Digressions&Impressions

Lenin and The State's Essential Coerciveness

In what follows I use Lenin's The State and Revolution (1917; hereafter S&R quoted by chapter and section) as my guide to an orthodox Marxist interpretation of Marx and Engels on the nature of the late nineteenth century capitalist-imperial state. It's perfectly fine for my purposes if you think that Lenin flattened Marx and Engels or misrepresents them (or the evolution of their thought, etc.). It's also fine for my purposes if you think that this is not the best version of a Marxist theory (orthodox or not) of the capitalist state out there. 

Drawing on Engels' fascinating (1884) The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, for Lenin the modern state is the effect of class conflict; the state exists in order, it's fundamental function is, to reduce the transaction costs of class conflict. As Engels puts it: "in order that these antagonisms, classes with conflicting economic interests, shall not consume themselves and society in fruitless struggle, a power, apparently standing above society, has become necessary to moderate the conflict and keep it within the bounds of “order”; and this power, arisen out of society, but placing itself above it and increasingly alienating itself from it, is the state." This independent power understands itself "as apparent mediator." In some respects (I will qualify this below) this anticipates the idea familiar from twentieth century neoliberalism which conceives of the state as an "impartial umpire" above civil society (I am quoting the excellent SEP entry on Hayek by Schmidtz and Boettke).

Of course, Marxists emphasize that the mediating role is not truly impartial. It serves the interest of capital. In particular, the bourgeoisie have captured the state for their own interests. As Marx and Engels put it in the Communist Manifesto, "the executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie." Or as Lenin puts it, "According to Marx, the state is an organ of class rule, an organ for the oppression of one class by another; it is the creation of “order”, which legalizes and perpetuates this oppression by moderating the conflict between classes.  (S&R 1,1) It is worth noting that this emphasis on the order creating nature of states anticipates the Ordoliberal self-understanding in non-trivial ways, and also, as I learned from Erwin Dekker's biography of Tinbergen, more technocratic social democrats like Tinbergen, and the young Rawls as Katrina Forrester persuasively argues in the early chapters of In the Shadow of Justice. I return to this below.

While Lenin suggests that bourgeois politicians would deny it, as an empirical matter, it's not difficult for liberal thinkers to agree that late nineteenth century liberal states are characterized by rent-seeking elites biased toward relatively narrow interests. This was, in fact Hobson's view in his (1905) Imperialism -- a book Lenin (recall) studied carefully -- and Lippmann's in his (1937) The Good Society. And it is a familiar refrain from, say, the Chicago school onward in so-called classical liberal understandings of the contemporary state (recall here).

As an aside, Lenin anticipates the view of liberals of the 1930s that the 1870s were a watershed period in the development of the nineteenth century liberal state. As Lenin notes, in commenting on a remark by Marx that it "was understandable in 1871, when Britain was still the model of a purely capitalist country, but without a militarist clique and, to a considerable degree, without a bureaucracy." (3.1) For, in the 1920s and 30s, in reflecting on the collapse the global order during WWI, so-called neo-liberals came to believe that a corruption of liberalism was manifested after the 1870s. (They would tell different stories about the timing and original source of that corruption (compare here with here). 

The point of the last few paragraphs is that there is non-trivial overlap between Lenin's Marxist analysis of the period leading up to WWI and the liberal analysis of that same period in the first third of the twentieth century.  This is, as I have shown in a different context (recall), also visible in the accounts of the rise of militarism and imperialism as an effect of national monopoly. A crucial difference is that for Lenin capitalism naturally tends toward monopoly whereas Hobson treats it as an effect of rent-seeking behavior.

I use the language of 'rent-seeking' because the Marxist-Leninist position is that in addition to the exploitation of proletariat by capital, and the structural domination of all under capitalism, government offices and the leading functionaries in the bureaucracy are treated as special rents. This is manifest in the following passage (and others like it): "The bureaucracy and the standing army are a “parasite” on the body of bourgeois society--a parasite created by the internal antagonisms which rend that society, but a parasite which “chokes” all its vital pores." (Lenin S&R, 2,2) I don't mean to deny that in context Lenin's major point is the intrinsically coercive nature of the state. I return to that below. But on the orthodox Marxist view it is notable that the bureaucracy (and the army) is parasitic on the body of bourgeois society. These are rents extracted not just from the proletariat, but even from the bourgeoisie. This is pretty much Hobson's own position. (It is peculiar that Lenin implies this would be denied by "the petty-bourgeois and philistine professors and publicists.")

That is to say, on the Orthodox Marxist view the state is a coercive mechanism for upward redistribution. Further evidence for the claim that the bureaucracy is understood as a source of class based rents can be seen in the proposals what to do with the bureaucracy in the transitional period after a successful revolution (and before the state has withered away): 

At the present the postal service is a business organized on the lines of state-capitalist monopoly. Imperialism is gradually transforming all trusts into organizations of a similar type, in which, standing over the “common” people, who are overworked and starved, one has the same bourgeois bureaucracy. But the mechanism of social management is here already to hand. Once we have overthrown the capitalists, crushed the resistance of these exploiters with the iron hand of the armed workers, and smashed the bureaucratic machinery of the modern state, we shall have a splendidly-equipped mechanism, freed from the “parasite”, a mechanism which can very well be set going by the united workers themselves, who will hire technicians, foremen and accountants, and pay them all, as indeed all “state” officials in general, workmen's wages. Here is a concrete, practical task which can immediately be fulfilled in relation to all trusts, a task whose fulfilment will rid the working people of exploitation, a task which takes account of what the Commune had already begun to practice (particularly in building up the state).

To organize the whole economy on the lines of the postal service so that the technicians, foremen and accountants, as well as all officials, shall receive salaries no higher than "a workman's wage", all under the control and leadership of the armed proletariat--that is our immediate aim. S&R 3,3

After the revolution, functionaries in the bureaucracy will be paid workman's wages, the implication being that their existing wages are a form of extraction, parasitic on proletariat's labor, that is, a rent. I don't mean to suggest that's the extent of the change. Lenin also re-activates ideas I associate with the French revolution (including Girondins intellectuals like Grouchy) in which bureaucrats are elected and subjects to recalls. (For example: "The workers, after winning political power, will smash the old bureaucratic apparatus, shatter it to its very foundations, and raze it to the ground; they will replacce it by a new one, consisting of the very same workers and other employees, against whose transformation into bureaucratic will at once be taken which were specified in detail by Marx and Engels: (1) not only election, but also recall at any time; (2) pay not to exceed that of a workman; (3) immediate introduction of control by all, so that all may become “bureaucrats” for a time and that, therefore, nobody may be able to become a “bureaucrat”. S&R 6, 2; see also 6,3))

Let me wrap up with the crucial issue. While compared to anarchists, liberals tend to expect obedience to legitimate law,  liberals understand the liberal state as providing order without authoritarianism. In fact, the introduction of professional police -- as opposed to citizen militias and armed forces -- is seen as a crucial means forward away from despotism in part because the use of force against civilians can be more calibrated and less lethal than it is when every riot or public disorder is treated as a trigger of military action. And even states in which the mercantile tendency toward state violence is not fully defeated, but only partially tamed by parliament, law, press, and public opinion are often understood as doing so without extensive authoritarianism. (Of course, there are standing objections to this claim during, say, the Jim Crow era, and many periodic states of emergency.)

By contrast, for Lenin [here he is quoting Engels (1891 preface to the third edition of The Civil War in France)], the state is nothing but a machine for the oppression of one class by another, and indeed in the democratic republic no less than in the monarchy." (S&R 4.5; see also 2.1) Fundamentally, according to the Marxists we're focusing on here, the modern state is a coercive entity to impose class interests. Lenin (S&R 1.1) quotes Engels to that effect, the state “consists not merely of armed men but also of material adjuncts, prisons, and institutions of coercion of all kinds.” (Engels 1884; ch. 9)

That according to Lenin the most democratic state is essentially coercive is also revealed, by his view of what happens after the revolution:

Democracy is a form of the state, it represents, on the one hand, the organized, systematic use of force against persons; but, on the other hand, it signifies the formal recognition of equality of citizens, the equal right of all to determine the structure of, and to administer, the state. This, in turn, results in the fact that, at a certain stage in the development of democracy, it first welds together the class that wages a revolutionary struggle against capitalism--the proletariat, and enables it to crush, smash to atoms, wipe off the face of the earth the bourgeois, even the republican-bourgeois, state machine, the standing army, the police and the bureaucracy and to substitute for them a more democratic state machine, but a state machine nevertheless, in the shape of armed workers who proceed to form a militia involving the entire population. S&R 5, 4 (Higher phase of communist society)

What's notable about this is that the intrinsic coerciveness of the state is treated as an essential core that must be preserved through the transitionary period (the dictatorship of the proletariat) as a means to destroy class enemies, and to force changes in class structure and the possibility of acquiring rents. As Luxemburg discerned (recall the post earlier in the week) this understanding of the state, and the post-revolutionary transition period, has an inherent fragility; in so far as one leaves the coercive nature of the state untouched, one then opens the door to state capitalism in which a new managerial class extracts rents (as described by Burnham (recall) in The Managerial Revolution).

My point in the previous paragraph is not a victorious one. For, after the work of Foucault, few would be satisfied with the relatively limited list of coercive institutions that the orthodox Marxist tradition focus on. In addition, the last few years of financial crisis and pandemic have shown that liberal states have many instruments of coercion that they can use without fundamentally altering the liberal structure of the state or even traditional political institutions (elections, parliaments, press, rule of law, etc.) Simultaneously, Black Lives Matter has reminded many that even policing can easily be experienced as occupation, or worse. So, what I take away from the Marxist orthodoxy is that for liberalism to have proper self-understanding it needs to have an account of the centrality of the liberal state's coerciveness.** To be continued.

 

Michael Polanyi on the collapse of liberalism and the Rise of Fascism: Religion and Liberty

Anglo-American liberalism was first formulated by Milton and Locke. Their argument for freedom of thought was twofold. In its first part (for which we may quote the Areopagitica) freedom from authority is demanded, so that truth may be discovered. The main inspiration of this movement was the struggle of the rising natural sciences against the authority of Aristotle. Its programme was to let everyone state his beliefs, and to allow people to listen and form their own opinion; the ideas which would prevail in a free and open battle of wits would be as close an approximation to the truth as can be humanly achieved. We may call this the anti-authoritarian formula of liberty. Closely related to it is the second half of the argument for liberty, which is based on philosophic doubt. While its origins go back a long way (right to the philosophers of antiquity) this argument was first formulated as a political doctrine by Locke. It says simply that we can never be so sure of the truth in matters of religion as to warrant the imposition of our views on others. These two pleas for freedom of thought were put forward and were accepted by England at a time when religious beliefs were unshaken and indeed dominant throughout the nation. The new tolerance aimed pre-eminently at the reconciliation of different denominations in the service of God. Atheists were refused tolerance by Locke, as socially unreliable.

On the Continent, the twofold doctrine of free thought — anti-authoritarianism and philosophic doubt — gained ascendancy somewhat later than in England and moved on straightaway to a more extreme position.--Michael Polanyi (1951) "Perils of Inconsisency" in The Logic of Lberty, p. 117 (in the Libertyfund edition.)

