Digressions&Impressions

On Information and the State: from Justin Smith to George Stigler

[Over time I plan to phase out D&I at typepad. This post was first published at  digressions.impressions.substack here. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber at <digressionsimpressions.substack.com>]

A recent wide-ranging, erudite, and politically salient Substack post by Justin Smith defends the thesis that "we may identify a vast process currently underway whereby we are moving, in our efforts to understand reality and to harness it to our ends, from its to bits. It seems to me the real story of the past few decades, a story that easily explains the rise in popularity of the simulation argument...is of a fairly total regime change, from physics to informatics —here I am adapting the French informatique, which names the research domain in question far more appropriately than “computer science”— as the Prima Scientia or ultimate science of reality." (The post may be gated so you will have to trust me on its interest or take a subscription to Justin's excellent substack, Hinternet.) Presumably, by 'regime' Smith is suggesting that the wide world of learning is fundamentally ordered and (he makes an explicit nod to Hacking here) ordering and authoritative in some sense. 

In these digressions, I have been joking over the years that economics will soon be displaced by computer science. But as is usual while I have been focusing on a change in one tree, Justin is noticing the shifts in the wider forest.

Unfortunately, Smith never defines 'information' (and its non-trivial cognate,) 'units of information processing' despite it playing a key role in his overall argument. That's probably a feature and not a bug of his argument because part of his point is that in virtue of the significance and fluidity (within constraints) of symbolic representation information is not (ahh) ontically stable, eternally out there. 

Inform has Latinate roots (to give form to, to shape, educate, etc.), and, perhaps, there are echoes of the scholastic doctrine of hylomorphism lurking here. (Not so long ago, I was pleased to learn that computer scientists use 'hylomorphism' to refer to a certain recursive function which struck me as very funny and profound at once.) As I was barely conscious contemplating the possible significance of this, through the mystery of the associative process and the rapidity of modern networks (and Google), I looked up and downloaded George Stigler's (1961) "The Economics of Information." This paper has over 12000 citations, and alongside his work on economic regulation, crucial to his importance to the development of economics (for which he got a Nobel).

Somewhat amusingly, Stigler also fails to give a definition of information. He tends to use 'knowledge,' 'advertising,' subjective beliefs, and the comparison of prices by consumers as ways of understanding and describing information. Information can be 'pooled' and has a 'flow.' Most famously, information is costly (and can be bought and sold).

That information is costly is both part of the cause and part of the effect of the dispersion of prices. (In an older tradition of economics -- as David M. Levy taught me, one can think of Wicksteed -- prices were thought to be uniform in a market at a given time; although earlier, during the 18th century, Adam Smith and his contemporary, James Steuart, thought that prices dispersed, too although their analysis is not identical.) I don't mean to suggest that this exhausts the role of information in Stigler's analysis of economic life because it connects means and ends, but about that some other time more.

In Stigler's paper, I encountered a fascinating passage that is worth quoting and discussing (and this is the real point of this digression):

The maintenance of appreciable dispersion of prices arises chiefly out of the fact that knowledge becomes obsolete. The conditions of supply and demand, and therefore the distribution of asking prices, change over time. There is no method by which buyers or sellers can ascertain the new average price in the market appropriate to the new conditions except by search. Sellers cannot maintain perfect correlation of successive prices, even if they wish to do so, because of the costs of search. Buyers accordingly cannot make the amount of investment in search that perfect correlation of prices would justify. The greater the instability of supply and/or demand conditions, therefore, the greater the dispersion of prices will be.
In addition, there is a component of ignorance due to the changing identity of buyers and sellers. There is a flow of new buyers and sellers in every market, and they are at least initially uninformed on prices and by their presence make the information of experienced buyers and sellers somewhat obsolete.
The amount of dispersion will also vary with one other characteristic which is of special interest: the size (in terms of both dollars and number of traders) of the market. As the market grows in these dimensions, there will appear a set of firms which specialize in collecting and selling information. They may take the form of trade journals or specialized brokers. Since the cost of collection of information is (approximately) independent of its use (although the cost of dissemination is not), there is a strong tendency toward monopoly in the provision of information: in general, there will be a "standard" source for trade information. (Stigler 1961, 220)

Chicago economists are not exactly known for assuming that any market will tend toward a monopoly. As I noted last week, in the 1950s Stigler's work was, in fact, prominent for undermining empirically the Marxist (and Marx-inspired) thesis that markets tend naturally tend to monopoly. 

Now, later when (in part inspired by the work of the sociologist Morton and in part because of his interest in which economics Phds would be hired where) Stigler turned to the sociology of scientific knowledge, he tackled this tendency toward monopoly in knowledge production head on. And so I will return to it some other time. But in the 1961 paper he leaves the point in the quoted passage alone.

It would be tempting here to discuss the role of google or wikipedia or the stanford encyclopedia of philosophy as standard sources of information in our ecologies. (And to what degree ChatGPT can displace these or become one itself.) But I want to close with an important broader context in which i situate Stigler's passage.

In the liberal tradition — with which Stigler was very familiar — which understands, as a a core function of the state, it (the state) as a machinery of record, a collector and disseminator of accurate public data. A lot of our social practices, inside and outside the market, presuppose a social infrastructure in which the machinery of record is reliable, allowing public authorities and private actors to plan their activities. For that to happen, the public must be well-informed, and the only way citizens can possibly be well-informed on complex matters of policy is for state experts to organize and process information. Elsewhere, also in joint (forthcoming) work with Nick Cowen I have argued that Walter Lippmann's (1922) Public Opinion puts this vision forward.[1]

In fact, the germ of Lippmann’s idea is expressed in the closing paragraph of John Stuart Mill’s and Harriet Taylor’s On Liberty (1869, Ch. 5), where they claim that “the greatest dissemination of power consistent with efficiency” should be allied with “the greatest possible centralisation of information, and diffusion of it from the centre.” In context, it is clear (recall) that they are responding to Tocqueville’s fears that in order to prevent democratic despotism through local self-government, incompetent art of government is inevitable.

So, lurking in Stigler (1961) is a causal account that both explains the origin of the state and justifies the state's continued existence as a (perhaps even natural) authoritative monopoly provider of the machinery of record. (In fact, this is how Smith explains the epistemic origin of the state: as guarantor of measures and weights and the soundness of currency. ) And that even in a bit-rich world this will remain so.

Of course, Marxists and Libertarians may object that the account hinted at here effaces the violence of the state. This is undoubtedly so, but I consider this a feature not a bug of the argument.

• This first appeared at: <On Information and the State: from Justin Smith to George Stigler (substack.com)> a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Chicago Economics, MIT, and Monopoly Capitalism

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Marxism predicts that left to its own devises capitalism tends toward monopoly. Let's call this the 'monopoly capitalism thesis.' I suspect the most famous articulation of this thesis was develop in the context of debates over the nature and fate of early twentieth century imperialism. For, both (recall; and here) Hobson (not a Marxist) and Lenin noticed that (militaristic) imperialism and monopoly were mutually reinforcing. For Hobson (in his 1902 Imperialism), monopoly capitalism was the effect of rent-seeking political behavior (by corrupt, imperial, financial interests). Lenin (ca 1916) didn't deny this, but while drawing on German data, especially, thought that capitalism had an inevitable tendency toward monopoly and cartels, and that imperialism (the search for monopoly markets overseas) is an effect of this tendency.

