Digressions&Impressions

The Culture Wars, the Contradictions of our Age, and the Liberalism of Reparations.

Once upon a time the United States of America was a de jure racist society. As was much of the world beyond its borders, controlled as it was by racist European empires. There was a broadly understood and explicitly codified and enforced racial organisation of who could live where, of how individuals could interact, of what sort of jobs were appropriate for whom, of how law and order would operate — or wouldn’t (Wells-Barnett 1895). The science (Morris 2015), sport (Rogosin 2007), and artistic culture of the day (Cooper 1892), were largely carried out in conformity with, if not support of, racist norms. Gross or subtle as it may have been in any given instance, the colour line ran through everything and one crossed it only at great personal peril (Du Bois 1904, 530).

But mountains crumble and rivers disappear, new roads replace the old, stones are buried and vanish in the earth. Time passes and the world changes. So it was that eventually this de jure racist system went the way of all things. The civil war overthrew the slave regime. Racial immigration laws were repealed. The civil rights act made various sorts of explicitly racist laws and practices impermissible. By the latter half of the 20th century it was clear an officially endorsed de jure racial caste system was no longer to hold sway in American life. Likewise abroad the great European empires fell, and in their place sprang up a plethora of nations governed by formerly colonised peoples. All things considered, the 20th century saw de jure racism suffer a world-historic defeat...

Whatever else changed, the people who have the stuff still tend to be white, and blacks must still sell our labour to them if we are to get by.

In this way American domestic politics mirrored the broader global trends of a post imperial world (Táíwò 2022a, ch.2). The European empires despoiled and depopulated nations (Davis 2002, Marschal 2017). What they left in their wake were often under-developed economies (Rodney 1972) and institutional structures ripe to be taken over by local elites who could simply continue the pattern of authoritarian wealth extraction (Fanon 1961, ch.3; Acemoglu & Robinson 2012). But the end of formal colonisation did not generally lead to reparations. For the most part agents based in the former colonial metropoles retained ownership of key resources and even infrastructure (Nkrumah 1965), and if anything inefficiencies in the credit market have led to a net capital flow from the former colonies to the former colonisers (Picketty 2015, 58). Neither domestically nor internationally did a change in cultural attitudes and legal permissions correlate with a change in racial patterns of ownership. As such, many of the material patterns of inequality from the bad old days of de jure racist regimes have survived the demise of their former ideological superstructure.

Returning to the US, these persistent material inequalities have consequences for occupational inequality....

And the political intelligentsia are still largely white, which has arguably affected the content and focus of their work (Mills 2017). This then is where history has placed us. The maddening ambiguity of our position is what leads to the titular white psychodrama. One cannot reconcile oneself to this society because it constantly pulls in two directions - it presents one with an ideological narrative that speaks of equality, and a material structure that witnesses rank inequality. At some level this society just does not make sense to itself, its own ideology out of whack with the plain facts of its own existence. There are those who are tempted to focus only on the positives, and see in this a story of triumphant progress towards racial justice or a post-racial future. And there are those who are inclined to see in it a story of eternal recurrence, racism ever reinventing itself. But both of these perspectives are too tidy to capture the phenomenon. For this story is of a world and a nation in contradiction with itself.

...How then do people respond to the facts relayed in this historical narrative, and what does it mean for their ability to reconcile themselves to their own social order?--Liam Kofi Bright (2022, forthcoming) "White Psychodrama" Journal of Political Philosophy. [Emphasis added]

Kofi Bright introduces his paper (with nods to Hegel and Rawls) with a methodological aspiration: "One might hope that [i] philosophy could reconcile ourselves to our social world and [ii] each other. To entertain this as plausible is to think [iii] there is some perspective one could reach via philosophical inquiry that [iv] shows our life and society to be as they are for good reason, [v] allowed us to see it all as in some sense rational." (Numbers added to facilitate discussion.) And while I have a growing self-awareness that many of these digressions are modest impressions on or an occasional, recalcitrant modest 'yes but' to Liam Kofi Bright's evolving oeuvre, I have never thought of philosophy as a means to [i-v]. Maybe I am too angry or vain to become identical with such a thought, but neither 'reconciliation' nor 'rationality' ever become applied to my conceptualization(s) of our lives and society. And this, alongside my close vicinity to (if not outright membership in) the "political intelligentsia," makes me suspect with growing dread that I may well be (one of the minor cogs that is) the subject matter of "White Psychodrama."

The methodological aspiration that introduces the paper is partially echoed in the question that closes the block quote at the top of this post (which is the culmination of a section titled, "A Narrative Of How We Got Here.") But there philosophy and 'us' are absent. So, lurking in Liam Kofi Bright's paper is a soft opposition, perhaps it's just a matter of degree, between the orientation characteristic of philosophy and that of the political intelligentsia. Both are thought to reconcile themselves to the world, but only in philosophy can we come to understand the world as rational. That is to say, lurking in Liam Kofi Bright's analysis is a traditional (familiar from Plato, Al-Farabi, Smith, Madison, Arendt, etc.) distinction between the opinions (or ideology) of the political intelligentsia and the episteme (or theodicy rationalizations) of the philosophers.

I don't mean to suggest that Liam Kofi Bright engages in the fallacy of the overlooked alternatives. He recognizes "there may not be such a perspective. Perhaps to see the world aright is to recognise it as a jumbled mess, with no progressive tendency towards greater coherence, and no satisfaction to be had in achieving superior insight. Perhaps there is no good end we are collaboratively working towards, no possible reconciliation with each other; maybe we are perpetually on the brink of descending once more into a Hobbesian nightmare." But what's important about this explicit recognition is that it suggests we're in a high stakes context: the inability to even conceptualise reconciliation is to be some way down a slippery slope toward murderous anarchy. Despite the British spelling, there is no option of mere muddling through (or exiting to a desert island) in his set up. Given that the explicit background is slavery, empire, and genocide, this may be fair enough.

Of course, the way the methodological aspiration is formulated might suggest a quietist attitude. But that would be misleading, Liam Kofi Bright also emphatically claims, "We ought then make the social world worthy of reconciliation." Let's call this the 'revolutionary impulse' in his argument. And, perhaps, my alertness to this impulse is my occasion to highlight the claim that the world and nation is in contradiction with itself. In material dialectics such a diagnosis of self-contradiction is, of course, the funnel toward certain kind of revolutionary action. As he puts it (echoing MLKjr's comments to Harry Belafonte, but unusually in a paper dense with references without citation,) "We cannot and ought not reconcile ourselves to a society wrapped up in its own contradictions, no more than we should seek to integrate into a burning house."

Now at this point one may well suspect that one is listening in on a conversation that may not include everyone as agents in the earlier 'we'. I don't think that's right, but it is worth quoting the full passage to see how easy one can misread the essay:

Here I am interested in how our peculiar socio-economic conditions shape the contours and possible points of resolution in the cultural debate around issues of race. It shall be seen that characteristic responses to our social order, which I shall describe through stylised character archetypes, make it impossible for any lasting reconciliation to be had for participants in the culture war. Instead our responses both generate and constitute a kind of racialised psychopathology, that I describe as white psychodrama. Given this analysis of the social order and its sources of psychic incoherence, I will suggest a way forward. My hope is that this will at least help people of colour caught in the midst of this work towards a world we can live in, and by seeing ourselves as so working reconcile ourselves to our actual present social activities. We cannot and ought not reconcile ourselves to a society wrapped up in its own contradictions, no more than we should seek to integrate into a burning house. But we can come to see ourselves as knowingly and self-consciously working to resolve those contradictions, quenching that fire, and laying the foundations for a better structure that we may all live comfortably therein.

One may well think that the intended audience of 'we' here, is "people of colour" or "the PoC intelligentsia." And, if one reads hastily, one may well wonder if all of this isn't just a call to burn it all down.

But I don't think it's the only audience or that the content of revolution here is destructive. After all, Kofi Bright is not advocating letting the fire consume the house, rather he is explicit in calling for the fire to be quenched. And that quenching and rebuilding is only possible, if I understand him correctly, after reparations.* 

Now, at this point -- knowing my bourgeois, liberal proclivities -- you may suspect I will denounce the revolutionary ardor of Kofi Bright. But I don't view reparations or compensation for injustices suffered as a illiberal, a category error, or a radical step too far. After all, (recall) the Federal Republic of Germany, then governed by (relatively conservative) Ordo-liberals explicitly recognized the ideal of reoperations as the start of a proper response to the genocidal atrocities of Nazism and to make living in a common home, however imperfectly, possible. From the liberal perspective, reparations are the ground zero for massive historical injustices in order to make non-zero-sum interactions available to all of us.+ 

As an aside, Rawlsianism and (even more) utilitarianism have a tendency to privilege forward-looking theorizing and to encourage a kind of forgetting of the past. (This is a feature not a bug in much liberal philosophy.) And this leads them to the familiar sophisms that block reparations in their analyses;  that the status quo provides the solid foundations for the future.

So, clearly there is a possible task for the white political intelligentsia lurking in Kofi Bright's analysis and rhetoric: that is, it is to reject the Repenter stance (who leaves structures alone and only focuses on individual racial improvements) as much as the Represser stance (who would like racial bygones to be bygones). Now, from a Marxist perspective this is an invitation to be a race traitor. (There is no doubt that successful revolutions require them.) And one may well suspect that there are many incentives that despite the effectiveness of Liam Kofi Bright's rhetoric prevent the move from Repenter/Represser to pro-reparations (and "to realise racially egalitarian group ideals.")

