Digressions&Impressions

On Hazony and Bourke on Burke and Frank S. Meyer, and the risks of Freedom

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Lodged inside Yoram Hazony's Conservatism: A Rediscovery is also a polemic against what came to be known as 'fusionism.' (Recall my series of posts on Hazony's book recall the first one here; here the second; here the third one; and the fourth.) I quote Hazony: "This alignment of liberals and conservatives was assembled, first and foremost, by William F. Buckley Jr., the young founder and editor of the conservative weekly, National Review. But its principal theoretician was his close associate, Frank Meyer, who was credited with having devised a “fusion” of liberalism and conservatism appropriate to conditions in America during the Cold War. That this “fusionism” was politically successful cannot be denied...Meyer’s fusion was also a version of Enlightenment liberalism." Chapter VI (section 5)

In fact, when Hazony turns to Meyer's (1962) in Defense of Freedom, Hazony is scathing: "Meyer’s book is devoted to repeated attacks on Edmund Burke, Russell Kirk, and other defenders of the Anglo-American conservative tradition. Among other things, Meyer accuses Burke of having inspired a standpoint characterized by “an organic view of society, by a subordination of the individual person to society, and therefore, by a denial that the freedom of the person is the decisive criterion of a good polity.”"

Intrigued by Hazony's characterization of Meyer (how could the architect of fusionism, which I think a historic mistake, be an Enlightenment liberal?), I decided to read Meyer (1909 – 1972). Vefore I get to what I want to say about Meyer today, I should note that Hazony subtly misrepresents Meyer here. Meyer is not a critic of Burke the conservative. He is, however, a critic of Kirk and other so-called 'new Conservatives' who have conflated Burke "the practical statesman," whose pronouncements were (to use Huntington's taxonomy [recall yesterday's post]) situational not a political philosophy, with an oracular prophet of a movement. According to Meyer, Burke could take for granted the worth of the (1688) constitution he defended.* That is, Meyer actually admires Burke. (This is not to deny that Meyer also disagrees with some of the late Burke's pronouncements on reason, but he tends to agree with Burke's underlying commitments on liberty.)

Meyer thinks that certain pronouncements of Burke, when treated as an eternal philosophy, lend themselves toward an organicist conception of society and a dangerous form of status quo bias, that what is, is right. As Hazony discerns (and Meyer acknowledges in a note) this is de facto a version of Strauss' criticism of the Burke Strauss found popular among American conservatives.

As an aside, if I am right about this then Richard Bourke’s characterization of recent conservatism (recall yesterday’s post) is misleading. For, our contemporary historical interest in twentieth century conservatism is due in large part to its political success in its ‘fusionist guise’ Stateside. (There is no interest in Kirk today other than as the partial trigger of fusionism.) By design, then, fusionism also rejects the very ‘Burke myth’ Bourke diagnoses from the start. How this could be so forgotten is, in fact, a very interesting question; but about that some other time.

Okay, with that as set up, let me turn, in conclusion, to the main point of today's digression. Meyer thinks reason is, then, required both as a grounds of criticism of any status quo and in the articulation of the means by which the proper end of society, virtue, must be pursued. (Meyer is in contemporary parlance, a certain kind of indirect liberal perfectionist.) In fact, he puts the point in the following way in a passage from 1964 that I find especially congenial: 

In the political and economic realm, however, these truths establish only the foundation for an understanding of the end of civil society and the function of the state. That end, to guarantee freedom, so that men may uncoercedly pursue virtue, can be achieved in different circumstances by different means. To the clarification of what these means are in specific circumstances, the conservative must apply his reason. The technological circumstances of the twentieth century demand above all the breaking up of power and the separation of centers of power within the economy itself, within the state itself, and between the state and the economy. Power of a magnitude never before dreamed of by men has been brought into being. While separation of power has always been essential to a good society, if those who possess it are to be preserved from corruption and those who do not are to be safeguarded from coercion, this has become a fateful necessity under the conditions of modern technology.--"Freedom, Tradition, Conservatism," Reprinted from What is Conservatism? (1964), p. 14 in Libertyfund edition of In Defense of Freedom and Related Essays. [Emphasis added.]

That is, we can describe Meyer's core insight that the pursuit of individual virtue requires negative freedom. But that effective negative freedom, or the freedom of choice worth having, also requires certain social conditions. And in particular, Meyer advocates the (legal) destruction of (to use Sam Bagg's felicitous phrase) concentrated powers (which prevent and curtail formal freedoms in all kinds of ways). Meyer here echoes what I take to be one of the true insights of ordo-liberalism of a generation before. (The ORDOs are more realistic, however, about how much state capacity this presupposes.)

Meyer repeatedly emphasizes that his own position requires fallible contextual judgment. Meyer recognizes that allying with conservatism often entails, I quote from the same page, being "associated with authoritarianism." In context, there is, in fact, a real difference between opposing the state's leviathan to defend the "principle of federalism that reserves to the states or to the people all power not confided to the national authority" before the break up of Jim Crow or after; to worry about sociological scientism in Brown vs Board of Education while agreeing with its verdict in the particular case (or to use such scientism to reject the verdict), etc. 

The previous paragraph is not written by a moralist. If one agrees with Meyer's framework it is worth recognizing that opposing concentrated power in the name of making the pursuit of private virtue as free and responsible agents possible is not sufficient by itself to guard against rather significant errors of moral and political judgment. For, one must also make reasoned, and fallible, judgments about the order in which these powers are tackled and by way of coalitions with those whose ends one only partially shares. What makes Meyer's philosophy especially notable, even tragic, is that his is a most articulate sensitivity toward the risk of such grave error as a feature of freedom, that is, ineliminable from the human condition.

• This first appeared at: <On Hazony and Bourke on Burke and Frank S. Meyer, and the risks of Freedom (substack.com)> a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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See pp. 61-62 and p. 10 of the Libertyfund edition of In Defense of Freedom and Related Essays.  (P. 10 is a reference to Meyer's 1955 essay, Collectivism Rebaptized."

On Olaf Stapledon, Technology induced Extinction Risk, and the Awesome new Atomic and AGI power

 The First Industrial Revolution was almost entirely dependent on coal, oil and falling water, which sources occur only in certain localities. Scientists have been exploring the possibilities of deriving industrial power from the tides, from differences of temperature (which means ultimately from sun-light) and from the disintegration of atoms. It is impossible to say yet what success will be attained in these ventures. But it seems probable that the result will be at least a far wider distribution of the sources of power. It may well be that the perfected production of atomic power will involve a vast and complex enterprise undertaken under a world-wide authority, and the universal distribution of electric current derived from atomic generators. As it is certainly probable that the transmission of power in the form of electricity is going to become very much cheaper and more efficient, ample power will be available everywhere. Each village throughout the world will either tap a high tension grid or generate its own power. As to atomic energy, its frightful dangers are obvious. It is not inconceivable that the belt of minute planets, the Asteroids, between Mars and Jupiter, is the wreckage of a world which its inhabitants accidentally destroyed by the unwise use of atomic energy. It would be a pity to turn our planet into another belt of Asteroids. But atomic energy, though dangerous, promises fabulous source of power in comparison with which coal and oil are quite insignificant. It opens up the possibility of transforming the whole face of the planet according to man's needs. It could , for instance, easily render the Arctic islands and the Antarctic Continent warm and habitable. And atomic power for industrial purposes, we are told, is already “in the offing.” Meanwhile the danger of atomic warfare is increasingly frightful. Short of exploding the planet, atomic energy used as a weapon might do so much damage that the present war, in comparison, would seem an affair of flint arrows and axes. The abolition of war becomes more urgent as man's power increases.--Olaf Stapledon (1946) Youth and Tomorrow, pp. 74-5

Olaf Stapledon (1886 –  1950) is known only to aficionados of science fiction now (Last and First Men and Star Maker are classics that shaped the genre throughout the twentieth century, and arguably kept Spinozistic ideas alive in a positivist age), but in his writings he also helped invent 'futurology' and 'transhumanism.'  I hasten to add, in case you are are of more discerning taste, J.L. Borges was an admirer of Stapledon. Stapledon obtained a PhD in philosophy from University of Liverpool under Alexander Mair (hitherto unknown to me). Stapledon's first book (1929), A Modern Theory of Ethics: A Study of The Relations of Ethics and Psychology, was clearly based on his PhD. Judging by citations, it made no impact on the scholarly world of his day. 

The quoted passage is from a short book written in preparation of a post (second) world war age. In the book, Stapledon is  committed to renewed internationalism (he clearly regrets the failures of the League of Nations) and a form of democratic socialism that can avoid dictatorship (even though Stapledon is clearly very impressed by achievements of the Soviet Union). About his politics some other time more.