Arguably, (recall) Schumpeter (in Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (1942) synthesized the two positions by suggesting that in conditions of modernization, monopoly would be caused (perhaps not by an internal logic of market economies, but rather) by, the "concentration of decision-making centers of the administration and the state" who seek out social counterparts in capitalist enterprises, who in turn take advantage of rents. While Burnham (in The Managerial Revolution 1941) is not interested in exploring the dynamics of the monopoly capitalism thesis, one can find a similar conclusion in it (see also my comment about Berle & Means below).

In what follows, I don't mean to suggest that the theoretical structure of the monopoly capitalism thesis was not developed after mid-century. Arguably Joan Robinson, Paul Sweezy and Baran, and Ernest Mandel all did so in various ways, and have inspired renewed work. From the left one could mention (recall this post) Durand, Cédric Durand's (2017) Fictitious capital: How finance is appropriating our future; from the more libertarian right one could mention Eric A., Posner and E. Glen Weyl (2018) Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society, which strongly implies our age is characterized by monopoly capitalism.

As an aside, with the revival of scholarly interest in the roots of neoliberalism, it is quite natural to come away thinking that the major point of contention between Marxists and liberals within political economy centered on the socialist calculation debate. This debate is theoretically very interesting because it brings together epistemology, social theory, political economy, and (after Oskar Lange) artificial intelligence. And because Hayek got an early Nobel (in part) for his contribution to it, and Austrian economics shaped American libertarianism, there has been impressive continued interest in it even after central planning lost its luster. But even critics of Marxism can acknowledge the soviet style central planning and administrative pricing need not be the only way really existing Marxism can be tried out. This observation made me return to the fate monopoly capitalism thesis: why did it not haunt mid twentieth century economics?

Now, a key part of the answer has to be in the success of Keynes & Keynesianism and also the very idea of a mixed economy (the genealogy of which I have not studied, but I assume involves Samuelson). But in a way this pushes the problem back a level--why think a mixed economy is stable so as to block the monopoly capitalism thesis (or road to serfdom thesis)?

Part of the answer can be found in a number of empirical, inductive studies associated with 'Chicago economics,' especially Warren Nutter’s (1951) The Extent of Enterprise Monopoly in the United States, 1899–1939, which originated in his (1949) dissertation and the fifth lecture, “Competition in the United States,” of George Stigler's (1949) Five lectures on economics problems first delivered at LSE at the behest of Robbins. (For detailed description of the material I am about to discuss see my paper, but back then I studied it through lens of paradigm building.)

I doubt I need to re-introduce Stigler (a future Nobel), who was at Columbia, to my audience. But despite the recent political and polemical focus on the Virginia School, Nutter is understudied (even his Wikipedia page is scarce), and only Daniel Kuehn has written much on him. Nutter, who during the cold war was one of the pre-eminent scholars of the Soviet economy Stateside (together with my very teacher Franklyn Holtzman), was at Yale when his dissertation work made an impact on American public life (it was featured in Fortune magazine). He later joined and co-founded the Virginia school of public choice and ended up a significant figure in the Nixon administration. In 1969, he published an extension of the dissertation with Henry Einhorn: The Extent of Enterprise Monopoly: 1899-1958. 

Now, as my comments above suggest, the 'monopoly capitalism thesis' drifted out of Marxism into mainstream-ish opinion during the Great Depression. Nutter's official target the “hypothesis that monopoly is automatically generated in a private-enterprise system” was also defended by Arthur R. Burns "in his book, The Decline of Competition.” Burns was an institutionalist economist at Columbia. (This Burns should not be confused with another economist at Columbia, Arthur F. Burns, who became more prominent as Chair of the Federal Reserve.) In his book, our Burns argues that technological developments alongside patent laws (which generate rents) made monopoly inevitable (and that anti-trust was imperfect).

Another, politically more important target (for Nutter and Stigler) is The Modern Corporation and Private Property (1932), co-authored by A.A. Berle and Gardiner Means. This was a major work that shaped the New Deal, corporate governance, and corporate law for  a generation. Berle and Means analytically (and legally) separated corporate ownership (which, under modern conditions, was diffused) from corporate control (which was concentrated). They thereby anticipate Schumpeter and Burnham's focus on a relatively narrow managerial-corporate class (albeit not to be identical simply with capital in a Marxist sense).

Nutter and Stigler have different empirical ways of tackling the underlying question, and they use different proxies to get a handle on the empirical problems (of operationalization concentrations within a industry and measuring its change over time, and of the whole economy). And their empirical findings don't always agree. But in a rather critical review (1953) article, "Is monopoly increasing?" Solomon Fabricant (an economist associated with NBER [see this portrait drawn by Lipsey]), who notes Nutter's and Stigler's partiality toward competition, and hostility to anti-trust policy, and implies they may be systematically biased,  concludes, nevertheless, “Yet, whatever the outcome, by the essential validity of their conclusion must stand. All the doubts that can be raised do not destroy, rather they support, the conclusion that there is no basis for believing that the economy of the United States is largely monopolistic and has been growing more monopolistic.” (92. Nutter himself had suggested there might have been very modest growth in monopoly, but mostly as an effect of government policy.) 

That is to say, by the early 1950s the economics profession thought the monopoly capitalism thesis was, if not empirically falsified, then at least decidedly unpromising empirically. This is especially notable because the data they covered included the impact of the Great Depression and all the New Deal activity.

In work (1951) that covered later time-series data for manufacturing through 1949, "The measurement of industrial concentration," another economist, M.A. Adelman, also decried the imperfection of the data (although he praised Nutter's measures explicitly) and diagnoses underdetermination of theory by data. (He also acknowledges that Nutter is more interested in monopoly, while he is more interested in concentration.) At the end of his survey Adelman concludes: 

"But although a given set of facts is compatible with more than one policy conclusion, this does not make it compatible with any conclusion, i.e., the facts are not simply irrelevant. Stated somewhat differently: our conclusions, if correct, should mean something for the atmosphere in which policy is formed. References to "the growth in economic concentration," or statements that "during the past I6 years [I932-48] big business has been getting bigger and little business littler," or that "the forces of concentration [are] growing stronger by the hour," or that "concentration of industry is increasing so fast that no half-measures can stop it," and many others of like tenor - these must now be dismissed as unfounded. Concentration may be a problem, but for better or worse it is not threatening to engulf the economy. The moral, therefore, is simply that there is time to stop, look, and take thought. This may detract from the color and excitement of our public life, but it may also contribute to better results."  

Adelman has, I think, attracted no scholarly attention. But he became one of pillars of the MIT economics department that Samuelson built to pre-eminence. (After his early work in anti-trust he became somewhat well known in the 1970s as a leading expert of energy economics and how to tackle the oil crisis.) And so he very much represents the middle of the road of the economics profession of the era.

I quote Adelman's passage at length because it gives a sense of how he takes the empirical results to license considerable de-politicization. (One can also find this in Fabricant's conclusion.) While economists remained highly interested in theories of monopoly and imperfect competition, and how to deal with (ant-trust) policy questions emanating from actual monopolies and economic concentration (and a whole range of potentially fascinating technical questions), the monopoly capitalism thesis was effectively dead, or at least temporarily pushed to the margins. 

As I noted in my original paper, this conclusion remained intact even if this inductive approach to the question of monopoly as pursued by Nutter and Stigler got displaced by a very different approach articulated by Harberger in “Monopoly and Resource Allocation.” (1954) And while this, in turn, was quite consequential for the shape of American anti-trust (not the least compared with the Ordoliberal approach), it was unconcerned with the monopoly capitalism thesis.