But to make integration in the same house possible is, as Lea Klarenbeek (building on Haslanger's ideas) has shown, a two-way process. This process is, thus, much easier when the pie that is to be divided is being enlarged (and so liberalism and markets get a toe-hold back in). How to do so without worsening the climate crisis is a real challenge technologically, economically, and politically. But the task of the bourgeois intelligentsia is not to be a source of diversion, but to articulate the real social problems and to amplify the solutions that experts and social movements devise which will strengthen the survival of democratic self-government and rule of law.

So, while I agree that my kind is primarily engaged in "a conflict over how to psychologically manage the results of living in a materially deeply unequal society," I view reparations as the right thing to do and a sine qua non reformist move to make such stress much better manageable. Material and political inequalities are, I suspect, part of the human condition, but partially repairing the past as a means to more solid foundations is in our power, even now. And if advocating reparations is treated as Repenter-on-steroids-syndrome, I accept the moniker. 

 

Historiography of the Enlightenment in The Dawn of Everything, Pt 2

Kandiaronk: For my own part, I find it hard to see how you could be much more miserable than you already are. What kind of human, what species of creature, must Europeans be, that they have to be forced to do good, and only refrain from evil because of fear of punishment? … 
    You have observed that we lack judges. What is the reason for that? Well, we never bring lawsuits against one another. And why do we never bring lawsuits? Well, because we made a decision neither to accept or make use of money. And why do we refuse to allow money into our communities? The reason is this: we are determined not to have laws – because, since the world was a world, our ancestors have been able to live contentedly without them.

Given that the Wendat most certainly did have a legal code, this might seem disingenuous on Kandiaronk’s part. By laws, however, he is clearly referring to laws of a coercive or punitive nature. He goes on to dissect the failings of the French legal system, dwelling particularly on judicial persecution, false testimony, torture, witchcraft accusations and differential justice for rich and poor. In conclusion, he swings back to his original observation: the whole apparatus of trying to force people to behave well would be unnecessary if France did not also maintain a contrary apparatus that encourages people to behave badly. That apparatus consisted of money, property rights and the resultant pursuit of material self-interest:

Kandiaronk: I have spent six years reflecting on the state of European society and I still can’t think of a single way they act that’s not inhuman, and I genuinely think this can only be the case, as long as you stick to your distinctions of ‘mine’ and ‘thine’. I affirm that what you call money is the devil of devils; the tyrant of the French, the source of all evils; the bane of souls and slaughterhouse of the living. To imagine one can live in the country of money and preserve one’s soul is like imagining one could preserve one’s life at the bottom of a lake. Money is the father of luxury, lasciviousness, intrigues, trickery, lies, betrayal, insincerity,– of all the world’s worst behaviour. Fathers sell their children, husbands their wives, wives betray their husbands, brothers kill each other, friends are false, and all because of money. In the light of all this, tell me that we Wendat are not right in refusing to touch, or so much as to look at silver?

For Europeans in 1703, this was heady stuff.---David Graeber & David Wengrow (2021) The Dawn of Everything, pp. 54-55

This is the second digression on The Dawn of Everything (here is the first); and here tweet impressions of each chapter (see here for links). When the book first appeared, David Bell (a historian of the French Enlightenment at Princeton) skewered the book for its misrepresentations of the French enlightenment, even going so far as to use "scholarly malpractice." Soon, this was followed by a generous and sensible, but at times critical review by Kwame Anthony Appiah in the New York Times. This review also strongly suggests that the characterization of Enlightenment thought is flawed. Meanwhile, Justin Smith (Paris), who arguably is the leading historian of early modern philosophy of my (now senior--shit times flies) generation, gave the book a very positive review (here). Smith notes, quite rightly that their achievement can be found in "their sympathetic plaidoyer for the singular reality of lives lived in the past, their commitment to the idea that these were real people, as weird and idiosyncratic and unfathomable by quantitative methods as you and I....It’s a weird thing to have to insist on: that there is something that it was like to be a member of the prehistoric leisure class, which is to say to have been a prehistoric human being." However, when he comes to their treatment of Lahontan's Dialogues avec le sauvage Adario, he expresses considerable skepticism about their insistence that 'Adario' just is expressing the views of the historical Kandiaronk (a Huron statesman).* I then read a critical (as of yet) unpublished review by Helen de Cruz (who among her specialities is an expert on the philosophy of anthropology and the cognitive sciences). 

As it happens the last few years, I have been reflecting a bit on the encounter of Europeans with the new world as reflected in early modern (political) philosophy. And so, before I say anything else, I think it is highly likely that European philosophy was shaped by the Jesuit Relations as Graeber and Wengrow suggest (p. 44ff), and that it makes a lot of sense to look for traces of (American) indigenous influence on European thought. Prompted by Ryan Hanley, my own focus has been on the Jesuit reports on China, but I noticed, while preparing this post, that Leibniz comments on Lahontas and 'Adario' in a letter from 1710, and does not treat him as fictional. (This letter is discussed in scholarship on Lahontas.) 

In various undergraduate courses, I teach Machiavelli's The Prince, which seems to have circulated as early as around 1513, but was published in 1532; I teach More's Utopia, which was first published in 1516, and I teach the Las Casas-Sepulveda (or The Valladolid) debate (1550–1551), centered on Las Casas' Defense of the Indians read at the Valladolid debate (and drawing on his earlier works). I mention these because they are very well known through the next few centuries; all of these texts are much earlier than Montaigne's Essays, which seems a common reference among Appiah, Smith, and Bell. Now, of these three works, The Prince is rather provincial. Even though it has quite a bit to say about Mediterranean politics, the Turkish barely register, and the other Islamic powers are ignored. It is a surprisingly Euro-centered book.

By contrast, More's Utopia is clearly responding to, and drawing on, another Florentine's adventures in the Americas, Amerigo Vespucci’s The Four Voyages. Utopia is important because, in passing, great civilizations of the Americas ("New Castille," that is, what we would call Peru) are mentioned in passing, "they came to towns, and cities, and to commonwealths, that were both happily governed and well peopled." And it is strongly implied that the locals have knowledge of navigation and astronomy (but lack a compass). In The Dawn of Everything, Utopia is mentioned in passing, as an exemplary work representing "civic prosperity and hierarchy," (p. 336) but little more. The fictional city that gives Utopia its name, is generally not treated as hierarchical because property is in common and money abolished (!), and it is in many respects rather egalitarian, but it does have a political hierarchy: in which the federation is governed by elected representatives.

In addition, the whole book, Utopia, is framed by a critique of the legal practices then current among Europeans (recall back in 2013). In fact, a stadial theory (with the Bible being the savage baseline!) is inscribed in this account! And the implication, as I noted a few years ago, is that the Europeans are the real savages (a point echoed by Montaigne and by eighteenth century legal reformers like Beccharia (recall) and Sophie de Grouchy). So, this precedes Kandiaronk's criticism by considerable  time. Now, some indigenous described in Utopia are treated as savages and ripe for colonialization, so I don't want to suggest More's book is unproblematic (recall here; here). 

Las Casas  was himself steeped in the Spanish conquest and control of the Americas. (By comparison, Justin Smith does mention Garcilaso de la Vega, who wrote a generation after Las Casas.) He wrote detailed histories of the conquest (and its brutalities), and echoing the work by some fellow Dominicans, he famously attacked the Aristotelian view of natural slavery (in which the indigenous were natural slaves), from the (more biblical) perspective of natural equality. Throughout his adult life he attacked the manner of Spanish rule, and as a bishop refused absolution to slave owners. Las Casas was very famous for the next few centuries. (Unfortunately, he is the originator of the idea -- which he later much regretted -- of importing African slaves to the Americas.)

Now, Las Casas' rival, Sepulveda invents (recall) the disastrous trope that the natives are inferior, and like backward children: *"If you know the customs and manners of different peoples, that the Spanish have a perfect right to rule these barbarians of the New World and the adjacent islands, who in prudence, skill, virtues, and humanity are as inferior to the Spanish as children to adults." This idea has a disastrous afterlife. In the Essay, Locke, who (alas) was rather invested in the colonial enterprise, frequently treats the savage mind as if a child's (see, especially, 1.2.27), and he suggests they don't think general propositions (1.2.12). The effect of this, and the tremendous influence of his anthropology, is -- as Chris Berry, Sandra Peart, and David Levy taught me--, that for some Enlightenment thinkers, it became natural to equate indigenous people with an earlier ('savage') age or stage of the development of the human species. It's this view that became influential among nineteenth century imperialists and their anthropological handmaidens, who draw on a contrast (which gets its most eloquent articulation, alas, in David Hume (recall here; recall here, drawing on Chirimuuta)) between civilization and savagery to justify conquest. Much of The Dawn of Everything is on the legacy of such views in anthropology and popular culture since.