The passage caught my attention because it entertains the possibility of technology induced human/species extinction of the species that deploys a new technology. This extinction possibility is in the news again thanks to the (recall) impact of Parfit's writing on longtermism and (the publicity surrounding) rapid developments in AI/AGI. 

Contemplating civilizational collapse or the extinction of species are not new thoughts in the history of philosophical writing or social theory. As I have noted (recall), in book 3 of Plato's Laws, (677a-678a) Plato's Athenian stranger entertains the possibility that the Earth has experienced frequent catastrophic natural events (he explicitly mentions massive floods and pandemics, but it's easy to imagine he also assumes earthquakes and perhaps even meteorite impacts) that have wiped out whole populations of humans and other species of animals, and has set-back the technological capability of civilizations for millennia. (We know from the Hebrew Bible account of the flood and other ancient writings that Plato is not unique in this.)

It's also not new to think that civilizational collapse is endogenous to civilizational life. Arguably this is one of the the natural ways to understand the Hebrew Bible's account of the scattering after the tower of Babel; in (recall) The Great Endarkenment, Elijah Millgram suggests that the linguistic diversification and differentiation (and subsequent cultural implosion and scattering) is itself the effect of the advanced division of labor that makes the building of the tower possible. (This is the great set-piece that opens Millgram's (2015) book.) Social theory going back to Ibn Khaldun is rife with cyclical, civilizational processes in which the key drivers of expansion and success also become self-undermining.

It's also not wholly unusual to recognize the potential civilizational collapse that is endogenous to one's own civilizational life. The writings of a number of elite authors of the final century of the roman republic are pretty clear on the fact that endurance of the roman republic is threatened by its own past history of success (due to conquest imported habits of luxury and/or empowered generals to aim for political power). Of course, often the point of recognizing the potential of civilizational collapse is to create a call to political arms, or a philosophical prophecy, to prevent the collapse from occurring (we can see hints of this in Plato's story of Atlantis). But sometimes the doom is inevitable or fated (as some of the Roman authors clearly came to think).

But, as Parfit de facto notes in Reasons and Persons, there is a non-trivial difference between foreseeing civilizational collapse of one's civilization and the collapse of one's whole species. Now, absent a certain kind of ethical or axiological cosmopolitanism, it seems obvious to me that most authors of the past lamented the possible collapse of their own civilization and showed remarkable indifference to the possible collapse of larger humanity. (This is an option that Parfit does not consider, but if he had he would clearly have suggested that this shows a clear error in their implied axiology.)

Now, Stapledown's writings suggest he is a cosmic cosmopolitan. And in this respect, he clearly fits in a philosophical tradition tracing back to Fontenelle, Huygens, and Kant.  So, it's no surprise he contemplates the possibility of endogenous technologically induced extinction among aliens as an example worth avoiding in the harnessing of atomic power. There are some hints in Youth and Tomorrow that it was written during wartime, and interestingly enough he does not mention the use of atomic weapons. But just before the passage quoted at the top of this post, he claims that "the manufacture of atomic bombs necessitates organisation of production on a national scale and the danger of the misuse of these terrific weapons forces world-wide organisation upon us." (p. 73; emphasis added)

It's a bit unfortunate that Stapledown does not clarify what he means by 'misuse' of atomic weapons here. (He was a pacifist during World War I, but not during the second world war.) Does he mean their deployment, or does he worry about them falling in the hands of rogue states/actors, or does he worry about nuclear world war? But he clearly thinks that atomic power isn't merely a technological problem, but also a political problem on a global scale. After all, he thinks that a world-wide organization is required to handle it.

In the quoted passage at the top of this post, Stapledon is discussing what we now call the 'Kuiper belt' (or Edgeworth-Kuiper belt') [UPDATED: see Ken McLeod's comment below.] But was only then recently proposed by K.E. Edgeworth in a 1943 paper in the Journal of the British Astronomical Association. It would be worth trying to figure out if Stapledon knew Edgeworth personally. In Edgeworth there is no mention of an alien civilization. I am not claiming that Stapledon is the first to propose the hypothesis that the asteroids are themselves the effect of a technologically induced existential collapse, but given this timeline he has to be among the first.* Clearly the function of Stapledon's hypothesis is to alert us to avoid this fate (not, perhaps, to create a testable hypothesis for planetary explorers of the solar system).*

It is, of course, an open question to what degree global institutional control of atomic power mitigates risk or accelerates existential risk. But since this post is long enough as is, I close with the following observation: the possibility of technology induced (endogenous) extinction is, thus, not new with the possibility of AGI. Our society has lived with the possibility of technology induced (endogenous) extinction of humanity for almost eighty years now. To say that is not to underestimate the existential risk that follows from the introduction of new technology. But it is worth noting that we have a history of living with, and perhaps managing, such risk, and perhaps we can learn from this history. For, while it would be nice if there were a technological fix to the existential extinction risk of AGI, it's more likely than not we'll need institutional and social mitigation of such risk. 

 

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. 

 

 

Zera Yacob and Intellectual traditions; a note on the origins of Africana Philosophy

What should we make of this similarity? Note that it would be anachronistic to describe Zera Yacob’s argument as “Lockean,” for the Second Treatise of Government was published over two decades after Zera Yacob wrote his Hatäta. This points us toward the limits on the usefulness of viewing Zera Yacob and Locke as sharing an early modern world. Consider Richard Tuck’s Natural Rights Theories: Their Origin and Development (1979), which explores categories of Roman law, locates the birth of natural rights discourse in the late medieval period, and examines figures like Hugo Grotius, John Selden, and Thomas Hobbes before giving Locke attention in the final chapter. Scholarship like this places Locke in a certain lineage of thought, which shaped him just as much as the political context of his times. Zera Yacob does not stand in that lineage. Indeed, when comparing Zera Yacob to Descartes and Locke, we should remember that Locke read and was influenced by Descartes, learning from his approach to philosophy even while rejecting central views of his. There is a sense in which Locke and Descartes share a modernity that Zera Yacob does not, a point that need not lead us to deny that Zera Yacob is a modern philosopher but rather to say that he inhabits a different modernity. (p. 130)

[W]hile Zera Yacob can be seen as similar to Descartes but must be recognized as outside the lineage leading to and branching out from him, Amo, like Locke, did philosophy in the wake of Descartes and critically responded to his work. (p. 132)

 

What I think this means is that, for Cugoano, as for Zera Yacob, the idea of natural rights is not really embedded within a modern European intellectual tradition. Certain formulations of it may be paradigmatically European, but it is ultimately a concept that transcends cultural boundaries, which also means that one can come up with paradigmatically Fanti formulations of it. Cugoano thus does not fit neatly into the framework of modern Africana philosophy as a form of modern European philosophy into which Amo and Haynes fit. But, of course, neither is he disconnected from the European tradition in the way Zera Yacob is. Cugoano, I believe, represents modern Africana philosophy as a convergence of African and European intellectual trajectories, a hybrid case of radicalizing European thought from within, as with Haynes, while also modernizing African thought through comparing indigenous and foreign viewpoints and using reason to decide what makes the most sense, like Zera Yacob.

I take Cugoano to be, in this way, a model for Africana philosophy going forward. The riches of the Western philosophical tradition must be valued but also made sharper and more liberating through the use of a critical philosophy of race lens. At the same time, there must be constant efforts to transcend the Western framework by rooting Africana philosophy in oral and literary traditions from Africa and the diaspora. In many instances, we may come to a conclusion like Cugoano’s about natural rights: that what we thought of as particularly Western is not and that the cross-cultural recognition of a shared concept may strengthen our sense of commitment to the value at stake. (p. 138)

The quoted passages are all from Chike Jeffers' (2017) "Rights, Race, and the Beginnings of Modern Africana Philosophy." The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Race. This is a text that I assign as required background reading to the session that roughly goes from Las Casas to Cugoano and discusses slavery, mercantile political economy, and rights in my lecture course on the History of Political Theory. This is a required course with enrollments between 500 and 600 students. Jeffers' paper is short and hits the sweet spot because it offers helpful historical context, makes important distinctions, and it explains the ongoing significance of the material discussed. It's also astonishingly brief, and clear. I warmly recommend it. 