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Hayek on Liberal Utopia, the Long Game, and Weberian Politics

[Over time I am plan to phase out this blog at typepad. This post was first published at  digressions.impressions.substack here. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber at <digressionsimpressions.substack.com>]

In response to my recent suggestion, in my celebration of Chandran Kukathas, [see also this nicely edited reprint in Liberal Currents] that, not unlike other liberal thinkers, "Hayekians" are profoundly anti-political (even suspicious of politics), I was redirected to Hayek's (1949) "The Intellectuals and Socialism" by the doyen of Hayek studies, Bruce Caldwell. In that paper, Hayek argues that liberal intellectuals should focus on the long game and develop what Hayek calls, "liberal utopia." Contemporary neo-Hayekians -- I am thinking of people not unlike Caldwell and Kukathas, but also Pete Boettke (whose writings [see, for example here] first alerted me to the significance of the passage I am about to discuss) -- seem to be  inspired by the following passage as articulating the task of liberal intellectuals:

What we lack is a liberal Utopia, a program which seems neither a mere defense of things as they are nor a diluted kind of socialism, but truly liberal radicalism which does not spare the susceptibilities of the mighty (including the trade unions), which is not too severely practical and which does not confine itself to what appears today as politically possible. We need intellectual leaders who are prepared to resist the blandishments of power and influence and who are willing to work for an ideal, however small may be the prospects of its early realization. (F.A. Hayek (1949) "The intellectuals and socialism," p. 432; emphasis added).

Somewhat sadly most critics of Hayek and what is now known as 'classical liberalism' or 'neoliberalism' do not take this passage seriously at all. They are quick to associate Hayek with Reagan, Thatcher, and Pinochet and all kinds of (dirty) practical politics. Such critics find it hard to believe that the argument's effect on Hayekian intellectuals has been to urge them to keep their hands politically clean and to focus primarily on the noble task of contributing to articulating the elements of a liberal utopia unhindered by short-term feasibility.

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In a creative (2022) paper, Mikayla Novak plausible treats Hayek's pre-WWII proposal for interstate federation as a kind of exemplar of the sort of liberal utopian thinking, which she treats as an instance of heterotopia, Hayek may council. In an important article, Caldwell himself points to Hayek's theorizing in The Constitution of Liberty (1960) and Law, Legislation and Liberty (1973-79) as other examples of such utopian theorizing. The function of a liberal utopia is not to guide day-to-day policy based on a blueprint (that's there error of the so-called 'man of system' derided by Adam Smith), but to offer an ideal (even a social theory) that may mobilize others in the long term and that also may be useful in interpreting reality. In fact, in Law, Legislation and Liberty Hayek puts the point as follows: "It is not to be denied that to some extent the guiding model of the overall order will always be an utopia, something to which the existing situation will be only a distant approximation and which many people will regard as wholly impractical. Yet it is only by constantly holding up the guiding conception of an internally consistent model which could be realized by the consistent application of the same principles, that anything like an effective framework for a functioning spontaneous order will be achieved." And in context, it is clear that Hayek treats Adam Smith's impact on the development of British free trade as the exemplar to be emulated.

However, if we look again at the passage quoted from "The intellectuals and socialism," it is worth noting that a liberal utopia is also called a "program" (Foucault picks up on this) and that in his choice of words, 'truly liberal radicalism,' Hayek is evoking the Philosophical Radicals, the politicians who were inspired by Bentham's program. The natural implicature in light of Hayek's relentless criticism of the constructivism of Bentham, which is thus a false liberal radicalism, is that Hayek is trying to generate a program that involves both an intellectual revolution and eventually actionable legislation of the sort we find in the circle of Bentham's political admirers in the 1820s and 30s. Since Hayek (and other neo-liberals of the period) was in dialogue with Dicey's Lectures on the Relation between Law and Public Opinion (recall; also here; and here), and Dicey describes the significance and impact of the Benthamite program, it stands to reason Hayek was inspired to offer an alternative.

Now, I admit that the claims of the previous paragraph rests on slender evidence. But the liberal utopia passage is preceded by another one on the previous page that motivates my reading:

"The difficulty of finding genuine and disinterested support for a systematic policy for freedom is not new. In a passage of which the reception of a recent book of mine has often reminded me, Lord Acton long ago de-scribed how "[a]t all times sincere friends of freedom have been rare, and its triumphs have been due to minorities, that have prevailed by associating themselves with auxiliaries whose objects differed from their own; and this association, which is always dangerous, has been sometimes disastrous, by giving to opponents just grounds of opposition..." More recently, one of the most distinguished living American economists has complained in a similar vein that the main task of those who believe in the basic principles of the capitalist system must frequently be to defend this system against the capitalists-indeed the great liberal economists, from Adam Smith to the present, have always known this. --Hayek "The intellectuals and socialism." (p. 431).

The point of this paragraph is not that the true liberal must restrict herself to devising a new utopia, but that in addition they must seek out ("finding"/"associating themselves") political coalition partners. To be sure, this is not ad hoc policy. It has to be a 'systematic policy' -- that is based on a program -- that can promote freedom. In fact, this is so in the full expectation that these others will not share in Hayek's liberal ideals and may be motivated by much less lofty goals.

In fact, both Acton & Hayek recognize that coalitions with others will involve judgment, including judgements one may turn out to be truly mistaken or "sometimes disastrous." (Just ask the critics of neo-liberalism's occasional flirtation with transitional dictatorship.) And the risks involved include that one must also be willing to speak truth to potentially powerful friends (capitalists), and take on vested interests (unions) that are also dedicated to helping the people whose freedom one claims to promote. This all echoes Weber's account of the sometimes tragic choices facing a “politician with a sense of vocation.”

As an aside: I don't think that Hayek is here anticipating the fusionism (between truly liberal radicalism) and conservative thought that became so characteristic of actual American politics on the right. But that it occurred need not surprise after the fact. What Hayek shows is that political life involves aligning oneself with those, who may share quite different commitments, to make possible one’s goals. This is, in fact, very much like my own view,* and this is why I spoke of 'Hayekians' and not Hayek in my piece.

Now originally, I thought Caldwell understands Hayek to be advocating a kind of political dis-engagement by the intellectual who prepares the way for later generations. But he called my attention to a set of recorded remarks by Kukathas on the 'dilemma' that the liberal, who might exercise power, faces. In his five minute remarks, Kukathas rejects the path of avoiding political life and the path of realism, but advocates restraint and forbearance in power and to stick to liberal principles, especially as ground in the core value of toleration. (The remarks start around 1 hour and 13.) I take it Caldwell thinks this is more principled than the one I endorse. I agree that Kukathas' position is rather noble, it follows (to quote Weber) "the maxim of an ethic of ultimate ends-that is, in religious terms." But this one sided political stance, is not Hayek's.

For, I doubt Hayek believes that when one associates "with auxiliaries whose objects" differ from one's own, one can always stick to one's liberal principles in political life (be at coalition building or power holding). For, if one could stick to one's principles in political life then there wouldn't be any danger or risk of disaster. That's to say, Hayek is, as Foucault discerned, a Weberian in ways that many contemporary Hayekian intellectuals are not.

• Over time I am plan to phase out this blog at typepad. This post was first published at  digressions.impressions.substack here. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber at <digressionsimpressions.substack.com>

---

*Recall I wrote: "So, from this perspective, any program of reform must include a constituency or coalition that can promote the policy effectively. Obviously, the promise here is that this may increase the chances of uptake; it also often makes all liberal proposals much more status-quo friendly. Sometimes the concession to feasibility makes the liberal program appear as a handmaiden to conservatism or common sense morality."

