology. Rather than, for example, promoting a marketplace of ideas as a means toward consensus/truth, the marketplace of ideas becomes another vehicle for permanent disagreement (anticipating Mouffe and Berlin to some degree) and a check on power that presents itself as truth. This is, of course, Foucault's great theme.* 

 

Foucault's Historicism and Societies reconsidered

By "archeology" I would like to designate not exactly a discipline, but a domain of research, which would be the following: in a society, different bodies of learning, philosophical ideas, everyday opinions, but also institutions, commercial practices and police activities, mores—all refer to a certain implicit knowledge [savoir] special to this society. This knowledge is profoundly different from the bodies of learning [des connaissances] that one can find in scientific books, philosophical theories, and religious justifications, but it is what makes possible at a given moment the appearance of a theory, an opinion, a pracctice. Thus, in order for the big centers of internment to be opened at the end of the seventeenth century, it was necessary that a certain knowledge of madness be opposed to nonmadness, of order to disorder, and it’s this knowledge [savoir] that I wanted to investigate, as the condition of possibility of knowledge [connaissance], of institutions, of practices.

This style of research has for me the following interests: it allows me to avoid every problem concerning the anteriority of theory in relation to practice, and the reverse. In fact, I deal with practices, institutions and theories on the same plane and according to the same isomorphisms, and I look for the underlying knowledge [savoir] that makes them possible, the stratum of knowledge that constitutes them historically.--Michel Foucault in an interview with Raymond Bellours which appeared in Les Lettres françaises (1966) reprinted as "The Order of Things" in Michel Foucault, Aesthetics: Essential Workks 1954-84, translated by John Johnston but slightly amended by the editors of the reprint, pp. 261-262.*

In general I dislike quoting from interviews with authors commenting on their own work. But I do so here because it very nicely captures a feature of Foucault's commitments (one that does not disappear in his late lectures) that I would like to discuss. (In the interview, Foucault himself goes on to contrast what he does with what Sartre does, so I am not doing justice to his own intentions here.) This feature is known within philosophy as a kind of historicism or even organicism.  By 'historicism' I mean here the idea that an age has certain fundamental characteristics in common and that these help define what we might call its unique nature. 

Now in the passage, Foucault relies on a distinction that in English turn out to track two kinds of knowledge, but for my present purposes I am going to leave aside possible confusion(s) about this. For I am only interested in his account of savoir, which is the common, condition of possibility that makes possible "practices, institutions and theories" (etc.) of a particular age. This is the deep structure, one might say, that makes  a particular kind of (as my former teacher, Jody Azzouni explores in his work) semantic perception possible. That is, under savoir just fall the material and formal (etc.) conditions that make, say, certain practices and theories (etc.) intelligible as possible explanations, possible causes, etc. 

To be sure, if one is in a grip of certain kind of monisms -- that truth just is what Tarski called the 'classical conception' or that causation just is counterfactual dependence (etc.) -- the previous paragraph is a certain kind of relativistic gibberish to you. That's fine. I am not interested here in defending relativism. I would deny that it is gibberish or unintelligible. But if you can't get your head around it, that's fine, too.

Now, Foucault's Les mots et les choses: Une archéologie des sciences humaines (1966), translated as The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, is an exploration of  the relationship between the two kinds of knowledge in a particular age (which can last for a couple of centuries), as well as the transformation of this relationship from one age to the next, as well as the different contents of both kinds of knowledge in different ages, especially as manifested in different number of what one might call 'human sciences.' One of the effects of this study is that one becomes aware that what counts as a 'science' is itself, in part, structured by or the effect of the underlying stratum. (Again, if one is in the grip of a particular kind of monism then, of course, the idea that different sciences can differ in fundamental character may well be a bit weird.) I like Foucault's approach because it makes visible the fondness accross an age's sciences for say, fixed point theorems, or equilibrium models (etc.) that generate a certain family resemblance among domains of (say) expertise.

My interest here is not in the methodological question of how one can make visibe something implicit that is in a way, simultaneously, an absence from the material one studies. In the qouted passage, Foucault himself hints at one of his techniques; he looks for the effects of certain fundamental contrarieties (in his corpus) and explores how these have certain epistemological, pragmatic, or even generative features that these contrarieties have in common. Unlike the Straussian, for whom the tacit is the true message, for Foucault the tacit is the source of a kind of social unity (to be explained below).

As an aside, it is worth noting, and perhaps this is illuminating to some degree (if not skip this paragraph), that the underlying structure, which one may well think of as a kind of relativized a priori, has certain features in common with the place of a ding-an-sich in Kant's critical philosophy or natura naturans in Spinoza's. That is, in the substratum contrarieties co-exist and rather than being a source of falsity or nonsense, they are productive in  the domains that are conceptualized from or built on them. As I said, if this paragraph is mysterious, please skip it.

From a political perspective, it is interesting that Foucault treats philosophical ideas and everyday opinions as on par (and on the same side of the divide). He explicitly rejects, for the purposes of archeology, the Platonic, Madisonian, Arendtian (etc.) contrast between the domains of truth and  the domains of opinion. But he does not alert his audience to the significance of this rejection. (Later in the interview, when he returns to the status of philosophical ideas, as edifices, he ignores this political distinction, but contrasts these with the kind of playful 'subphilosophies' studied in history of ideas; that is, the contrast between Kant and Fontenelle.) Foucault himself, quite clearly wants to reject the priviliging of theory over practice (see p. 262). 

And the reason I am alert to a kind of (philosophical-)political perspective here, is that Foucault uses the terminology of a 'society' to characterize the kinds of intellectual eras he is interested in. Or to be precise: it seems that within the domain of what Foucault calls an archeology, a society is constituted by different practices, texts, institutions that have a common stratum that makes their unity possible.

For Foucault, societies understood in this way (as a kind of partially invisible structure that makes semantic perception possible, and a certain kind of commonality that infuses the practices of an era), have an origin, a flourishing and endpoints. And the archeologist of society points at, and makes visible to some degree, the structures that are a condition of possibility of a society. Importantly, while societies derive their unity from the lower stratum (savoir), which I playfully compared to a kind of ding-an-sich in character, they (that is, societies) are nothing over and above the practices, institutions, and disciplines that constitute them (or that express this unity).

From a metaphysical perspective one may well wonder if such societies really are compatible with the nominalism (even partial skepticism) one may also discern in Foucault. But here I close on the political question one can ask about the structures delimited by Foucault: to what degree are Foucaultian societies spontaneous orders or are they the partially foreseen effect of certain kind of (intellectual) legislators (what I sometimes call, 'philosophical prophets')?

To be continued.

Why is Hume important to foucault?

It is here that knowledge breaks off its old kinship with divinatio. The latter always presupposed signs anterior to it: so that knowledge always resided entirely in the opening up of a discovered, affirmed, or secretly transmitted, sign. Its task was to uncover a language which God had previously distributed across the face of the earth; it is in this sense that it was the divination of an essential implication, and that the object of its divination was divine. From now on, however, it is within knowledge itself that the sign is to perform its signifying function; it is from knowledge that it will borrow its certainty or its probability. And though God still employs signs to speak to us through nature, he is making use of our knowledge, and of the relations that are set up between our impressions, in order to establish in our minds a relation of signification. Such is the role of feeling in Malebranche or of sensation in Berkeley; in natural judgement, in feeling, in visual impressions, and in the perception of the third dimension, what we are dealing with are hasty and confused, but pressing, inevitable, and obligatory kinds of knowledge serving as signs for discursive kinds of knowledge which we humans, because we are not pure intelligences, no longer have the time or the permission to attain to ourselves and by the unaided strength of our own minds. In Malebranche and Berkeley, the sign arranged by God is the cunning and thoughtful superimposition of two kinds of knowledge. There is no longer any divinatio involved - no insertion of knowledge in the enigmatic, open, and sacred area of signs - but a brief and concentrated kind of knowledge: the contraction of a long sequence of judgements into the rapidly assimilated form of the sign. And it will also be seen how, by a reversal of direction, knowledge, having enclosed the signs within its own space, is now able to accommodate probability: between one impression and another the relation will be that of sign to signified, in other words, a relation which, like that of succession, will progress from the weakest probability towards the greatest certainty.