In The Great Transformation, Karl Polanyi popularized (recall here; and here) for many Marxists and progressives a fairly straightforward narrative about the rise of fascism, totalitarianism, and national-socialism (sometimes I'll just use 'fascism' for this whole group): by undermining social cohesion the markets promoted by liberalism give rise to fascism. And (echoing a trope from Adam Smith himself) the workplace in the capitalist economy undermines cognitive proper functioning and the functioning of wider culture (this is especially so when it is accompanied by violence as it was under imperialism and even domestic development). In particular, because markets are also inherently fragile, they generate disruptive crises which fatally undermine the authority of ordinary politicians and open the doors to strongmen of various types (or 'fascism') who take advantage of a wider sense of despair and humiliation.

Sometimes people also add an idea (recall) derived from Lenin to this argument: that is, that capitalist economies naturally become monopolistic. And (partially drawing on the liberal Hobson) such monopoly promotes violent imperialism and/or militarism (and not to mention opens the door to the a concentration of power in the hands of few oligarchs). And from there it is small step to a strongman (if a worker's revolution doesn't stop the process). 

By contrast, market friendly liberals (e.g., Austrians, Ordoliberals, and neoliberals) when confronted with the collapse of liberal civilization after World War I and the aftermath of the Wall Street crisis, offered a different analysis one that also harkened back to Hobson's views: while on the surface the nineteenth century looks liberal, liberals were never so powerful as to defeat mercantilism (which historically preceded it). And depending on the liberal thinker the details will differ, but all agree that in its political guise liberalism suffered setback after setback from the 1870s onward (or even earlier). On this view the early partial success of liberalism actually enhanced the rent-seeking and militaristic forces of mercantile imperialism. On this view, monopoly is not a necessary byproduct of market economies, but the effect of political decisions (tariffs, especially). And one may add, even if monopolies were the consequence of market economies left to themselves, this only shows the need for robust antitrust (ordoliberals especially argued this). The problem for this 'solution' is that it has to prevent rent seeking even though the view itself predicts its likelihood.

It should be noted that both explanations suggest that democracy (broadly conceived) cannot save itself if the economic circumstances are dire enough. And it is no surprise that some theorists thought that democracy inevitably led to Bonepartism (or military dictatorship by plebiscite), also sometimes known as caesarian democracy (recall here). Marx's The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon offers a nice expression of the idea, and as I recently learned (recall) it became a staple of the so-called Italian Elite school. 

In particular, as James Burnham notes, while drawing on Michels' (1911) Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy in his (1943) The Machiavellians, because of mechanisms that drive elite capture (recall) and because of the doctrine of the general/popular will, it is actually fairly predictable that a leader of a democracy can turn himself into the true representative of the general will of the people. And so rather than Bonepartism being at odds with democracy it is actually its "logical culmination," (Burnham, p. 145). To be sure Bonepartism itself is not totalitarianism, but the step to it may not be so difficult.

But all these explanations suffer from an obvious problem: some states managed to remain broadly liberal warts and all (Switzerland, Holland, the United Kingdom and many of its Dominions, as well as the United States), despite suffering many of the same evils as the countries that did succumb to various strongmen. And this opens the door to alternative approaches.

As I noted before (recall), Karl Polanyi's brother, Michael Polanyi went in a different direction, one of the attendees of Lippmann Colloquium in 1938. (Today he is primarily known for ideas about tacit knowledge in the philosophy of science. In what follows, i will first be alluding to his (1941) "The Growth of Thought in Society, Economica). He noted that in places where fascism (now broadly conceived) succeeded, there had been a previous successful ideological and violent campaign attacking society's intermediaries: these partially self-governing intermediary societies (within science, art, law, the crafts, engineering, medicine, the press, etc.) are for him constitutive of liberal society. This form of liberalism partially harkens back to features we now more often associate with Burke's little platoons and with continental corporatism. But in his Rationalism, Pluralism, and Freedom, Jacob T. Levy has shown that what I here call Michael Polanyi's move is, in fact, a recurring theme within liberalism (that we can also find in Adam Smith).

And in fact Michael Polanyi thereby provides a mechanism for an observation that had figured prominently in Karl Polanyi's argument: that liberal authority seemed to collapse in the face of an organized but not especially threatening minority.  The collapse may look sudden, but it builds on a period of successful intimidation of the ordinary functioning of lots of intermediaries that stabilize liberal society. And if I can glance obliquely to our own time, one crucial lesson of this is that it is really important to bring the rule of law down on those that intimidate these intermediaries. It's to be feared that our own governments have not really learned Michael Polanyi's lesson.

Michael Polanyi himself must have felt that this account leaves out a crucial bit: motivation. Where do the would-be-elites and early cadres of fascists come from in a liberal society? In "Perils of Inconsistency," first published in his collection The Logic of Liberty (1951), Michael Polanyi tackles this question. Echoing and anticipating themes one finds in Hayek, Polanyi thinks that the difference maker is to be found in differential uptake of certain philosophical ideas. (And this also echoes Russell's views in The History of Western Philosophy then recent.) 

For Michael Polanyi, liberalism has its roots in a rejection of religious fanaticism and Church authority (p. 116). Both were replaced by a conception of liberty involving intellectual freedom. And for Polanyi this conception was internally contradictory (see above).* He claims one cannot simultaneously obtain a market place of ideas in public opinion -- notice that he does not attribute this idea to Mill -- and profess a mitigated skepticism at the same time. 

And simply put: on Polanyi's view, because of the demands of religious toleration (p. 122), Locke taught some places how to live with this inconsistency, while maintaining the authority of conscience and ideals pertaining to reason and justice formerly associated with church authority. (This is the bit, I think, is also in Russell--apologies that I lack an exact reference.) To put this amusingly, Locke taught the virtue of hypocrisy to Anglo-Saxon political culture--one continues to pay more than lip-service to certain ideals and so prevent their popular collapse. (On Polanyi's view this one also sees in Utilitarian practice.) As Polanyi puts it (again echoing Russell): "I believe that the preservation up to this day of Western civilization along the lines of the Anglo-American tradition of liberty was due to this speculative restraint, amounting to a veritable suspension of logic within the British empiricist philosophy." (121) One person's shallowness, is another's heroic self-command.

But, by contrast, under the influence of the French Enlightenment, other places tried to remove the inconsistency and replace Church authority with the authority of a public and objective reason. And to simplify greatly, nineteenth century continental philosophy -- special animus is directed by Polanyi at Hegel and Fichte, and then Marx and Nietzsche -- showed that this cannot be done, and that a species of nihilism is a result:

The process of replacing moral ideals by philosophically less  vulnerable objectives was carried out in all seriousness. This is  not a mere pseudo-substitution, but a real substitution of  human appetites and human passions for reason and the ideals  of man.

This brings us right up to the scene of the revolutions of the twentieth century. We can see now how the philosophies which guided these revolutions and destroyed liberty wherever they prevailed, were originally justified by the anti-authoritarian  and sceptical formula of liberty. They were indeed anti-authoritarian and sceptical to the extreme. They set man free  from obligations towards truth and justice, reducing reason to its own caricature : to a mere rationalization of conclusions, pre-determined by desire and eventually to be secured, or already held, by force. Such was the final measure of this liberation: man was to be recognized henceforth as maker and master, and no longer servant of what had before been his ideals.

This liberation, however, destroyed the very foundations of  liberty. (p. 126)

And this opened the door, on Polanyi's view to fanatics that could mobilize the serious moral passions of individuals who had been taught contempt for public morality. So, crucially, rather than seeing the varieties of fascism as inherently "savage," Polanyi sees fascism as building on a moral inversion  developed by Marxism. On this view, where public reason and public morality are seen as ideological, or merely a fig leave for the operation of power, fascism and authoritarianism can appeal to the moral sensibility of dissatisfied (and ambitious) individuals.

The important point here is that rather than seeing the success of strongmen as merely the success of cynicism, Polanyi glimpses that they can win in contexts where liberal society has lost its inner faith because they (the fascists) manage to channel moral grievance and moral disgust into a politics of violent renewal. 

Polanyi's own conclusion is that that liberalism and certain forms of religion are natural allies. (He is greatly cheered by the Christian Democratic defeat of Communism in Italy, and elsewhere.) Historically this was an important move because it prefigures the fusionism (of market friendly and religious conservative types) that made the Republican Party so successful in the latter half of the twentieth century (and so interestingly studied by Melinda Cooper in Family Values). And confronted by the success of Trumpism, I have been tempted by the idea (recall), in dialogue with Thomas Pink, that liberalism needs the help of religion, a revitalized Catholic Church, especially.+ 

Okay, let me wrap up. I don't mention all of this because I think Polanyi's history of philosophy is especially accurate or insightful. Nor do I mention it because I think we should go back to fusionism Stateside or Christian Democracy in Europe. But rather, I think Polanyi, is insightful that a successful public culture must do some justice to, or find a way to channel to proper public ends, the moral sensibility of the population. This means, I think, that liberal neutrality needs to be rethought without giving up on the virtues of liberalism.

 

On Táíwò and Elite Capture

In 1957 the pioneering African American sociologist E. Franklin Frazier published an English translation of his study of the U.S. black middle class, Black Bourgeoisie. We might also think of it as a pioneering work in the study of elite capture of politics. Frazier accuses the black middle class of being insecure and powerless, constantly constructing a world of “make-believe” to deal with an “inferiority complex” caused by the brutal history of racial domination in the United States. Immediately controversial upon its publication, the book notes in a preface to the 1962 edition that Frazier was both applauded for his courage and threatened with violence...

Value capture is managed by elites, on purpose or not. In other words, elites don’t simply participate in our community; their decisions help to structure it, much in the way that game designers structure the world of games. After all, elites face a simpler version of oppression than non-elites do: whereas working-class black folk are pressed by racial slights and degradation alongside economic problems that might require “socialized medicine” to solve, elites’s economic position makes them comfortable enough to focus on their own status and cultural power—often at the expense of non-elites....

Such elite capture threatens a whole group’s value structure, as everyone is confronted with this simplified version of the initial values and incentives to adopt it. This can tend, over time, to push understandings of the group values—both by those in the group and outside of it—toward the elites’ simpler direction.

There is another crucial insight that can be gained from applying the analogy of games to our discussion of elite capture. Design decisions structure a game’s built environment, baking the outlook of designers into the decisions players are faced with. In similar fashion, elite decision-making determines what options are available to non-elites. This is precisely the role that the press, social media influencers, military top brass, and titans of capital have in our lives. That is, they frame the conditions of work (and play) for the rest of us.--Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò (May 7, 2020) "Identity Politics and Elite Capture" Boston Review 

Last year Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò published a number of striking essays on elite capture (I mentioned these in passing here). In Addition to the piece from Boston Review I have partially quoted above (and will quote below), I also warmly recommend this post here. And judging by his personal website (and Amazon), he is about to publish a whole book on elite capture. But since there are a lot of fascinating moving parts in the Boston Review essay, I'll focus on it alone. Do read the essay because it very cleverly draws on ideas by C. Thi Nguyen to explicate what they call "value capture," which for Thi Nguyen and Táíwò involves the narrowing and simplification of values in virtue of participation in a (gamified) process.

As Táíwò (recall also this post) notes, "Elite capture is not unique to black politics; it is a general feature of politics, anywhere and everywhere," (emphasis added). Elite capture is, thus, a law of politics. It's a natural effect of the division of labor within politics, and the natural obstacles (time, expertise, lack of transparency, etc.) to monitoring by non-elites of elites, and so shows up within political parties, unions, and basically any social organization that allows some kind of distinction between the membership and its leadership. Elite capture is also reinforced by the absence of political consensus in the context of pluralism (which makes elite negotiation and representation so important).