 

But as I was preparing my quiz about the text, and so re-reading it, I became uneasy in reflecting on the passages quoted above. To be sure, the underlying idea of what Africana philosophy should be going forward (articulated in final paragraph, but also made available throughout the chapter) strikes me as rather attractive and is not something I am going to challenge here. In fact, in some ways I am going to reinforce Jeffers' main point because I want to suggest that Zera Yacob is much more connected to what Jeffers calls 'the European tradition,' although what I prefer to call the (partially overlapping) 'Abrahamic-Platonic traditions' that also shaped non-trivially Descartes and Locke. What do I have in mind?

 

First, Yacob (1599 – 1692) is, in part, polemicizing against the Jesuits and, now I quote Jeffers, "as “Franğ,” a Ge’ez word that literally means “foreigner.” But note that he uses that word in a way that is interchangeable with “Catholic.”" (p. 131) And, in fact, if you read Zera Yacob’s Hatäta "or “inquiry,” commonly called his Treatise" (p. 128) it's very clear that Yacob was rather acquainted with their teachings (which he largely rejects).+ Now, Descartes was taught by Jesuits at La Flèche. (Descartes was there between 1607-1614.) So, there is a non-trivial sense in which they were exposed to largely the same views. (The Jesuits standardized their curriculum.) Obviously, I am not claiming that they had the same teachers (although Jesuits did move around so it's not wholly impossible they encountered the same people--how cool would that be?), but I would be amazed if the Iberian Jesuits who are his targets did not bring with them ideas shaped by, say, Francisco Suárez's metaphysics and moral/political theory, including his theory of rights. (Suárez was an intellectual celebrity of the age.) Suárez is rather important to Descartes and, as I have noted (here), Suárez also shaped the social contract tradition (including Hobbes and perhaps -- I will not make the case today -- Locke).

 

Second, Yacob is quite clearly evoking Augustine's Confessions at various points. This is not just in virtue of the auto-biographical style, but also in particular details of the narrative (not the least the early sinful behavior and the attraction to various alternative intellectual traditions). One important commonality is the significance of David's Psalms to both. I don't think either can do without an explicit or implicit allusion to Psalms on a single page! (I suspect one can write a PhD about this.) I return to this below. Either way, Descartes' debts to Augustine, and Augustine's Confessions has itself generated a huge scholarly enterprise. In saying this, I don't mean to suggest there are no differences between Descartes or Yacob, but just to point to the fact that they share in an overlapping tradition even if they may be mediated by different sources and contexts. (I don't mean to suggest that Descartes himself was especially shaped by Psalms--I leave that aside, although intrigued to reflect on it.)

 

Third, a good chunk of (what we might call) the philosophy in the Hatäta draws on the Book of Wisdom (which Yacob, as is common, attributes to Salomon). I don't want to make this claim more precise here. But while Yacob is plenty critical of the particularity and some of the laws of Judaism, the Hebraic sources in his text are abundant. This he does share with Hobbes and Locke. I don't mean to suggest that the sources are exclusively Jewish; I would love to know, for example, if Al-Ghazali's Deliverance of Error (with with the Hatäta and the Meditations share non-trivial commonalities) was circulating among the Muslim scholars he encountered and debated. 

 

But it's only if one denies that the Book of Wisdom (which itself is shaped by Hellenistic philosophy) is philosophy or insists that the Hebrew Bible is non-philosophy (as some who are in the grip of  the opposition between Jerusalem and Athens might claim) that this is not part of the overlapping tradition(s). (I have argued against this claim in many digressions, but start here.) In addition, it's quite clear that Yacob identifies with David's enforced exile from court, and perhaps (I put this more tentatively) even the Israelites in the dessert. 

 

So, while it is undoubtedly true that Yacob and Descartes and/or Locke did not share the exact same modernity, I also suspect that in some non-trivial respects they did. It is striking that both politically and religiously the question of religious pluralism and the role of using state authority to impose a single religion dominate France and Ethiopia (and England) in their life-times, including rather dramatic reversals of fortune. I am not especially fond of 'modernity' because it is often inscribed in complex conceptual hierarchies (involving 'feudalism,' civilization vs barbarism, etc.), but it can be useful to point to the symmetry of conditions that these thinkers faced.

 

Does anything hinge on this? Well, I am certainly not the first to note debts of Africana philosophy to Hebraic and Abrahamic sources more broadly. But when in 2019 Peter Adamson (who has collaborated with Jeffers) writes, in the context of Zera Yacob that the "Ethiopian philosophical tradition simultaneously belongs to at least two larger stories: that of philosophy within various Christian traditions of the East, and that of African philosophy," that is factually true, but it effaces the Hebraic contribution to at least the former (and, perhaps the latter--in so far as Hebraic philosophy itself was developed, in part, under African skies). A similar claim can be made "about ancient Egyptian philosophy" (which Adamson goes on to mention) in so far as Philo is a rather signicant presence in it. 

I don't think this is merely a matter of geographic score-keeping. It has important contemporary political salience when 'philosophy' plays a role in identity formation and articulation (as it seems to do within Africana philosophy--that is not a criticism!). That there is also a very clear Hebraic root in Yacob [!] and all the figures discussed in the Beginnings of Modern Africana Philosophy (with perhaps partial exception of Amo) is, thus, non-trivial (if only because the bondage and exodus of Israel resonate within it). It also may facilitate discussion today among Africana philosophers and those philosophers that takes Hebraic sources seriously. This is no small matter given the polarizing effects of Zionism and Palestinian nationalism in our world.

 

Including the Hebraic tradition(s) into the narrative may also be epistemically useful if Yacob is right. Because he thinks that when different traditions agree, we are more likely to find truth, whereas their differences reveal their errors--and in religious conflict we de facto always defend error. It's probably more natural to read him as saying that this is so because when traditions agree they latch onto the truth (a thought like this can be found in Montaigne, too). But I'd like to read him Spinozistically as suggesting, and I'd like to argue for this at some point that this is his view, that through dialogue when we find ways to agree, and so live in peace with each other, we instantiate or generate the truth.*

 

Montesquieu, Spinoza, Federalism, and Political Hebraism

IF a republic be small, it is destroyed by a foreign force; if it be large, it is ruined by an internal imperfection.

To this twofold inconveniency democracies and aristocracies are equally liable, whether they be good or bad. The evil is in the very thing itself, and no form can redress it.

It is therefore very probable that mankind would have been, at length, obliged to live constantly under the government of a single person, had they not contrived a kind of constitution that has all the internal advantages of a republican, together with the external force of a monarchical, government. I mean, a confederate republic.

This form of government is a convention, by which several petty states agree to become members of a larger one, which they intend to establish. It is a kind of assemblage of societies, that constitute a new one, capable of increasing by means of farther associations, till they arrive to such a degree of power, as to be able to provide for the security of the whole body....

From hence it proceeds that Holland, Germany, and the Swiss Cantons, are considered in Europe as perpetual republics.

The associations of cities were formerly more necessary than in our times. A weak defenceless town was exposed to greater danger. By conquest, it was deprived not only of the executive and legislative power, as at present, but moreover of all human property‡.

A republic of this kind, able to withstand an external force, may support itself without any internal corruption; the form of this society prevents all manner of inconveniences.

If a single member should attempt to usurp the supreme power, he could not be supposed to have an equal authority and credit in all the confederate states. Were he to have too great an influence over one, this would alarm the rest; were he to subdue a part, that which would still remain free might oppose him with forces independent of those which he had usurped, and overpower him before he could be settled in his usurpation.

Should a popular insurrection happen in one of the confederate states, the others are able to quell it. Should abuses creep into one part, they are reformed by those that remain sound. The state may be destroyed on one side and not on the other; the confederacy may be dissolved, and the confederates preserve their sovereignty.

As this government is composed of petty republics, it enjoys the internal happiness of each; and, with regard to its external situation, by means of the association, it possesseth all the advantages of large monarchies.

THE Canaanites were destroyed by reason they were petty monarchies, that had no union nor confederacy for their common defence: and, indeed, a confederacy is not agreeable to the nature of petty monarchies.

As the confederate republic of Germany consists of free cities, and of petty states subject to different princes, experience shews us, that it is much more imperfect than that of Holland and Swisserland.

The spirit of monarchy is war and enlargement of dominion: peace and moderation is the spirit of a republic. These two kinds of government cannot naturally subsist in a confederate republic.--Montesquieu, Charles. Complete Works, vol. 1 The Spirit of Laws. T. Evans, 1748, pp. 165-166. Book IX Chapters 1-2

It is fairly well-established that these paragraphs inspired in various ways Madison and Kant's Perpetual Peace. It seems to be less well known that Montesquieu is echoing Spinoza's Political Treatise (3.15-16 [recall here; here]),* where Spinoza explains how one can use conventions by which several small states agree to become members of a larger voluntary confederation. 