The connection of ideas does not imply the relation of cause and effect, but only of a mark or sign with the thing signified. The fire which I sec is not the cause of the pain I suffer upon my approaching it, but the mark that forewarns me of it.

The knowledge that divined, at random, signs that were absolute and older than itself has been replaced by a network of signs built up step by step in accordance with a knowledge of what is probable. Hume has become possible.--Michel Foucault The Order of Things (1970) {1994, Vintage Books Edition} Translated by Alan Sheridan* (original Les Mots et les Choses, 1966), 59-60 [Emphases in original]

When confronted by Foucault's argument here it is natural to scrutinize each of the steps and try to figure out how they correspond to, say, the underlying material in Malebranche and Berkeley. But here I wan't ask a different question: why does Foucault want to emphasize that [the philosophy of] a certain definite individual has become possible? This is peculiar because the strength of Foucault's general argument does not rest in the analysis of individual philosophers, but rather in showing a kind of higher order similarity, a style of thought, or a set of structural and conceptual constraints on an era's production of knowledge in, and that only becomes visible by the study of, different fields (including a kind of linguistics and a kind of political economy and so on) alongside each other. And these constraints make all the folk in an era possible (in Foucault's sense). This is why, for example, in context, he uses the language of a "single network of necessities" and gives us a string of individuals "Hobbes, Berkeley, Hume, or Condillac." (63; see also, p. 117, where this list returns, and p. 65, where Condillac seems to be key figure in the network, and p. 70, where Hume has equal billing with Condillac. Foucault uses a different list to represent the "Classical age" -- "Locke and Linnaeus, Buffon and Hume" -- at p. 162.)

So, why single out Hume on p. 60? Now part of the answer is clear from one of my posts earlier in the week (here). Hume becomes exemplary, for Foucault, to show that while similitude/resemblance loses its central significance in its characterization of the nature of a sign, resemblance does not disappear but resides, as Foucault puts it in Humean terms, mutely 'below knowledge' acting as a natural relation behind the scenes as it were constraining our mind (see p. 68). In that post, I argued that Foucault ends up misreading Hume (and suggested that Foucault ends up misrepresenting what he calls the classical age.) I don't mean to relitigate that claim. Rather, to restate my question: why is Hume exemplary for this argument (since it is by no means obvious Foucault went back to Hume to analyze him carefully, yet simultaenously offers numerous examples that draw on Hume)? 

Part of the answer is that Hume plays a role in the self-understanding of the philosophical status quo, (Husserlian) phenomenology, that Foucault is reacting to. In this self-understanding Hume's critique is the source of the "transcendental motif" of Kant. In this self-understanding this transcendental motif gets merged with "the Cartesian theme of the cogito," and so produces Husserl's revival of "the deepest vocation of the Western ratio." (325) So, in this narrative Hume is a kind of steppingstone. Familiarity with this narrative and this Hume is often presupposed in Foucault's narrative in The Order of Things (see especially, the role of Hume in representing "radical doubt" (162)).*

It is worth noting that Foucault contests the self-understanding of phenomenology and also how it fits in the West.+  He reinterprets phenomenology as exhibiting the very "great hiatus" that Foucault has diagnosed (in the book) in the "modern episteme at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries." (325) As it happens Foucault's analysis of Hume's friend, Adam Smith, is central to understanding the nature of that hiatus (see pp. 224-225). In Foucault's account Smith articulates a principle of order that is not reducible to the analysis of representation that Foucault thinks characteristic of the classical era. (225) How to make sense of this is a topic of interest to me, but about that some other time more. 

So, let me sum up. Hume plays a triple role in The Order of Things. First, alongside a number of other familiar philosophers his works are treated as illustrations for Foucault's claims about the nature of representation and knowledge in the classical episteme. In such cases Foucault assumes considerable knowledge about Hume (and these other thinkers) among his implied audience. That Foucault can do so is explained by the second role Hume has, that is, of being a familiar steppingstone in a narrative that undergirds the self-understanding of phenomenology (which is treated as the ruling philosophical status quo by Foucault). This narrative is Foucault's target.

The main argument against this self-understanding of the past does not turn on a single philosopher -- although Adam Smith is central to the argument but on a more general reconfiguration of what the human sciences (and philosophy) were (recall this post that tries to illuminate by comparing Kuhn and Foucault).

However, and this is the third role, in characterizing the distinctive nature of the classical age, Foucault does single out Hume. And this is so because he can both assume familiarity with Hume (given the familiarity of Foucault's audience with Hume as a steppingstone in their standard narrative) as well as render Hume unfamiliar in virtue of his retelling of the story of early modern philosophy. As my post earlier in the week suggests, Foucault's analysis of Hume cannot withstand close scrutiny. This problem, if I am right, raises serious concerns about the status of his whole project [since the leading representative of the classical age by Foucault's lights does not conform to his template), although it goes beyond my remit (even pay-grade) to adjudicate the significance of this to his debate with phenomenology. But as should be clear, when Foucault revisits Hume in his lecture of  28 March 1979 in The Birth of Biopolitics his understanding of Hume is (recall here); and here) much more text-sensitive than it was in the earlier book. 

Foucault on Humean Criticism and Habit, and Beccaria

    Where was I wanting to go? I wanted to analyze a certain system of power: disciplinary power. It seemed to me, in fact, that we live in a society of disciplinary power, that is to say a society equipped with apparatuses whose form is sequestration, whose purpose is the formation of a labor force, and whose instrument is the acquisition of disciplines or habits. It seems to me that since the eighteenth century there has been a constant multiplication, refinement, and specification of apparatuses for manufacturing disciplines, for imposing coercions, and for instilling habits. This year I wanted to do the very first history of the power of habits, the archeology of those apparatuses of power that serve as the base for the acquisition of habits as social norms.

Let’s consider this notion of habit. If we look at it in eighteenth century political philosophy, habit has a primarily critical use. This notion makes it possible to analyze law, institutions, and authority. The notion of habit is used for knowing the extent to which something that appears as an institution or authority can be founded. To everything appearing thus founded, the following question is put: You claim to be founded by the divine word or by the sovereign’s authority, but are you not [quite simply] a habit? This is how Humean criticism works, using the notion of habit as a critical, reductive instrument, because habit, on the one hand, is only ever a result and not an original datum—there is something irreducibly artificial in it—and, on the other hand, while unable to lay claim to originality, it is not founded by something like a transcendence: habit always comes from nature, since in human nature there is the habit of contracting habits. Habit is both nature and artifice. And if this notion was used in the political and moral philosophy of the eighteenth century, it was in order to get away from anything of the order of traditional obligations founded on a transcendence, and to replace these obligations with the pure and simple obligation of the contract; in order to replace these traditional obligations, which are shown to be only the effects of habit, with a game of obligations in which the will of each will be voluntarily bound and actualized in the contract. To criticize tradition through habit in order to contractualize social bonds, such is the essence of this use of the notion of habit.
   Now it seems to me that the use of the term habit in the nineteenth century is different. In political literature, it ceases being regularly used in a critical way. On the other hand, it is used prescriptively: habit is what people must submit to. There is a whole ethics founded on habit. Far from habit limiting the sphere of morality, of ethics, a whole politics of habit is formed that is transmitted by very different sorts of writing—writings of popular moralization or tracts of social economy.--Michel Foucault The Punitive Society: Lectures at the College de France 1972-1973, translated by Graham Burchell, 28 March 1973, pp. 237-238. [Emphasis in original.]