Now Táíwò rightly singles out Frazier's (1962) Black Bourgeoisie as a landmark study of elite capture, but it should not come as a surprise that a law of politics has been studied before: the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Italian Elite school of political sociology-- with Pareto, Mosca, and Michels as most famous scholars -- had developed a whole theory of politics ground in this political law. Including an account of rent-seeking.** In his 1943 book The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom, James Burnham had introduced them as a group to a wider English speaking public, and ideas about elite capture are central to his reconstruction. (Of course, Pareto, Mosca, and Michels were very well known to specialist sociologists and economists of the age.)* Both Walter Lippmann's (1922) Public Opinion, and Schumpeter's Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (1942), are also very indebted to ideas of the Italian Elite school.** And while I'll leave this hanging here, in fact, Pareto (partially mediated by Parsons) and Schumpeter shaped the analysis of the ideas on crony-capitalism and rent-seeking in public choice and Chicago economics (recall here).

I don't mean to disparage the originality of the Black Bourgeoisie, a book very much worth re-reading. In fact, it was so controversial in its own day that Frazier encountered what we would call canceling in his own time. As he recounts in the 1962 preface to a reprint of the book, "I was invited by a Negro sorority to discuss the book but so much bitterness was aroused by the invitation that it had to be canceled. One leading member of the sorority accused me of having set the Negro race back fifty years." (p. 2) If one goes on to read the book one learns that fraternities and sororities play a key role in his analysis of elite formation (or "molding") and recruitment, and elite commitments. 

In his Boston Review essay, Táíwò argues convincingly that identity politics as pioneered by Combahee River Collective was originally part of a broader effort to avoid certain kinds of elite capture (that expressed itself in tokenism and marginalization), and so an enabling condition of coalition politics. And he notes that they suggest more strategies (including consciousness raising, and elite participation in activism) to avoid elite capture in the "right kind of political culture."

Now, above I used Táíwò's words to attribute a law of politics to him. So, if I were interested in gotchas it would be tempting to suggest here that by his own lights political culture cannot solve the problem of elite capture, it can only mitigate it. And perhaps this is all Táíwò means to argue. (Maybe the book will shed light on this.) But, of course, the problem is that according to the theory of elite capture, political culture is shaped by elite institutions and practices, as Táíwò himself notes. So, I don't think this solves his problem.

But he has another out: he could argue that by "the right kind of political culture" he means a species of sophisticated anarchism (say, of the sort recently revived in The Dawn of Everything by David Wengrow and David Graeber). For, at least conceptually some kinds of anarchism avoid the distinction between membership and leaders (masses and rulers, etc.) As it happens, the Italian Elite school and Burnham don't ignore anarchism, and claim it, too, is inevitably shaped by elites. (Something Ursula Le Guin also suggests in The Dispossessed.) But it's conceivable one can develop a form of anarchism that is not subject to the phenomenon of elite capture. And Táíwò's closing emphasis on the fact that 'we're in it together' might suggests he inclines toward such a view. (I return to this below.)

I want to close with three observations. First, Pareto was what we would now call a classical liberal when he developed ideas of elite capture. But when Burnham popularized Pareto's ideas, Burnham -- a professor of philosophy at NYU -- was an ex-Trotsky-ite (then famous for his book The Managerial Revolution) and on his way of co-founding the revival American conservatism (co-founding The National Review with William Buckley).+ And for Burnham the key to freedom, in the context of the inevitability of elite capture, is the possibility of opposition to the government which requires a rule of law, which in turn requires that within society that there are multiple social forces that counter each other and mechanisms to prevent the concentration of power. (And because Burnham is no liberal this does not require a focus on markets or property rights.)

And so my first observation is that 'elite capture' is not an idea exclusive to one political orientation. It's an important idea to all students of political life. And it is a standing problem for conceptualizations of politics that assume representatives speak for their (political, union, or shareholder, etc.) electorates or where politics is treated like an ideal speech act. So, Táíwò is right to emphasize it, and I look forward to engaging with his book.

However, second, it's possible that Táíwò does not think of 'elite capture' as a general law of politics, as I presented him. For he writes, "it is a fully general problem of politics in a world that distributes power and resources unjustly and unequally." (emphasis his!) And this suggests that he thinks elite capture can be avoided once the material conditions have been equalized (i.e., "resources unjustly and unequally") and there is no difference in power. But the only possible political system that delivers that is a form of anarchist-syndicalism. Fair enough. But this is more than a change in political culture.

Third, I fear that in using Thi Nguyen's ideas on "value capture," Táíwò also ends up suggesting that without mediation of elites there is a more authentic and discrete set of values and commitments that should guide policy. That is, value capture corrupts the will of the people. Now, I think one can recognize the phenomenon of value capture in the political sphere, but deny that this always involves a corruption of ordinary or popular will in the context of the division of political labor.++ (The idea that elites corrupt by way of elite capture is very popular among far right populists.)  For, in virtue of the division of cognitive and political labor, outsiders, masses (etc.) will often be in the position of having no access to a minimal opinion on a topic at all. I grant that such a view can easily slide in a cynical or meritocratic attempt to down-play the views (and interests) of non-elites, but that's not what I am suggesting here. Rather, it's the political process itself that makes clear what the people's values and their orderings are (and this is shaped by elites). So, such value capture is necessary to a well-functioning liberal democracy. And that requires elites that work in the interest of those they represent. So, rather than elite capture only being a problem to liberal democratic political life, it must given its inevitability also be part of its solution. To be continued.

 

 

 

21 March 1979: Foucault on Economic Imperialism (XXXIII)

I would like to talk a little about one aspect of American neo-liberalism, that is to say, the way in which they try to use (i) the market economy and (ii) the typical analyses of the market economy to (iii) decipher non-market relationships and phenomena which are not strictly and specifically economic but (iv) what we call social phenomena. In other words, this means that I want to talk about the application of the economic grid to a field which since the nineteenth century, and we can no doubt say already at the end of the eighteenth century, was defined in opposition to (v) the economy, or at any rate, as complementary to the economy, as that which in itself, in its own structure and processes, does not fall within the economy, even though the economy itself is situated within this domain. In other words again, what I think is at stake in this kind of analysis is the problem of the inversion of the relationships of the social to the economic.--Michel Foucault, 21 March, 1979,  translated by Graham Burchell, Lecture 10, The Birth of Biopolitics,  239-240.

The main point of the tenth lecture is introduced in the first paragraph (quoted above). As I have noted before, the phenomenon described by Foucault is usually called 'economic imperialism,' a phrase that goes back to Talcott Parson's analysis of the effect of Robbins' re-definition of economics back in 1934. 

Now before I get to the main point of Foucault's analysis -- the 'inversion' mentioned in the last quoted sentence --, I want to note explicitly that Foucault does not explain what an 'economic grid' is. It is immediately tempting to assume that the economic grid is the kind of thing studied by (ii) or, if we remember the language of 'programming' in lecture 9, partially constituted by (ii), perhaps in interaction with (i). And my reason for noticing this is that Foucault does not pause to reflect on the relationship between (i) and (ii).

For, as any informed observer can tell you, the relationship between (ii) the typical analyses (note the plural) of the market economy, presumably as typified now by Chicago economics (in particular Becker, Mincer, Stigler, Schultz, etc.), and (i) the market economy is by no means simple. For example, I often joke that the Black-Scholes-Merton formula for (rational) option pricing makes no reference to supply and demand. (While the formula is a product of Chicago economics this formula is far from what Foucault has in mind here.) There is a similar, more sophisticated joke to be made about the absence of money in the GE Arrow-Debreu model (manifestly not Chicago).

Another strange slippage occurs, when Foucault moves from (i) the 'market economy' to the (v) economy. Even nineteenth century laissez-faire economists noticed that not all activity which could be sensibly called 'economic' were within or facilitated by 'the market' (not the least because slavery existed for a good chunk of the nineteenth century). 

When a few pages down, Foucault returns to the theme he speaks, more precisely:

In comparison with the ambiguity, if you like, of German ordoliberalism, American neo-liberalism evidently appears much more radical or much more complete and exhaustive. American neo-liberalism still involves, in fact, the generalization of the economic form of the market. It involves generalizing it throughout the social body and including the whole of the social system not usually conducted through or sanctioned by monetary exchanges. This, as it were, absolute generalization, this unlimited generalization of the form of the market entails a number of consequences or includes a number of aspects and I would like to focus on two of these.
First, the generalization of the economic form of the market beyond monetary exchanges functions in American neo-liberalism as a principle of intelligibility and a principle of decipherment of social relationships and individual behavior. This means that analysis in terms of the market economy or, in other words, of supply and demand, can function as a schema which is applicable to non-economic domains. And, thanks to this analytical schema or grid of intelligibility, it will be possible to reveal in non-economic processes, relations, and behavior a number of intelligible relations which otherwise would not have appeared as such—a sort of economic analysis of the non-economic. (243)

Here it is pretty clear that what it means to be a market economy (i) involves 'monetary exchanges'. Now Foucault is saying that (ii) just is the canonical way of analyzing (i). And striking one can use (ii) to study activities (iii) that do not involve monetary exchange, but still can be made intelligible (by (ii)) as falling under an 'economic form.' Somewhat annoyingly Foucault does not say what  the content of the economic form is. But it is clear that form of the market economy seems to be constituted by 'supply and demand.'  So, the economic form can be materialized in monetized (market) exchanges and in non-monetized (non-market) exchanges and be studied with the same tool-kit (ii), which involves (inter alia) analysis of supply and demand.

Now, the initial pay-off of this is a new possibility: [A] "to reveal in non-economic processes, relations, and behavior a number of intelligible relations which otherwise would not have appeared as such."

Now the strong version of [A] suggests that without the tools of (ii) some human phenomena would simply remain unintelligible. This strong version presupposes that no other grids are possible or (if we weaken it a bit) available. Because Foucault does not explain the conditions he puts on the nature of intelligibility, it is hard to evaluate this claim (which rules out grids derived from, say, "demography, sociology, psychology, and social psychology," (245) etc.). But it seems to entail that Foucault thinks most of what passes for social science fails to generate intelligibility of what they study (that is the social phenomena). That's no reason to doubt that Foucault did not hold the strong version of [A].

As slightly weaker version of [A] I have hinted at before. And it presupposes the thought that in order to make phenomena involving human  behavior intelligible, we need to see them/us as agents. And, as Foucault notes (recall also lecture 9) it is the Chicago version of tools of (ii) to make it possible to see choice, and thus, agency in the patterns of social life. This weaker version still entails that there is a sense in which passes for social science fails to generate intelligibility of what they study, but they themselves might (legitimately even) think otherwise.

The weakest version of [A] is to make it relative to professional economists; such that non-economic processes, relations, and behavior become intelligible to them qua professional economist. 

When we turn to Foucault' description of  analysis of how (ii) is applied to (iii) and (iv), we see that supply and demand is just one element in a larger analytical tool-kit "of investment, capital costs, and profit—both economic and psychological profit," etc. As Foucault notes, quoting Jean-Luc Migué, "the analytical framework traditionally reserved for the firm and the consumer" is applied to the ''household"...."This involves making the household a unit
of production in the same way as the classical firm." I don't mean to suggest this is exhaustive; I have already noticed (recall) the significance of the redefinition of  homo oeconomicus as utility maximizer in lecture 9.