On Humean sovereignty with some Dicey, Schmitt,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Milton Friedman on Marx and Mill (pt 1): The Road to Serfdom and the Art of Government

Judged by the course of events of the last century, rather by the avowed aim of Mill and Marx, there is much for reversing the stereotyped roles assigned to the two men. If collectivism ultimately triumphs over individualism, it will be in no small measure a result of the influence of the ideas first popularized and made respectable by Mill; whereas, if individualism ultimately triumphs, it will be in no small measure a result of the ultimate effects of the belief in revolutionary action to which Marx and Engels gave such vivid expression in the Manifesto…

The great defect of the Benthamite liberals among whom Mill grew up was the absence of any theory or doctrine of the positive role of the state in the organization of economic activity. Benthamism was at bottom a fervent belief in the possibility of improving the condition of mankind through legislative enactment devoted to achieving the “greatest happiness of the greatest number.” These central premises do not themselves prescribe any particular content for legislative action. They are, in strict logic, consistent equally with fargoing collectivism and paternalism or with the ”laissez faire” doctrines with which they were in fact combined. The acceptance of laissez faire as a guiding principle was far less the product of explicit analysis or comparison of any exhaustive set of alternatives[;] prohibited were largely assaults on person or property overwhelmingly regarded as clearly indefensible and the appropriate subject for punitive legislation. In this way, the success of laisses faire removed one of the chief factors responsible for the initial acceptance of laissez faire. By the end of John Mill’s life, the state was no longer what it was during his father’s or Bentham’s time—a corrupt, inefficient instrument whose enactments were widely held in low repute. It had become a relatively honest and efficient body, whose enactments were held in high esteem by the body politic.

The sweeping away of the hindrances to the free movement of men, goods, and capital was followed by the great improvements in economic well being. Yet there obviously remained much misery and poverty to which a passionate humanitarian like Mill could not remain blind. It was perhaps not unnatural that we was willing to sanction action by an honest and much improved state administration to redress grievances. He had no principles of state action by which to test proposals for reform. He was almost certain to minimize or reject entirely the argument—if it were made—that direct interference by the state would threaten that private liberty he prized so highly.  For this argument conflicted with his deep, though naïve, belief in the perfectibility of human beings through education. Once men were educated, he believed, they would become not only wise but also good.--Milton Friedman (September 10, 1948) "Discussion of Paper by V.W. Bladen The Centenary of Marx and Mill" at The Eight Annual meeting of the Economic History Association. Hoover Institution, Collection Title: Milton Friedman papers Container: box 39. [HT David M. Levy]

Bladen's paper can be found here. Originally Friedman had been invited to comment on a paper on laisser faire by J. Bartlett Brebner (which was turned into an influential article: "Laissez Faire and State Intervention in Nineteenth-Century Britain." The Journal of Economic History, 8(S1), 59-73.) From the correspondence at Hoover it's unclear what prompted the move, but Bladen's paper was the opening and keynote to the conference, and Friedman did not object. The other commentator on the program is Elizabeth Schumpeter--the schedule adds in parenthesis: "Mrs. Joseph A." And it would be lovely to locate her comments. 

Bladen was late sending Friedman his paper, and this may help account for the fact that much of Friedman's discussion reads as a riff on A.V. Dicey's (1905 [1914]) Law & Public Opinion rather than a detailed criticism of Bladen (although Friedman added a passage on trade unionism that clearly is critical of Bladen). Throughout Friedman's writings Dicey is an important source, not the least his better studied (1951) “Neo-Liberalism and its Prospects” Farmand, 17 February 1951, pp. 89-93 [recall this post] and his (1962) "Is a Free Society Stable?" New Individualist Review [recall here] some other time I will return to that. (The 1962 piece draws on themes from the manuscript I am discussing today.) And while in today's post 'Marx' is clickbait in the title, I will return to Friedman's comments on Marx, too. Okay, with that in place, let me turn to the text.

Friedman attributes to Dicey (1835 – 1922) a kind of road to serfdom thesis in which Mill's good intentions lead not just to the prevailing support for collectivism that Dicey diagnoses as the effect of Mill's writing at the end of the nineteenth century, but also that the collectivist reforms proposed by Mill would (now quoting Friedman) "seriously threaten political liberty" in virtue of the gradualism that Mill advocated and the tendency to attribute difficulties consequent intervention to the "defects of the price system." Crucially, for Friedman it's the historical experience of Marx's effect on the Russian revolution that halts the English road to serfdom. 

Now, in his analysis Friedman ignores the role of imperialism, and the opportunities for rents this provided, in changing the political culture of nineteenth century liberalism. Hobson, for example, argued that this undermined the pacific, free trade coalition. And while Dicey has less nostalgia for this coalition, he concurs with Hobson's diagnosis. {Of course, given Mill's own advocacy for a civilizational mission of British imperialism, it's not as if this lets Mill off the hook.} It is worth noting that Dicey thinks that imperialism (and high taxation that is the effect of it) may well have slowed the road to serfdom process that Friedman attributes to him (see, especially, the 1914 introduction to the second edition, and chapter XII).

It's a bit odd that Friedman misses the significance of (financial and military procurement) rents to imperialism. Because earlier, in describing the rise of laissez faire, Friedman argues in a public choice vein, that “The Benthamites devoted much attention to improving public administration. Their success in this connection was as great as in establishing a large measure of laissez faire, and the two achievements are not of course unrelated. The establishment of laissez fair enormously reduced the benefits which civil servants could confer on private individuals and greatly lessened the incentive or opportunity to break laws.” 

As an important aside, I am pretty confident that Friedman had read Hayek's Road to Serfdom by 1948. And there is no sign in his 1948 argument that he is as critical of Hayek in the way that his later use of Dicey in 1962 suggests (recall here). 

What's neat about the material I have quoted above is that according to Friedman the key defect in Mill's political economy is that "he had no principles of state action by which to test proposals for reform." That is, the central problem that Mill faces in using state action to ameliorate the plight of the poor and miserable, is that according to Friedman Mill lacks -- and now I am using terminology common to Mill, J.N. Keynes, Friedman, and Foucault -- an art of government.

In fact, (recall) we know from his correspondence with Stigler (Hammond & Hammond) that by 1948 Friedman had started working on his (1953) "Methodology of Positive Economics" paper that uses that very terminology. And that Friedman ends up echoing Mill by treating the art of economics as dependent on empirical science. For it’s this science that provides the knowledge that constitute at least part of the rules of how one gets from given ends to proper outcomes. That is, the dependence of the art on positive science is epistemic in character. And so lurking here is a more fundamental (Marshallian) criticism of not just Mill's art of government, but his political economy more generally one that attributes to Mill a kind of violation of a do no harm principle in political life. To be continued.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rawlsian Minutiae, Mill, and Free Speech

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

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

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

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

The following is from p. 352 in Knight:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

From p. 343:

 