The first quoted paragraph above is about as lucid a description of the political significance of Foucault's projects throughout the 1970s.  We can describe Foucault's project as the exploration of the social mechanisms that make us unselfconscious rule followers not the least that make us productive agents. (Notice that he is not interested in individual habits; just the habits that instantiate or effectuate social norms.)

But in the next paragraph he inscribes this project, which could easily have been the start of an ethnographic or sociological project (with social psychology mixed in), into what we might call a 'natural history' of the development of the conceptualization of habit. It could  be instructive to try to connect this natural history of habit with Foucault's more famous natural history of homo economicus in his Birth of Biopolitics lectures. And the ground-zero of this project is Hume's philosophy which generates "Humean criticism" in political philosophy.

In their footnotes, the editors of The Punitive Society usefully refer to some key passages in Hume's philosophy to explain what Foucault may have in mind. But they don't venture any suggestions on who these Humean critics in political philosophy might be. This is a shame. Because Foucault explicitly mentions the analysis of "law, institutions, and authority," I suspect Foucault is thinking of Beccaria, who is a Humean in several ways (albeit not only Humean): for example, "the power of habit," Beccaria writes, "is universal over every sensible being. As it is by that we learn to speak, to walk, and to satisfy our necessities, so the ideas of morality are stamped on our minds by repeated impressions." (Crimes and Punisments, Chapter 28) Since Beccaria plays a very prominent role in The Punitive Society, this would be my best guess. However, I have been unable to find any other use of 'Humean criticism' in Foucault's thought so this is quite speculative.

However, it is not purely speculative because thinking of Humean criticism in terms of Beccaria can explain something otherwise deeply puzzling, interconnected features about Foucault's claim. As is well known Hume was a critic of the social contract. And, in fact, many have read Hume's philosophy and (especially) history as friendly to the conservative principles of the Tories and critical of the Whig and Lockean social contract theory. Something accentuated by Hume's argument in his (1752) essay "Of the Original Contract." So, it is odd to see Foucault attribute to the Humean a desire "to get away from anything of the order of traditional obligations founded on a transcendence, and to replace these obligations with the pure and simple obligation of the contract; in order to replace these traditional obligations, which are shown to be only the effects of habit, with a game of obligations in which the will of each will be voluntarily bound and actualized in the contract. To criticize tradition through habit in order to contractualize social bonds, such is the essence of this use of the notion of habit."

To be sure, one can read Hume as undermining the grounds of many (if not all) "traditional obligations founded on a transcendence" (and certainly the suspicion he does so cost him the Chair at Edinburgh). But there is no reason to attribute to Hume (the stereotypical liberal view) of ascribing to "a game of obligations in which the will of each will be voluntarily bound and actualized in the contract." It's also not obvious Hume is really criticizing tradition through habit (as opposed to diagnosing habit as the source of tradition).

But Beccaria does combine a Humean moral psychology and social theory with a social contract theory! Beccaria introduces it in chapter 3 as follows:

The laws only can determine the punishment of crimes; and the authority of making penal laws can only reside with the legislator, who represents the whole society united by the social compact...If every individual be bound to society, society is equally bound to him by a contract, which, from its nature, equally binds both parties. This obligation, which descends from the throne to the cottage, and equally binds the highest and lowest of mankind, signifies nothing more, than that it is the interest of all, that conventions, which are useful to the greatest number, should be punctually observed. The violation of this compact by any individual, is an introduction to anarchy.

What's interesting about Beccaria's social contract theory is not just its incipient utilitarianism, which alongside the social compact is not really analyzed in any great depth (and probably is in tension with the Humean elements in his social theory), but rather that the contract itself is between the individual and society. (Beccaria has moved quite a bit a way from Locke's account of society and is anticipating a more Smithian/Fergusonian approach.) And as the final sentence of the quoted passage already reveals, the purpose of law, then, is, as Beccaria makes explicit in chapter 35, "only intended to maintain the social compact, and not to punish the intrinsic malignity of actions." (This feature Foucault comes to admire in Bentham and in Becker and Stigler.)

And, indeed, as Foucault has noticed, the obligation that is generated by the (implied) social contract is to follow social norms, especially those social that serve the majority. And, as Beccaria argues at much greater length in Crimes and Punishments, if the institutions of society are properly designed, or function well (and, as he notes in chapter 40, the laws don't incentivize norm violation), than citizens can be counted on doing so from habit. 

 

 

Foucault, Similitude, and Hume & Newton

As for similitude, it is now a spent force, outside the realm of knowledge. It is merely empiricism in its most unrefined form; like Hobbes, one can no longer 'regard it as being a part of philosophy', unless it has first been erased in its inexact form of resemblance and transformed by knowledge into a relationship of equality or order. And yet similitude is still an indispensable border of knowledge. For [in classical period] no equality or relation of order can be established between two things unless their resemblance has at least occasioned their comparison. Hume placed the relation of identity among those 'philosophical' relations that presuppose reflection; whereas, for him, resemblance belonged to natural relations, to those that constrain our minds by means of an inevitable but 'calm force'.

Let the philosopher pride himself on his precision as much as he will... I nevertheless dare defy him to make a single step in his progress without the aid of resemblance. Throw but one glance upon the metaphysical aspect of the sciences, even the least abstract of them, and then tell me whether the general inductions that are derived from particular facts, or rather the kinds themselves, the species and all abstract notions, can be formed otherwise than by means of resemblance. [20]

At the border of knowledge, similitude is that barely sketched form, that rudimentary relation which knowledge must overlay to its full extent, but which continues, indefinitely, to reside below knowledge in the manner of a mute and ineffaceable necessity.--Michel Foucault The Order of Things (1970) {1994, Vintage Books Edition} Translated by Alan Sheridan* (original Les Mots et les Choses, 1966), pp. 67-68

The position attributed to Hume by Foucault in the first paragraph above recalls Hume's claim (in the first Enquiry) that "it seems evident, that, if all the scenes of nature were continually shifted in such a manner, that no two events bore any resemblance to each other, but every object was entirely new, without any similitude to whatever had been seen before, we should never, in that case, have attained the least idea of necessity, or of a connexion among these objects." (EHU 5.8) Even so the view being attributed to Hume is also a bit awkward as an interpretation of Hume's accounts of natural and philosophical relations (a distinction articulated in the Treatise), and the role of resemblance and identity among them. I want to highlight three problems.

First, in his own voice, Foucault distinguishes natural and philosophical relations as follows: philosophical relations presuppose reflection. Now, in Hume reflection is a mechanism of the mind that turns ideas into new impressions. That is, "impressions of reflexion are only antecedent to their correspondent ideas; but posterior to those of sensation, and deriv'd from them." (Treatise 1.1.2.1.) The paradigmatic examples of impressions of reflexion are "desire and aversion, hope and fear." (Treatise 1.1.2.1.) That is to say, the passions and emotions. I mention this explicitly because on Foucault's interpretation, the elements or relata or building blocks of philosophical relations are impressions of reflection or the ideas derived from them. (And it would be surprising if the passions played a role in them.)

For, Hume does not explicitly claim that reflection is presupposed in any philosophical relation including identity (which is the one singled out by Foucault). After all he claims, "we extend it to mean any particular subject of comparison, without a connecting principle." (Treatise 1.1.5.1) So, it is strictly speaking false to suggest that in Hume philosophical relations require the operation of reflection.