In addition, among the 'social' are not just phenomena related to education, family, and crime, but also government (recall this post on the relevant passage in lecture 10). This matters because it turns that that if you deploy (ii) you don't just make phenomena intelligible, you can also criticize them, as noted, in light of an "economic tribunal." (247) As Foucault puts it, "these two aspects—the analysis of non-economic behavior through a grid of economic intelligibility, and the criticism and appraisal of the action of public authorities in market terms..." (248)

Now, Foucault does not really make an effort to explain how analysis slides into authoritative criticism. He mentions the use of cost-benefit analysis. But in a way this presupposes what needs to be explained. For, cost-benefit analysis presupposes a further standard. Either comparison with some reference class or the thought that beyond a certain baseline level/ratio some benefits are not worth the(se) cost(s). Now, the moment one writes this it is obvious that there will be contestation over the reference class or the baseline level.

I think a better understanding of the underlying idea of the move to analysis to normativity is also noticed by Foucault, but earlier in lecture 9. That is an effect of Robbins' definition (the one that prompted Parson's musing on economic imperialism), “Economics is the science of human behavior as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have mutually exclusive uses.” For the analysis of this relationship allows one to judge some courses of action objectively as ineffective, or with a lot of opportunity costs, or instrumentally irrational. 

And as Foucault notes, in his majestic treatment of the evolution of criminology from the eighteenth century to Chicago neoliberalism, this style of reasoning did not have to await Robbins' definition. In the eighteenth century Enlightenment reformers criticized "the ineffectiveness of the system of punishment, with reference to the fact, for example, that public torture and executions or banishment had no perceptible effect on lowering the rate of criminality, insofar as it was possible to measure this at the time...there was an economic grid underlying the critical reasoning of the eighteenth century reformer." (248) Foucault does not mention Grouchy, but we see such reasoning in her, too. He goes on to claim, that "this great concern of the law, the principle constantly recalled that for a penal system to function well a good law is necessary and almost sufficient, was nothing other than the desire for what could
be called, in economic terms, a reduction in the transaction cost." (248-249)

Somewhat amusingly, the otherwise diligent and excellent editors of the lectures, do not drop a note to Coase (or Commons) here. And so leave unexplained one of Foucault's jokes (one that Coase himself would appreciate, I think) that one strain of Chicago economics is a recovery of insights from the eighteenth century.*

The more important point left hanging now is the question what is distinctive about Chicago post-Robbins? One answer Foucault offers, in his treatment of the Chicago treatment of crime, can be discerned in his analysis of a point made by Stigler, "The regulatory principle of penal policy is a simple intervention in the market for crime and in relation to the supply of crime. It is an intervention which will limit the supply of crime solely by a negative demand, the cost of which must obviously never exceed the cost of the supply of the criminality in question." (256) Here we do see the spirit of Robbins. Because violations of this principle (which presupposes an idea of instrumental rationality) are now to be criticized. (Here, too, one can wonder about the relationship between the analysis and the phenomena analysed.)

I have noted before, and so won't repeat, that by taking the ends for granted, the analysis is weirdly un-transparent, even to itself, about its substantive normative commitments. But as usual Foucault is more interesting than me. He notes the following kind of implication, as a promissory note, we the idea "of a society in which there is an optimization of systems of difference, in which the field is left open to fluctuating processes, in which minority individuals and practices are tolerated, in which action is brought to bear on the rules of the game rather than on the players, and finally in which there is an environmental type of intervention instead of the internal subjugation of individuals." (259-260)

What Foucault is pointing to that if one sees/interprets the regulatory principle as providing one with or reflecting policy mechanisms that help determine different points on demand and supply curves (of crime, etc.), then one has levers by which to manipulate, say, (and I use Stigler's terminology) the "supply of offenses." (In Stigler, this is all articulated in terms of marginal costs/returns.)

For Stigler (who uses a lovely quote from Adam Smith), and Foucault tracks this, "offenses are in a sense demanded by the society." And so once one treats the regulatory principle as governing the (law) enforcement agency, one has a social/planning choice what range of offenses will exist (at what cost).

One may still wonder how one gets from Stigler to Foucault here. After noting that by Stigler's lights (of his economic analysis) much law enforcement is clearly irrational, Stigler offers the following thought: "a second and wholly different reason for the use of what appear to be inappropriate sanctions and inappropriate appropriations to enforcement bodies: the desire of the public not to enforce the laws....Variation in enforcement provides desirable flexibility in public policv," (Stigler 1970: 534-535)** 

14 March 1979: Foucault on the Neo-Liberal Criticism of Ricardo and Marx (XXIX)

[T]he American neo-liberals say this: It is strange that classical political economy has always solemnly declared that the production of goods depends on three factors—land, capital, and labor—while leaving the third unexplored. It has remained, in a way, a blank sheet on which the economists have written nothing. Of course, we can say that Adam Smith’s economics does begin with a reflection on labor, inasmuch as for Smith the division of labor and its specification is the key which enabled him to construct his economic analysis. But apart from this sort of first step, this first opening, and since that moment, classical political economy has never analyzed labor itself, or rather it has constantly striven to neutralize it, and to do this by reducing it exclusively to the factor of time. This is what Ricardo did when, wishing to analyze the nature of the increase of labor, the labor factor, he only ever defined this increase in a quantitative way according to the temporal variable. That is to say, he thought that the increase or change of labor, the growth of the labor factor, could be nothing other than the presence of an additional number of workers on the market, that is to say, the possibility of employing more hours of labor thus made available to capital. Consequently there is a neutralization of the nature itself of labor, to the advantage of this single quantitative variable of hours of work and time, and basically classical economics never got out of this Ricardian reduction of the problem of labor to the simple analysis of the quantitative variable of time. And then we find an analysis, or rather non-analysis of labor in Keynes which is not so different or any more developed than Ricardo’s analysis. What is labor according to Keynes? It is a factor of production, a productive factor, but which in itself is passive and only finds employment, activity, and actuality thanks to a certain rate of investment, and on condition clearly that this is sufficiently high. Starting from this criticism of classical economics and its analysis of labor, the problem for the neo-liberals is basically that of trying to introduce labor into the field of economic analysis. A number of them attempted this, the first being Theodore Schultz, who published a number of articles in the years 1950–1960 the result of which was a book published in 1971 with the title Investment in Human Capital. More or less at the same time, Gary Becker published a book with the same title, and then there is a third text by Mincer, which is quite fundamental and more concrete and precise than the others, on the school and wages, which appeared in 1975.
In truth, the charge made by neo-liberalism that classical economics forgets labor and has never subjected it to economic analysis may seem strange when we think that, even if it is true that Ricardo entirely reduced the analysis of labor to the analysis of the quantitative variable of time, on the other hand there was someone called Marx who ... and so on. Fine. The neo-liberals practically never argue with Marx for reasons that we may think are to do with economic snobbery, it’s not important. But if they took the trouble to argue with Marx I think it is quite easy to see what they could say [about] his analysis. They would say: It is quite true that Marx makes labor the linchpin, one of the essential linchpins, of his analysis. But what does he do when he analyzes labor? What is it that he shows the worker sells? Not his labor, but his labor power. He sells his labor power for a certain time against a wage established on the basis of a given situation of the market corresponding to the balance between the supply and demand of labor power. And the work performed by the worker is work that creates a value, part of which is extorted from him. Marx clearly sees in this process the very mechanics or logic of capitalism. And in what does this logic consist? Well, it consists in the fact that the labor in all this is “abstract,” that is to say, the concrete labor transformed into labor power, measured by time, put on the market and paid by wages, is not concrete labor; it is labor that has been cut off from its human reality, from all its qualitative variables, and precisely—this is indeed, in fact, what Marx shows—the logic of capital reduces labor to labor power and time. It makes it a commodity and reduces it to the effects of value produced. Now, say the neo-liberals—and this is precisely where their criticism departs from the criticism made by Marx—what is responsible for this “abstraction.” For Marx, capitalism itself is responsible; it is the fault of the logic of capital and of its historical reality. Whereas the neo-liberals say: The abstraction of labor, which actually only appears through the variable of time, is not the product of real capitalism, [but] of the economic theory that has been constructed of capitalist production. Abstraction is not the result of the real mechanics of economic processes; it derives from the way in which these processes have been reflected in classical economics. And it is precisely because classical economics was not able to take on this analysis of labor in its concrete specification and qualitative modulations, it is because it left this blank page, gap or vacuum in its theory, that a whole philosophy, anthropology, and politics, of which Marx is precisely the representative, rushed in. Consequently, we should not continue with this, in a way, realist criticism made by Marx, accusing real capitalism of having made real labor abstract; we should undertake a theoretical criticism of the way in which labor itself became abstract in economic discourse. And, the neoliberals say, if economists see labor in such an abstract way, if they fail to grasp its specification, its qualitative modulations, and the economic effects of these modulations, it is basically because classical economists only ever envisaged the object of economics as processes of capital, of investment, of the machine, of the product, and so on. Michel Foucault, 14 March, 1979,  translated by Graham Burchell, Lecture 9, The Birth of Biopolitics, 219-222. [emphasis added)

For readers familiar with Foucault's Birth of Biopolitics, it may be thought strange I have resisted plunging into his account of the relationship between genetics, development, and human capital theory which are at the heart of Lecture 9. For what seemed like a "bit of science fiction" (227) has finally arrived and will become more salient in the aftermath of the pandemic and asymmetric response(s) to unfolding climate change. (I don't wish to avoid it, but in re-reading Foucault I am always struck by moves that seem recurrently timely.) Rather, I return to material I partially quoted and skipped last time.  Today, I focus on his rational reconstruction of a historical debate that can help us situate a lot of debates about neoliberalism.

Foucault is very clear that from the perspective of Chicago economics (the American neo-liberalism of Schultz, Becker, and Mincer), the classical economics that comes out of Ricardo is a garden path (or degenerative research program). When it comes to the implied anthropology of capitalism, and, especially the significance of human capital in it, Chicago is closer to the earlier Adam Smith in some respects than Ricardo and other classical and neo-classical economists. This is why George Stigler is often quoted as saying "it's all in Adam Smith." 

As an aside, what I have said in the previous paragraph is clearly not true of Milton Friedman who was very much inspired by Marshall. But Friedman does not figure in Focuault's analysis of Chicago at all, and, unlike Stigler, also cannot be simply assimilated to it. To the point jokingly, despite the importance of (recall) Simons to Foucault's narrative, in Foucault's hands Friedman is not a characteristic (Chicago school) neoliberal.*

But as Foucault notes (225), by building on (recall) the Robbins definition of economics (as optimization under given constraints and in light of scarcity), Chicago also re-establishes the significance of a utilitarian homo oeconomicus who maximizes utility or Max U (in McCloskeys' memorable phrase). And this echoes the Benthamite (so-called English radical) tradition (recall lecture, p. 41) that merged with classical economics in the wake of Ricardo and James Mill. That is to say, a major sub-theme of Foucault's whole lecture series on the Birth of Biopolitics is a kind of natural history of the changing conceptualizations of homo oeconomicus: (i) in the classical period starting with Ricardo he is the man of exchange or man the consumer in terms of satisfaction/pursuit of needs (p. 225); (ii) in the neoliberal period, especially in the (recall) ORDO senses, "he is the man of enterprise and production." (147, lecture 6) And (iii) at Chicago he is also "an entrepreneur," but now, especially, "an entrepreneur of himself," who develops and produces/maintains his own human capital as a source of earnings (226), even a possible earning stream into the future (230). The previous sentence simplifies in a crucial way: because as the Chicago program develops, as Foucault shows in the remainder of the lecture, it starts to be able to calculate the contribution of the family, culture, schooling, and (yes) genetics into the constitution of this auto-entrepreneur.