The Great Endarkenment, Part I

Perhaps eventually an overall Big Picture will emerge—and perhaps not: Hegel thought that the Owl of Minerva would take wing only at dusk (i.e., that we will only achieve understanding in retrospect, after it’s all over), but maybe the Owl’s wings have been broken by hyperspecialization, and it will never take to the air at all. What we can reasonably anticipate in the short term is a patchwork of inference management techniques, along with intellectual devices constructed to support them. One final observation: in the Introduction, I gave a number of reasons for thinking that our response to the Great Endarkenment is something that we can start working on now, but that it would be a mistake at this point to try to produce a magic bullet meant to fix its problems. That turns out to be correct for yet a further reason. Because the approach has to be bottom-up and piecemeal, at present we have to suffice with characterizing the problem and with taking first steps; we couldn’t possibly be in a position to know what the right answers are.
Thus far our institutional manifesto. Analytic philosophy has bequeathed to us a set of highly refined skills. The analytic tradition is visibly at the end of its run. But those skills can now be redirected and put in the service of a new philosophical agenda. In order for this to take place, we will have to reshape our philosophical pedagogy—and, very importantly, the institutions that currently have such a distorting effect on the work of the philosophers who live inside them. However, as many observers have noticed, academia is on the verge of a period of great institutional fluidity, and flux of this kind is an opportunity to introduce new procedures and incentives. We had better take full advantage of it.--Elijah Millgram (2015) The Great Endarkenment: Philosophy for an Age of Hyperspecialization, p. 281

There is a kind of relentless contrarian that is very smart, has voracious reading habits, is funny, and ends up in race science and eugenics. You are familiar with the type. Luckily, analytic philosophy also generates different contrarians about its own methods and projects that try to develop more promising (new) paths than these. Contemporary classics in this latter genre are Michael Della Rocca's (2020) The Parmenidean Ascent, Nathan Ballantyne's (2019) Knowing Our Limits, and Elijah Millgram's (2015) The Great Endarkenment all published with Oxford. In the service of a new or start (sometimes presented as a recovery of older wisdom), each engages with analytic philosophy's self-conception(s), its predominate methods (Della Rocca goes after reflective equilibrium, Millgram after semantic analysis, Ballantyne after the supplements the method of counter example), and the garden paths and epicycles we've been following. Feel free to add your own suggestions to this genre.

Millgram and Ballantyne both treat the cognitive division of labor as a challenge to how analytic philosophy is done with Ballantyne opting for extension from what we have and Millgram opting for (partially) starting anew (about which more below). I don't think I have noticed any mutual citations.  Ballantyne, Millgram, and Della Rocca really end up in distinct even opposing places. So, this genre will not be a school.

Millgram's book, which is the one that prompted this post, also belongs to the small category of works that one might call 'Darwinian Aristotelianism,' that is, a form of scientific naturalism that takes teleological causes of a sort rather seriously within a broadly Darwinian approach. Other books in this genre are Dennett's From Bacteria to Bach and Back (which analyzes it in terms of reasons without a reasoner), and David Haig's From Darwin to Derrida (which relies heavily on the type/token distinction in order to treat historical types as final causes). The latter written by an evolutionary theorist.* There is almost no mutual citation in these works (in fact, Millgram himself is rather fond of self-citation despite reading widely). C. Thi Nguyen's (2020) Games: Agency as Art may also be thought to fit this genre, but Millgram is part of his scaffolding, and Nguyen screens off his arguments from philosophical anthropology and so leave it aside here.

I had glanced at Millgram's book when I wrote my piece on synthetic philosophy, but after realizing that his approach to the advanced cognitive division of labor was orthogonal to my own set it aside then.++ But after noticing intriguing citations to it in works by C. Thi Nguyen and Neil Levy, I decided to read it anyway. The Great Endarkenment is a maddening book because the first few chapters and the afterward are highly programmatic and accessible, while the bulk of the essays involve ambitious, revisionary papers in meta-ethics, metaphysics, and (fundementally) moral psychology (or practical agency if that is a term).  The book also has rather deep discussions of David Lewis, Mill, and Bernard Williams. The parts fit together, but only if you look at them in a certain way, and only if you paid attention in all the graduate seminars you attended.

Millgram's main claim in philosophical anthropology is that rather than being a rational animal, mankind is a serial hyperspecializing animal or at least in principle capable of hyperspecializing serially (switching among different specialized niches it partially constructs itself). The very advanced cognitive division of labor we find ourselves in is, thus, not intrinsically at odds with our nature but actually an expression of it (even if Millgram can allow that it is an effect of economic or technological developments, etc.). If you are in a rush you can skip the next two asides (well at least the first).

As an aside, first, lurking in Millgram's program there is, thus, a fundamental critique of the Evolutionary Psychology program that takes our nature as adapted to and relatively fixed by niches back in the distant ancestral past. I don't mean to suggest Evolutionary Psychology is incompatible with Millgram's project, but it's fundamental style of argument in its more prominent popularizations is. 

Second, and this aside is rather important to my own projects, Millgram's philosophical anthropology is part of the account  of human nature that liberals have been searching for. And, in fact, as the quoted passages reveal, Millgram's sensibility is liberal in more ways, including his cautious preference for "bottom-up and piecemeal" efforts to tackle the challenge of the Great Endarkenment.+

Be that as it may, the cognitive division of labor and hyperspecialization is also a source of trouble. Specialists in different fields are increasingly unable to understand and thus evaluate the quality of each other's work including within disciplines. As Millgram notes this problem has become endemic within the institution most qualified to do so -- the university -- and as hyper-specialized technologies and expertise spread through the economy and society. This is also why society's certified generalists -- journalists, civil servants, and legal professionals -- so often look completely out of their depth when they have to tackle your expertise under time pressure.** It's his diagnosis of this state of affairs that has attracted, I think, most scholarly notice (but that may be a selection effect on my part by my engagement with Levy's Bad Beliefs and Nguyen's Games). Crucially, hyperspecialiation also involves the development of languages and epistemic practices that are often mutually unintelligible and perhaps even metaphysically incompatible seeming. 

As an aside that is really an important extension of Millgram's argument: because the book was written just before the great breakthroughs in machine learning were becoming known and felt, the most obvious version of the challenge (even danger) he is pointing to is not really discussed in the book: increasingly we lack access to the inner workings of the machines we rely on (at least in real time), and so there is a non-trivial sense in which if he is right the challenge posed by Great Endarkenment is accelerating. (See here for an framework developed with Federica Russo and Jean Wagemans to analyze and handle that problem.) 

That is, if Millgram is right MacAskill and his friends who worry about the dangers of AGI taking things over for rule and perhaps our destruction by the machine(s) have it backwards. The odds are more likely that our society will implode and disperse -- like the tower of Babel that frames Millgram's analysis -- by itself. And that if it survives mutual coordination by AGIs will be just as hampered by the Great Endarkenment, perhaps even more so due to their path dependencies, as ours is.

I wanted to explore the significance of this to professional philosophy (and also hint more at the riches of the book), but the post is long enough and I could stop here. So, I will return to that in the future. Let me close with an observation. As Millgram notes, in the sciences mutual unintelligibility is common. And the way it is often handled is really two-fold: first, as Peter Galison has argued, and Millgram notes, the disciplines develop local pidgins in what Galison calls their 'trading zones.' This births the possibility of mutually partially overlapping areas of expertise in (as Michael Polanyi noted) the republic of science. Millgram is alert to this for he treats a lot of the areas that have been subject of recent efforts at semantic analysis by philosophers (knowledge, counterfactuals, normativity) as (to simplify) really tracking and trailing the alethic certification of past pidgins. Part of Millgram's own project is to diagnose the function of such certification, but also help design new cognitive machinery to facilitate mutual intelligibility. That's exciting! This I hope to explore in the future. 