But one may well think this is not the end of the matter. After all, Hume lists seven sources of comparison that can be "considered the sources of all philosophical relations. (Treatise 1.1.5.1, emphasis added.) These turn out to be viz. "resemblance, identity, relations of time and place, proportion in quantity or number, degrees in any quality, contrariety, and causation." (Treatise 1.3.1.1,) If reflexion is crucial to these (especially identity) than the spirit of Foucault's account can be saved. But none of them presuppose reflexion. In addition, Hume divides this list "into two classes; [first] into such as depend entirely on the ideas, which we compare together, and [second] such as may be chang'd without any change in the ideas." Crucially, again, reflexion is irrelevant to this. So, Foucault misrepresents Hume here on philosophical relations.*

To be sure, I don't mean to deny Foucault's claim that "no equality or relation of order can be established between two things unless their resemblance has at least occasioned their comparison." This is Hume's position, too: 

The first [philosophical relation] is resemblance: And this is a relation, without which no philosophical relation can exist; since no objects will admit of comparison, but what have some degree of resemblance.  (Treatise 1.1.5.3; emphasis in original)

But while it is true that for Hume identity is only a philosophical relation this is not true for resemblance in Hume. For, second, Hume recognizes two kinds or sites of resemblance, one is a philosophical relation and when it functions in a philosophical relation, although resemblance "be necessary to all philosophical relation, it does not follow, that it always produces a connexion or association of ideas." (Treatise 1.1.5.3) Only natural relations generate an association of ideas. And for Hume there are three such natural relations of which resemblance is one. (Treatise 1.1.4.1.) Which he does treat, as Foucault suggests, as a "gentle force." (Treatise 1.1.4.1)  [As an aside, Foucault's 'calm' force is almost certainly the effect of translation either from Hume's English to Foucault's French Hume or from Foucault's text to my translation, etc. For this reason, I am treating resemblance and similitude as synonyms here even though Hume does not really use 'similitude' in the Treatise.]

This, matters because, third, thus, in Hume's Treatise similitude/resemblance doesn't just reside mutely 'below knowledge' acting as a natural relation behind the scenes as it were constraining our mind, but it is also the content of knowledge (and so made explicit). So, here, too, Foucault is misrepresenting Hume's position.

Now, so far, I have skipped the material Foucault quotes and references with endnote [20] in the material I have quoted above. It's natural to read Foucault here as quoting Hume as evidence for his position. But Hume scholars may well wonder what the source of the quoted passage is. (It's not Hume after all.) In fact, the passage quoted by Foucault that starts with "Let the philosopher pride..." is not, first impressions notwithstanding by Hume, but rather is as endnote [20] indicates, a quote from Merian's (1767) Reflexions philosophiques sur la ressemblance, a book I had never looked at before.

Merian is a translator of Hume's first Enquiry and an important critic of Hume, which gave the world the term 'phenomenalism' in order to describe Hume (in 1793). See this (1997) paper by Laursen and Popkin for details (here). Sadly, their paper does not mention the Reflexions philosophiques. With help from Profs. Sophie Roux and Charles T. Wolfe, I located an online copy of the work, which is not very long. Merian does not seem to mention Hume or natural & philosophical relations in his Reflexions! So, Foucault's reading of Hume is not indebted to this work by Merian! (In fact, Merian merely seems here to be capturing Hume's insight of the first Enquiry 5.8 -- a work he had translated just a few years before -- that I quoted above.)

We can conclude then that here on Hume, Merian is not a source for Foucault, but that Merian is used by Foucault to articulate Hume's position (that Foucault recognizes in Merian's 1767 text). At this point one may well wonder if in the quoted passage above, Foucault is relying primary on the first Enquiry, but that would be curious here because he does directly refer to the Treatise (1.3.3 & 1.4.4--the latter a bit odd because it is Hume's account of the modern philosophy) in a endnote in a later chapter on the relationship between Hume's account of causation and its relationship to similarity.

To be sure I don't mean to suggest that you need to follow my interpretation of Hume's account of natural and philosophical relations. That's notoriously contested terrain. But rather that Foucault gets rather basic features of Hume's position wrong. Given that all the other references to Hume in The Order of Things are actually rather formulaic (and the kind of shorthand one may find in post-Kantian philosophy) one may well wonder how carefully Foucault read his Hume. (Oddly he never cites Merian again in the book.)

You may think that this is just scholarly book-keeping. That would be fine actually. However, the significance of this is that it undercuts Foucault's larger claim (which concludes the section) that "from the seventeenth century, resemblance was pushed out of the boundaries of knowledge, toward the humblest and basest of its frontiers." (71) This is, as we have seen, not true for Hume. I also would deny this is true of, say, of Newton's natural philosophy. If anything, one of the key issues in Newton's account of space and time is that Newton cane give a clear account of what Newton calls the 'species and magnitude' of the measure of space, but that he has a difficulty to do so for the measure of time. (See the postscript to my seventh chapter in my Newton's Metaphysics: Essays.) So the resemblance of spaces is much easier secured by Newton (and can do all kinds of work for him through geometric reasoning) than the putative resemblance of time. (This is no trivial matter if we look ahead to Einstein.) 

I actually suspect that in the background early modern empiricism (here meaning Locke, Newton, and Hume) in all their variety are tacitly assimilated by Foucault to 20th century (Carnapian) empiricism where resemblance is indeed foundational (although problematized by Goodman and Quine). But that's just a hunch.

 

 

Mill's Elitism and Progressivism, The Art of Government, Tocqueville (and Foucault), Part I

The mode of conducting the practical business of government, which is best under a free constitution, would generally be best also in an absolute monarchy: only, an absolute monarchy is not so likely to practise it. The laws of property, for example; the principles of evidence and judicial procedure; the system of taxation and of financial administration, need not necessarily be different in different forms of government. Each of these matters has principles and rules of its own, which are a subject of separate study. General jurisprudence, civil and penal legislation, financial and commercial policy, are sciences in themselves, or rather, separate members of the comprehensive science or art of government: and the most enlightened doctrines on all these subjects, though not equally likely to be understood or acted on under all forms of government, yet, if understood and acted on, would in general be equally beneficial under them all. It is true that these doctrines could not be applied without some modifications to all states of society and of the human mind: nevertheless, by far the greater number of them would require modifications solely of detail, to adapt them to any state of society sufficiently advanced to possess rulers capable of understanding them. A government to which they would be wholly unsuitable, must be one so bad in itself, or so opposed to public feeling, as to be unable to maintain itself in existence by honest means.--J.S.Mill (1861) Considerations on Representative Government, Chapter 2 ("The Criterion of a Good Form of Government.)

One can find passages in Mill's writings that suggest he was a skeptic about the very possibility of an art of government. But some of the works that endured endorse the art, and even suggest it, as above, that it is a "comprehensive science." In Mill, this tends to mean, amongst other things, that it is a body of rules (see System of Logic). But in the quoted passage he also emphasizes that these involve certain "doctrines."

In virtue of the fact that these rules are context insensitive, Mill is willing to call these rules a 'science.' Presumably the rules, which are built on a body of empirical generalizations (in the indicative), have the character of (what he and his followers) would call 'imperative statements' (recall this post). These have the task of providing one the means for given ends, that is, a kind of instrumental or conditional rationality. This is actually something meta, because government itself has this kind of instrumental rationality baked into its purpose according to Mill; it exists (no surprise here given his utilitarianism) to promote "the interests of any given society." 

Interestingly enough, and this anticipates Foucault's observation (recall here) on the liberal art of government as such in the first few sentences of the Birth of Biopolitics, for Mill there is a version of the art 'which is best under a free government.' Now undoubtedly he does not mean to say, in the first instance, that this is the optimal art of government, but in the second instance he notes that is best sans phrase. It turns out that there is a normative art of government that would be context invariant.

Obviously, I overstate Mill's explicit position. As the ancients teach there are more modes of tyrannical government, where, as he notes, the normative art of government is impossible by definition because it would be self-underming ("A government...so bad in itself, or so opposed to public feeling, as to be unable to maintain itself in existence by honest means").* But what Mill calls a 'free constitution' and an 'absolute monarchy' do not exhaust the non-tyrannical options. (By a 'free constitution' Mill means something like what we call a 'liberal democracy' to considerable degree.) I return to this issue below. But Mill allows (and there are echoes of Hume here), that good government is, in principle, possible in an absolute monarchy even if it is rare in practice.