And so, what Chicago does, on Foucault's account, is to merge this re-invented utilitarian homo oeconomicus with a kind pre-Ricardian Smithian sensibility about human nature. And, to look ahead a bit beyond Foucault, this synthesis turns out to be both fertile and unstable as the experimental and behavioral psychologists explore the Smithian sensibility and see how at odds it is with the given utilitarian framework. (This previous sentence is most manifest in the work of Vernon Smith and his school, who understands himself as returning to the Smithian tradition.)

Now, recall that the distinct element of the ORDO response to Marxism is, in part, to say that even if the Marxists are right that monopoly is inevitable under the logic of pure capitalism, society -- and especially an independent state -- can prevent this outcome by an expansive understanding of anti-trust law whose twin aims are to prevent economic monopolies and to prevent rent-seeking behavior from would be powerful economic agents. (I am not claiming that is the whole story.) By contrast, one effect of the Chicago critique of Ricardian classical economics is, as Foucault notes, that it simultaneously can accept the Marxist critique of Ricardo/classical economics and de-fang its significance so much that it can practically ignore it.**

And the way it defangs it, on Foucault's creative account, is by way of a (implicit--since this is all Foucault's rational reconstruction) genealogy of error (this is the highlighted part above) in which the Marxist critique of capitalism is itself shaped by the classical elements, which it understands as ideology, it has inherited. And both classical economists and their marxist critics look at large scale processes that make value a kind of abstraction (even though they disagree over the source and nature of this abstraction.) And in response, the neo-liberals change the topic: and focus on "what they call
substitutable choices, that is to say, the study and analysis of the way in which scarce means are allocated to competing ends, that is to say, to alternative ends which cannot be superimposed on each other." (222) And rather than explaining (the source of) value, or thereby the exploitation of a class, the focus now becomes "how the person who works uses the means available to him." (223)

The effect of this, as I noted last week, is an important moral pay-off. In the Chicago neo-liberal approach, there is a methodological and epistemological perspective that takes the "point of view of the worker and, for the first time, ensure that the worker is not present in the economic analysis as an object—the object of supply and demand in the form of labor power—but as an active economic subject." (223) That is to, the Chicago school manages to bring its tools into line with important moral and political commitments of liberalism. 

To put the point in previous paragraph in moral and rhetorical terms. The utilitarianism of the radical tradition has a tendency to treat economic agents as means. But in the neo-liberal Chicago school economic individuals are treated as agents with their own distinctive aims. And so the scientist can take their choices seriously as choices and the moralist, society, or policy-maker can hold them accountable for their choices. That this shift in perspective also generates serious moral and political problems once policy aims to program/nudge it is evident.  But in the short term it has the rhetorical advantage that when the Marxist says 'exploitation,' and has to invoke a whole conceptual structure to explain why, the neo-liberal says 'choices' and can respectfully point at what we do. And, perhaps unexpectedly, this rhetorical move turned out to be attractive not just to the traditional economic right, but also politically to all those (but now I am echoing Melinda Cooper here; and here) who wished to emancipate from the hegemony of the 'traditional' wage-earning family structure.

 

14 March 1979: Foucault on Programming Human Capital (XXVIII)

I would like to bring out some aspects of American neo-liberalism, it being understood that I have no desire and it is not possible to study it in all its dimensions. In particular, I would like to consider two elements which are at once methods of analysis and types of programming, and which seem to me to be interesting in this American neo-liberal conception: first, the theory of human capital, and second, for reasons you will be able to guess, of course, the problem of the analysis of criminality and delinquency.
First, the theory of human capital. I think the interest of this theory of human capital is that it represents two processes, one that we could call the extension of economic analysis into a previously unexplored domain, and second, on the basis of this, the possibility of giving a strictly economic interpretation of a whole domain previously thought to be non-economic.
First, an extension of economic analysis within, as it were, its own domain, but precisely on a point where it had remained blocked or at any rate suspended....Starting from this criticism of classical economics and its analysis of labor, the problem for the neo-liberals is basically that of trying to introduce labor into the field of economic analysis. A number of them attempted this, the first being Theodore Schultz, who published a number of articles in the years 1950–1960 the result of which was a book published in 1971 with the title Investment in Human Capital. More or less at the same time, Gary Becker published a book with the same title, and then there is a third text by Mincer, which is quite fundamental and more concrete and precise than the others, on the school and wages, which appeared in 1975.--Michel Foucault, 14 March, 1979,  translated by Graham Burchell, Lecture 9, The Birth of Biopolitics, 219-220.

Perhaps, some other time I return to neoliberal history of classical economics that Foucault summarizes in the part I skipped in this quote. And in what follows I also ignore Foucault's acuity in grasping the inner meaning, as it were, of intellectual trends in a different rather technical discipline in real time. 

In the first quoted paragraph, Foucault introduces the central theme of the lecture and, perhaps, of the whole book without alerting his audience (or himself) that he has done so. There are features of American neo-liberalism (in his discussion he mostly confines himself to Chicago economics) that are "methods of analysis and types of programming." That papers and books in economics contain methods of analysis is no surprise. But Foucault insists, without initially making a big deal about it, that they are simultaneously types of programming. And so the question is what (or who) is being programmed and what counts as a program in this context?

While Foucault uses programming (and its cognates) throughout the lecture, Foucault only offers his answer in the final two sentences of lecture nine: "programming of policies of economic development, which could be orientated, and which are in actual fact orientated," toward the development of human capital. (233) So, it is humans and, perhaps, whole societies that are to be programmed. The purpose of this programming can be varied. For, example the focus on developing human capital is to stimulate economic development (locally and internationally) from which many things may follow. (The analysis of delinquency may serve other ends.) 

I do not know if in the 1970s, a French audience, would have heard 'programming' as the thing we do to write software or make computers and robots run. Perhaps, they heard it terms of scheduling. Or perhaps they heard it as an ironic counterpart to the programmatic political projects ordinarily associated with five year social planning. But it is quite clear that Foucault treats these economists not merely as offering (who?) new kinds of descriptions of society, but also offering a new kind of praxis. 

Foucault's claim here sits uneasily with the self-understanding of many Chicago economists of the period; they, following Milton Friedman's lead , generally claim that they make a sharp description between the descriptive ('positive') and prescriptive ('normative') elements in their work; while leaving practice ('art') largely to the side. So, for example, 

THE new economic approach to political behavior seeks to develop a positive theory of legislation, in contrast to the normative approach of welfare economics. The new approach asks why certain industries and not others become regulated or have tariffs imposed on imports or why income transfers take the form and direction they do, in contrast to asking which industries should be regulated or have tariffs imposed, or what transfers should be made.
Both the normative and positive approaches to legislation, however, generally have taken enforcement of laws for granted, and have not included systematic analyses of the cost of enforcing different kinds of laws. In separate studies we recently formulated rules designed to increase the effectiveness of different laws. We proposed that offenders convicted of violating laws be punished by an amount related to the value of the damages caused to others, adjusted upwards for the probability that offenders avoid conviction. Gary S. Becker & George J. Stigler. "Law enforcement, malfeasance, and compensation of enforcers." The Journal of Legal Studies 3.1 (1974): 1.*

Stigler and Becker (both Chicago Nobels eventually) present themselves as doing something on the 'positive'/descriptive side of things. In their work they explore the costs of enforcements. Yet, even if one grants that their work is firmly grounded in empirical analysis, it is not so odd that Foucault thinks they are doing what he calls programming. For, they offer a rule of punishment intended to decrease 'cost' of punishment and increase the 'effectiveness' of these. To an outsider that does seem prescriptive.  Why do Becker and Stigler not call that normative analysis? To an outsider this seems like obscurification. 

The beauty of Foucault's treatment in lecture 9, is that he shows that part of the confusion stems from the way Robbins' definition of what economists do gets (ahh) operationalized in economics. I quote Foucault (initially quoting Robbins):

“Economics is the science of human behavior as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have mutually exclusive uses.” You can see that this definition of economics does not identify its task as the analysis of a relational mechanism between things or processes, like capital, investment, and production, into which, given this, labor is in some way inserted only as a cog; it adopts the task of analyzing a form of human behavior and the internal rationality of this human behavior. Analysis must try to bring to light the calculation—which, moreover, may be unreasonable, blind, or inadequate—through which one or more individuals decided to allot given scarce resources to this end rather than another. Economics is not therefore the analysis of processes; it is the analysis of an activity. So it is no longer the analysis of the historical logic of processes; it is the analysis of the internal rationality, the strategic programming of individuals’ activity. (222-223)

Economics stops being the large scale study of historical processes. Rather, economics becomes the study of the scarce means given ends. As Foucault notes in the passage I quoted at the top of this post, this definition is topic neutral. And facilitates what (already (recall) back in 1934) Talcott Parsons called 'economic imperialism' (that is, "the extension of economic analysis into a previously unexplored domain, and second, on the basis of this, the possibility of giving a strictly economic interpretation of a whole domain previously thought to be non-economic.") The setting of ends is treated as normative or prescriptive activity. And so when one studies means in light of scarcity one is doing descriptive work.

So, in the just quoted passage, the rules offered by Stigler and Becker are rules that govern the means, but not the ends criminal laws are supposed to serve. They are a form of instrumental rationality or conditional/hypothetical rationality. 'Programming' is an excellent term to capture what is going on here because these 'rules' offered by Becker and Stigler are, in fact, supposed to be legally binding on subjects.

Now, a critic may well worry about the immaculate conception of the ends. Who decides what they are? And by what right do Stigler and Becker assume them as given? (Answering these questions has informed my own work on them.) But Foucault, however notices or is interested in something else. (I think this is really spectacular.) I continue with Foucault's analysis of human capital theory:

This means undertaking the economic analysis of labor. What does bringing labor back into economic analysis mean? It does not mean knowing where labor is situated between, let’s say, capital and production. The problem of bringing labor back into the field of economic analysis is not one of asking about the price of labor, or what it produces technically, or what is the value added by labor. The fundamental, essential problem, anyway the first problem which arises when one wants to analyze labor in economic terms, is how the person who works uses the means available to him. That is to say, to bring labor into the field of economic analysis, we must put ourselves in the position of the person who works; we will have to study work as economic conduct practiced, implemented, rationalized, and calculated by the person who works. What does working mean for the person who works? What system of choice and rationality does the activity of work conform to? As a result, on the basis of this grid which projects a principle of strategic rationality on the activity of work, we will be able to see in what respects and how the qualitative differences of work may have an economic type of effect. So we adopt the point of view of the worker and, for the first time, ensure that the worker is not present in the economic analysis as an object—the object of supply and demand in the form of labor power—but as an active economic subject. (223)

To put the point as a paradox: the very theory that seems to objectify humans as capital and that is often accused of treating citizens as optimizing paws in engineering problems, is in fact a theory that treats humans as subjective agents. Now, as my former colleague John Davis has shown in a number of books, as this theory gets developed (in ever more subtle mathematical ways), it becomes difficult to see where, in the effervescent moments of a second derivative, agency ends up being located. But that's for a different time.