That we're in the ambit of Spinoza (and Machiavelli) is clear from Montesquieu's concern with corruption (which is a major theme of Spinoza's political writings, or so I argue here) and also by Montesquieu political reading of the Biblical narrative in the quoted paragraph (which also has Machiavellian roots). For, rather than emphasizing the Caananites' idolatry or Jewish providential election, Montesquieu remarks that the conquest of land of Canaan was due to institutional weakness of the Canaanites and, de facto, institutional strength of the Biblical Jews. Montesquieu echoes here, and offers a gloss, on chapter 17 [paragraphs 44-55] of the Theological Political treatise. There Spinoza had emphasized the confederate nature of the conquering Biblical Jews and compared them explicitly to the Dutch in his own day [III/210]. (Spinoza notes that the Dutch lack a common temple.)

While I don't mean to suggest that Montesquieu is slavishly echoing Spinoza here, there are further hints of Montesquieu's debts to Spinoza's chapter 17 of the TTP. For, in the quoted passage from Montesquieu I read six terse arguments in favor of confederate republics:

1. Common protection against foreign enemies. This is the defensive character of a confederacy.
2. Protection against usurpation by an individual citizen of one of the confederate states.
3. Protection against insurrection by the masses of one of the confederate states.
4. Ability to combat local rent-seeking
5. Ability to reform local institutions.
6. Ability to survive implosion of member units.

Except for the first argument, the other five all involve the capacity to notice problems in a member unit of the confederacy and for the remaining units to act on this diagnosis. And what these five arguments presuppose, thus, is that the confederacy lacks a central power that can over-awe the member units, so that the member units can be self-correcting with each other. And, in fact, near the end of chapter 17 of TTP, Spinoza notes that by turning the confederacy into a  monarchy (which does have such a central power), the first Hebrew state became vulnerable to usurpation [see paragraphs 83-111],  insurrection [107-108], corrupt/rent-seeking [106], and the inability to reform the institutions piecemeal [111].** (See also, the treatment of Benjamin by the other tribes at 17.57. And while Spinoza does not explicitly anticipate the sixth it's logically presupposed in his argument (including the survival of Judah after Israel was destroyed).

 

 

 

 

 

Hazony on Conservatism, part III

Regardless of its scale, the introduction of the state alters the order of tribes and clans in one decisive way. The ability of families, clans, and tribes to conduct independent policies in matters of war, peace, and the punishment of major crimes is brought to an end. The competition among families, clans, and tribes, which constantly led to bloodshed in the pre-state order, becomes, in the state, a competition in which violence is proscribed, thereby establishing a sphere of domestic peace over a certain territory. While rivalry among loyalty groups continues unabated within this domestic sphere, it is now conducted in accordance with norms of speech and behavior that have been adopted to assure a certain measure of honor and influence to all sides. So long as this balance of honor and influence is maintained, the peaceful coexistence and alliance among the families, clans, and tribes living under the state can be maintained.

The state thus introduces a profound transformation in human life. But the fundamentals of human nature are not changed by it. Human beings continue to form families, clans, and tribes. And while these loyalty groups are to various degrees domesticated—meaning that they become more peaceable among themselves—they nonetheless retain their hierarchical structure, their tendency to adopt a common judgment based on the views of leading figures within the hierarchy, and their intense competition for honor and influence. All this continues, along with the insult and anger that occur when one’s family or tribe has been disregarded or dishonored and its influence slighted. And if the norms of domestic speech and behavior, which have been established to guarantee a measure of honor and influence to all sides, are not upheld, then the peaceful coexistence and alliance among the tribes will quickly disintegrate. At such times, the old order of tribes and clans inevitably reasserts itself. Then the competition among the tribes becomes violent again, and their assertions of independence from one another grow more strident, until finally the state exists in name only or not at all. Yoram Hazony (2022) Conservatism: A Rediscovery, Chapter: V "The Purposes of Government,"pp. 234-235)

This is the third in a series of posts on Hazony's Conservatism (recall the first one here; and here the second one on Hazony's post-feminist conception of the family). And as should be clear by now, I mix exposition with immanent critique (even if sometimes I am bad at hiding my own liberal commitments). Hazony starts the fifth chapter with the claim that "Enlightenment liberalism" -- by which he means an ideology that originates in what he calls a "rationalist manifesto," Locke's Two Treatises of Government (1689) -- has, in virtue of a one-sided focus on the "freedom of the individual," no place for "the national interest, or of the general welfare of the nation, or of the common good of the nation, or of the good of the commonwealth" (p. 223 emphasis in original).

The claim would have surprised Locke, who, after all, put the Latin phrase "Salus populi suprema lex esto" [that is, The health/welfare of the people should be the supreme law"] on the frontispiece of the Two Treatises. Locke goes on to remind the reader (at II.158) that  it "is certainly so just and fundamental a rule, that he, who sincerely follows it, cannot dangerously err." Even Jefferson -- who is the high priest of Enlightenment liberalism in Hazony's book -- appealed to the principle in a 1810 letter to John B. Colvin (28 September) in order to explain that the executive sometimes can ignore written law (and offering several examples of this behavior from one of Hazony's heroes, George Washington).*

I do not mean to suggest there is no genuine contrast between liberalism in all its varieties and Hazony's conservatism. One cluster of contrasts becomes clear if we look at how Hazony describes the purpose of government and the function of statecraft in it. As the quoted passage shows, the state transforms the state of war (constant bloodshed) into a situation of "intense competition for honor and influence." (At another point, Hazony describes a "bitter" competition. (p. 237)) The Hobbesian or Spinozistic state of nature is always a latent possibility within the ordinary life of the polity. Hazony doesn't mention Spinoza, but his view is actually rather close to Spinoza.** Unlikes Hobbes and Spinoza, Hazony understands the state of nature and peace not in terms of individuals, but in terms of hierarchically organized loyalty groups (families, congregations, tribes, clans, nations, etc.).

As a crucial aside, for Hazony such loyalty groups are not primarily organized around genes or race. He makes this clear in a crucial note attached to the introduction where he distinguishes his views from those of "the “white identity” movements of the extreme right, which seek a politics based on biological race."  His loyalty groups share a "heritage, usually including a common language or religious traditions, and a past history of joining together against common enemies." In the note, Hazony emphasizes his is "the traditional Anglo-American conception of the nation, inherited from the Bible." In context he does not explain what he means, but there is a passage (recall here), drawing on Talmud Megillah 13a,  in his earlier God and Politics in Esther, centered on an interpretation of the daughter of the Pharao's actions at Exodus 2: 5-6, which shows that for Hazony through one's actions one can become part of, and be adopted by, a loyalty group. (In Graeber and Wengrow's Dawn of Everything one finds (recall) a description of such a mechanism in their account of pre-Columbian conquest practices of the Turtle and Bear clans.)

It's worth noting that the mechanism of inclusion (and exit) from a loyalty group is ground in a kind of individual conscience that the pharaoh's daughter exercises. Conscience is emphasized in Hazony's (protestant and American) sources, but Hazony ignores it in Conservatism. But the freedom to act on conscience -- and some room for exit -- is crucial for Hazony's scheme if one wish to avoid loyalty groups to become despotic. This is tacitly recognized in the moving, concluding autobiographical personal chapter. But it does not have a comfortable theoretical place in his general argument (because it would move his stance too close to Locke's and presumably open the door to a species of liberalism.)

Be that as it may, a key function, then, of statecraft or the art of government in Hazony's political theory is to manage or balance the intense competition for honor and influence among the hierarchically organized, social pillars of state. The point of managing it is to generate internal cohesion, so as to allow not just domestic peace, but also for a "unified front...[and] power projected" against foreign rivals. (p. 237) Without such proper management the cohesion and "bonds of loyalty" will quickly fall apart.

Hazony explicitly recognizes that the skill-set involved in managing honor and influence among traditional loyalty groups is distinct from the leadership within traditional loyalty groups. But Hazony treats the problem as one involving issues of scale due to lack of repeated personal interaction. When one has a liberal sensibility one immediately recognizes a further problem for such statecraft in Hazony's account. Honor is intrinsically zero-sum. This is a feature and not a bug within traditional loyalty group in Hazony's account, but it turns into a dangerous impediment to stability in the interactions among loyalty groups, absent a common enemy. 