But as plenty of scholars have noted, the Lockean anthropology, while influential, has notable critics including Adam Smith (recall, also with a passing comment on The Dawn of Everything) and Beattie (recall).  Hume and Smith both had stadial theories. But, as the previous sentence suggests, they have very different details. This is important because Graeber and Wengrow suggest -- and I was really fascinated and impressed by this -- that stadial theories are invented by Turgot (a contemporary of Smith) as a response to the "indigenous critique" (of the sort quoted at the top of this post), although presented by Madame de Graffigny in fictional form. And as the rightly suggest (p. 60), Turgot draws on what I have been calling a Lockean anthropology and so for him the earlier stages are vestiges of our earlier selves. (I think there is a direct influence of Locke on Turgot, but leave that aside.) This kind of thinking, inspired the earlier anthropologist mindset that studying indigenous types was kind of a window into our past (like the light of distant stars). But as I documented in my book, Smith's critique of this whole approach was well known in the nineteenth century (although some (recall) also treated him like a Lockean in these matters). While I am happy that Wengrow and Graeber are critical of the use that people like Pinker make of the Enlightenment, their own approach also flattens the intellectual landscape (and the intellectual roots of their own discipline).

Locke matters to the larger story in other way, and especially in light of the passage quoted above, but before we get there a brief detour with regard to  Las Casas, who is not mentioned in the book, but he is alluded to in the following passage:

Legal scholars in universities like Salamanca in Spain were not impressed by this expedient. At the same time, attempts to write off the inhabitants of the Americas as so utterly alien that they fell outside the bounds of humanity entirely, and could be treated literally like animals, also didn’t find much purchase. Even cannibals, the jurists noted, had governments, societies and laws, and were able to construct arguments to defend the justice of their (cannibalistic) social arrangements; therefore they were clearly humans, vested by God with powers of reason.
    The legal and philosophical question then became: what rights do human beings have simply by dint of being human – that is, what rights could they be said to have ‘naturally’, even if they existed in a State of Nature, innocent of the teachings of written philosophy and revealed religion, and without codified laws? The matter was hotly debated. We need not linger here on the exact formulae that natural law theorists came up with (suffice to say, they did allow that Americans had natural rights, but ended up justifying their conquest anyway, provided their subsequent treatment was not too violent or oppressive), but what is important, in this context, is that they opened a conceptual door. Writers like Thomas Hobbes, Hugo Grotius or John Locke could skip past the biblical narratives everyone used to start with, and begin instead with a question such as: what might humans have been like in a State of Nature, when all they had was their humanity? Each of these authors populated the State of Nature with what they took to be the simplest societies known in the Western Hemisphere, and thus they concluded that the original state of humanity was one of freedom and equality, for better or worse (Hobbes, for example, definitely felt it was worse). It’s important to stop here for a moment and consider why they came to this verdict – because it was by no means an obvious or inevitable conclusion.--The Dawn of Everything, pp. 32-33.**

But this story does no justice to the fact that people like Las Casas attributed genuine civilization to the Americans. And, in fact, when Suarez (in 1612), the greatest of the Salamanca school, develops his state of nature theory to justify a social contract (recall), his is ground in an account of the Fall, where political life originates in patriarchic clans (and this is by no means projected onto the Americas). So, the story that Graeber and Wengrow tell while not implausible skips a few steps. (In my own view it is more likely that Hobbes and Grotius are drawing on Book 3 of the Laws and Lucretius.)

So, Hobbes' choice, in chapter 13 of Leviathan, to project the state of nature on "many places of America" (not all) actually cries out for a better explanation. These Americans are treated as anarchist, but sadly find themselves in a war of all. But unlike the later Locke, Hobbes is a natural egalitarian and so his Americans are not children or idiots. For while they are savages, they "are not without some good Morall Sentences; also they have a little Arithmetick, to adde, and divide in Numbers not too great." (Chapter 46) It's true they not philosophers, but that's because, on his theory, the state of nature prevents the development of higher sciences.

So, where are we? There was a huge sixteenth discussion of the Americas in Europe. Thomas More's brother-in-law, John Rastell, has an interest in exploring Newfoundland (but the expedition ended near Ireland in a mutiny). It's a problem that this material has not been properly assimilated yet into scholarship of the Enlightenment (despite Pagden's efforts). And we see that from the start, that is the early sixteenth century, this is the occasion for stadial theories. But these are used to criticize the European (late Feudal) status quo.

I could stop here, but I want to offer a remark on the quoted passage from Lahontan. Kandiaronk's position is completely compatible with Locke's description of the state of nature in chapter 5 of the Second Treatise (1689). For Locke (recall) the invention of money facilitates accumulation of property (and of itself) (see sect 35-48), and the need for laws that can settle disputes (94). And then in section 49 he writes, "thus in the beginning all the world was America, and more so than that is now; for no such thing as money was any where known." (That is an important contrast with More's account of the Utopian abolition of money.)

 I have no reason to doubt the words attributed to Kandiaronk are his. But the position was not wholly original. (Remember Locke's state of nature is actually rather pleasant; that's part of his criticism of Hobbes.) The difference being that Locke thinks the institution of money and property have beneficial outcomes that are endorsed, whereas Kandiaronk sees in them (what soon became known as Mandevillian) vices. That is to say Lahontan's readers could assimilate what they read to an already familiar position. In addition, while it is true that Lahontan's work influenced other Enlightenment books that used and perhaps drew indigenous critiques of Europe, Lahontan himself was not wholly original. He had been preceded by a somewhat mysterious and wildly popular work (recall) Letters Writ by a Turkish Spy (L'Espion Turc), which was written from the perspective of a Turkish visitor to France. Of course, that work did not offer an indigenous critique, but an oriental(ist) one! And finally, Fenelon's The adventures of Telemachus, son of Ulisses (1699) was widely influential (and overshadowed Lahontan) and offered a potent attack on European hierarchies founded in luxury. But it projected the ideal into the remote (Greek) past. 

None of this amounts to a charge of scholarly malpractice. I learned quite a bit from their critical treatment of Enlightenment stuff. I would happily give the book to a nerdy kid wanting to be inspired by intellectuals taking on big problems. And, as a scholar, I am glad they have re-opened the debate over the influence of indigenous views on European intellectual life in such a provocative way. My suggestion is that this influence is real, but that it should be pushed back into the early sixteenth century. And that many of the tropes (both bad and noble) that shape debates since, actually can be found already there. 

Okay, let me stop here for now. And leave the question of why we are stuck now, for future occasion. 

 

 

 

Gil Harman (RIP 1938-2021): On Adam Smith, Kuhn-Loss and Historiography

One important type of ethical theory treats moral properties as analogous in certain respects to "secondary qualities" like colors. According to this sort of theory, whether something is right or wrong depends on how impartial spectators would react to it. In the 18th Century, the Scottish philosophers Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, and Adam Smith explored theories of this type.1 In the 20th Century this sort of theory has sometimes been discussed under the name "ideal observer theory."2 Recently, especially in England, there has been renewed interest in this sort of ethical theory and its comparison between moral properties and secondary qualities.3

One possible objection to an impartial spectator theory is that it seems to require an -overly aesthetic conception of morality to take the primary point of view in ethics to be that of a spectator rather than that of the agent.4 If the spectator is taken to be primary, then the agent's aim would seem to be to produce something that will or would please the spectator. But that is just wrong. Such an aim is too "outer directed" to count as a moral motive. Morality is more agent-centered than that. It is much more plausible to take the agent's point of view as primary. In the first instance morality is a matter of the moral reasons an agent has to act in one way or another, where these reasons derive from the relevant moral rules rather than from a desire to gain the approval of spectators.
A few years ago, I pressed this objection myself when I discussed the ideal observer theory in a textbook of ethics.5 But I was too hasty. In reading Adam Smith's Theory of the Moral Sentiments, I discovered that Smith explicitly considers this issue and provides a plausible reply to the objection.
Because 20th Century discussions have tended not to consider such "psychological" questions as why agents might be motivated to act in ways that impartial spectators would approve (or, for that matter, why impartial spectators would care about anything), I will in this paper ignore recent discussion and return to the three great versions of the theory that were developed in the 18th Century by Hutcheson, Hume, and Smith, indicating why I think Smith's version of the theory is superior to the others.--Gilbert Harman (1986) "Moral Agent and the Impartial Spectator" The Lindley Lecture, The University of Kansas, p. 1. [HT: David M. Levy]

For many years, I heard a story about the late Gilbert Harman, who by all accounts was a supportive mentor, that he put up a sign on his door that said, ‘History of Philosophy: Just Say No!’ And I heard the story from folk, who approvingly treated Harman as an authority within the profession, and those (mostly historians of philosophy) that were horrified by the message this sent about the value of their work and the development of curricula across the profession. The story always puzzled me because thanks to my outside reader on my PhD, the economist David M. Levy, I was familiar with Harman's Lindley Lecture, which is a major contribution to the study of Adam Smith (and his relationship to Hutcheson and Hume).

I quietly wondered whether Harman subscribed to the view -- that I am familiar with from (recall) reading, say,  Samuelson's obituary of Viner -- that only disciplinary royalty should work in history of the discipline, while the rest are worker-bees solving particular, localized problems (including puzzles in the presentation of historical works relevant to the undergrad education of the discipline). And I mused on the fact to what degree his colleagues and students even knew about the Lindley Lecture, which was, in fact, very hard to acquire in the early-internet days when I was a PhD student in Chicago in the 1990s. 