Admittedly, the cognitive content of such agency is reductive in character because human motivation is treated in fairly simple fashion. Quoting Foucault again,

People like Schultz and Becker say: Why, in the end, do people work? They work, of course, to earn a wage. What is a wage? A wage is quite simply an income. From the point of view of the worker, the wage is an income, not the price at which he sells his labor power. Here, the American neo-liberals refer to the old definition, which goes right back to the start of the twentieth century, of Irving Fisher, who said: What is an income? How can we define an income? An income is quite simply the product or return on a capital. Conversely, we will call “capital” everything that in one way or another can be a source of future income. Consequently, if we accept on this basis that the wage is an income, then the wage is therefore the income of a capital. Now what is the capital of which the wage is the income? Well, it is the set of all those physical and psychological factors which make someone able to earn this or that wage, so that, seen from the side of the worker, labor is not a commodity reduced by abstraction to labor power and the time [during] which it is used. Broken down in economic terms, from the worker’s point of view labor comprises a capital, that is to say, it as an ability, a skill; as they say: it is a “machine.”And on the other side it is an income, a wage, or rather, a set of wages; as they say: an earnings stream.
This breakdown of labor into capital and income obviously has some fairly important consequences. First, if capital is thus defined as that which makes a future income possible, this income being a wage, then you can see that it is a capital which in practical terms is inseparable from the person who possesses it. To that extent it is not like other capitals. Ability to work, skill, the ability to do something cannot be separated from the person who is skilled and who can do this particular thing. In other words, the worker’s skill really is a machine, but a machine which cannot be separated from the worker himself, which does not exactly mean, as economic, sociological, or psychological criticism said traditionally, that capitalism transforms the worker into a machine and alienates him as a result. We should think of the skill that is united with the worker as, in a way, the side through which the worker is a machine, but a machine understood in the positive sense, since it is a machine that produces an earnings stream. An earnings stream and not an income, precisely because the machine constituted by the worker’s ability is not, as it were, sold from time to time on the labor market against a certain wage. In reality this machine has a lifespan, a length of time in which it can be used, an obsolescence, and an ageing. So that we should think of the machine constituted by the worker’s ability, the machine constituted by, if you like, ability and worker individually bound together, as being remunerated over a period of time by a series of wages which, to take the simplest case, will begin by being relatively low when the machine begins to be used, then will rise, and then will fall with the machine’s obsolescence or the ageing of the worker insofar as he is a machine. We should therefore view the whole as a machine/stream complex, say the neo-economists—all this is in Schultz is it not—it is therefore a machine-stream ensemble, and you can see that we are at the opposite extreme of a conception of labor power sold at the market price to a capital invested in an enterprise. This is not a conception of labor power; it is a conception of capital-ability which, according to diverse variables, receives a certain income that is a wage, an income-wage, so that the worker himself appears as a sort of enterprise for himself. Here, as you can see, the element I pointed out earlier in German neo-liberalism, and to an extent in French neo-liberalism, is pushed to the limit, that is to say, the idea that the basic element to be deciphered by economic analysis is not so much the individual, or processes and mechanisms, but enterprises. An economy made up of enterprise-units, a society made up of enterprise-units, is at once the principle of decipherment linked to liberalism and its programming for the rationalization of a society and an economy. (224-225)

So Foucault understands human capital theory as a theory focused on agents, which are simultaneously programmable machines, that is, as possible generators of income streams. Given the recent focus on risk and uncertainty, and the many social and political challenges (pandemic, climate, financial instability) which lay in the future, it is natural to wonder about how we should think of possible income of these machines with, as the logicians teach, necessarily finite time spans. And this is also natural because Foucault (correctly) treats Chicago economics as a return to the radical utilitarian program of Bentham (248) and given that utilitarianism is as a technique of decision-making resolutely oriented toward the future (and spectacularly useful to forget crimes from the past).

Even so, agents don't fall like manna from heaven ready to produce income streams; they need to be educated and cultivated, and constituted by norms and institutions. Capital-ability is the product of history, and the machine-stream ensemble is built over time in society. So, lurking in this theory is a complex analysis relating past and (possibly discounted) future time. And while from one perspective wages merely reflect supply and demand at a given time, in other perspective they become a way to connect individual decisions over time to larger social ends (e.g., development). And as Foucault recognizes, the irony is that a relatively libertarian, intellectual community with distrust of collective planning, pioneers a set of analytical techniques by which policy-makers may come to shape (if not program) human agents toward collectively imposed ends.  

 

14 March 1979: Foucault on Social Contracts, the welfare state, and American Neoliberalism (XXVI)

The second contextual element is of course the Beveridge plan and all the projects of economic and social interventionism developed during the war. These are all important elements that we could call, if you like, pacts of war, that is to say, pacts in terms of which governments—basically the English, and to a certain extent the American government—said to people who had just been through a very serious economic and social crisis: Now we are asking you to get yourselves killed, but we promise you that when you have done this, you will keep your jobs until the end of your lives. It would be very interesting to study this set of documents, analyses, programs, and research for itself, because it seems to me that, if I am not mistaken, this is the first time that entire nations waged war on the basis of a system of pacts which were not just international alliances between powers, but social pacts of a kind that promised—to those who were asked to go to war and get themselves killed—a certain type of economic and social organization which assured security (of employment, with regard to illness and other kinds of risk, and at the level of retirement): they were pacts of security at the moment of a demand for war. The demand for war on the part of governments is accompanied—and very quickly; there are texts on the theme from 1940—by this offer of a social pact and security. It was against this set of social problems 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. Michel Foucault, 14 March, 1979,  translated by Graham Burchell, Lecture 9, The Birth of Biopolitics, 216

I have deliberately gone slowly through Birth of Biopolitics because I did not want to skip straight to Foucault's discussion of 'American neo-liberalism,' (215-216; especially the celebrated treatment of Becker). In this I echo Foucalt's deliberate procedure. When he arrives at lecture nine, he announces, at its start, "Today I would like to start talking to you about what is becoming a pet theme in France: American neo-liberalism." Foucault knows -- and we have seen him repeatedly remind his audience -- that what he has to say about ORDO-liberalism is of little interest to his audience, which he often castigates as being in the grip of cliches. Their real interest is to take on the new ascending, intellectual hegemony located in Chicago and in the public eye associated with Pinochet, etc. Foucault never mentions Pinochet or the Chicago Boys. His interest is not to contribute to cold-war dialectics; he want, as he says repeatedly through the lecture course, more immanently, discuss liberal govermentality toward which liberal democracies are -- and here Foucault exhibits the political sensitivity of a poet -- already moving. And while Milton Friedman has already won the first of the Chicago nobels, in 1979, Thatcher's first election victory is still a few weeks away, it is by no means obvious that a discussion of Chicago, Becker, and Hayek is then simultaneously prophetic.

In the 'banal' (216) part of his lecture, Foucault ties American-neoliberalism to the Chicago school. He writes, "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.” (216) The first remarkable feature here is that Foucault will define the school in terms of a set of fundamental texts. This is a natural move for a philosophical historian, of course. But it is odd claim for somebody focused on practice (i.e., the art of governmentality). So, for example, Foucault ignores the two features of Chicago method, that, in its early self-understanding, can be said to define it as a school: (i) Chicago price theory (the same term is used for a famous introductory course and text-book);* (ii) a commitment to Marshallian partial equilibrium. 

The second remarkable feature is that Frank Knight is completely effaced from the narrative of Chicago. Given Foucault's interests this is no surprise. But it is worth noting: the Chicago legacy of focusing on uncertainty and a kind of meta-methodological sensitivity toward, and the political embeddedness of, the limitations of economics as a science are completely effaced. I don't mean to suggest that the focus on Simons (recall here; here), who was by then long dead and undoubtedly obscure to a European audience, is a mistake.**

The passage quoted at the top is the second of "three" (banal) contextual "elements" against which american neo-liberalism is defined: "Keynesian policy, social pacts of war, and the growth of the federal administration through economic and social programs—together formed the adversary and target of neoliberal thought, that which it was constructed against or which it opposed in order to form itself and develop." (217) But as usual with Foucault, his asides are incredible illuminating. 

It may seem that to oppose the Beveridge plan is to oppose social planning. And undoubted social planning -- collectivism in the jargon of the age -- is one of the targets. But Foucault recognizes that the legitimacy of social planning is ground in a new kind of social contract. In Foucault's presentation the need for a social contract is felt by the elites, who recognize that after a decade of economic suffering calling people up for war may require justification that  goes beyond ordinary war propaganda. 

As an aside, Foucault here subtly historicizes the renewal of the social contract tradition then a decade underway by those who had been foot-soldiers (Rawls) in that great war. Rather than focusing on Rawls' religious roots, one can better understand this renewal as a (renewed) demilitarization of the social contract.

Be that as it may, to oppose Beveridge is not just to oppose social planning, but to oppose the very terms of the war-time social contract. For this social contract trades the non-negligible risk of death (or the death of a loved-one/breadwinner) in war for an obligation toward other forms of (social) security.+ That is to say, to criticize Beveridge is not just to criticize economic policy, but the very conceptualization of the polity. 

Why might one wish to do so? For one, in this hostile perspective (and it seems Foucault kind of endorses it), the very conceptualization of the welfare state is a war-state. This is a trope going back to the Vienna critic of Neurath (and Bismarck), but here it is part of the very conceptualization of the legitimacy of the welfare state. Second, it is by no means obvious that this social contract is liberal. And the problem is not so much the welfare state side of the equation (the benefit), but the war-side (the cost). The very point of a liberal state is the preservation of (bare) life. This is why, as Nick Cowen alerted me, life becomes before "liberty and the pursuit of happiness!"

In his rhetorically charged polemic, Simons (1945) presciently himself calls attention to this, "Written by a nominal Liberal, radical-reactionary in its substantive proposals, libertarian in its rhetoric, thissecond Beveridge Report may forecast or largely determine the course of British postwar policy." (212) Part of Simons' ire is that Beveridge is clothed as liberal, but substantively it is an odd mix of radicalism (that is, as Foucault had already explained in lecture 2, Benthamite utilitarianism) and reactionary-ness (that is, committed to war and hierarchy). And, indeed, Simons recognizes that for all its noble social ends, Beveridge plan is also a contribution to survival of (declining) political imperialism, "England's commercial power is to be mobilized and concentrated, to improve her terms of trade, to recruit satellites for a tight sterling bloc, and to insulate herself and them from unstable, unplanned economies, i.e., from the United States." (Simons 1945: 213)

That is to say, on the Simons interpretation of Beveridge, which Foucault shadows even amplifies beyond Simons' own rhetoric (notice the language of the "demand for war"), American neo-liberalism understands itself not merely as a critique of the welfare state, but it understands itself as a critique of an illegitimate social contract that underpins it; for from a truly liberal perspective, one cannot really, if one has minimal Hobbesian intuitions (one cannot contract away the natural right to mere self-preservation), consent to the pact inscribed in Beveridge. And, in fact, Simons is clear that if executed fully, the Beveridge plan would involve in open-ended trade wars leading to the real kind (Simons 1945: 227-228).** The point had been foreshadowed in lecture 5 (see what Foucault says about Ropke on p. 110).

Let me close with a remark. In what follows, Foucault is largely uninterested in Friedman (the focus is on Becker then still much more obscure). But the 'banal' point he has made in terms of Simons' criticism of Beveridge helps explain the increasing popularity of Friedman in the 60s and 70s. For Friedman was one of the most eloquent and visible critics of the draft (during the Vietnam war). His argument (inspired by Simons but not identical) was as much economic as it was political, "large armed forces plus the industrial complex required to support them constitute an ever-present threat to political freedom."   