Hazony rejects the liberal solution which, roughly, is to displace the political onto non-zero-sum 'growing the pie activities' (increase trade -> wealth and cosmopolitan structures). So he offers an alternative:

To put this matter as simply as possible: The state and government are traditional institutions of certain societies. Their continued existence therefore depends entirely on the cultivation of bonds of mutual loyalty among the rival tribes that constitute the nation; and these bonds, in turn, depend on the conservation and transmission of particular traditions of speech and behavior that allow rival tribes and parties to compete, while at the same time honoring one another. There is, in other words, a causal relation between the cultivation and transmission of certain traditions within society and the existence of the state and state government. If appropriate traditions are not intensively and successfully cultivated, then the alliance among these rival tribes will end, and both the state and its government will cease to be. (237)

One effect of this is that political management becomes an intense task not just for the leadership of the state but also the leadership of the loyalty groups. And the glue that holds them together is constituted by traditions (including nationalism and a national religion(s)).

This is not incompatible with democratic life and constitutional parliamentarianism (as Hazony emphasizes). In fact, in principle, it can also be characterized by pluralism (which Hazony ignores). Some version of such an approach is familiar from, say, Lijphart's account of the social pillar system of Dutch Consociationalism. This is characterized by quite intense elite interaction (as Hazony emphasizes, too). Hazony's account does not really emphasize the pluralist possibilities. (The word 'pluralist' occurs, I think, only once in a reference to Isaiah Berlin's analysis of Selden, who is, in fact, a key progenitor of Hazony's intellectual thought.) In a later post, I discuss the motives and grounds for as well complications of Hazony's rejection of a pluralist consociationalism, and his insistence on adopting Christianity as a public religion. 

The problem here is that the existence of such glues does not solve the zero-sum nature of honor. Hazony himself kind of recognizes this because he returns to it again as follows:

What is needed above all else is to do the practical political work of cultivating ties of mutual loyalty among the various tribes and parties. This involves constantly balancing their interests and needs against one another, and ensuring that this balance leads to a renewed exchange of honors among them. Where the national political leadership has cultivated such mutual loyalties among the differents [sic] tribes and factions that constitute the nation, then the state can be firm and its government effective. (p. 239)

So, the domestic art of government requires constant political management of interests and needs of loyalty groups. The cultivation of "ties of mutual loyalty" is -- echoing Hume, who is self-consciously echoing Montesquieu -- in the service of the national spirit of unity. But the spirit of unity can only be stable if the loyalty groups have a commerce in honors among them. The problem is that such a commerce (it's the nature of the beast) has winners and losers.  

The problem for Hazony's scheme is not, as one might suspect I'll argue, that a system of hierarchy ground/founded on honor is intrinsically unstable (although it is always teetering on the brink of violence), but rather that it requires unusual if not rare and rather demanding skill to manage it properly. And as far as I can tell, he offers no mechanism such that the nation or the leaders of the nation can recognize and regularly elevate the right sort of leader into the position. (For as he notes this is not a skill that is exhibited in the life of loyalty groups themselves.) If anything, since in his scheme such leadership accrues non-trivial honor, one should expect the honor loving to seek it in particular. But there is no reason to believe that honor loving and the practical judgment needed to manage the honor loving are naturally conjoined. 

Orwell, Pynchon, Spinoza, and the stability of texts and records (Pt III)

[46] We lack, not only all these things, but also and especially, a phraseology of this language. For time, the devourer, has obliterated from the memory of men almost all the idioms and manners of speaking peculiar to the Hebrew nation. Therefore, we will not always be able, as we desire, to find out, with respect to each utterance, all the meanings it can admit according to linguistic usage. Many utterances will occur whose meaning will be very obscure, indeed, completely incomprehensible, even though they are expressed in well- known terms.
[47] In addition to the fact that we cannot have a complete history of the Hebrew language, there is the very nature and constitution of this language. So many ambiguities arise from this that it is impossible to devise a method which will teach you how to find out with certainty the true meaning of all the utterances of Scripture. For besides the causes of ambiguity common to all languages there are certain others in this language from which a great many ambiguities are born....

[65] These are all the difficulties I had undertaken to recount arising from this method of interpreting Scripture according to the history available to us. I consider them so great that I don’t hesitate to say this: in a great many places either we don’t know what Scripture really means or we’re just guessing about its meaning without any certainty.-- Spinoza, Theological Political, Treatise Chapter VII, translated by E. Curley.

This is the third and final post in a series on Orwell's 1984 inspired by Thomas Pynchon's (2003) "Introduction" to it (here is pt 1; pt 2). After this week's controversy (recall), it might seem cheeky that this piece is mediated via Spinoza. But careful readers of the second in the series will not be surprised (I hope). Okay, with that in place, let me turn to Orwell.

After Winston has been tortured, he comes arrives at three slogans, the third of which is: "GOD IS POWER." Now, on the face of it, this is an odd slogan in the context of 1984. For, first it seems religion and theology are altogether outlawed in Oceania, and this in fact only the second mention of 'God' in the book. What mysticism exists is itself (recall) funneled through the creation of Newspeak. Much earlier, God had been mentioned in the context of the Party's rewriting the poems of Kipling, in which 'God' could not be eliminated as a rhyme (with 'rod'--the subject matter is serious, but the scene is hilarious). Shortly after, writing "GOD IS POWER," Winston insists he is no believer.

The slogan itself echoes one of the claims of his torturer, who says, 'We are the priests of power... God is power.' And, in fact, he goes on to claim in one of the more philosophical passages in the book.

Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes: only in the mind of the Party, which is collective and immortal. Whatever the Party holds to be the truth, is truth. It is impossible to see reality except by looking through the eyes of the Party.

And in fact, Winston echoes this argument in the context of writing down the "GOD IS POWER" slogan. 

Now, that God is power is a feature of Spinoza's a priori demonstration of God's existence (see, especially, E1P11S). And there is, in fact, more than a kind of superficial similarity between the de-individualized Party and Spinoza's conception of eternality. I don't mean to press the analogy too far because Spinoza's idealism (yes, I know very controversial) is not of the subjective kind.  And while Spinoza's philosophy certainly risks turning the state into a new idol, he would reject many of the Party's techniques and positions. 

This may all be a bit anachronistic, but it is worth recalling that Orwell certainly thought Swift the first great critic of totalitarianism (see his essay Orwell (1946) "Politics vs. Literature — An examination of Gulliver's travels.") And in a World-War II BBC program, Orwell treats Hobbes "and other 17th century writers" as original predictors of totalitarianisms. So, the connection is not entirely far-fetched.

In particular, in the Appendix to 1984, we are told by a narrator of the distant future that in Oceania, "What was required in a Party member was an outlook similar to that of the ancient Hebrew who knew, without knowing much else, that all nations other than his own worshipped 'false gods'. And, in contrast to Pynchon, I claimed that key features of life in Oceania are modelled on a certain interpretation of the Old Testament. But this is also a problem.

For, from the first, famous sentence of 1984, we are also reminded that we have entered a universal with a certain kind of instability at its core. That the clocks strike "thirteen" is distinctly odd.* Odder still is that when Winston starts his diary, he quickly writes, ‘To begin with he did not know with any certainty that this was 1984. It must be round about that date, since he was fairly sure that his age was thirty-nine, and he believed that he had been born in 1944 or 1945, but it was never possible nowadays to pin down any date within a year or two." The theme is repeated throughout the novel.** This uncertainty about the date is especially odd because in his work, at the Ministry of Truth, which involves fabricating and retouching news-stories in the Times, he encounters the official date on the newspaper every day.

But, of course, that calendric reform coincides with a major political revolution is no surprise. It's happened before. So, the Party could have changed dates for convenience sake. And the fact that Winston is part of the process of permanent falsification (in the ordinary not Popperian sense) means he knows nothing he reads can be trusted. The "terrible" book by the traitor Emmanuel Goldstein ("The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism") turns out to be circulated and written by the Party so Winston's torturer claims. Can he be trusted, who knows?

In fact, and I hate to go meta-textual, but textual instability is even part of the title of Orwell's book, which is often spelled just '1984'; 'nineteen eighty-four' and 'Nineteen Eighty-Four.' And as Pynchon notes, the American edition was almost published without its appendix.

Now, first, Orwell's important political insight, anticipating (recall) Arendt, is that in true totalitarianism the center and near-center is often not just paranoid, but also has no better access to the truth of its own affairs than ordinary citizens or foreigners. In a system like that it cannot develop a true shadow book-keeping. And, as Orwell notes, this also makes collective planning so difficult and self-defeating.

Second, (recall) as Walter Lippmann (building on, as Nick Cowen reminded me, J.S. Mill) emphasized, reliable record-keeping by the state (of birth, death, property deeds, etc.) is one of the bedrocks of many species of modern liberty. Yes, anarchists everywhere and some Foucaultians will see in such legibility an immanent, would-be panopticon. (Pynchon's own writings are worth re-reading for reflection on this.) Even so, reliable record-keeping is the foundation of removing many forms of uncertainty and generating reliable expectations. And when there is little reason for doubt and suspicion about these records, the politics tends to be more temperate. Blessed are the times in which such record keeping can be taken for granted, and is available to all! 