And so I always quietly assumed that Harman was on party 'team progress' (familiar from Kuhn): we need a division of labor within philosophy, and with text-book driven education sufficiently shared background commitments as a baseline that will make, just like the practice of the natural sciences, such progress, or the illusion of progress, possible. And that requires a kind of domestication of the past (and, as Michael Della Rocca has argued the rest of philosophy, too). 

At some point, I became aware of Tom Sorrell's correspondence with Harman on this very topic. But I never tried to figure out its contents. Helpfully, the Princeton website records (a good chunk) of the exchange here. And it suggests the sign was put up in the context of a controversy over the undergrad curriculum. In addition, it quotes Harman's own views on the matter:

I believe my views about the history of philosophy are mostly orthodox nowadays. The history of philosophy is not easy. It is very important to consider the historical context of a text and not just try to read it all by itself. One should be careful not to read one’s own views (or other recent views) into a historical text. It is unwise to treat historical texts as sacred documents that contain important wisdom. In particular, it is important to avoid what Walter Kaufmann calls ‘exegetical thinking’: reading one’s views into a sacred text so one can read them back out endowed with authority. For the most part the problems that historical writers were concerned with are different from the problems that current philosophers face. There are no perennial philosophical problems.

On the whole, these views about the history of philosophy are quite close to those of my late friend Margaret Wilson.

For reasons I do not fully understand, I have sometimes upset people by distinguishing between philosophy and the history of philosophy or by noting that philosophy is what the history of philosophy is the history of.

I also think as an empirical matter that students of philosophy need not be required to study the history of philosophy and that a study of the history of philosophy tends not to be useful to students of philosophy. (Note ‘tends’.) Similarly, it is not particularly helpful to students of physics, chemistry, or biology to study the history of physics, chemistry, or biology.

Of course, it may be helpful for students of physics to start with classical Newtonian physics before taking up relativity theory and quantum mechanics. But it tends not to be helpful for them to read Newton.

The playful sign that was once on my office door, ‘History of Philosophy: Just Say No!’ was concerned with whether our students should be required to do work in the history of philosophy.

That is not to say that I have anything against the study of the history of philosophy. I do not discourage students or others from studying the history of philosophy. I am myself quite interested in the history of moral philosophy for example and have occasionally taught graduate seminars in Kant. I have done a certain amount of work on Adam Smith’s relation to Hume and others.

These remarks suggest I was mostly right about Harman. I have spent a good chunk of my blogging here and previously (sometimes in debates with Mohan Matthen) at NewAPPS, explaining why I think the Kuhnian team progress picture is a bad idea for philosophy (and the historians of philosophy), so won't repeat it here. But as Harman himself stresses his adherence to it is only partial; he recognizes and accepts explicitly that sometimes the history of philosophy is useful to the philosopher. And he reminds his interlocuter that he himself teaches history, and has done it.

As an aside, the denial of perennial philosophy is a self-aware form of the Kuhnian picture of team progress. Within the sciences, the textbooks will treat the pre-paradigmatic states of the discipline as immature babblings about the same topic. Within philosophy, the status quo will treat much of the pre-paradigmatic states as very imperfect expressions on our topics, or material irrelevant to our concerns. After all, so much was packed into philosophy once that we now ignore (for various reasons).

Okay, and returning to main thread, what's left obscure by the exchange reported on the Princeton website is when it is useful according to Harman to do history. As it happens the introductory material in The Lindley Lecture articulates this: the past can be a source of information on moves that are missed in present professional discussions.

This is especially so, when a particular view or theory is re-discovered or renewed without -- one may add -- much attention to prior discussions. In such circumstances an argument or objection can be taken as decisive by a particular, localized professional community and the argumentative (ahh) dialectic is halted prematurely. And while one can discover this in the armchair, too, this is much harder if one is a partisan to the debate (or swayed by local authority). In those latter cases, a careful, sympathetic engagement with the past, without reading the present status quo back into the past, can help those on top of contemporary discussions discern that one has missed an argumentative turn.  Notice, that this suggests another, related use to history. When discussions on particular topics are renewed/revived, it might be helpful to do a careful survey of previous episodes.

Of course, the uses discussed in the previous paragraph -- let's call them 'The Useful Retrieval Task(s)' or 'TURT' -- require the availability of material/texts and specialist knowledge of where to find such episodes. That is to say, what we may call contextual historians of philosophy are a collective good to the profession that it pays to have a large enough pool to have around. Somewhat amusingly, the more antiquarian and bookish these historians of philosophy are the more useful they might possibly be on the rare occasion that retrieval of a missed distinction or argument can be useful. The same argument applies to historians of philosophy that specialize in (so-called) non-Western philosophy. (I once quoted a plea by David Chalmers to that effect, and discussed it critically in an engagement with Amy Olberding here.) Much of such philosophy will be about different matters (again no perennial philosophy), but that does not prevent multiple discoveries of the same problem at different times and locations far apart.

Now, at this point I wanted to discuss Harman's treatment of Hutcheson, Hume, and Smith as an illustration and examination of what I take to be the practice that he preaches. This is also worth doing because I think I can show some of the limitations of that approach. But since this digression has gone longer than it ought, I won't do that now, and hopefully can return to it some other time. 

So, let me close on another detail of Harman's Lindley Lecture. Near the end of his lecture, he writes that "Smith works this theory out with a mass of detail which I cannot try to summarize. I believe that the book in which he works this out, his Theory of the Moral Sentiments, is one of the great works of moral philosophy." (p. 13). And then he adds a remark (labelled postscript 2):

Finally, it is perplexing that Adam Smith's ethics should be so relatively unread as compared with Hume's ethics when there is so much of value in Smith. What I have talked about here only scratches the surface. Why should Smith's ethics be so neglected? Is it that Hume also had a metaphysics and an epistemology and that Smith did not? Or is it that Smith was a more important economist than Hume? And why should that matter? I do not know.19--Harman (p. 14)

Footnote 19 starts with "I am indebted to David Levy for getting me interested in this project." The older I get the more this footnote amuses me because it turns out that TURT can be outsourced to different disciplines. Of course, since professional economists have actively tried to eliminate professional historians of economics from professional economics (on grounds that look like the party of progress familiarized by Kuhn, and, as I have shown [here and here], actively promoted within professional economics before and after Kuhn), there is a real risk (tragedy of the commons) that no discipline will curate the possibility of TURT.

I am also amused because at my dissertation defense, David Levy asked me Harman's questions. At the time (almost twenty years ago), I already knew that Smith's ethics was constantly forgotten and rediscovered in philosophy. My favorite example of this can be found in C.D. Broad's (1950) review in Mind of A.N. Prior's Logic and the Basis of Ethics. Although, I don't think I realized then, as I do now, that this is itself an older, recurring trope. Levy himself thinks that Harman's use of the trope is distinctive because he is rare in thinking that Smith's ethics is in some key respects superior to Hume's (recall the quote at the top of this post).

In my (2017) book I show that Smith does have a metaphysics and epistemology (one that also crucially deviates from Hume), but they are mostly submerged in The Theory of Moral Sentiments. I reconstructed them primarily (note!) from other texts collected in Essays on Philosophical Subjects. To be sure, I did not write my book to address Harman's questions! And I am unsure if having showed this we can make (ahh) progress on Harman's last three questions in postscript 2.

But if we take a step back, we can see that postscript 2 asks the reader to consider the grounds of what Harman takes to be (what has come to be known as) "a Kuhn-loss." And here Harman clearly recognizes that he is on unsure grounds. He plausibly suggests that Smith's TMS got written out of the discipline (philosophy) in virtue of the fact that Smith became part of economics. And I have noted, these two disciplines became conceptualized as non-overlapping complements in the late nineteenth and twentieth century (see especially this article).

But I do think the answer to Harman's Kuhn-loss question is relatively simple. Sidgwick, who is (recall this post on the effect on Rawls) partially responsible for developing the party-of-progress conception in philosophy, wrote textbooks, including Sidgwick's Outlines of the History of Ethics, in which Smith was clearly presented as a lesser (proto-Utilitarian) Hume.

This happens in two ways, when in the Introduction of that influential book, Smith is first introduced, alongside Hume and Hartley, only Hume's views are briefly summarized and Hume's views are treated as not especially significant for ethical matters. They are treated as psychologically significant. (Sidgwick is here developing and anticipating the manner in which the empirical-normative contrast turns out to prefigure disciplinary salience). So, a natural effect of Sidgwick's introduction is that it looks like there is little in Smith for those interested in ethical affairs.

That Sidgwick actually does not intend this implicature about Smith only becomes clear obliquely. When discussing J.S. Mill, Sidwick notes that Mill's treatment of justice is very indebted to Adam Smith (p. 241 in the 1886 edition). 

But that point itself may not be noticed by those readers especially interested in Sidwick's views on Smith. For earlier, he treats Dugald Steward as a (superior) synthesis of the insights of Shaftesbury and Smith (note 2 on p. 221 in the 1886 edition).

Of course, if one reads the section devoted to Smith in Sidgwick's Outlines, one may well come accross two important features. First, that according to Sidgwick, Smith clearly improves on Hume on what Sidgwick calls the "quality of the moral sentiment" (205). But, this, too, is treated more as a contribution to psychology and the "analysis" of its phenomena (206), than to ethics. 