Second, as I have emphasized in my work on synthetic philosophy, there are reasonably general theories and topic neutralish (mathematical and experimental) techniques that transcend disciplines (Bayesianism, game theory, darwinism, actor-network, etc.). On the latter (the techniques) these often necessetate local pidgins or, when possible, textbook treatments. On the former, while these general theories are always applied differently locally, they are also conduits for mutual intelligibility. (Millgram ignores this in part.) As Millgram notes, philosophers can make themselves useful here by getting MAs in other disciplines and so facilitate mutual communication as they already do. That is to say, and this is a criticism, while there is a simultaneous advancement in the cognitive division of labor that deepens mutual barriers to intelligibility, some of this advance generates possibilities of arbitrage (I owe the insight to Liam Kofi Bright) that also accrue to specialists that help transcend local mutual intelligibility.** So, what he takes to be a call to arms is already under way. So, let's grant we're on a precipice, but the path out is already marked. 

 

 

Milton Friedman (Schumpeter, Foucault, Dicey, and Hayek) on the Possibility of a Free Society

THERE IS A STRONG TENDENCY for all of us to regard what is as if it were the “natural” or “normal” state of affairs, to lack perspective because of the tyranny of the status quo. It is, therefore, well, from time to time, to make a deliberate effort to look at things in a broader context. In such a context anything approaching a free society is an exceedingly rare event. Only during short intervals in man’s recorded history has there been anything approaching what we would call a free society in existence over any appreciable part of the globe. And even during such intervals, as at the moment, the greater part of mankind has lived under regimes that could by no stretch of the imagination be called free.

This casual empirical observation raises the question whether a free society may not be a system in unstable equilibrium. If one were to take a purely historical point of view, one would have to say that the “normal,” in the sense of average, state of mankind is a state of tyranny and despotism. Perhaps this is the equilibrium state of society that tends to arise in the relation of man to his fellows. Perhaps highly special circumstances must exist to render a free society possible. And perhaps these special circumstances, the existence of which account for the rare episodes of freedom, are themselves by their nature transitory, so that the kind of society we all of us believe in is highly unlikely to be maintained, even if once attained.--Milton Friedman (1962) "Is a Free Society Stable?" New Individualist Review.

In yesterday's post, I said something about the intellectual significance of New Individualist Review to the political development of what came to be known as 'fusionism' Stateside and its Hayekian context (and so the mainstreaming of neoliberal ideas, 'neoliberal' in its historical sense, that is). I also suggested that Friedman's essay (I quoted the first two paragraphs above) should be understood in context of the surprisingly critical reception of the Road to Serfdom thesis in this context. (Friedman's friend and colleague, Stigler, savages it.)

I wish I had read Friedman's essay before I blogged on Graeber and Wengrow's recent Dawn of Everything because one way to understand the significance of their book is that it challenges the idea that a genuinely free society is rare. Now, obviously Friedman and Graeber/Wengrow don't mean the exact same thing with a 'free society.' While Friedman is a right or 'individualist' libertarian he is clearly not an anarchist, so it's not the case that Graeber/Wengrow refute Friedman's claim here. (And it's pretty clear that Graeber & Wengrow would not accept Friedman's claim that we're living in a free society.) But since Graeber/Wengrow and Friedman agree that legally sanctioned coercion is itself generally problematic (in ways that mainstream liberals often think not, alas), my suggestion is not altogether farfetched. Because it's pretty clear that the many urban polities that Graeber and Wengrow admire are open to commerce while rejecting state organized/sanctioned/rent-seeking (etc.) capitalism (which is what draws Friedman's ire, too).

So, one way to react to Friedman's set-up of his argument is that he is (tacitly) working with a biased sample or a historically limited data-set (something Friedman may well appreciate given his kind of research in monetary history) because, and this is the interesting part, he is drawing on a literature (shared by Marxists and certain classical liberals alike) that presupposes something like an idea of progress (that has already occurred) and that is distinctly Eurocentric/Western. This can be checked because Friedman's main source is Lectures on Law and Public Opinion in the Nineteenth Century (1905) by A. V. Dicey. Dicey clearly impressed Friedman because he also frames Friedman's argument in his important earlier (1952) essay "Neo-Liberalism and its Prospects” that I have discussed here.

What makes Friedman's "Is a Free Society Stable?" interesting are  two important observations. First, and this one (I am pretty sure) he has repeated elsewhere but here clearly credits Dicey with noticing, is that the consequentialist arguments that tend to support classical liberalism all violate what we might call 'naïve empiricism' or 'lived experience' because they require a kind of statistical or aggregate perspective:

The argument for a free society, he goes on to say, is a very subtle and sophisticated argument. At every point, it depends on the indirect rather than the direct effect of the policy followed. If one is concerned to remedy clear evils in a society, as everyone is, the natural reaction is to say, “let’s do something about it,” and the “us” in this statement will in a large number of cases be translated into the “government,” so the natural reaction is to pass a law. The argument that maybe the attempt to correct this particular evil by extending the hand of the government will have indirect effects whose aggregate consequences may be far worse than any direct benefits that flow from the action taken is, after all, a rather sophisticated argument. And yet, this is the kind of argument that underlies a belief in a free or laisser-faire society.

So, that also means (and this is Dicey's initial observation) that arguments for a free society have a kind of utopian quality ahead of their existence. And even while such societies exist, given the abstracted/philosophical nature of the argument it is "says Dicey...really amazing and surprising...that for so long a period as a few decades, sufficiently widespread public opinion developed in Britain in favor of the general principle of non-intervention and laisser-faire as to overcome the natural tendency to pass a law for the particular cases." (The natural tendency is, thus, rooted in what I called the naïve empiricist assumption which is attributed to ordinary life.) Obviously, as an aside, Marxists would take Dicey's argument, if they cared to take it seriously, and suggest that it is violence (and then ideology) that has to do the job to get people to accept a free society.

I don't mean to suggest such utopianism is required. For, as Friedman notes there is another route that is at least partially ground in experience:

one of the factors that led Bentham and the Utilitarians toward laisser-faire, and this is a view that is also expressed by Dicey, was the self-evident truth that if you wanted to get evils corrected, you could not expect to do so through the government of the time. The government was corrupt and inefficient. It was clearly oppressive. It was something that had to be gotten out of the way as a first step to reform. The fundamental philosophy of the Utilitarians, or any philosophy that puts its emphasis on some kind of a sum of utilities, however loose may be the expression, does not lead to laisser-faire in principle. It leads to whatever kind of organization of economic activity is thought to produce results which are regarded as good in the sense of adding to the sum total of utilities. I think the major reason why the Utilitarians tended to be in favor of laisser-faire was the obvious fact that government was incompetent to perform any of the tasks they wanted to see performed.

So, you might say that on Friedman's view Bentham and the radicals that followed backed themselves into laisser-faire as a kind of second best (or n-th) best option. What's undoubtedly correct here is that there is no intrinsic connection between free society and Utilitarianism. But Friedman ignores how important Adam Smith (and Hume) is to Bentham's intellectual development and the more important political radicals.

The second really interesting observation by Friedman is set up by him noting that "Dicey’s argument is enormously strengthened by an asymmetry between a shift toward individualism and a shift away from it." (For all his admiration, Friedman doesn't mince words about a kind of Victorian complacency in Dicey.) By contrast, in virtue of accepting the rarity of a free society (and a kind of explanatory parsimony), Friedman treats the mechanisms one might posit in a road to serfdom thesis as symmetrical (even potentially identical) with those that lead to a free society. Friedman is motivated to do so, also, by his reflection on Schumpeter's acceptance of the Marxist idea that capitalism is doomed to failure (but with this twist that "[W]hereas Marx’s view was that capitalism would destroy itself by its failure, Schumpeter’s view was that capitalism would destroy itself by its success."). 