Third, I put the passages of Spinoza at the top of the post because in many ways we readers of 1984 are in the position that Spinoza attributes to the would-be-interpreter of Scriptures. In a way, the Appendix reinforces this point. For, it provides us with an interpretation of the rules of Newspeak that, while compelling, is clearly also post facto and may, in fact, serve it's own political ends. As I noted last week, Pynchon is surprisingly optimist in reading the Appendix as a sign of a restoration of sorts, whereas my two previous posts argue that this need not be so. And because Orwell deliberately does not inform us of the author of the Appendix and his/her intentions, we are pretty much in the same position as Spinoza implies about Scriptures, "we are completely ignorant of the authors (or, if you prefer, Writers) of many of the books, or else we have doubts about them." (TTP VII [58]).

Let me close. I do not mean to suggest that the severe textual and referential instability of and in 1984 reduces it to a kind of meaningless white noise. Spinoza address an objection like this in Chapter X, too:

[42] But perhaps someone will say that in this way I overthrow Scripture completely—for in this way everyone can suspect that it is faulty everywhere. But that would be wrong. 

Something like this seems true of one's reading of 1984. But once one starts pressing on the details, one has to allow major insecurity about one's own judgments of it. Paradoxically, inducing such an experience into the attentive reader may well be one of its aims. 

On Pynchon on 1984

By the time they have left the Ministry of Love, Winston and Julia have entered permanently the condition of doublethink, the anterooms of annihilation, no longer in love but able to hate and love Big Brother at the same time. It is as dark an ending as can be imagined. But strangely, it is not quite the end. We turn the page to find appended what seems to be some kind of critical essay, "The Principles of Newspeak". We remember that at the beginning, we were given the option, by way of a footnote, to turn to the back of the book and read it. Some readers do this, and some don't - we might see it nowadays as an early example of hypertext. Back in 1948, this final section apparently bothered the American Book-of-the-Month Club enough for them to demand that it be cut, along with the chapters quoted from Emmanuel Goldstein's book, as a condition of acceptance by the club. Though he stood to lose at least £40,000 in American sales, Orwell refused to make the changes, telling his agent, "A book is built up as a balanced structure and one cannot simply remove large chunks here and there unless one is ready to recast the whole thing . . . I really cannot allow my work to be mucked about beyond a
certain point, and I doubt whether it even pays in the long run." Three weeks later the BOMC relented, but the question remains, why end a novel as passionate, violent and dark as this one with what appears to be a scholarly appendix?
The answer may lie in simple grammar. From its first sentence, "The Principles of Newspeak" is written consistently in the past tense, as if to suggest some later piece of history, post- 1984 , in which Newspeak has become literally a thing of the past - as if in some way the anonymous author of this piece is by now free to discuss, critically and objectively, the political system of which Newspeak was, in its time, the essence. Moreover, it is our own pre-Newspeak English language that is being used to write the essay. Newspeak was supposed to have become general by 2050, and yet it appears that it did not last that long, let alone triumph, that the ancient humanistic ways of thinking inherent in standard English have persisted, survived, and ultimately prevailed, and that perhaps the social and moral order it speaks for has even, somehow, been restored.--Thomas Pynchon (2003) "Introduction" Nineteen Eighty-Four By George Orwell [HT: Victor Gijsbers]

We know that Pynchon is not the only major novelist that grappled with Orwell's Appendix to Nineteen Eighty-Four; at the end The Handmaid's Tale, Atwood, who according to her own testimony about 1984, "read it again and again," pays homage to it in the "Historical Notes" themselves "Being a partial transcript of the proceedings of the Twelfth Symposium on Gileadean Studies, held as part of the International Historical Association Convention held at the University of Denay, Nunavit, on June 25, 2195." In presenting these historical notes, Atwood, reassures the reader, who may have no taste for (recall) Socratic metaphysics --  "for everything that has come into being destruction is appointed, not even such a fabric as this will abide for all time, but it shall surely be dissolved" (Plato, Republic, 546a)" -- that the "Gilead period," too, will come to an end in some sense. 

Pynchon, who is not exactly known for his optimism, is right to pay attention to the Appendix to 1984, but I am not entirely sure that his hesitant ("perhaps") optimism about what the Appendix signals can withstand scrutiny. His interpretation assumes, first, that the (let's call it) authorial stance of the Appendix has to be taken at face value. That's decidedly odd because 1984 represents us with a world in which just about every text is a forgery of some sorts. (While it would be a mistake to treat them alike, Orwell and Borges were contemporaries, after all.) In fact, much of the action of 1984 consists in the production of forgeries (not just of texts of memories). The production of newspapers by the Ministry of Truth and the torture chambers of Ministry of love have this in common. So, why would the Appendix be any different?

As an aside, the apparent function of the forgeries in Oceania appear to be to produce a totalizing infallibility about everything, not the least the past, of the Party. (No Pope would dream of this!) And what it illustrates is that even if one were to grant (for the sake of amusement) the linguistic idealist, that all is text, what one may call the production values that inform or are exhibited by the production of texts make a huge difference. Linguistic idealism comes in many varieties. If one treats this focus on 'values' as bourgeois, feel free to replace 'production values' with 'means of production' in the previous sentence. In so far as Orwell is a true socialist (and an author), this attention to the conditions of textual production need not surprise. 

But let's stipulate that we need to take the Appendix at face value. You may say, 'What else can we do, after all?' It's true, as Pynchon emphasizes, that the Appendix treats Newspeak as a thing of the past. Given that Pynchon explicitly understands Newspeak as the essence of Oceania, and in his argument tacitly relies on the metaphysical principle, I'll paraphrase Spinoza (E2D2), that when its essence is taken away the entity ceases to be, Pynchon infers from the demise of Newspeak quite reasonably that Oceania must have ended.

Before I get to the merits of Pynchon's argument, a reader may suspect that I will object to Pynchon's metaphysics as an imposition on the world of 1984. Of course, I am assuming you are not the kind of reader who may find my parading of metaphysical jargon quite pedantic. Even so it's worth noting that the core torture scenes in Part III of 1984, emphasize that metaphysics is salient. The torturer, O'Brien, repeatedly, in fact, reminds his victim, Winston Smith, that metaphysics is not his "strong point." So I am not going to object to the form of Pynchon's argument.*

Newspeak is what the philosophers call a final language. In the text -- I have in mind both 1984 and its Appendix -- this is marked by the contrast between the provisional versions (as, I now quote the Appendix, "embodied in the Ninth and Tenth editions of the Newspeak Dictionary") -- and its definitive form "embodied in the Eleventh Edition of the Dictionary."  As we learn from the Appendix and, earlier in the novel, from Syme, who, before he is presumably vaporized, is one of the developers of Newspeak, Newspeak is supposed to be an austere language: its vocabulary culled down, and, through some semantic tools the expressive power of particular words is greatly enhanced, the language's expressive power is curtailed. It's a final language designed to be spoken and used by the Party.**

Now, Syme indeed suggests that the "Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect. Newspeak is Ingsoc and Ingsoc is Newspeak." The narrator of 1984 adds that this is expressed with "a sort of mystical satisfaction." And indeed this idea, the perfection of language, is characteristic of what we may call Enlightenment mysticism (and satirized by Swift). Pynchon's interpretation of 1984 is rooted in Syme's understanding of Newspeak.

The Appendix, which follows Syme's interpretation of Newspeak sometimes literally, omits this mystical claim. I'll quote the Appendix (and then suggest an alternative to Pynchon's interpretation):

The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought--that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc--should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words. Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express, while excluding all other meanings and also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods. This was done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and by stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings, and so far as possible of all secondary meanings whatever.

Unlike Syme, the Appendix places greatest emphasis on the fact that the purpose of Newspeak was to make what in 1984 is called 'Thoughtcrime' impossible. Even a Quine-ean couldn't be heretical through indirect methods in Newspeak. We might say, then, that it is regimentation that is the fundamental function of Newspeak as a final language.

Interestingly enough, this is an aside, the author of the Appendix recognizes that once Newspeak is perfected, it would make translation of books and even complex fragments from older languages into Newspeak in a certain way impossible unless they either referred "to some technical processor some very simple everyday actions." (The Appendix offers the Declaration of Independence as an example of how "impossible" would be to render it into Newspeak.) One wishes (recall) our advocates of formal languages would keep this in mind.