I take it that the 'art of government' just is, for Mill, well grounded skill at what he calls 'the practical business of government.' And this happens to be subdivided into a whole number of practical disciplines commonly taught we might surmise in law schools ("General jurisprudence, civil and penal legislation") and public policy or and/or economics departments ("financial and commercial policy.") The point is not just that within the art of government there is a cognitive division of labor, specialization, but also that these disciplines are ultimately subordinate to a larger purpose.

Some of you may be eager to remind me that strictly speaking the art of government is not really context insensitive. Mill quite clearly presupposes something like a distinction between advanced civilization, and those cultures that still require some tutelage. As he puts it at the start of the chapter that I have been quoting, "the proper functions of a government are not a fixed thing, but different in different states of society; much more extensive in a backward than in an advanced state." This stadial idea of cultural development is deeply woven into Mill's social theory (and, obviously, is a part of his support for a certain kind of reformed imperialism.) Strictly speaking, and this is a further strain of elitism in Mill, only those that would have to apply the art of government need to 'advance' to the level familiar from civilized culture. 

As an aside, every time I confront these features of Mill's thought I always despair a little bit for the liberal tradition. But I also find in it a salutary lesson that great moral sensitivity is compatible with great obtuseness, and this should make us skeptical in our dispositions about our own certitudes. (No, I won't preach more of my skepticism today.)

Be that as it may, somewhat paradoxically, where the art of government is most needed (the underdeveloped state), according to Mill, because there government must have many functions, it is unavailable because (to put in modern slightly more neutral terms, well only slightly) of a lack of human capital to develop and implement it. Mill himself uses puts it as follows: "the most important point of excellence which any form of government can possess is to promote the virtue and intelligence of the people themselves." So, lurking here is the idea that real development presupposes considerable state capacity and expertise that rests on considerable human capital. And as a people develop government functions disappear or wither away. (I put it like that because there is something analogous in Marxism.) A nation of super-intelligent spinozist sages would not need any government. But the tragedy of human life (and development) is, on Mill's view, that (knowledgeable) investment in human capital only really gets going after decent enough government has been achieved.

For Mill, "one criterion of the goodness of a government, the degree in which it tends to increase the sum of good qualities in the governed, collectively and individually, since, besides that their well-being is the sole object of government, their good qualities supply the moving force which works the machinery [of government]." When I started this post, I wanted to say something about how we can discern here in Mill a response to Tocqueville but about that some time more. I do note that we can see here some non-trivial kinship between Becker and Stigler and Mill. So, when discussing the programming of human capital by Chicago, Foucault's tendency to treat Becker and Stigler as the natural culmination and intensification of the utilitarian-philosophical-radical traditon (in context Mill is clear that his views on this point have an affinity with Bentham's) is actually well grounded. (I have a suspicion that Halevy and Lepage have something to do with this. But again, some other time more.)

One element of the art of government is guided by the following doctrine (which looks back to Hume and Spinoza and Madison): "The ideally perfect constitution of a public office is that in which the interest of the functionary is entirely coincident with his duty." And this, for Mill, scales up to what Rawls calls the 'basic institutions:' "What we have said of the arrangements for the detailed administration of the government is still more evidently true of its general constitution. All government which aims at being good is an organization of some part of the good qualities existing in the individual members of the community for the conduct of its collective affairs." 

That is, we may say then, that Mill divides what we can call political theory/philosophy in two. One is engaged with  the basic structure or as he puts it, the "fundamental constitution of the government." This is institutional design. (Recall this post.) And the other, is the art of government, that is, the understanding of the mode of conducting the practical business of government, Obviously, there is an important connection between the two because there are going to be many interaction effects between them. While it is tempting to see the designing of the 'fundamental constitution' as the more important institution (since it molds the rest), as the argument above has revealed, without the proper clay it won't get off the ground. And so that means that, in practice, the constitution, and even the most general principles that enter into the art of government must respect context. (The rest of the chapter articulates this very point.) In this chapter, Mill treats the art of government as part of political philosophy.** 

Here I want to close with an observation. One may well think in light of the significance of professional schools above, that fundamentally the art of government is something technocratic for Mill. But I don't think that's quite right. Not only because of the ways in which empirical and normative elements blend in it. For the aim of the art is something programmatic: the capacity to articulate and implement modes of government that "favor and promote, not some one improvement, but all forms and degrees of it." And while that  presupposes an ideal constitution, which is to be developed theoretically, it also presupposes a program of open-ended intellectual, moral, and social progress in our capacities for (and this is the significance of my Spinozist joke above), self-government. 

 

 

 

Foucault on Hume on Interest and (Adaptive) Preference

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On the Modernity and Popularity of Public Philosophy by Academic Philosophers, and some Foucault on Kant

I sometimes suspect that advocates of public philosophy by academic philosophers [sometimes: PPAP] are (tacitly) are committed to at least two of the following three following propositions.

1. PPAP is a relatively recent invention.
2. Public philosophy is not new at all, it just is (the extension or renewal of) Dewey-ian style pragmatism.
3. Socrates, or the public gadfly, is a good model for PPAP.
4. Public philosophy is the dissemination or making accessible of existing (but otherwise esoteric to the public) philosophical knowledge.

Obviously, this does not exhaust all the possibilities. I want to make two comments about this list. First, those committed to (1.), tend to be analytic philosophers (of the sort that do not tend to understand themselves as intellectual descendants of Dewey--so that can include all kinds of pragmatists). My suspicion for thinking this is that this tribe (my own) has been going through a process of interest and valorization of public philosophy during the last (say) decade. I could point to a lot of blog posts or social media commentary to suggest this (including my own). But this thought also fits with the popularity of the 'icy slopes of logic' thesis (articulated by Reisch) that suggests that analytic philosophy retreated into the ivory tower due to the cold war.

Of course, if the icy slopes of logic thesis were true (which I have been known to doubt), then it follows, almost by definition, that 1 is not true. For, the left wing of Vienna was committed to PPAP. Let's grant that Neurath and Carnap were committed to PPAP before their forced exile. It does not follow that one couldn't say something in the spirit of 1.

One might argue, for example, that as an aspiration PPAP is not recent. But one might say, while reflecting on the fate of the Vienna Circle, that the social conditions to do it right, without danger to oneself (or society, were one takes inductive risk of philosophical praxis seriously) are relatively rare and recent. It's only when what we might call a Mill-ian ethos takes hold of elite/juridical/political institutions (even if grudgingly) and has sufficient popular acceptance then (1.) holds. And we, oh moderns, are blessed with times in which we may think what we like, and say it. Let's call this self-congratulatory stance the Millian Ethos Thesis.

For those who recognize their Spinoza or Hume (or Tacitus) in the previous paragraph, neither were professional academics. Hume famously did not get the job at Edinburgh, Spinoza prudently declined a position at Heidelberg. This failure is especially notable in the case of Hume who starts his Treatise with the express aim to 'to try the taste of the public.'

That such an ethos relatively recent achievement may be illustrated by the fate of (the otherwise well connected) Bertrand Russell, who was sacked from his position at Trinity for his public pacifism during WWI and later was denied a position at City University (for his views on sexual morality and his atheism).* I use Russell here not to argue for the suggestion that PPAP only exists when there is no limitation on what can be said in public, but rather to remind the reader the range of topical constraints that existed until quite recently on the very possibility of PPAP. (There is a real contrast between the way, say, Noam Chomsky has been treated and Russell.)

Second, Socrates is a terrible example of PPAP for mass societies like ours. By this, I don't just mean that he was not an academic and his life ended badly, but also we don't reach anything like 'the public' if we go around a popular spot in town and have elenctic conversations with the folk. (I don't diss the activity, by the way.)  Implicitly this is understood because usually when people talk about public philosophy for our kind, they talk about editorials, TV, podcasts, You Tube channels, etc. These have in common that, with luck, they reach a very wide audience. They also tend to presuppose commitment to (4.) more than (3.), and are often nudged along by grant agencies and administrators.