Crucially, for Sidgwick (p. 207), Hume and Smith jointly anticipate the view of the origin of the moral sentiments "current in the utilitarian school." (A point, as noted above, he clarifies on p. 241 in the context of Mill.) But he goes on to say that jointly their "methods of explanation compare unfavorably with that of Hartley," (pp. 207-208). So, at this point there is really no reason for a reader of Sidgwick's Outlines to come away thinking they should read The Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS). And when he summarizes his view of Hartley, he (Sidgwick) observes that:

Hartley is obviously in earnest in his attempt to determine the rule of life, the systematic vigour which still gives an interest to his psychology, in spite of his defects of style and treatment, is not applied by him to the question of the criterion or standard of right conduct; on this point his exposition is blurred by a vague and shallow. optimism that prevents him from facing the difficulties of the problem. A somewhat similar inferiority appears in Adam Smith's work, when he passes from psychological analysis to ethical construction. He takes care to assure us that the general rules of morality impressed on us by the complicated play of sympathy which he analyzes are "justly to be regarded as the laws of the Deity;" but it can hardly be said that his theory affords any cogent arguments for this conclusion, or in any way establishes these rules as objectively valid. It would seem that the intellectual energy of this period of English [sic] ethical thought had a general tendency to take a psychological rather than a strictly ethical turn. In Hume's case, indeed, the absorption of ethics into psychology is sometimes so complete as to lead him to a confusing use of language.--Sidgwick, Outlines, pp. 211-212.

Again, a natural effect of Sidgwick's treatment is that in so far as Smith's account in TMS is interesting at all, it is primarily as a moral phenomenology or psychology of empirical affairs. But that even in that area, Hartley is more interesting. I think Sidgwick's conclusion is, in part, the result of projecting backwards a particular (anachronistic) version of the fact-value distinction onto Hume and Smith. One that become part of the professional DNA of both economics and philosophy such that a mutual, agreeable division of labor is possible (and in context Sidgwick and Marshall accepted this division).

So, I hope to have answered here Harman's postscript 2 questions (at least in provisional manner). But I also want to note that my answer illustrates one of the dangers of relying on authoritative textbook traditions (which is required by the party of progress). These can shape the self-conception of even advanced students, that even once important and famous books are mistakenly neglected. So, even the party of progress must leave room, as Liam Kofi Bright has suggested to me, for arbitrage opportunities and allow the development of seemingly epiphenomenal intellectual activities (such as history of philosophy and/or economics) that make it possible. 

The end of Liberalism; or the coming age of unreasonable views

David Held and Pietro Maffettone collect essays exploring the global dimensions -- and arguing for the necessarily global character -- of contemporary political theorizing...In addition to the familiar topics of human rights and global distributive justice, it includes contributions on the legitimacy of international law and transnational political institutions; on just war theory; and on a cluster of issues including territoriality, the global economy, and humans' relations to the natural environment and to future generations.

This integrated approach is welcome, and the book as a whole is a valuable resource for readers seeking to acquaint themselves with the state of the art in global political theory. The editors' introduction makes two agenda-setting points. First, they claim, political theory has reached a "cosmopolitan plateau," where acceptance of the equal moral status of all individuals (regardless of birthplace or location) defines the boundaries of reasonable disagreement in normative theorizing. Of course, different authors draw significantly different conclusions from the assumption of equal moral status; many theorists accept it without understanding themselves to be thereby committed to radically revisionist conclusions about global distributive justice or about the entitlements of states to control their own borders.--Emma Saunders-Hastings @NDPR Reviewing David Held and Pietro Maffettone (eds.), Global Political Theory, Polity, 2016.

When I started reading the review of Global Political Theory, I naively assumed that it would be an eclectic -- in the traditional sense of choosing the best from different stuff -- book trying to canvass what different intellectual traditions, necessarily partially interpreted and constituted, from different parts of the globe can contribute to political theory today. As the reviewer and the introduction of the volume make clear that's not what the volume is about. Global political theory (hereafter GPT) develops the implications of a certain class of moral egalitarianisms to ethical issues that have a global reach. It does so, as the editors of the volume under review note in their introduction (pp. 8-9), by quoting and accepting Thomas Pogge's (1992) framework of cosmopolitanism, which entails that (i) individuals are the units of ultimate moral concern (individualism); (ii) it applies to all humans (universality); (iii) such moral concern (ought) to have moral force for everyone (generality).

As an illuminating aside (in order to bring out the intellectual parochialism of GPT), something weird happens in the quote from Pogge's widely reprinted and influential 1992 essay, which self-consciously was written to fill the moral gap made available by "a new world order." The essay's general ambition is to make "moral progress" possible and it hopes that with the "gradual institutional reform" it proposes, "borders could be redrawn to accord more easily with the aspirations of" -- peculiarly enough not individuals, but -- "peoples and communities." (48) In Pogge's essay the second feature, universality, is contrasted with moral concern for a "subset" of humans, for example, "men, aristocrats, Aryans, whites, or Muslims." This happens to be one of two mentions of Muslims in the book (or, as it happens, Pogge's essay). (In the volume, the other is a reference to Muslim Brotherhood.) While it is no doubt true that Muslims have done immoral things to non-Muslims (as well as, countless Muslims) in the name of Islam, Islam is a religion that is especially hospitable to a variety of cosmopolitanism;* and it is no surprise that in it, self-consciously cosmopolitan perspectives have been embraced. One could argue, as William Gallois does, that this legacy is the source of continued revival of cosmopolitanism in later European thought and (perhaps more speculatively) one reason why asylum seekers are welcomed with comparative generosity in some Muslim majority states.

In his 1992 paper, Pogge contrasts his concrete inspiration with the ways "politicians are speaking of a new world order." In historical context this is a nod to President Bush's first Gulf war to restore the border between Iraq and Kuwait and restore a (protected) sovereignty to Kuwait sanctioned by international law and global institutions. In that context, a new world order referred to American supremacy within the constraints of, and channeled  by, international law and institutions. The complex entanglement of contemporary ethics with American hegemony (in the way Mill's or Green's thought was intertwined with imperial power) demands to be better understood and, I would argue, questioned (recall Khan on Singer). Be that as it may, Pogge's willingness to revisit borders is prescient, although as we've learned since, the actual process of redrawing of borders tends to be (a few notable exceptions granted) violent. 

That there are many who wish to turn political theory (and international law) into a branch of a certain flavor of ethics is familiar enough. As it happens, this past year I have conducted three job searches in political theory (including comparative), and so have  seen about (by a conservative estimate) 300 job dossiers of candidates with PhDs fairly recently minted in North America and Western Europe. The vast majority of these projects buy into some version of such moral egalitarianism and a good many apply it in the manner of GPT.

What I had not truly grasped before is that within GPT deviation from such cosmopolitan egalitarianism marks one as unreasonable (in the way predicted by Carl Schmitt). Again, I had naively assumed that being reasonable would consist in something like the disposition of treating disagreement even conflict with others by way of discussion in which reasons are (sincerely) offered, analyzed, and jointly evaluated. But in GPT to be reasonable means that one cannot enter the conversation unless one accepts certain moral commitments (in professional terms, a certain "consensus"). In their introduction, Held and Maffetono do not explain where such views about the boundary of legitimacy originate and who polices the boundary of who is let into the conversation (presumably that dirty job is farmed out to anonymous referees who -- like the marines -- do their work outside the scope of publicity).

One thing one learns from Thomas Kuhn (or George Stigler) is that where we find a professional consensus absent science, there are other forces that produce uniformity. In fact, Kuhn teaches that if one wants the appearance of intellectual progress one does well to create such uniformity of background commitments. The previous paragraph suggests, then, that the avalanche of work on GPT is the collective considered wisdom of our young scholars that the primary road to professional advancement and (for the more idealistic among them) improvement of humanity requires one to work within some version of GPT. 

We know from history that intellectual mono-culture are great at problem-solving (and this can generate great creativity), but otherwise not very robust. They are incapable of adapting to changing circumstances and unable to confront, truly, the most urgent questions in which one must come to terms with arguments of the deviants from orthodoxy. (For this would require it to be self-critical about its own commitments.)+ So, a moment of reckoning is due. If history were ironic, then the professional triumph of GPT is also the moment it becomes obsolete.** After all, the political and democratic resurgence of views that reject versions of GPT's normative cosmopolitanism is the striking feature of our time. So, it is tempting to preach the end of liberal cosmopolitanism and become a prophet for a new order.

But history is probably not ironic. So, while some of us, outside the professional boundaries, search for alternative political theories, GPT may well continue to thrive even if the political conditions that gave rise to it, and that allow it to shape the political order, have long passed. After all, some of the greatest philosophical scholastics lived in the twentieth century and have enriched our intellectual universe.