Be that as it may, a more natural interpretation of the demise of Newspeak presents itself now.  For, from the point of view of the Party, the elimination of even possible Thoughtcrime would be self-defeating. For Thoughtcrime grounds the repressive apparatus of the Party. The possibility of Thoughtcrimes are -- as much as the conditions of permanent War -- central to the structure of self-discipline of the Party. The elimination of Thoughtcrime as a category would spell doom to the survival of the Party because it would lose its main means of self-control as a ruling, corporate spirit. It would then have to start codifying laws of some sort and bureaucratize, formalize these. This was not a problem in the world of 1984 because the perfection of Newspeak had been projected, as the Appendix notes in its closing sentence, into a more distant future (2050).

So, a more natural political possibility is that the Party abandoned the project of Newspeak because it saw that its perfection would be self-undermining and incompatible with the ideological needs of Ingsoc in power.*** (By contrast, a socialist language planner like Carnap recognizes that Esperanto, for example, is great for a world of public Enlightenment.) And the Appendix reflects the writings of someone who is intimately familiar with the abandonment of Newspeak (not the demise of Oceania).  Admittedly, there are some passages in the Appendix that exhibit a rather free-thinking attitude: the use of the Declaration of Independence as an example, in particular, is rather cheeky. And it forms the best evidence for Pynchon's interpretation. But the more literal reading of the Appendix understands it as a fragment from a reconstruction of the rise and fall of Newspeak as a social enterprise. That is compatible with the survival of Oceania once the Party realized that the mystical attitude toward Newspeak threatened to make it the essence of Oceania.+

 

 

On Srinivasan, Firestone, and The Young

Now that I am a professor, I confess that some of these arguments don't grip me in the way they once did. Not because I think they are wrong -- I still think they are right -- but because I no longer feel them to be, in a sense, necessary. As a teacher, I see that my undergraduate students, and in some cases my graduate students, for all their maturity, intelligence and self-directedness, are, in an important sense, still children. I don't mean this as a claim about their legal or cognitive or moral status. They are perfectly capable of consent, and have the right to determine the course of their lives just as I have the right to determine the course of mine. I simply mean that my students are so very young. I didn't know, when I was in their place, how young I was, and how young I must have seemed even to those professors who were kind enough to treat me like the fully fledged intellectual I mistakenly thought I was. There are plenty of people my students' age, most of them not in university and will never be, who are adults in ways that  my students simply aren't. My students youthfulness has much to do with the sort of institutions at which I have taught, filled with the sort of young people who have been allowed, by virtue of their class and race, to remain young, even as many of their peers have been required to grow up too quickly.--Amia Srinivasan "On Not Sleeping With Your Students," in The Right to Sex, pp. 147-148.

The vagueness, even repetitive circularity of the passage -- what it is to be "young" or "youthful" is merely  gestured at -- is very uncharacteristic of Srinivasan (an incredibly clear writer). I think the last sentence suggests we're supposed to interpret such youth as innocence (recall 'still children') or privilege (to be contrasted by those who have to grow up too quickly). Part of the problem is that is the "maturity" these young have is meant to be a kind of intellectual sophistication that somehow does not give them what they need in the art of real living. And this is because, and I now I link it up to a broader theme hinted at in Srinivasan's essay, they have been failed by the educational institutions at which Srinivasan teaches. To be sure, being outside these institutions may be worse in other ways (notice that "too quickly.")

I read Srinivasan's Right to Sex just after my first encounter with Firestone's The Dialectic of Sex. [If you reader lack time/patience, please skip this paragraph and next the three until "at this point."] As it happens, Firestone comes off rather badly in The Right to Sex. (To be sure I don't think Srinivasan has a particular animus against Firestone--among philosophers a willingness to criticize is a sign of respect.) Firestone is treated as the exemplary white feminist who "facilitated the resurrection of the timeworn myth of the Black rapist" (p. 11, Srinivasan quoting Angela Davis approvingly.) The Dialectic of Sex "falters critically in its treatment of race and rape." (p.11)) In a different context and in a different essay/chapter, Srinivasan introduces Firestone as one of the Redstockings "pro-woman feminists," who are portrayed as racially insensitive (if not worse) and who had "on the whole little interest in defending the legitimacy of desires beyond the confines of heterosexuality." (78) 

As an extended aside, I think these charges against Firestone are rather uncharitable even if they also reveal something troubling about how she sets up some of her arguments and a pattern of oversights. For example, the passage from Dialectic of Sex, that Davis quotes as evidence (and quoted by Srinivasan) is explicitly about "the black man's feelings about white woman."  These are said to have "intense mixture of love and hate; but however he may choose to express this ambivalence, he is unable to control its intensity." (emphasis in Firestone. In my (2015) edition of Dialectic of Sex this is on p. 100 not p. 110 as Davis suggests.) In so far as black on white rape is being discussed in context it is treated primarily as a *fantasy* and the effect of their dependence. 

Of course, Firestone's chapter as a whole does discuss rather critically the misogyny and abuse by the leaders of Black Power (and other social movements) of women in their movement. And so seems to lack much interest in the historical roots and causes of black nationalism. But the idea that black men want white women 'to be on top of their women' (Dialectic of Sex, p. 96) she attributes to the liberal establishment! (I do not mean to deny that Firestone often presents an extremely reductive and schematic/stereotypical view of black men, but that's a feature of her social freudianism and is true of all groups portrayed.)

Echoing Davis closely on this point, Srinivasan claims that for Firestone "the rape of white women by black men is the result of a natural Oedipal urge to destroy the white father and take and subjugate what is his." As I suggest, I deny Firestone actually claims anything this reductive. But in so far as she makes any claims about such urges, it is in the context of the more important claim she understands racism in "terms of the power hierarchies of the family." And these hierarchies are by no means natural for Firestone. In fact, these hierarchies (and the family-structure  they sustain) must be completely destroyed according to Firestone. For Firestone race is important culturally "only due to unequal distribution of power" in the family and in wider society. 

At this point the reader may wonder what this has to do with the original passage from Srinivasan I quoted above.+ As it happens the chapter on racism in Dialectic of Sex, is preceded by the chapter on childhood. Firestone's key claim in this chapter is that in our culture (both relative to other cultures in history as well as absolutely), children's dependence and subordination is tremendously accentuated. Our culture has created a 'cult of childhood' that serves patriarchy and that harms children and their caregivers (mostly women). And rather than seeing childhood, say, as a kind of apprenticeship into adulthood,* kids today must be happy. And the means to make them happy is to make them safe and provide for fun activities, and so inevitably dependent on the wills and money of their parents. And this is especially so in the modern upper-middle class family.

On Firestone's view, bourgeois kids are kept young (in the sense I think conveyed by Srinivasan) by the shelter and enrichment provided by loving parents. And, in fact, Firestone (rather too romantically) thinks that only "children of the ghettos and the working-class" escape this forced immaturity of the modern family (which she calls the "myth of childhood"). These kids "living on the street" escape. And while Firestone recognizes this escape is very partial (because they are still dependent and "oppressed as an economic class" oddly no mention of race). Given the reality of modern racialized policing and the carceral state (Srinivasan is excellent on this), Firestone undoubtedly was too optimistic (and probably shouldn't have tried to illuminate her theory by appealing to stereotypes and generic statements).

But the point here is about the youthfulness of our students. And here, Firestone is on firmer ground in chapter 4 of The Dialectic of Sex. One way kids are kept young, according to Firestone, is through the education system. In schools, kids are segregated by age from each other as well as the rest of society, and nearly constantly dependent on the approval and evaluation of an adult (or the age-specific peers). Learning is outer-directed (the age-specific curriculum) and "approval conscious." 

In reading Firestone, I was reminded of my son's intense dislike for some of his teachers (who ruined his interest in some topics). This is ordinarily invisible to me, but due to covid and home-schooling, some of his life is more accessible. When I enquired why this was so, he would report that the teachers were patronizing. And this was not just a matter of tone (using the kids-specific-voice), but also the great many arbitrary seeming rules that govern the in-class-room behavior and choice of topics. 

And much to my puzzlement (remembering my neighborhood adventures at age 11), playing with friends on the streets is not-done in his/our London bourgeois environment even when lockdown ended. Playdates happen, if they happen at all, at home under supervision of a parent (mostly mum) or a nanny. (The gendered workforce is alive and kicking.) Outside, on the streets, there is apparently a non-specific threat. (Perhaps life in the the suburbs are really different.) No wonder the multi-player, violent online game is where all the excitement is for him. (Firestone's chapter is very good on what we now call helicopter or protective parenting may generate violent fantasies.) 