As an aside, if you accept my claim that Hayek is Friedman's real target in his 1962 article (which I claim is plausible on contextual grounds), what's neat about this is that he inscribes the road to serfdom thesis in a larger debate, inspired by Marxism, about the historical necessity of capitalism, and its subsequent demise. And in Friedman (recall here and here) not unlike Foucault in Lecture 7, The Birth of Biopolitics, 21 February 1979. Birth of Biopolitics, Schumpeter is crucial for linking the debates about monopoly capitalism and the road to serfdom thesis. (And unlike Foucault, Friedman, in turn, treats Schumpeter as a variation on Veblen and Burnham as a variation on Schumpeter--it is really a virtuoso performance by Friedman.) Some other time I will address Friedman's criticism of Schumpeter's thesis.

The mechanism, which has some unacknowledged roots in Marx's analysis, is as follows:

the development of laisser-faire laid the groundwork for a widespread respect for the law, on the one hand, and a relatively incorrupt, honest, and efficient civil service on the other, both of which are essential preconditions for the operation of a collectivist society. In order for a collectivist society to operate, the people must obey the laws and there must be a civil service that can and will carry out the laws. The success of capitalism established these preconditions for a movement in the direction of much greater state intervention.

But then Friedman adds:

The process I have described obviously runs both ways. A movement in the direction of a collectivist society involves increased governmental intervention into the daily lives of people and the conversion into crimes of actions that are regarded by the ordinary person as entirely proper. These tend in turn to undermine respect for the law and to give incentives to corrupt state officials....the erosion of the capital stock of willingness to obey the law reduces the capacity of a society to run a centralized state, to move away from freedom. This effect on law obedience is thus one that is reversible and runs in both directions. It is another major factor that needs to be taken into account in judging the likely stability of a free system in the long run.

And this argument is directed against both Marxist necessity and the road the serfdom. Because countervailing forces are naturally developed as one goes down the road to serfdom: "Once government embarks on intervention into and regulation of private activities, this establishes an incentive for large numbers of individuals to use their ingenuity to find ways to get around the government regulations." (And this, in turn, starts to swallow up time of the more earnest government officials, etc.) Friedman recognizes his claims are speculative (much more historical work is needed), but a reader of Friedman comes away thinking that free societies are rarely stable, if one means by that, in equilibrium; that is, they are always in some kind of crisis (again this anticipates Foucault's idea that liberalism is co-constituted with crisis); but these crises of a free society have, on the whole also a self-correcting quality over the medium term.

It's easy to mock Friedman's position as I have reconstructed it as a kind of providential optimism. But perhaps such providentialism is required within political life; the great danger of it is that encourages complacency about the possibility of a crisis that fatally undermines a free society.

 

 

Stigler (and Milton Friedman) on Hayek's Road to Serfdom Thesis with a nod to Condorcet and even Rawls at the end

The conservative, or the traditional liberal-or libertarian, or whatever we may call him-will surely concede this proposition in the large. He will say that this is precisely the problem of our times: to educate the typical American to the dangers of gradual loss of liberty. One would think that if liberty is so important that a statue is erected to her, then the demonstration that a moderate decline of personal freedom leads with high probability to tyranny would be available in paperback at every drugstore. Such a book is not so easy to find. In fact, it may not exist. 

    No one will dispute that there have been many tyrannies, and indeed it is at least as easy to find them in the twentieth century as in any other. Moreover, the loss of vital liberties does not take place in a single step, so one can truly say that a tyranny is entered by degrees. But one cannot easily reverse this truism and assert that some decrease in liberties will always lead to more, until basic liberties are lost. Alcoholics presumably increased their drinking gradually, but it is not true that everyone who drinks becomes an alcoholic.
    An approach to a demonstration that there exists a tendency of state controls to increase beyond the limits consistent with liberty is found in Hayek's Road to Serfdom. But Hayek makes no attempt to prove that such a tendency exists, although there are allegations to this effect. This profound study has two very different purposes: (1) A demonstration that comprehensive political control of economic life will reduce personal liberty (political and intellectual as well as economic) to a pathetic minimum. (I may observe, in passing, that this argument seems to me irresistible, and I know of no serious attempt to refute it. It will be accepted by almost every one who realizes the import of comprehensive controls.) (2) If the expansion of control of economic life which has been under way in Britain, the United States, and other democratic western countries should continue long enough and far enough, the totalitarian system of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy will eventually be reached. This second theme is not a historical proposition-and no historical evidence was given: it is the analytical proposition that totali­tarian systems are an extreme form of, not a different type from, the democratic "welfare" states to which the book was addressed. Hayek was telling gentlemen drinkers, and especially some Englishmen-who were becoming heavy drinkers-not to become alcoholics.
    The thirty-five years that have passed since the outbreak of World War II have seen further expansions of political control over economic life in the United States, and in most western European nations except Germany. Yet no serious diminution of liberties deemed important by the mass of educated (or unedu­cated) opinion has taken place. Another hundred years of governmental expansion at the pace of these recent decades would surely destroy our basic liberties, but what evidence is there that such an expansion will continue? Quite clearly, no such evidence has been assembled. But it is one thing to deny that evidence exists for the persistence of present trends to the point where they will endanger our liberties, and quite another to deny that such a momentum exists. Or, differently put, where is the evidence that we won't carry these political controls over eco­nomic life to a liberty-destroying stage?
    This may be an impeccable debating point, but it will carry much less conviction than an empirical demonstration of the difficulty of stopping a trend. When men have projected the tendency of a society to a distant terminus, they have invariably committed two errors. The tendency develops in a larger number of directions than the prophet has discerned: no tendency is as single-minded as its observer believes it to be. And the tendency encounters in the society other and contradictory forces which eventually give the course of events a wholly different tum. We have no reason to believe that the current prophets are any wiser.
    So I conclude: we should fish or cut bait. On the subject of liberty the conservative should either become silent or find something useful to say. I think there is something useful to say, and here is what it is.--G.J. Stigler (1975) The Citizen and the State, pp. 17-18

Among Hayek scholars it is a well known fact that the Chicago economist (and self-described 'conservative'), G.J. Stigler, was rather critical of Hayek's road to serfdom thesis. (See especially the rather intense exchanges between Bruce Caldwell, one side, and Andrew Farrant with Edward McPhail, on the other.) But I haven't seen the point discussed in wider scholarship on the nature of neoliberalism, so it can't hurt to amplify its existence. In addition, to the best of my knowledge Caldwell, Farrant and McPhail rely on Stigler's (1988) autobiography, Memoirs of an Unregulated Economist, and on his earlier essay (1961) "Reflections on the loss of Liberty." This early essay was reprinted with modifications as "reflections on Liberty" as chapter 2 in The Citizen and the State. The passage quoted above is pretty much identical in substance to the earlier essay. But in virtue of its context -- it's now part of a larger argument in a book -- it is worth revisiting in its incarnation in the Citizen and the State, which is Stigler's contribution to the liberal art of government (and art of economics). 