 

 

A thread from Spinoza to James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock, via Knut Wicksell (and Christian Wolff)

It should not be surprising, therefore, that the most “sympathetic” or “congenial” works are to be found among the “realists” in the history of political doctrine. Initially we look to Glaucon in Plato’s Republic, to Thomas Hobbes, and to Benedict Spinoza. Of these, and others within this tradition, only Spinoza’s work seems to have much in common with our own, and only his seems deserving of special comment.
In his Tractatus Politicus, published posthumously in 1677, Spinoza approaches the whole study of political organization in a way that seems surprisingly modern by our standards. First of all, men are assumed to be motivated solely by considerations of interest. This is an underlying assumption of the models through which Spinoza examines alternative organizational arrangements. He states, quite specifically, that human behavior is taken as an empirical fact and that he makes no attempt to attach either praise or condemnation to the behavior that he observes. Spinoza examines the various political institutions in terms of their efficacy in producing results which he holds to be desirable. To him, political institutions are variables subject to change and perfection, and he conceives the primary task of the political scientist to be that of analyzing the workings of alternative organizational structures and of making such recommendations for change as seem indicated. His work on the political order anticipates, in many respects, that of David Hume and that of Adam Smith on the economic order. Spinoza deliberately sets out to construct political institutions in such a fashion that individuals acting in pursuit of their own interests will be led, by the institutional structure within which such action takes place, to further the interests of their fellow members in the political group.
The constitutional and the operational levels of collective decision-making are clearly separated in Spinoza’s work. For the latter, at least in his aristocracy model (his discussion of democracy was not completed), simple majority rule is acknowledged as appropriate for reaching decisions in legislative assemblies. For changes in the constitution, in the basic laws, “common consent” or relative unanimity is suggested. Spinoza’s work, in many respects therefore, may be taken as the most appropriately chosen classical precursor to that of this book. It should be stated, however, that Spinoza’s influence on our own ideas has been limited to his general and indirect effects on the Western intellectual tradition. In a specific sense, we have carefully reviewed Spinoza only after the completion of an initial draft of the main body of this book.
Although Spinoza is often described as a follower of Hobbes, we do not find Hobbes’ work at all similar to Spinoza’s in relation to our own construction. As we have suggested above, it seems essential that some separation of the constitutional and the operational level of decision be made before politics, as a social science, can be satisfactorily divorced from moral philosophy. If sovereignty is conceived as being necessarily undivided and indivisible, this essential separation cannot be made readily. The contractual apparatus, to Hobbes, becomes an excuse or a justification for political obedience of the individual and little more. Hobbes’ construction is aimed at establishing a basis for political obligation, whereas Spinoza’s construction becomes a genuine theory of political order that, more than most others, is largely divorced from all issues of obligation.

At this point, as elsewhere in this Appendix, it is necessary to refer to the work of David Hume.

....

We find a similar emphasis in the writings of Christian Wolff in 1750. Wolff’s work is also noteworthy because of his clear conception of the collective organization as a set of rules or institutions that are subject to analysis, to modification, and to reform. His method, like that of Spinoza, was that of examining alternative political institutions on which members of the community of rational individuals might agree jointly.--James M. Buchanan, "Marginal Notes on Reading Political Philosophy" (1962) The Calculus of Consent: Logical Foundations of Constitutional Democracy, By James Buchanan & Gordon Tullock  [HT Hartmut Kliemt]

The Calculus of Consent launched Public Choice theory and Constitutional Political Economy, and was a major milestone (recall) toward Buchanan's (1986) Nobel. I was sent back to it by Hartmut Kliemt, who had generously commented on a draft paper that I had sent him. In my paper I argue that (recall) Spinoza is concerned with the problem of luxury in the TTP (a key issue in 18th century political economy). And that in the Political Treatise Spinoza shows what mechanisms (recall) might be used to prevent luxury from corrupting the state. I noted in my paper that Spinoza anticipates (recall also here) Hume and James Buchanan in uncanny ways. I noted that I was not the first to muse about this connection. (In particular I cite Doug Den Uyl and Kliemt.)

The Calculus of Consent has two appendices. The one that I quoted above is by James Buchanan. The Appendix is explicitly designed to forestall a certain kind of objection: "Our work could, quite properly, be charged with serious omission if we should fail to include what must be, at best, relatively uninformed commentary on the classical treatment of some of these problems....We hope that these notes will be helpful in relating our analysis to what has gone before and in pointing up the differences which, in our view, make the analysis contained in the main text of this book essentially unique." Buchanan then goes on to describe the "relation of political science to moral philosophy" and how to situate Buchanan & Tullock's achievement. I hope to return to that some day. He then turns to Spinoza, who is explicitly recognized as anticipating their own approach.

First, Spinoza is treated as a proto-rational choice theorist.* In particular, he treats Spinoza (correctly) as a theorist of  alternative organizational structures (hereafter: mechanism design or mechanism). This is exactly right (and also anticipates another Chicago trained Nobel, George Stigler). And, more important what Spinoza's mechanisms have in common is the attempt not to reform human nature, or to turn people into the wise, but rather to make human nature serve the common good; as Spinoza puts it in the Political Treatise, “I conclude that those common perils of peace of which we here speak , must never directly but indirectly be prohibited , namely by making the fundamental principles of the government such as to have for result not that the mass of the people strive to live wisely  ( for this is impossible ) but be led by such dispositions as will promote the state's weal. (TP 10.6; translated by William McCall, 1854--this is the translation Buchanan used.)+ This indeed anticipates Hume (Smith, and Buchanan).

Second, Buchanan is even more struck by the anticipation of his distinction between constitutional level and operational levels of collective decision-making in Spinoza's treatment of aristocracy. At the constitutional level Buchanan and Tullock require unanimity, and he sees Spinoza's use of “common consent”  as a kind of ("relative") unanimity. It is worth noting that in McCall's translation, Spinoza only uses the phrase in 2.17. But that precedes the treatment of aristocracy. And, indeed, what Spinoza says there is true not just of aristocracy, but for all kinds of  constitutions: "This right,which is determined by the power of the multitude, is usually called government. And he possesses this right absolutely and without limitation, who by common consent has the guidance of the commonwealth, which consists in establishing, interpreting, abolishing laws, fortifying cities, deciding on war and peace, etc." (TP 2.17) And so one can see why Buchanan was primed to read this as equivalent to his constitutional level. 

It is worth noting that Spinoza anticipates Hume's account of the genesis of the institution of justice (which really is for him the political founding:  "that justice is the sense that “all the members of the society express to one another, and which induces them to regulate their conduct by certain rules” (3.2.2.10). This is also a unanimity requirement. But here (in Spinoza and Hume), the distance with Hobbes is not far. For, in Leviathan, the commonwealth is, when not founded through conquest, instituted by a unanimous covenant “of every man with every man . . . as if every man should say to every man, I Authorise and give up my Right of Governing myselfe, to this Man, or to this Assembly of men.”  Of course, Buchanan would not deny that. 

Buchanan makes two related claims about the difference between Hobbes and Spinoza.One is an odd mistake, the other is perceptive. In reverse order, first, he implies that Spinoza allows for divided sovereignty. That's strictly speaking false. Spinoza is as unitary about sovereignty as Hobbes is (which is revealed in Spinoza's treatment of the need for the sovereign to control the church). But it's true that Spinoza thinks there are benefits to be derived from functional division of powers that make it look as if he is willing to allow for division of powers.  But, on a more fundamental level Buchanan is right, Hobbes offers an account of obligation whereas Spinoza does not.** By contrast in Spinoza, and now I quote a perceptive treatment by Justin Steinberg, "The commonwealth must be structured so as to promote compliance; when there is excessive vice or non-compliance, the blame must be “laid at the door of the commonwealth.” 

Interestingly enough, the contrast between Hobbes and Spinoza on obligation is not in J. W. Gough's The Social Contract, which is the authority Buchanan claims to follow when he describes Wolff's debts to Spinoza. (In the first (1936) edition,  Gough writes: "The most important of the followers of Hobbes was Spinoza, who constructed a theory of political obligation which in most essentials corresponds closely to Hobbes's." (107))++ So, Buchanan read his sources with independent mind.++

Okay, let me wrap up. Buchanan says explicitly that Spinoza did not influence the development of his thought. He does repeatedly credit (also in The Calculus of Consent), the great Swedish economist, Wicksell, with decisive influence on him (including the point about unanimity). So, this naturally made me wonder, whether Wicksell could have been influenced by Spinoza. Thanks to Google my search was brief and fruitful. Below I picture the closing lines of Wickell's (1917) fascinating review of the revised, second Swedish translation of Mill's On Liberty. To be continued:

 

On Foucault on 17 January 1979: On Dynamics of Liberty or Method and Enemies (V)

Undertaking the history of regimes of veridiction—and not the history of truth, the history of error, or the history of ideology, etcetera—obviously means abandoning once again that well-known critique of European rationality and its excesses, which has been constantly taken up in various forms since the beginning of the nineteenth century. From romanticism to the Frankfurt School, what has always been called into question and challenged has been rationality with the weight of power supposedly peculiar to it. Now the critique* of knowledge I would propose does not in fact consist in denouncing what is continually—I was going to say monotonously—oppressive under reason, for after all, believe me, insanity (déraison) is just as oppressive. Nor would this political critique of knowledge consist in flushing out the presumption of power in every truth affirmed, for again, believe me, there is just as much abuse of power in the lie or error. The critique I propose consists in determining under what conditions and with what effects a veridiction is exercised, that is to say, once again, a type of formulation falling under particular rules of verification and falsification. Michel Foucault, 17 January 1979, lecture 2  The Birth of Biopolitics. translated by Graham Burchell, 35-36

One strain easy to miss in the fascinating ambitions of lecture 2, is Foucault's polemic with the Frankfurt school. That is to say, I missed it when I taught last year it only to be taken by surprise (looking ahead) in lecture 5. His main criticism above seems to be that ideology critique lacks originality (it goes back to romanticism) and is tired old hat ("etcetera;" "once again;" "well- known;" "constantly" "always"). The more subtle criticism, which is a consequentialist argument from authority ("believe me") is is that if the effect of ideology critique is a regime of unreason or error, it is no better. That is to say, and this has been noted by critics of Foucault, there is a kind of status quo bias built into Foucault's methodology; it is not sufficient to show that the status quo is problematic if you don't have a path toward a better outcome. 

It would be tempting now to turn to Foucault's methodology, but, as it happens, the polemic with Frankfurt is not finished yet. A few pages (or since these are lectures, minutes) later he claims that:

We should keep in mind that heterogeneity is never a principle of exclusion; it never prevents coexistence, conjunction, or connection. And it is precisely in this case, in this kind of analysis, that we emphasize, and must emphasize a non-dialectical logic if want to avoid being simplistic. For what is dialectical logic? Dialectical logic puts to work contradictory terms within the homogeneous. I suggest replacing this dialectical logic with what I would call a strategic logic. A logic of strategy does not stress contradictory terms within a homogeneity that promises their resolution in a unity. The function of strategic logic is to establish the possible connections between disparate terms which remain disparate. The logic of strategy is the logic of connections between the heterogeneous and not the logic of the homogenization of the contradictory. So let’s reject the logic of the dialectic and try to see—this is what I will try to show in these lectures—the connections which succeeded in holding together and conjoining the fundamental axiomatic of the rights of man and the utilitarian calculus of the independence of the governed. (42-43)

The heterogeneity he has in mind (recall) is liberalism's two traditions/concepts of liberty -- the contractualist-republican and utilitarian ones. And the significance of his claim, to liberalism, and this anticipates structurally something Jacob Levy has recently emphasized (recall;and recall) in a slightly different fashion, is the creative tension, a dynamics of liberty, within liberalism of these non-identical yet coexisting conceptualizations of liberty. And strikingly, Foucault wants to adopt a logic of inquiry that does justice to and can convey precisely these dynamics, "the connections which succeeded in holding together and conjoining the fundamental axiomatic of the rights of man and the utilitarian calculus of the independence of the governed. " As I signaled earlier in the week, by adopting what he calls strategic logic, Foucault's rewriting of the tradition is simultaneously a means of extending it because it facilitates the expression of this creative dynamic. 