In fact, many of the class-room rules that my son finds arbitrary clearly exists in order to control restless boys. (He goes to an all-boys school.) So, they accentuate the dependence felt. The best moment of his year was when he was given some responsibility as a camp councilor. 

As it happens the malicious, insufferable effects of dependence is the great theme of The Dialectic of Sex. For Firestone, the purportedly modern happy childhood, is one never ending humiliation (and shame) of their "dependence, economic and otherwise." (And in this respect structurally resembles women's subordination in the family, and is also structured by it.)  

And, going beyond Firestone, as contemporary colleges (more the ones I teach in, perhaps, than Srinivasan's) become more like giant high schools (often in the name of efficiency or bureaucratic impartiality and fairness) with frequent testing and exams as the main mechanism toward advancement (alongside many rules about how one ought to behave), this dependence, this enforced tutelage continues. (It is also welcomed by the majority of our students, who like the predictability of it.)

Given that Srinivasan also models her account of student-teacher dependence in part on the dependence of the patient on the psycho-analysist (which is structured by a code of ethics in a way that teachers tend to resist), I suspect Srinivasan agrees with Firestone that those kids that excel in our educational students are simultaneously infantilized in some important respects despite the opportunities our (elite) institutions provide them with. 

For Firestone, writing in 1970, this structural dependency was altogether disqualifying of the institution, which together with the other institutions that promote subordination and hierarchy should be abolished. (After the revolution very different kinds of educational institutions are required.) Since those days what she calls the "cult of childhood" has only intensified despite the fact that women's participation in the workforce and income inequality among the sexes has diminished. But she wouldn't be mystified by this because income inequality has increased dramatically, such that our society can be best characterized as oligarchic.

And even though I have a liberal's abhorrence of revolution, Firestone's criticism of the effects of dependency is persuasive (despite being colored by her struggle with Freudianism). As Firestone recognizes, educators are functionaries of extremely hierarchical institutions that for good and bad also extend the (ahh) immaturity of students (even though that is disguised by language that treats them as consumers). Some other time, I hope to return to Firestone's program to abolish the conditions of such dependency (e.g., basic income, abolition of the family, separating child-birthing from biology, using technology to replace drudgery, etc.) and reinterpret them as a liberal project. 

While in some of her writings Srinivasan is receptive to revolution (recall Srinivasan on Stanley here; Srinivasan on Nussbaum here), when confronting the effects of the extended dependency of our students in The Right to Sex, and their teachers' tendency to "assimilate themselves to their students," she does not promote revolution, but advocates self-command, "one must stand back, step away and leave them to get on with it." (148)** 

I have to admit that while I endorse Srinivasan's stance (how could I not, given my own version of it here?), I find Srinivasan's position baffling (unless her previous flirtation with revolution is now reinterpreted as a symptom of her then youthfulness). In other places in The Right to Sex  Srinivasan castigates individualist, liberal responses to feminist criticism that leave the structures and preconditions of subordination intact.  But here, when it comes to our own vocation as teachers it seems Srinivasan recoils from revolution altogether. And, in fact, she even hesitates for many wise and judicious reasons about using the law to "guide culture." (146) 

Now, in re-reading Srinivasan's essay (before publishing this response), it occurs to me that it's possible I missed an important clue. Rather than writing as a revolutionary feminist, in this essay she is appealing to the enlightened self-interest of the professoriate. For given the "trend towards increased regulation of sex on campus," there is an "opportunity for professors, as a group, to think about the aims of pedagogical practice, and the norms of conduct appropriate to achieving them." (142) And in fact, as she reminds us "professors have a strong incentive to take these things serious." So, while still feminist, she is writing conditioned on or presupposing the continued functioning of the very institution (she is writing about and works in).

This, then, and now I am wrapping up, is very much an ameliorative feminism, one -- and now I am quoting the near final lines of the book -- that recognizes a feminism that "need not abjure power" and recognizes its "own entanglement with violence." (178) And while in context of this last essay, Srinivasan is talking about (socialist) proposals to displace the carceral state, we get a glimpse in these essays of an intersectional feminism that already assumes if not its own partial victory then at least its recognized "ethical authority." (178)

 

 

The History of Federalism, More's Utopia, Spinoza, and Quentin Skinner (II)

It is acknowledged, however, that self-government in this literal sense poses some almost insurmountable difficulties. Of these the most obvious, as Harrington observes, is that 'the whole body of the people' is 'too unwieldy a body to be assembled'.

Sir Thomas More had put forward one possible solution in his Utopia of 1516, at the time when the ideal of the civitas libera was first being seriously canvassed in England. A genuine res publica, More suggests, must take the constitutional form of a federated republic. One of the first things we learn about the newly discovered island of Utopia is that its citizens live in fifty-four self-governing cities that manage their own affairs by means of annually elected magistrates chosen from among themselves. Milton enthusiastically takes up the idea in his Ready and Easie Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth, in which he ends by proposing that 'every countie in the land' should become a kinde of subordinate Commonaltie'. The effect will be to enable the body of the people 'in all things of civil government' to have justice in thir own hands', so that they will have none then to blame but themselves, if it be not well administerd'.--Quentin Skinner (1998) Liberty Before Liberalism, 30-31

The other day, I kind of promised a post in which I disagree with Skinner. And since I know readers love polemics, I thought It warn you that this post is no polemic. The comment quoted above is an aside in Skinner's overall argument. But I like the aside. And it got me musing a bit about two issues.

First, Part I of Utopia is framed by a purportedly autobiographical introduction, where the narrator (More) is sent to Flanders as an ambassador by Henry VIII. And the first paragraph tells us the first stop is Bruges. Now, Bruges was a major city at the time. But I have always been puzzled about why the brief stop in Bruges is even mentioned because the action quickly moves on to Antwerp, where the conversation takes place in Peter Giles's garden.  

Here's a suggestion: in 1464 Bruges was (see here) the site of what is now known as "The Estates General of 1464," which was an was the first assembly of the estates of the Burgundian Netherlands  as wikipedia nicely puts it, now parts of France, Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands.  Now, historically that's an important event because it was part of (not entirely successful) Burgundian state-building. In Belgium and Dutch history it's important because it is treated (not very prominently) as the origins of Dutch/Belgian parliamentary/representative democracy. (Of course, that takes some twisting and anachronistic interpreting.) But from our perspective what matters is that it is the first really serious modern attempt to bring together representatives of peoples that are formerly represented already on a provincial level in a federative structure.*

So, starting the intellectual journal of Utopia in Bruges is laden with symbolism to then contemporary readers. It is not only a cosmopolitan town of trade, it's also the site of momentous political innovation then less than a half century old, and still unfolding. Of course, Charles the Bold already dead when More's visit to Bruges is supposed to take place. And the streamlined Utopian federation is nothing like the messy affair of the reality of the Estates General of 1464.

Second, I noted a few weeks ago that Spinoza's Political Treatise has a clear plan of federation, in which sovereign states contract joint treaties of peace and so escape the mutual state of war (3.15-16,) Undoubtedly Spinoza is influenced by the political experiences of the then United Provinces, his admiration for the constitution of the Kingdom of Aragon (Political Treatise, 7.30), and his interpretation of the Hebrew State described in the Hebrew Bible. By 1677 this idea was not wholly novel, and there would have been multiple sources that could have inspired it.+

But, even so, (recall) at the start of the Political Treatise, Spinoza makes a point of alerting the reader that More's Utopia is in his sight in the very first paragraph. The allusion is not naturally taken as a compliment: "Whence it has come to pass that, instead of ethics, [philosophers have generally written satire, and that they have never conceived a theory of politics, which could be turned to use, but such as might be taken for a chimera, or might have been formed in Utopia, or in that golden age of the poets when, to be sure, there was least need of it." And as I have noted, Spinoza seems to create (or, perhaps, echo) a trope in which Utopia is ridiculed as useless at the start of an ambitious purportedly more realist reform tract.

But it doesn't follow from this that the mechanisms described in Utopia or the philosophy behind Utopia is rejected entirely. I have already noted that More anticipates Spinoza's (recall) stadial analysis of Mozes' legislation; Utopia anticipates Spinoza's approach to freedom of religion and civic religion; and in other respects here and, also, here]. Without denying the non-trivial differences, the both promote a work ethic in which the corrosive effects of inequality and luxury are held at bay through the use of cleverly designed mechanisms that use incentives to foreseeable ends. All I am suggesting here, echoing Skinner, is that there is a pre-history to thinking about federates states at a large scale in which More and Spinoza figure.+