When Stigler's essay first appeared in 1961 in New Individualist Review, which originated at The University of Chicago and had strong connections  to its faculty, he had just returned to The University of Chicago where Hayek was still in the Committee on Social Thought. The Review was a central vector in the intellectual revitalization of the anti-New Deal forces on the Right, and in fact Hayek and his students played a central role in it. Interestingly enough, the Review published major criticisms of Hayek. In addition to Stigler, Hamowy's "Hayek’s Concept of Freedom: A Critique" also originated in it. Sometimes Hayek is not named, but the critical thrust of the argument is clear enough (see, for example, Milton Friedman's "Is a Free Society Stable?"). This original context also helps to explain Stigler's emphasis on educating 'typical Americans.' (In those days conservatives could not take their own typicality for granted.)

Recall that a road to serfdom thesis holds that an outcome unintended to political decisionmakers is foreseeable to the right kind of observer and that in addition the outcome leads to a loss of political and economic freedom over the medium term. I use ‘medium’ here because the consequences tend to follow in a time-frame within an ordinary human life, but generally longer than one or two years (which is the short-run), and shorter than the centuries’ long process covered by (say) the rise and fall of civilization. Crucially for a road to serfdom thesis, along the way, in order to ward off some unintended and undesirable consequences, decisions are taken that tend to lock in a worse than intended and de facto bad political unintended outcome. It is pretty clear that Stigler attributes a road to serfdom thesis in this sense to Hayek. (A lot of the debate in Hayek studies is whether Hayek thought the welfare state must lead to serfdom.)

Now, Stigler's overall point is to try to turn the road to serfdom thesis from prophecy to a theory that can be tested empirically, which is treated as useful speech. Part of its utility is to "frighten" modern man "with [empirical] evidence." (18) But it is worth noting that lurking in Stigler's argument is a hypothesis that social tendencies naturally encounter and, perhaps even trigger, "other and contradictory forces which eventually give the course of events a wholly different turn." So Stigler's account presupposes, in fact, a commitment to a certain kind of pluralism as a social reality which can counterbalance serfdom inducing forces. (At the very end of this long post I return to characterize this pluralism.) To put it politically: there is a clear commitment to the proposition that New Deal Coalition can be defeated.

As an aside, Stigler's point about the plurality of social forces that may be a countervailing internal balance seems to anticipate Milton Friedman's ideas on the matter. In 1962, Friedman writes, "I HAVE BEEN EMPHASIZING forces and approaches that are mostly pessimistic in terms of our values in the sense that most of them are reasons why a free society is likely to be unstable and to change into a collectivist system. I should like therefore to turn to some of the tendencies that may operate in the other direction." ("Is a Free Society Stable?"). And Friedman thinks this is also an effect of the fact that (the side-effects of) tendencies in one direction become visible and become grounds for mobilization. (Since the two were close colleagues it's possible Friedman is the source of Stigler's point despite publishing later.) Friedman's essay is worth reading because he puts the road to serfdom thesis in the context of Dicey's arguments and a general awareness that liberal societies are historically rare.

The evidence of loss of liberty Stigler will point to are primarily economic, but some of them (media monopolies/oligarchies, land-management) clearly do have an effect on political issues. Yet, it's worth noting that when Stigler first published the piece, Jim Crowe had not been defeated even formally in the South. So, this, and the claim just before the passage I quoted above that "our franchise is broad...we have the political system we want" (16) suggests remarkable complacency about the state of civil rights (this is no surprise (recall) after Brad de Long called attention to his racist and condescending essay directed at students and civil rights leaders a few years later).

In fact, in The Citizen and the State, "The Loss of Liberty" follows a chapter called, "The Unjoined Debate." It seems to have gone unnoted that there, too, he address the Road to Serfdom thesis:

Let us begin with the most fundamental issue posed by the increasing direction of economic life by the state: the preservation of the individual's liberty-liberty of speech, of occupation, of choice of home, of education.
The situation is presently this: everyone agrees that liberty is important and desirable; hardly anyone believes that any basic liberties are seriously infringed today. The conservatives believe that a continuation of the trend toward increasing political control over economic life will inevitably lead to a larger diminu­tion of liberty. The liberals believe that this contingency is remote and avoidable. The more mischievous of the liberals point out that the conservatives have been talking of the planting of the seeds of destruction of liberty for decades-perhaps the seeds are infertile. Liberty is thus not a viable subject of controversy; neither side takes the issue seriously.
The lack of any sense of loss of liberty during the last two generations of rapidly increasing political control over economic life is of course not conclusive proof that we have preserved all our traditional liberty. Man has an astonishing ability to adjust to evil circumstances.
It is not possible for an observant man to deny that the restrictions on the actions of individuals have been increasing with the expansion of public control over our lives. I cannot build a house that displeases the building inspector. I cannot teach in the schools of the fifty states because I lack a license, although I can teach in their universities.

This list of controls over men can be multiplied many-fold, but it will not persuade the liberal that essential freedoms are declining. The liberal will point out that restrictions on one man may mean freedom for another. (5-6)

What's notable about this passage is that the veracity of the road to serfdom thesis has been elevated to it being "the most fundamental issue" in the modern administrative state. But simultaneously he thinks the conservative has engaged in "indolence parading as prophecy" with his "seeds-of-destruction talk." (6) That is to say on the acknowledged key question -- can liberalism [in its wider sense] survive? -- Stigler thinks Hayek's case is underwhelming. 

What's also notable, and I realize I am testing your patience, is that Stigler clearly resists the idea that liberty is merely freedom of contract and simultaneously elevates freedom of speech beyond the other (unmentioned) political liberties. This is, in fact, no surprise because the chapter/essay is framed by the idea that "the controversy between conservatives and liberals in the United States is so ineffective that is serving the purposes of controversy. The quality of controversy is not only but in fact declining, and what was once a meaningful debate is becoming completely unjoined."  (4). This passage was first written in 1966 (in the middle of the Vietnam War and Civil Rights debates). And even if you reject much of Stigler's political stance in the age (as I do), the fact that this idea is conventional wisdom of our own age (about the recent past) should give us pause. There is a sense in which liberal democracy is co-extensive with the further thought 'that the quality of controversy has declined.' Foucault (recall) picks up on this and treats liberal democracy as co-constituted with a sense of crisis.

Somewhat surprisingly, I think, the proper purpose of debate according to Stigler is announced on the following page, "the believer in democracy, or even more basically a believer in the dignity of man, has a moral obligation to seek to remove differences of opinion among groups by honest argument." (4) And this will also make "progress into our policies" possible. (13) We are not far removed from Rawls' idea that conceptual engineering will make overlapping consensus possible. And the reason for this position in Stigler is ground in a kind of negative Condorcet-ian insight (Condorcet goes unmentioned) that "the larger the group, the more certain we can be that is not insane in the sense of being divorced from apparent fact and plausible reasoning." (4, emphasis in original) And so their common position reflects "common factual beliefs and the same causal processes." (4) If large groups disagree, Stigler implies, they are both latching onto something fundamental in social reality. 

Now, Stigler recognizes that eliminating "differences of opinion on public policy" is not likely because there are "unresolved factual and theoretical questions" and so "alternative policies" may well be equally reasonable. (13) This passage echoes Friedman's views in 1953 (which in turn echo Stigler's own views from the 1940s). But he also allows genuine value disagreement: "we shall still have men [sic] disagreeing on the comparative roles of individual responsibility and social benevolence." (13) That is, when confronted by the social tensions of the 1960s, at least one leading Chicago economists became receptive to the reality of value pluralism. And thought it important enough to repeat it in his major book on liberal, political statecraft.