At this point it is unclear whether Foucault thinks that by so doing one gives liberalism a new lease on life or one helps to push it over the precipice. But he is explicit that dialectical logic (which I take him to associate with the Frankfurt school, especially Horkheimer and Marcuse [both mentioned later in the lecture series)) is both simplistic and incapable of respecting the creativity lodged within the liberal tradition. De facto he is saying that the unity they offer is not worth having.

I could stop here, but it is worth noting what liberalism's rule of reason he is willing to apply strategic logic to is. He writes:

Governmental reason in its modern form, in the form established at the beginning of the eighteenth century with the fundamental characteristic of a search for the principle of its self-limitation, is a reason that functions in terms of interest. But this is no longer the interest of an entirely self-referring state which only seeks its own growth, wealth, population, and power, as was the state of raison d’État. In the principle to which governmental reason must conform, interest is now interests, a complex interplay between individual and collective interests, between social utility and economic profit, between the equilibrium of the market and the regime of public authorities, between basic rights and the independence of the governed. Government, at any rate, government in this new governmental reason, is something that works with interests....In its new regime, government is basically no longer to be exercised over subjects and other things subjected through these subjects. Government is now to be exercised over what we could call the phenomenal republic of interests. (44...46)

The rule of reason is thus the rule of interests, and this is, quite clearly, itself in constant motion a moving target. And in part it is a moving target because as interests are both shaped and pursued, perceived needs and how these perceptions are constituted evolve. So, we  may say that in this phenomenal republic there is lodged a further complex dynamics that has, in turn, a complex interplay with the dynamics of liberty. 

These complex, multi-faceted dynamics come together in the market which is (recall) a stupendous machine that helps coordinate the pursuit of our needs. I put it like this because here in lecture 2, Foucault has already signaled, without mentioning his name, that Hayek is not an aberration from liberalism but central to the tradition. But the lecture ends on alerting to the reader to the significance of James Buchanan's research program (e.g. Calculus of Consent):

The fundamental question of liberalism is: What is the utility value of government and all actions of government in a society where exchange determines the true value of things? this question encapsulates the fundamental questions raised by liberalism. With this question liberalism posed the fundamental question of government, which is whether all the political, economic, and other forms which have been contrasted with liberalism can really avoid this question and avoid formulating this question of the utility of a government in a regime where exchange determines the value of things. (46)

This is, of course, precisely the research agenda of public choice theory (Buchanan, Tullock), which goes unnamed in the Birth of Biopolitics (and perhaps everywhere in Foucault's work). And, of course, if we look at Buchanan's research project closely it mixes the two traditions noted by Foucault. The contractualist-republican element is (recall) exhibited in the significance to Buchanan of the constitutional moment; this is the part of Buchanan where he is very close to Rawls.  But within the constitutional order Buchanan inherits (what Foucault calls) the radical tradition and applies in Foucaults terms the utility value of government and all actions of government in a society where exchange determines the true value of things.* That is to say, Foucault helps explain why the Virginia school is, itself, an expression of the central problematics of liberalism. 

 

On Vestal Virgins, Marxism and Final Causes (via Ernest Nagel, Huxley, and Bacon)

The third type of philosophy of science will require only brief exposition. It is professed, among others, by a number of scientists in this country and England, whose object is to show the social implications of theoretical research and thereby to rob modem theories of their air of mystery. They explain, frequently with admirable lucidity, the new sources of power opened up by science, the economies in human effort which it is capable of effecting, and the close interdependence of science and the technological arts. The dominant emphasis is thus placed upon scientific theories as engineers' "blue-prints for action," rather than as disclosures of some final reality.
There might be little to object to this approach to science if those who take it would not confuse their thesis by other claims: that scientific research ought always to be conducted with the social good in view, or that all significant research is in fact deter­mined by the organization and practical needs of society. There is, however, no evidence for the proposition that a warm social conscience is the best guide for the conduct of research; there is no ground for assuming that everyone knows what is socially desirable, that what is not of immediate social value will never prove to be so, or that devotion to socially valuable results neces­sarily contributes to the fullest development of systematic knowl­edge. There is overwhelming evidence to show that the content and direction of theoretical research is in the main controlled by technical problems internal to the sciences, and that changes in the social economy do not in general constitute the sufficient con­ditions for the specific content of theoretical inquiries.
A number of writers in this group make the further claim that the methods as well as the conclusions of science conform to the triad of "dialectical principles" sacred to many followers of Hegel and Marx. For example, Levy has argued that the occurrence of a distinct type of wave produced by a ship after it reaches a critical velocity illustrates the law of abrupt change of quality with sufficient increase of quantity; and Haldane has borne witness to the inestimable value of all three laws in his own biological researches. Space is lacking to examine these and other claims for the virtues of the dialectic laws. It must suffice to recall Einstein's remark that philosophers are fortunate indeed in beingg always able to establish the agreement of the latest findings of science with their own metaphysical principles. The principles of dialectic can be guaranteed never the fail, because their terms have no fixed content; they can be stretched to cover any facts whatsoever, after the facts have been independently established.
Were it not for the mysterious profundity claimed for them, and did they not serve to check inquiry by the glib finality with which they resolve all problems, the laws of dialectic could be left unreproached as a curious verbal game. As instruments for disentangling the web of theoretical constructions, however, they are as barren as the purest of vestal virgins.--Ernest Nagel (1941) "Recent Philosophies of Science," Kenyon Review (Vol 8), reprinted in Sovereign Reason (1954) 45-46.

I have quoted all of section 3, from a brief, critical "survey" of then prominent four philosophies of science by Ernest Nagel. Near the end of the paper, Nagel himself is forthright that he favors the fourth approach, which "does not aim at a compact system bt at painstaking analyses of the details of scientific procedure (46); but he associates it with names like "Mach, Poincare, Duhem, Campbell...Pierce....Russell, Wittgenstein, Tarkski...Carnap...James, Dewey, Cohen, Neurath, and Woodger;" (46) This approach frequently "goes under the somewhat unprecise and misleading of of "operationalism." (39) The two other approaches are associated with Whitehead (which gets a respectful critical treatment) and Eddington (which does not: his "philosophy of science consists of "outrageous puns."" (45)) 

The third type involves what we may call Marxist philosophy of science and Nagel's two exemplars are Haldane and Levy (surprisingly Bernal is not mentioned). I assume J.B.S. Haldane is somewhat familiar to readers of this blog. (And his work is due a rediscory given his interest in infectious diseases and pandemics.) I am pretty confident that most of my readers are less familiar with Levy. The index to Sovereign reason suggests this is a H. Levy. And with help of Google, I am pretty confident this is the author of (1938) A Philosophy for a Modern Man because it is also mentioned by Robert S. Cohen in "Marxism and Scientific Philosophy" a longer and more scholarly (and fascinating) review article in Metaphysical Review (1951).

The four features of Marxist philosophy of science that Nagel rejects are: (i) the normative claim that science ought to be guided by social aims; (ii) the empirical claim that it is always guided by social aims. In addition, (iii) the historicist thesis that science is determined by social economic context. And, finally, (iv) dialectical principles and its laws.

As an aside, (iii) was not just associated with Marxist philosophy of science. Institutional economists who were progressives (but not necessarily socialists or marxists) also accepted a version of (iii). As I have demonstrated, George Stigler, the Chicago economist, who was well read in philosophy of science (including Nagel) polemically rejects a version of (iii) in the 1950s-1960s; Stigler called it the “environmental theory" and he associated it with the historian of economics (and sociologist of knowledge) W. Stark and Wesley Mitchell, one of the leading institutionalists of the previous generation (who had died in 1948) and one of Milton Friedman’s mentors at NBER. 

Some other time I want to reflect a bit, from a sociological perspective, on the significance of the polemical rejection of dialectics by (would be) analytic philosophers, including those self-proclaimed analytic marxists more friendly to Marxism. Unlike his treatment of (i-iii), and his criticisms of the other approaches to philosophy of science, Nagel clearly does not think it is worth his effort to try to argue against dialectic and its laws. His only criticism that does not reduce to name calling ("no fixed content';" "mysterious profundity;" glib" etc.)* is that its practitioners engage in retrospectifve confirmation ("after the facts have been independently established"), which may be true but it is not a criticism of it qua philosophy of science. (As Nagel frankly admits it his own favored approach is not interested in "canons" of discovery. (47))

Here I want to close with an observation on Nagel's assertion that the laws of dialectic are as barren as the purest of vestal virgins. As it happens (friend of the blog, recall), David Haig discusses some of the history of this phrase in the history and philosophy of science in chapter 1 of his (2020) From Darwin to Derrida, a book I have had occasion to mention before. For, it is often the case that final causes are likened to barren virgins and, thereby, to be rejected. As Haig shows a version of the phrase goes back to Bacon's (1623) De Dignitate et augmentis Scientiarum, where Bacon is referring to the virgins consecrated to God (as vestal virgins were). Although it is likely, as Haig, suggests that the modern association of Bacon with the phrase "vestal virgins" is due to William Whewell, the founder of philosophy of science. (Whewell himself thought of final causes as constitutive and regulative to speculations.) It is with Huxley, while reviewing Darwin (1859), that the association of final causes as "barren virgins" to be left aside is put in place. (Haig and I both agree this was not exactly how Darwin thought about it.) 

We can assume that Nagel, who was widely read, was reasonably familiar with the association of the rejection of final causes as barren virgins since Huxley.[UPDATE: SEE FOOTNOTE]** Circumstantial evidence for the widespread familiarity of this point can be found in an essay in 1927 by C.D. Broad on "The Philosophy of Francis Bacon," where Broad warns his readers not to assume that in Bacon the phrase signals rejection of final causes. (I can't prove Nagel read this paper, but he was familiar with Broad's writings on the mind as a teleological system.) In the philosophy of biology, Nagel wrote quote a bit on teleological explanation. Much of it is naturally read as redescribing teleological concepts in terms of efficient causation or underlying laws. But near the end of his career he granted that "teleological concepts and teleological explanations" are not obscure (301) 

So, to sum up, Nagel treats the dialectics of those inspired by Hegel and Marx as fundamentally obscure. Writing in 1941, he thereby foreshadows the more common criticisms by analytic philosophers of folk who much later came to be known as continental philosophers.+ But the trope he activates to do so is one then commonly associated with the rejection of final causes.

But at no point were final causes thought obscure or unintelligible (even Spinoza did not go that far); rather from Huxley's polemics onward they were taken as local final causes to be thought unfruitful in scientific or experimental research. Because (recall) Huxley himself was an agnostic about fundamental matters, Huxley could acknowledge that general final causes were intelligible and perhaps appropriate in the domain of fundamental metaphysics. 

Nagel treats dialectics a bit like the early moderns treat the terms of scholastic philosophy: as fundamentally unintelligible. He simultaneously treats dialectics in the way Huxley treats local final causes: as intelligible albei unfruitful in (the philosophy of) science. But Nagel is so focused on his polemics that he forgets it can't be both.