Of course, when people mention Socrates or Diogenes the Cynic, they really mean something like 'being a gadfly of society.' The problem with a gadfly model is that it often presupposes a kind of persistent challenge to the social and political status quo. Almost no academic has time for that alongside our teaching, publishing, and service obligations. And I know of no modern example that fits the case when one ignores PR machines and looks at the facts dispassionately. (Feel free to offer your examplars.)

These impressions were triggered by reading the following passage in a lecture by Foucault, who was, of course, a significant public philosopher in his own right, to a French group of professional philosophers:

In this definition of the Aufklärung, there will be something which no doubt it may be a little ridiculous to call a sermon, and yet it is very much a call for courage that he sounds in this description of the Aufklärung. One should not forget that it was a newspaper article. There is much work to be done on the relationship between philosophy and journalism from the end of the 18th century on, a study ... Unless it has already been done, but I am not sure of that ... It is very interesting to see from what point on philosophers intervene in newspapers in order to say something that is for them philosophically interesting and which, nevertheless, is inscribed in a certain relationship to the public which they intend to mobilize. And finally, it is characteristic that, in this text on the Aufklärung, Kant precisely gives religion, law and knowledge as examples of maintaining humanity in the minority condition and consequently as examples of points where the Aufklärung, must lift this minority condition and in some way majoritize men. What Kant was describing as the Aufklärung is very much what I was trying before to describe as critique, this critical attitude which appears as a specific attitude in the Western world starting with what was historically, I believe, the great process of society's governmentalization. Michel Foucault (1978) "What is Critique" translated by Lysa Hotroch, reprinted in The Politics of Truth, edited by Sylvere Lotringer, p48. (Ellipses in original)

In the works collected in The Politics of Truth, Foucault expresses similar views, so this is something he clearly reflected on in the last decade of his life. What's neat for our present purposes is that Foucault calls attention to the fact that in "What Is Enlightenment?" Kant engaged in public philosophy, in the sense we tend to use the term today (and as assumed in this post), while also reflecting on the manner of it (and its limits).  Famously, Kant thought that in one's functional role (as professor, cleric, civil servant, etc.) one must be (passively) obedient to authority, while one simultanously one had a duty or at least the freedom to educate the public, including criticism of the authorities without adverse consequences (if one does so in a way that does not undermine now quoting Kant) "the stability of the community."

To what degree such stability really can be reconciled with the mobilizing function Foucault ascribes to Kant's conception of the public use of reason is no easy matter to settle. But it is worth noting that even a hardnosed thinker like Machiavelli (carefully read by both Foucault and Kant) praises the epistemic and social features of Rome's willingness to endure quite a bit of social rowdiness and mobilization as a means toward stabilizing the community (and the evolution of social practices.)+ As an aside, Kant here is at odds with our modern conception of academic freedom, which precisely creates some zone to be critical of one's authorities (and the authorities, and their dogma's) in one's teaching.

What's important to my present purposes is the violation of (4.) in Foucault's treatment of Kant as an exemplar. For while Kant's own view of the free use of public reason, as presented by Foucault (in non-controversial way) sounds something like (4.), the manner in which Kant defends the view is (to quote Foucault) "philosophically interesting." In fact, in a different essay, "What is Enlightenment?" Foucault starts with a contrast between Kant's age of Enlightenment and ours, favorably to the past, in which he describes the present attitude toward in which in public speech/utterances, "there is not much likelihood of learning anything new." This makes our public intellectual life rather boring, as Foucault suggests. (Of course, I am not discussing YOUR contributions to public intellectual life, my dear sophisticated readers.) Even if one suspects that Foucault may be romanticizing the past here, he is right in noticing that commitment to (4.) tends to part and parcel of what we may call the repetitionof the known. Of course, that may still be an important public service (and I am a friend of philosophy as service of the sort Dotson engages in), but the philosophy part is underserviced by it. 

I could stop here because I think it's pretty clear now why I think 1-4 are all false, or undesirable. But I want to close with two final (related) observations on the triggering passage I quoted from Foucault. First, what he says about  governmentalization is undoubtedly obscure if you don't read the wider lecture, and/or lack familiararity with the lectures he gave in that period at College de France. To simplify, it's a species of statecraft (including the art of governing without states or their apparatus). But for present purposes, we can leave it a bit obscure. But I do want to note the connection to Kant, Foucault asserts just before (in discussing developments since the 16th century in "Western Europe) the following:

And if we accord this movement of governmentalization of both society and individuals the historic dimension and breadth which I believe it has had, it seems that one could approximately locate therein what we could call the critical attitude. Facing them head on and as compensation, or rather, as both partner and adversary to the arts of governing, as an act of defiance, as a challenge, a way of limiting these arts of governing and sizing them up, transforming them, of finding a way to escape from them or, in any case, a way to displace them, with a basic distrust, but also and by the same token, as a line of development of the arts of governing, there would have been something born in Europe at that time, a kind of general cultural form, both a political and moral attitude, a way of thinking, etc. and which I would very simply call the art of not being governed or better, the art of not being governed like that and at that cost. I would therefore propose, as a very first definition of critique, this general characterization: the art of not being governed quite so much. (44-45)

Kantian critique then is, on this view, not some esoteric philosophical doctrine, but the outgrowth of a much wider European ethos that itself has a considerable development. And while there is in philosophy, perhaps, a lot more to critique then the idea that one 'not be governed like that' -- the rejection of permanent immaturity -- this is its central idea. It is to be sure, no anarchism. But it is an embrace of a kind of limitation on being governed. I think it is no surprise then that in the following year, Foucault explored at great length the liberal art of government (and Kant's role in developing it) because it just is the tradition that, warts and at all, embraces the art of not being governed quite so much.

My second remark is-- and this is based not just on the quoted passages like these alone (but a more wider reading in Foucault) - that Foucault embraces the Millian Ethos thesis in its Eurocentric fashion; a version that actually embraces European/Western (cultural) exceptionalism.** But let me stop here.

A note on Foucault and Kuhn on Scientific Revolutions, and Adam SMith & Stigler.

And thus, in fragments here and there, political economy is thought to have been silently bringing into position its essential themes, until the moment when, taking up the analysis of production again in another direction, Adam Smith is supposed to have brought to light the process of the increasing division of labour, Ricardo the role played by capital, and J-B. Say some of the fundamental laws of the market economy. From this moment on, political economy is supposed to have begun to exist with its own proper object and its own inner coherence.
In fact, the concepts of money, price, value, circulation, and market were not regarded, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in terms of a shadowy future, but as part of a rigorous and general epistemological arrangement. It is this arrangement that sustains the 'analysis of wealth' in its overall necessity. The analysis of wealth is to political economy what general grammar is to philology and what natural history is to biology. And just as it is not possible to understand the theory of verb and noun, the analysis of the language of action, and that of roots and their development, without referring, through the study of general grammar, to the archaeological network that makes those things possible and necessary; just as one cannot understand, without exploring the domain of natural history, what Classical description, characterization, and taxonomy were, any more than the opposition between system and method, or Tixism' and 'evolution'; so, in the same way, it would not be possible to discover the link of necessity that connects the analysis of money, prices, value, and trade if one did not first clarify this domain of wealth which is the locus of their simultaneity.--Michael Foucault The Order of Things (1970) {1994, Vintage Books Edition} Translated by Alan Sheridan* (original Les Mots et les Choses, 1966), pp. 166-167.+

In a correspondence shortly after Structure of Scientific Revolutions first appeared, Thomas Kuhn reminded the future Nobel laureate and Chicago Economist, George Stigler, that in Structure he considered economics as a mature science. The passage Kuhn refers to is one that illustrates Kuhn's argument for rejecting a definition of science. 