 

 

On Susan James's Spinozistic Criticism of Whig History of Philosophy

To some extent, we are bound to read past philosophers in the light of our own philosophical culture, which in turn makes some features of their works apparent to us and others invisible. What we find is shaped by who we are. However, there are many ways in which our existing interests can guide interpretation, and a striking feature of much current history of philosophy is what I shall call its teleological flavour. Although it is rare for commentators to adopt a wholeheartedly teleological approach and explain particular historical events or processes by citing an end to which they contribute, we can detect a teleological flavour when the work of a past philosopher is assessed in the light of contemporary values and praised for anticipating them.--Susan James (2016) Why Should We Read Spinoza? (111)

In her fascinating and characteristically incisive contribution to the recurringly renewed historiographic debates, Susan James cleverly naturalizes so-called teleological or Whig histories and, thereby, provides a kind of error-theory of such Whig history (116). She does so by drawing on Spinoza's philosophy both as the object and the subject of her inquiry. With Spinoza she diagnoses to "two contrasting pleasures" (114) that drive historical research:

There is the anthropological pleasure that historians of philosophy take in the strangeness of the philosophical past and its lack of relation to our own outlooks, an excitement in the discovery of ideas suppressed and paths not taken. On the other hand, there is the satisfaction of recognizing ourselves in earlier traditions, thus sustaining our sense of philosophical continuity and progress. These pleasures are not exclusive (we identify difference as a departure from continuity, and continuity as a departure from difference) and philosophers who engage with the past typically feel the pull of both. But while the anthropological pleasure acts as a brake on teleological interpretation by focusing our attention on rupture and untranslatability, the pleasure of recognition inclines us to view the past in a broadly teleological spirit. To satisfy it, we look to history for anticipations and affirmations of ourselves; and from there it is a short step to explanations and evaluations of the broadly teleological kind that we have so far been examining. (114)

It is pretty clear in what follows that according to James's Spinozism, the pleasure of recognition generates different distortions and even intellectual factions by way of sympathy and antipathy (120). (Strikingly, intellectual factions can be explained purely in psychological terms without appeal to institutions and incentives). These distortions involve "projections" from present to past, and they make us affirm "our own superior outlooks and values." (121) Crucially, our present philosophical "way of life" provides "the happy ending." (122) Susan James offers a creative reading of Spinoza in which such projections and status quo confirmation are "not blameworthy," but, James notes in her concluding sentence, "it is not philosophy." (125) This is a nice reversal of the ordinary dialectic in which the status of contextualist historians as philosophy is sometimes problematized.

As it happens, I am explicitly offered as a recent example of such teleological history (113), although my  views are not discussed. She discusses the two Jonathans: Bennett and Israel. Cést la vie. Yet, it is also peculiar, because, as it happens I am also a (methodological) critic of Bennett and Israel. More important, it's also a missed conceptual opportunity, because while all Whig history is too teleological, not all teleological, historically informed 'philosophy' is Whig history.

For, some teleological philosophers turn to history because they want to (i) learn from the past in order to (ii) combat the philosophical status quo. Rather than feeling superior to the past, such historians acknowledge the existence of philosophical insight and expertise unavailable now. Figures from the past, thus, can become (to explicitly use James's Spinozistic framework) exemplars for strategies, content, insight, and ends. Now James is right that relying on such exemplars does not itself constitute being engaged in philosophy.

But James ignores the fact teleological philosophers also try to recover the past for present and even future use. In so doing, teleological philosophers may discover that we already participate in, often unknowingly, in the teleological projects of past philosophers. This allows us to learn something crucial about ourselves and, thereby, to decide, if not legislate, to advance these projects as our own ends or reject them. Now, I am not going to offer a definition of philosophy, but to know oneself and one's historical situation and to be able to choose how to shape its tradition is philosophy enough for me.*

On the Significance of a Pre-history to Feminism

While studying women is not new,studying them from the perspective of their own experiences so that women can understand themselves and the world can claim virtually no history at all. It is also novel to study gender. The idea of a systematic social construction of masculinity and femininity that is little, if at all, constrained by biology, is very recent.”—Sandra Harding (1987) “Introduction: Is there a Feminist Method?” Feminism and Methodology (Indiana) p. 8.

In her introduction (quoted above) to her influential reader, Harding makes some claims that may have seemed plausible in the 1980s, but we now know to be seriously overstated (not to say misleading). Scholars are increasingly recovering women's voices from many historical periods in which the role of women is studied from the perspective of their own experiences. In addition, it is pretty clear that (recall) by the eighteenth century the social construction of gender was well understood.

But here I want to note a cost of this effacement. First, there is a historical injustice that the very intellectual women who have become victims of history, and often extremely sexist history, are being victimized not just by their contemporaries and effaced by (sexist/misogynistic) successors, but also, more unintentionally, being harmed by those whose insights they had anticipated. For, while Harding does not suggest that earlier feminists are a conceptual or historical impossibility, she emphasizes in context that modern feminism is culturally situated in a distinctive way and a reader may be forgiven in thinking that earlier cultures would not have access to some such ideas.

Second, at the time, Harding explicitly understands her own enterprise, and the Feminist method(s) she and her intellectual allies advocate, as something novel rather than a recovery in a new (and undoubtedly substantially different) context.* One consequence of this, is that one can then understand oneself as being part of (historical/social/political etc.) triumphant progress; the ground zero from which this progress is understood is -- judging by the examples given by Harding -- the generation of scholars that came to age in the 1960s or so. Harding comes close to suggesting that a Kuhnian revolution has occurred or is in the process of occurring (Kuhn, is in fact, mentioned for other purposes just before), but she does not do so.

However, it is notable that, in context (see, especially p. 5), Harding is acutely aware of the dangers of the welcoming of new insights leading one to embrace a progressive, teleological understanding of the very existence of feminist thought being part of the forward march of history. She explicitly notes (p.5) that one can say with equal justice that statistics of abuse reveal a "barbaric" state of affairs. Of course, a new social scientific (reflexive) paradigm is compatible with such a paradigm revealing a bad state of affairs.

If one recognizes that modern feminism is, in some measure, a recovery and reviving of earlier insights (while allowing that it is also a great transformation), that is, in fact, one of the great permanent possibilities of human existence, would that change much of anything? I think so, because it encourages us to look at the mechanisms of silencing and displacement. It is worth understanding how the pre-history of feminist ideas was effaced during the long nineteenth century not just to do justice to our predecessors, but also to better understand the ways in which the professionalization of philosophy relied on emphasizing some philosophical virtues that came at the expense of proto-feminist insights and arguments.

 

Can Philology Save Us? On Justin Smith's vision for the university of the 21st century

For philology may hold out not only the promise of reviving the humanities, but also of reestablishing the lost unity of the human sciences with the sciences of nature. Part of philology's apparent irrelevance today has to do with what we may diagnose as our society's radical and unprecedented presentism. No textual culture in human history has been so indifferent to its own past, and indeed this indifference strongly suggests that, though we continue to Tweet and to 'text' and to share memes that consist in part in strings of words, we are in fact moving into a post-textual era....This presentism not only cuts us off from what was long understood to be a central concern of the human sciences --to know who we are by knowing where we've come from--, it also perpetuates and deepens the contingent and unnecessary separation, as I've suggested, of the human from the natural sciences. Understood as philology, as a search for origins, the human sciences in fact share a great deal with a number of other sorts of inquiry often cordoned off from the human sciences on the other side of what has been called, since C. P. Snow introduced that term in 1959, the 'two-cultures divide'. Philology shares aims and objectives, and sometimes also methods, with archaeology, as also with paleontology, evolutionary biology, and perhaps even those branches of theoretical physics that deal with the distant origins of the universe. All seek to account for how the world got to be the way it is....

History...should be elevated to its rightful place, as the reigning science in the emerging universities of the 21st century. It is the best hope for an exit from the current dérive of the humanities, and, much more than this, it is the best hope for overcoming the false and arbitrary rift between the human and the natural sciences. History is considerably larger than philology, yet philology itself may be much larger than it is now perceived to be. Pollock notes that philology "has been everywhere that texts have been, indeed, in a way that we have yet to fully grasp, everywhere that language has been." This ubiquity was however grasped, for example, by the early Islamic field linguists who went out to build their lexica from the oral poetry of the Bedouins. Nor, at other times in history, as for Leibniz and William Jones, was the boundary of the genealogist's project set at the limits of language, but indeed extended to all the things named in language, to the world itself. In their diminished self-understanding, today's humanists have relinquished all these things to the natural scientists, who for the most part do not know what to make of them. By rediscovering its unity with philology in the shared project of history, natural science stands to gain as much as the humanities do: to rediscover its lofty purpose of enabling us to make sense of the world, and of our place in it.--Justin Smith "A Forgotten Field Could Save the Humanities," The Chronicle of Higher Education. [Behind a paywall; HT DailyNous.]

Justin Smith is probably the most creative and playful historian of (early modern) philosophy today.* So, I was sad to learn that he is "increasingly" leaving it "behind in view of its woeful provincialism." In his piece he also rejects 'localism' (which he associates with a deplorable, it seems, "new strain of identitarianism in the humanities.") He embraces, rather, "a global, rather than provincial," perspective. (He is quoting Sheldon Pollock, but in context he is endorsing it.) From context it's clear that the 'global' is something distinct from the 'universal' (or, at least, the purportedly universal that he associates with Anglo professional philosophy). Presumably, a universal perspective homogenizes, whereas the global makes space for differences due to (again quoting Pollock approvingly) "historicity, constructedness, and changeability," not in the least in the trajectories of knowledge production. This becomes clear from Smith's dazzling display of examples of "early Islamic field linguists,"  the Nietzsche-Wilamowitz debate, William Jones's research on the names of plant species in Sanskrit and other South Asian languages, and Leibniz's vision.