Furthermore, if precedent from the natural sciences serves, they will cease to be a source of concern not when a definition is found, but when the groups that now doubt their own status achieve consensus about their past and present accomplishments. It may, for example, be significant that economists argue less about whether their field is a science than do practitioners of some other fields of social science. Is that because economists know what science is? Or is it rather economics about which they agree?--Kuhn Structure (Second, enlarged edition), pp. 160-161.

What's notable about Kuhn's position here is that he ties essentially sociological and political criteria and concepts (viz., groups, status, consensus) to help identify if not characterize that we're in the presence of a scientific community. Undoubtedly this is familiar to my readers. But it's worth adding that the agreement isn't merely over the present, but also about the past. A few pages later Kuhn shows that it is textbook that generate such consensus over the past (pp. 165-167), and he is quite explicit that the textbook account of the past is outright fabrication: "the member of a mature scientific community is, like the typical character of Orwell's 1984, the victim of a history rewritten by the power that be." (167)

In Kuhn, the maturity of science and consensus are tightly intertwined and Kuhn is clear that both are, in part, the effect of textbook education (see also. p. 10). Now, I don't think Kuhn ever uses the language of 'immature' science (for it would be characterized by disagreement and so by definition is no science). But he does identify paradigmatic science with maturity, and so it is natural to treat what Kuhn calls as 'pre paradigm' period as the immature era which is, after, all  characterized by disagreement. In context Kuhn alerts the reader to the significance of this comment to "those concerned with the development of the contemporary social science sciences." (p.167)

As an aside, in "What is Enlightenment," Kant associates the progressive possibilities of intellectual autonomy, that is Enlightenment, with maturity. And the periods of authority over individual thought as immaturity. And there is interesting work to be done on the subtle shifts in and appropriations of Kantian commitments in Kuhn (and those that shaped Kuhn's philosophy.)

Before I return to Foucault, it is worth noting two features of Kuhn's position (that are textually connected in subsequent sentences, although I have reversed the presentational order). First, not all criteria that help identify a science are sociological or political in character. In particular, for Kuhn what makes consensus possible is the establishment of a paradigm (more about that below). And a paradigm is characterized by and makes "possible" what Kuhn calls "normal puzzle-solving research." (Postscript from 1969, p. 179) This seems very much internal to scientific practice, and undoubtedly can be characterized, in part, in epistemic terms.

However, and this is my second observation (and it is Foucault-ian in character), Kuhn explicitly assumes that there is no progressive puzzle-solving research in eras that are characterized by disunity of paradigms. Here's how Kuhn puts it: "The members of all scientific communities, including the schools of the "pre-paradigm" period, share the sorts of elements which I have collectively labelled 'a paradigm.' What changes with the transition to maturity is not the presence of a paradigm but rather its nature." (Postscript from 1969, p. 179) It's nature is that makes progressive puzzle-solving possible. So, paradigms make forward looking progress possible; and from the perspective of the paradigm, it's characteristic of the pre-paradigm era to exhibit "initial divergences" (17) of methods, evidential standards, and even what the subject matter really is.

It's quite odd that Kuhn doesn't notice that conceptually (and historically) it's quite possible that during disunified 'immature' eras the paradigms of the competing 'schools' (his term) can be progressive and be (or in virtue of their) puzzle-solving. (I actually think this is true even of cases central to his account of the scientific revolution in 17th century physics, but let me leave that aside here.) Since crisis eras of mature sciences are explicitly likened to pre-paradigmatic eras (72/84/101) -- and in crisis eras  of mature science there is still progressive puzzle-solving despite the anomalies - it is odd that Kuhn does not reflect on this.

Before I get to Foucault one important point as background. That there is a distinction between mature and immature sciences, and that they are seperated by intellectual revolutions of some sort, was widely held view among economists in the late nineteenth century through the middle of the twentieth centuries. This is, in fact, a point that Stigler kind of makes in his side of the correspondence with Kuhn. And he encloses a number of papers that show this. In addition, that consensus is a marker of such maturity is also present in economics. (I have done some scholarship to establish these points, too; see here; and here.) My own speculative view is that Adam Smith's essay on the History of Astronomy is the source, within nineteenth century and twentieth century economics of the existence of these proto-Kuhnian ideas within economics. (That he held such views see here.) But other intellectual sources are possible.

Okay, if we now look at the passage quoted at the top of the post, we see that in the first paragraph Foucault describes what he takes to be a common view on the transition from a fragmented prior era, to a mature unified intellectual discipline. It's easy to recognize a narrative that involves transition from a pre-paradigmatic stage to a paradigmatic stage here. Once there is a ruling paradigm, after all, a field has a coherent forward motion and a clearly defined subject matter (this is, in fact, the constitutive nature of a paradim). In fact, the narrative is common ground among economic textbooks and Marxists (who have a story about the developmental relationship between pre-classical and classicale economics).

I don't mean to suggest the common view is intended as a characterization of Kuhn's position. It's also more likely that Foucault is targeting a kind of whiggishness that is quite common in the writing of the growth of knowledge/science from within and about the sciences. But I don't think the distance between the two is as large as we often now understand it in post Kuhnian philosophy of science. While Kuhn rejected the idea that there was a telos within or of science (he is fond of comparing it to the undirecteness of Darwinian evolution), he still inscribes a soft teleology into his account in virtue of the way the mature/immature, diverging/consensus, and pre-paradigm/paradigm (all seperated by a revolution) distinctions (and the associated network of concepts) operate in his account. Kuhn has gone  native (and so as a matter of Kuhn interpretation he is right to reject the extreme relativists/constructivists in science studioes that have presented him as their progenitor).

But in the second quoted paragraph Foucault goes on to reject the common view. For him the pre-Smithian (and pre-classical) political economists were not different in kind with those that followed Smith-Ricardo-Say. They held very different kind of views and with different methods, but that is because the thought of the age was structured by a very different kind of set of conceptual background conditions (episteme).  These conceptual background conditions can be stable over considerable time and act on and through many different intellectual disciplines at once for Foucault. (Part of the excitement of Foucault's book is his analysis of the structural analogies of different disciplines in the same era (defined by an episteme). I leave aside here the mechanisms of how this is supposed to work.

Now, crucially for my present concerns Foucault recognizes ruptures between successive eras (epistemes) and within disciplines within eras.* These can coincide, when ruptures within disciplines lead to a new era. Interestingly enough, as it happens (and I return to this some other time) Adam Smith's work is a vector of such micro rupture in a field that also happens to inaugurate a much larger set of shifts. (I am not ascribing to Foucault a causal account here because I want to avoid discussing here his account of large scale change between epistemes.)**

So, in Foucault's account, from the perspective of a later time (within a discipline), especially in a later episteme, the earlier work will, when intelligible at all, seem childish or disunified. Very much the way Kuhn describes immature, pre-paradigm eras. But on Foucault's own all things considered view, this is a kind of optical illusion, itself the effect of unexamined teleological commitments. One is literally unable to see what he calls 'the link of necessity that connects' the conceptual structure and practices of those in an earlier age. And because Foucault doesn't use consensus as a marker of scienticity or disciplined knowledge he can actually analyze how it works -- and since he is interested in human sciences -- and how such knowledge works on humans on its own (contested) terms.**

To be continued.

Foucault, Lepage, Anarcho-capitalism and anti-Marxism

In his fifth lecture of 7 February 1979 Foucault introduces "American anarcho-capitalism" as a synonym for "contemporary American liberalism." (The Birth of Biopolitics p. 104.) In context, the intended contrast is with German Ordoliberalism and Hayek's Austrian liberalism. In the next lecture, of 14 February, 1979, Foucault contrasts "contemporary American anarcho-capitalism" with the "classical liberalism of the nineteenth century." (p. 133) Later in the sixth lecture, Foucault claims that "American anarcho-capitalism" develops from the rejection of "Keynesian economics, and others from the Beveridge plans or European social security plans." (pp. 144-145) Foucault doesn't use the phrase "Anarcho-capitalism" again. He does use 'anarcho-liberal' (and its cognates) a few times (p. 117; p. 161) as apparent synonym. 