It is worth noting that the natural antonyms of the province and 'provincial,' are not just the urbane and broad-minded, but also empire or imperial. And, in fact, the material and administrative precondition for the the global vision is often some kind of empire. And while we tend to think of colonial empires as great projects of subjugation and effacement of local difference, there are empires in which there is unity while respecting provincial diversity--it's these empires that most need (to quote Smith) a "unified project." One way to generate such a project, is to project "the lost unity" (emphasis added). These projects are fueled by restorative nostalgia that is, simultaneously, hyper-modern and a source of immense creativity. Such projects also involve an insistence that perspective matters and that hopeful greatness needs to be projected on a larger canvass. [For an excellent literary treatment of such matters, recall John Williams' novel Augustus.]

While Smith may wish nothing to do with something as crass as a military empire, his project does involve elements of restorative nostalgia (e.g., "elevated to its rightful place, as the reigning science") and a fondness for taking about 'we' when it suits him. He insists, also, that the present view of philology is mistakenly diminutive (see also the "diminished" view of the humanities) and "yet philology itself may be much larger than it is now perceived to be" in order to be more "lofty." In addition, he is not against the (selective, prudent) use of force because he insists that there must be 'compulsory instruction' in order to ensure that certain kinds of forgetting does not occur ("no one ever forgets that in the end there are no truly atemporal sciences.").

Like many who embrace such restorative nostalgia (Carlyle, Nietzsche, etc.), the criticism of the present is acute and insightful:

"Among the humanities, philosophy...is surely the field in which European area studies has most successfully disguised itself as a universal and timeless form of inquiry. How often do we hear philosophy professors demur, when the subject of, say, classical Indian logic comes up, that they "regrettably don't know anything about that." What they really mean is: "My professional identity is wrapped up with my not knowing anything about that." This is something we learn as graduate students: a period of socialization in which we learn not only how to display our knowledge of, and commitment to, a given circumscribed domain, but also learn how to scoff, subtly, at whatever research interest falls even slightly beyond that domain. This is an acquired syndrome, transmitted from faculty to graduate students in the course of their own professional reproduction.**

My sense is that Smith's diagnosis is an apt characterization of our teacher's generation (although we both know exemplars that displayed different attitudes). The new generation of professional philosophers is embracing a different ethic; one in which any topic or puzzle is a legitimate opportunity to display technical virtuosity. Such technical sophistication is, of course, compatible with (although need not entail it) a thin understanding of the topic (and its historicity, etc.)  

An impatient reader sympathetic to (various bits of) Smith's project may suggest that my remarks thus far are distracting from the main agenda of his piece: his research agenda, that is, to combat 'presentism' and to promote a unified project in which the humanities and the sciences jointly "make sense of the world, and of our place in it," in part, by taking our path toward the present seriously. There are certainly opportunities for such thick collaboration between the humanities and (for convenience sake) the life-sciences. (About a decade ago, I penned a series of three papers in which I claimed that the history of astronomy and the history of economics are crucial to astronomy and economics (conceived as a policy science.)) I do hope that some enterprising university Rektor of a "non-Euro-American, university of the 21st century," hires or consults with Justin to help her implement a university with three faculties (a 'faculty of history', a 'faculty of the atemporal sciences', a 'faculty of new stuff') along the lines envisioned by him.

But in his essay, Smith offers us the matter, but not the form of this unity which, thus, becomes unexpectedly its own telos. Smith offers us the institutional strategy without the standard that may justify or vivify it. Without such a vision it is not obvious why the experts of the present and future will join in the shared enterprise (and they will persuade their paymasters to block it). To put the point jokingly, what's missing is the sense in the sense-making (I might say, the utopian concepts). Previously, this form was supplied by (say) revelation or philosophy. By bagging Spinoza's criticism of revelation, Smith cuts himself off from the former. By turning his back on the latter, he seems to leave himself without resources. But, perhaps, he thinks, with the Romantics, that poetry or art can supply the form. That uncertain, transformative path must seem tempting.

Does the Political Center Always Hold?

Economists approach political competition with a simple but potent hypothesis called the “median voter theorem.” Anthony Downs, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, proposed the idea in his 1957 book, “An Economic Theory of Democracy.” Essentially, the idea is this: Any politician who strays too far from voters at the philosophical center will soon be out of office. In fact, there is a dynamic that pushes politicians to embrace the preferences of the typical or “median” voter, who sits squarely in the middle of public opinion. A significant move to either the left or the right would open the door for a rival to take a more moderate stance, win the next election and change the agenda. Politicians will respond to this dynamic, whether they are power-seeking demagogues or more benevolent types who use elected office to help the world. When it comes to the big issues, voters at the midpoint usually get the policies, if not always the exact outcomes, they want.---Tyler Cowen (2010) New York Times.

 

The median voter theorem states that "a majority rule voting system will select the outcome most preferred by the median voter".^[1]

The median voter theorem makes two key assumptions. First, the theorem assumes that voters can place all election alternatives along a one-dimensional political spectrum. It seems plausible that voters could do this if they can clearly place political candidates on a left-to-right continuum, but this is often not the case as each party will have its own policy on each of many different issues. Similarly, in the case of a referendum, the alternatives on offer may cover more than one issue. Second, the theorem assumes that voters' preferences are single-peaked, which means that voters choose the alternative closest to their own view. This assumption predicts that the further away the outcome is from the voter's most preferred outcome, the less likely the voter is to select that alternative. It also assumes that voters always vote, regardless of how far the alternatives are from their own views. The median voter theorem implies that voters have an incentive to vote for their true preferences. Finally, the median voter theorem applies best to a majoritarian election system.---Wikipedia.

When Bush v Gore was decided, I would tell my European friends that while the decision was dubious on legal grounds and, perhaps, unpleasant for some civil liberties it would not make much of a difference. I reasoned, mistakenly that, first, in America, the President is hemmed in by Congress, the Courts, a huge, internally conflicted bureaucracy, and relentless lobbying by special interests; second, I appealed to the median voter theorem which suggests to many (see Cowen above) that centrists policies will be pursued by governments wishing to be re-elected. So, in effect, I was predicting that during the first term President Bush would be little different from the President Gore we would have gotten if Florida's ballot had been better designed.

After that failed prediction, I stopped pontificating on US politics. 

The Median voter theorem, a beautiful application of rational choice theory to politics, is often deployed in order to explain why, in a two-party system, both parties pursue nearly indistinguishable policies (see Cowen above). That very same theorem, as articulated and developed by Anthony Downs (see here the classic article), also explains why for homo economicus it is rational not to to vote (the benefit to be gained from an individual vote is far outweighed by the dangers on the road to the polling station) or to be very uninformed of political issues (too costly to become informed), unless (this is often not noticed) one is especially passionate about a given issue or one's economic interest is tied to a particular policy.

Problem is, as deployed by Cowen and as stated by Wikipedia the Median voter theorem is manifestly false. (I say this not because President Bush falsified my prediction.) For it makes a further assumption (not explicitly specified by Wikepedia): that is, the outcome predicted by it also requires that the distribution of voter preferences is normally distributed. When voters are not normally distributed there is, ceteribus paribus,  no reason to expect that voters at the midpoint more or less get what they want (or that politicians will pursue centrist policies).  In re-reading Downs' original and truly fascinating article (about which more before long), I noticed that Downs, too, had recognized the point:

Stable government in a two-party democracy requires a distribution of voters roughly approximating a normal curve. When such a distribution exists, the two parties come to resemble each other closely. Thus, when one replaces the other in office, no drastic policy changes occur, and most voters are located relatively close to the incumbent's position no matter which party is in power. But when the electorate is polarized...a change in parties causes a radical alteration in policy. (143)

So, as originally formulated (yes, I have heard of Hotteling and Black) by Downs the Median voter theorem recognizes the significance of underlying distributions. 

I have no idea if the underlying distribution of the American electorate is genuinely polarized now. Even if it is clear that in present opinion polls (a) a larger than usual number of Democratic primary voters are pushing the Democrats toward the left, and (b) a majority of Republican primary voters seem to reject the Republican establishment (Trump, Cruz, and Carson jointly have about 60% of the vote), it does not follow that we are witnessing the generation of, say, a more bi-modal distribution. (Primary voters may not represent the majority of the electorate and many Trump voters -- the old so-called 'Reagan Democrats' -- are, in some respects , more left-wing than the pre-Trump Republican party, after all.) All I am claiming is that the median voter theorem does not entail that 'the center' will always hold; if voting blocs seriously disagree with each other, one side may well elect politicians that reject centrist policies even in the American system. (I am ignoring some further ambiguities about what the median is a median of.) Of course, there may be reasons to reject a rational choice model of politics (or an overtly simplistic rational choice model), but it is not obvious that in so doing we get a reason to expect centrist outcomes.

 

Sympathy in J.S. Mill and Elizabeth Anderson

But there is this basis of powerful natural sentiment; and this it is which, when once the general happiness is recognised as the ethical standard, will constitute the strength of the utilitarian morality. This firm foundation is that of the social feelings of mankind; the desire to be in unity with our fellow creatures, which is already a powerful principle in human nature, and happily one of those which tend to become stronger, even without express inculcation, from the influences of advancing civilisation. The social state is at once so natural, so necessary, and so habitual to man, that, except in some unusual circumstances or by an effort of voluntary abstraction, he never conceives himself otherwise than as a member of a body; and this association is riveted more and more, as mankind are further removed from the state of savage independence. Any condition, therefore, which is essential to a state of society, becomes more and more an inseparable part of every person's conception of the state of things which he is born into, and which is the destiny of a human being.--J.S. Mill (1863) Utilitarianism, Chapter 3.