It's pretty clear, however, that he is thinking of the Chicago school, especially the strand inspired by Henry Calvert Simons (1899 –1946). Because Foucault makes clear that that "Simons drafted a number of critical texts and articles, the most interesting of which is entitled: “The Beveridge Program: an unsympathetic interpretation,” which there is no need to translate, since the title indicates its critical sense." (p. 216) In addition, Foucault had just introduced Simons to his audience as follows, "The first, fundamental text of this American neo-liberalism, written in 1934 by Simons, who was the father of the Chicago School, is an article entitled “A Positive Program for Laissez-Faire.” (p. 216) And, in fact, Foucault explicitly identifies 'anarcho-liberalism' with the Chicago school (p. 161).

Foucault's adoption of the phrase 'anarcho-capitalism' is a bit strange because Simons is no anarchist. And, in fact, to the best of my knowledge most real anarchists (Left and Right) would not treat any Chicago economist as an anarchist (since they tend to accept non-trivial state institutions). Milton Friedman's defense, for example, of central banking often gets him criticized by certain libertarians and anarchists alike. 

Unusually, the editorial team of The Birth of Biopolitics is silent on Foucault's use. I mention that not to criticize them. For, in a note attached to a cryptic remark by Foucault -- "The ideas of North on the development of capitalism, for example, are directly in line with this opening up made by the neoliberals" -- in lecture of 14 February 1979 they call to "H. Lepage, Demain le capitalisme (Paris: Librairie Générale Francaise, 1978; republished “Pluriel”) p. 34 and chapters 3 and 4 (this book was one of the sources used by Foucault in the last of these 1979 lectures)." Lepage treats North at length in this fascinating book, translated by Sheilagh C. Ogilvie* as Tomorrow, Capitalism: The Economics of Economic Freedom (Open Court, 1982).

Lepage introduces the term 'anarcho-capitalism' near the end of the first chapter ("The New Economists") in a section, "The Libertarians," as follows:

This renaissance in modern economic thought has given rise to the appearance on the American political chessboard of a new ideological movement—the Libertarian movement. It does not yet represent more than an intellectual fringe, but it embodies an astonishing reconciliation between a distinctly controversial social libertarianism (favoring legalization of drugs, moral freedom, freedom from military conscription, international neutrality, suppression of the CIA, abolition of the corrupt ‘‘military-industrial complex’’) and an economic libertarianism that calls for a radically laissez-faire capitalist society in which a maximum of transactions would take place through voluntary contractual exchange.

Often having close ties with the ‘‘radical”’ philosophy of the New Left and mostly less than 40 years of age, these libertarians are the direct descendants of the great libertarian revolt of the 1960s. They hold the very existence of the state to be the supreme evil that is to be actively resisted. Opponents of all manifestations of Gulag, down to the least offensive, their objective is to abolish the state in favor of a social system in which all public functions would be made private. This has given them the name ‘‘anarcho-capitalists,’’ a name assumed by certain of their leaders such as David Friedman, son of Milton Friedman, also a professor of economics, now at UCLA and formerly at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg." Lepage Capitalism, Tomorrow, p. 25

A few pages later Lepage clarifies that "Milton Friedman, for instance, passes for “‘libertarian’’ in most circles, but he is not recognized as libertarian by militants of the Libertarian Party such as his own son." (p. 27) And a few lines down, he is equally clear that "not all Chicago school adherents or the new economists are libertarians." (p. 27) It's natural to read this page as suggesting that Nozick and David Friedman are anarcho-capitalists. In the section on anarcho-capitalism (near the end of chapter 7) only David Friedman is mentioned and quoted (and no Chicago economist).+ 

I suspect Foucault gets the term 'anarcho-capitalism/liberalism' from Lepage. And it is pretty clear that Lepage's discussions of Becker, Stigler, and North shape Foucault's analysis (about this some time soon more). But Foucault does not follow Lepage slavishly (or may have conflated Milton and David Friedman). Another important difference between Foucault and Lepage is that while Lepage identifies Simons as one of the founders of the "Chicago tradition," he treats Knight (correctly) as the "true founder." (p. 5) Lepage devotes no space at all to discuss Simons (who was long dead when Lepage wrote his book). By contrast Foucault largely ignores Knight and focuses on Simons. 

Okay, Capitalism, Tomorrow (Demain, le capitalisme) is a superb survey of anti-Keynesian economics and political philosophy of the 50s-70s. (It was a bestseller in France.) In his "foreword" to the English translation, James Buchanan notes that Lepage visited in September 1976. Throughout the foreword Buchanan treats Lepage as a "journalist." But I understand from Guillaume Yon that Lepage wrote important policy briefs for the regulatory framework of French electricity industry. And in France Lepage quickly became associated with 'new economists' and 'anarcho-capitalism.' And I suspect that Foucault used 'anarcho-capitalism' to alert his audience that he would be talking about the whole ensemble of characters that Lepage discusses in his book, rather than conflate the more narrow work of David Friedman with the much broader movement that Lepage discusses.

One reason Douglass North is so important to Lepage's argument, and why I think Foucault mentions him in that otherwise obscure passage when he first introduces 'anarcho-capitalism,' is that running through Lepage's book are a whole number of set-pieces in which known criticisms by Marxists of capitalism, markets, and/or liberalism are answered (if not refuted) rather thoroughly. As Lepage puts it in his introduction, "capitalism and economic freedom cannot be defended successfully...[without] new theoretical and scientific insight into the economic bases and implications of their own political philosophy," (p. 3; emphasis in original.) In fact, Capitalism, Tomorrow would still work very well in an 'intro to PPE' course or as the right-wing response to (say) Polanyi's The Great Transformation (or some such book) or as an introduction to economic way of thinking.

An example of this occurs right at the start of the book. After briefly introducing the significance of human capital theory and the new theory of consumer behavior to his audience, Lepage writes,

Formulated separately by Gary S. Becker at Chicago and Kelvin J. Lancaster at Columbia, the new theory of consumption sees the consumer as an individual who not only consumes but also ‘‘produces’’ his own satisfaction, using inputs consisting of his market purchases and his time. This is in itself—as we shall see'’—an intellectual revolution, yet despite its controversial political implications it is still practically unknown outside economic circles. Its new view of consumer demand finally makes it possible to reply effectively to the critics of capitalism who base their view of society on a supposed distinction between ‘‘true”” and ‘‘false’’ needs. In their view, advertising, by changing people’s desires, makes consumers the slaves of the producers, and the proliferation of new products becomes proof of the wasteful and suicidal nature of consumer society. But consumer behavior can be explained convincingly without invoking ‘‘false needs’’ or consumer irrationality. (Capitalism, Tomorrow, Chapter one, pp. 9-10, emphasis added)

My present point is not to endorse Lepage's claim that the new theory of consumption does respond adequately to the Marxist criticism. To evaluate that we will need to explore the details of his argument (in the very near future!) But rather that responding to anti-capitalism systematically is clearly Lepage's purpose. And I suspect this is what made the book attractive to Foucault, who, as is well known, runs with the idea that what is distinctive about American neoliberalism (as exemplified by Becker and Stigler) is the "programming of policies of economic development, which could be orientated, and which are in actual fact orientated," toward the development of human capital. (Birth of Biopolitics, p. 233) And this programming can, as Foucault clearly discerns, be developed through social policy and one's own activities.

Finally, Becker's move is at odds (recall; see also here) with Frank Knight’s position who claimed that “wants which impel economic activity and which it is directed toward satisfying are the products of the economic process itself.” (This is a view that is not just Marxist, but goes back to Smith and Rousseau and probably Aristotle.) Arguably this is one of the central oppositions between 'old' and 'new' Chicago.  TBC.