In her essay, Democracy: Instrumental vs Non-Instrumental Value, Elizabeth Anderson describes herself as joining "a tradition of democratic thinking advanced by John Stuart Mill and John Dewey." (214) While I tend to think of traditions as something one continues (or not), it is worth noting the possibility that in so joining the tradition, Anderson constitutes (or legislates) it. One of the characterizations of this tradition is that it understands democracy also as a "culture" and way of living.

One of the core ingredients of this democratic culture is "sympathy." (214) Anderson is explicit that the significance of sympathy is one of Mill's central contributions to the  tradition: "On Mill’s view, democratic participation is a way of life that unites two higher pleasures – sympathy and autonomy," (214; the higher pleasures, including sympathy, play a key role in the argument on p. 225: we want to be able to express "mutual sympathy and respect for our fellow citizens." In an efficient dictatorship we cannot develop these pleasures fully.) That is to say, participation in democratic life (in the variety of ways that's possible) can be a pleasing activity and one of these (higher) pleasures is sympathy. (Sometimes sympathy is also called a "power" (221); this, too, has its roots in Mill.) This pleasure is not merely an individual pleasure, but it is also characterized as a "shared good" (219) or an instance of communal "good living" (221) by Anderson. In addition, Anderson understands sympathy as "solidarity." She does so with appeal to Mill.

Sympathy or solidarity – what Mill called the “feeling of unity with others” – is expressed in a person’s never conceiving of himself “otherwise than as a member of a body” whose governing principle is that of a “society between equals,” which “can only exist on the understanding that the interests of all are to be regarded equally” and “consulted” (Mill 1957: 40). Mill thought such mutually sympathetic societies of equals existed in many forms, including marriage and workers’ cooperatives. But its broadest form is democratic government.--Anderson (221)

She then goes on to fuse Dewey with Mill (and, thereby generates the tradition she joins) by continuing, "Recalling Dewey’s remarks above, democratic sympathy requires recognition of rivals as loyal opponents from whom one may learn," (221; emphasis added--ES) Anderson here offers the merest hint at the existence of non-democratic forms of sympathy in which purported solidarity and unity exclude others, that is, (what we may call with a nod to Adam Smith's treatment) factional sympathy. And, it is clear, that in practice, many of the "mutually sympathetic societies of equals" that exist in the civil society of a democratic culture are both the great, necessary schools of democratic education in which we can experiment with democratic ways of living as well as being, simultaneously, sources of merely partial (or factional) solidarity.+

It is worth noting that Mill embeds his account in a treatment of stadial progress which starts with "savage independence" and ends in civilizational, mutual interdependence. Mill here echoes the eighteenth century treatment (mixing bits of Rousseau, Hume, and Smith). By now it is a familiar, albeit sad, fact that such language also justifies empire (in ways it did not, say, for Adam Smith). But it is, perhaps, less noticed that for Mill it does not follow that the civilized can ordinarily see reality for what it really is: that man's 'social nature' is itself a mixture of natural psychological dispositions and socialization from childhood in a society with advanced, division of labor. So, advanced man tends to take his own way of life as necessary rather than as (a superior) one among many.

In advanced society, especially,  sympathy expresses itself, according to Mil as "the desire to be in unity with our fellow creatures." I note this explicitly not to remark that Anderson ignores the stadial theory in Mill (for her purposes that's fine as long as the higher pleasures are available), but to note that she jumps from a desire to be in unity to a feeling of unity. For Mill, (the natural sentiment of)* an agent's sympathetic feeling (for unity) does not (necessary) entail the attainment (or the "expression") of "the feeling of unity," even if according to Mill, the disposition toward unity is, indeed, very powerful in advanced society. (Indeed, by Mill's lights it's powerful enough to secure at least the possibility of utilitarian morality in practice in such societies.) The worry is that here Anderson may have confused an outcome of a desirable social process with the disposition itself. Of course, Anderson may be using 'sympathy' in a normative fashion; recall her, "shared good." I return to this below.

But leaving aside Anderson's slippage from the desire for unity to the feeling of unity, one may well wonder what fellow-feeling or compassion (the literal translation of συμπάθεια) has to do with the rather more metaphysically (and politically) loaded use of 'sympathy' by Mill and Anderson. But, in fact, Mill picks up on an important strain in reflection on sympathy from the Ancient Greeks to his own time. In this strain, in which 'sympathy' is either a placeholder concept for some kind of causal relation or the thing that needs explaining, it has five characteristics (see here for my account of this):

1. Sympathy is used to explain apparent action at a distance.
2. The very possibility of sympathy presupposes that it takes place among things/events/features that are in one sense or another alike, often within a single being/unity/organism (which can be the whole universe).
3. The cause(s) of sympathy is invisible to the naked eye.
4. The effect(s) of sympathy can be (nearly) instantaneous.
5. Sympathy is, in principle, bi-directional even if the elements or agents that enter into a sympathetic relationship vary in their power to do so.

Quite clearly the Mill-Anderson conception of sympathy relies on the second and fifth characteristics. Sympathy is both a means toward unity (Mill) and presupposes it (Anderson). Moreover, 2 (which, recall, I have dubbed the "likeness principle" [LP]) has an equalizing tendency--both (agential) relata in a sympathetic relation contribute to the actualization of sympathy (as is made explicit in 5). So, this is why historically, sympathy is often found in thinkers with a concern for human equality. Of course, in Mill sympathy really still is a kind of social cause (in the very same chapter 3 of Utilitarianism, he sometimes echoes Hume's "contagion" approach to sympathy in). By the time the tradition reaches Anderson the causal conception of sympathy is not abandoned entirely (recall it can also be a "power"); but for Anderson democratic sympathy, or solidarity, is more an effect of a democratic culture (and cultivation/education, etc.) when it can take on a normative  significance (and be identified with 'good living").

If one has a providential cast of mind, one might see Anderson's normative use of 'sympathy' as the latent goal of the sympathetic tradition.** One can say, then, that Anderson resonates with the tradition she "joins" and, thereby, transforms and extends it and, perhaps paradoxically, gives it unity. 

 

On the Fate of A Pendulum Clock; or On How the Dutch Blew Their Empire

During the 1680s Huygens's pendulum clocks were involved in two episodes: (i) the great debate between Huygens and Newton over universal gravity and the search for longitude with Huygens’s pendulum clocks, which was arguably the most important technological issue for a country -- the Dutch Republic -- dependent on commerce by sea. The two episodes are linked because in 1690, in his major public response to the Principia, in his Discourse on the Cause of Gravity, Huygens  appealed to the evidence provided by his clocks on Thomas Helder’s 1686-7 expedition to the Cape of Good Hope aboard the Dutch East India Company [hereafter: VOC] ship, Alcmaer, to argue against Newton and for his own theory of gravity. The Principia had appeared in 1686. For the details of this story I refer you to the paper I wrote with George E. Smith.

As it happens the recipient of Huygens’s 1688 report was Johannes Hudde; a world class, Cartesian mathematician and natural philosopher of the astounding generation of students of the Leiden professor Van Schooten (who had introduced Descartes's mathematics to a wide European audience); this group included, in addition to Huygens, Johan de Witt. By 1688 Hudde had improved the waterworks of Amsterdam, introduced fire-hoses, was the leading director of the VOC, and, thereby, one the most powerful politician in Holland—as one of the Mayors of Amsterdam, he basically arranged the means for Stadtholder William III of Orange to invade England. (Amsterdam remembers him with a small street near the Amstel-hotel.) He also maintained a secretive correspondence with Spinoza over God’s nature and existence.[i]

Hudde was thus in an excellent position to support and evaluate Huygens’s efforts to build a working pendulum clock that could find longitude at sea. In my original paper with Smith, we note that in his 1688 report Huygens’s recommends to the Directors of the Dutch East India Company that major efforts be undertaken to de­termine longitudes for num­erous locations, using ec­lip­ses of the innermost satellite of Jupiter:

And although these errors will be improved upon before long through the use of the [pendulum] clocks, it would still be very helpful if one investigated the true longitude at some important places with regard to the Meridian of Texel or Amsterdam, by observing the satellites of Jupiter... [Translated by G.E. Smith & Eric Schliesser][ii]

The Dutch East India Company never followed up on this big-science-grant proposal. By contrast, the French were already engaged in such a project. It is noteworthy that after Huygens died in 1695, the Hudde-led VOC basically dropped further research into using clocks to find longitude. This despite the fact that Huygens had built up a twenty year technological lead over any competition. While his clocks had not been vindicated in sea trials, the results were at least promising enough to continue research and trials. While Leiden University maintained its position as an important educational center in mathematics and natural philosophy through the middle of the eighteenth century, it did not develop a critical mass in research.

Even to this day, some Dutch politicians extol the "VOC mentality." Given the many immoral activities of the Company, including non trivial participation in slave trade (in the East Indies not the transatlantic one) and its monopolistic rent-seeking this is shocking enough. But Dutch decline set in, in part, because of Hudde’s failure to develop and maintain a strategic, scientific infrastructure that would engage in technologically significant foundational research. Perhaps, British demographic advantage would have made Dutch relative decline inevitable anyway, but it is also possible that a more dynamic approach to 'science policy' could have staved it off for quite some time.