Digressions&Impressions

On the Crisis of Liberalism (II)

Regular readers know (recall) that I believe the second wave of liberalism+ has ended and that it may not survive the present darkness. (In brief: first long wave: 1776-1914; second wave: 1945-2009. Some readers will say, good riddance, and to you I say, I hope you do better.) The present crisis is much visible in our daily politics (and headlines), shifting public norms, and the rising confidence of regimes and thinkers who, again, openly espouse hierarchical, ethnic, zero-sum, eugenic, and violent solutions to present conflicts.* While there is much urgent, practical work to be done to salvage institutions that may be at the core of a renewal, some reflection away from daily politics is also required. This also requires attention not just because we need polities that make minimal decency possible,** but also because we need (or so I assume today) properly functioning liberal institutions to meet humanity's great challenges -- environmental disaster, genetic engineering, ethnic conflict, -- ahead.  To reflect on our shortcomings is a means of being liberal as well as a path toward its possible renewal. This is the second post (recall) in an open-ended series (see also here, here, and here).

What follows, then is the start of an attempt to display the existential challenges to liberalism that arise from within. I do not offer solutions to these challenges and so invite readers to chime in. In earlier posts, I discussed self-inflicted wounds such as (i) For profit media; and (ii) the financialization of the economy.

Today i focus on (iii) the Embrace of Revealed Preferences/The Rejection of a Philosophy of Life. One striking feature of the second half of the second wave of liberalism is that its most prominent advocates were economists and ('ethics first') political philosophers (or both). Jointly, their prominence conveyed the message that the point of a liberal project is protecting rights in order to make and re-distribute money. Of course, making money is not the end of the story, it is taken to be an instrument for the pursuit of one's private welfare and the embrace of (what a Rawlsian may call) private, nonpublic values and individual life-plans. Liberalism was seen as an important political and economic doctrine, not a philosophy of life.+ This has two important consequences, first, liberals embrace state-neutrality with respect to fundamental values/goods; and, second, we have a tendency to promote the idea that public speech and justification must be articulated in terms of public reason (with respect for fairness, principles of freedom, equality, and justice, etc.). 

By contrast, critics of liberalism appeal to shared, action-guiding projects: the health of the nation, submission to the divine plan, a green future, a post-revolutionary communist/socialist paradise, social harmony, traditional values, etc. Obviously, these projects are often incompatible with each other. And liberals are often tempted to argue from the pluralist reality of conflicting values in societies with advanced division of labor (and so conflicting interests) and a variety of ethnic and religious backgrounds to the prudential idea that state neutrality is required. We may even add that conflicting values are epistemically fruitful in preventing the dogmatic and premature embrace of any ideology.

But this stance generates a tactical and a philosophical challenge.  The tactical challenge is that critics of liberalism are left to articulate profound shared action-guiding projects, while liberals are left to point to statistics of rising GDP. Now, one may argue that the rejection of shared projects is a feature of liberal political ideology not a bug. And one may claim that rising GDP is often a sign of the removal of famines, the reduction of poverty, increased life expectancy, lower crime, etc. So, it's not as if the liberal's pointing to such statistics is morally worthless. But tactically, the liberal is left with uninspiring politic projects, especially in a context where by historical standards modern societies are already fairly wealthy and not very likely to suffer famine or violent crimes. (Yeah, go read your Pinker!)

The philosophical challenge is the articulation of a liberalism worth having that is both a shared, action-guiding project and does not violate core liberal commitments (the harm principle, the avoidance of cruelty, individual autonomy, non-dogmatism, freedom, justice, etc.). For, shared visionary projects are action-guiding (recall this post critical of Jacob Levy). The articulation of such shared projects, means rejecting a relatively recent, second-wave liberal dogma, nicely articulated by Shklar, "liberalism does not have any particular positive doctrines about how people are to conduct their lives or what personal choices they are to make." (Again, I pick Shklar because in many ways she is least like the problematic version of liberalism I am rejecting.) I think this claim is a mistake, even if I grant Shklar and her followers that creating political conditions and institutions in which cruelty is avoided a crucial and difficult enough task as it is.

The first sentence of Adam Smith's The Theory of Moral Sentiments, asserts, as an axiom, that flourishing of others is necessary to us.** He goes on to describe how such flourishing is possible and what objective conditions for it are. In particular, he draws a sharp contrast between what people imagine is worth attaining and what are true means toward flourishing. The liberal enterprise is, thus, from the beginning concerned with articulating shared projects, the institutions that may facilitate them, and an embrace of ideas that imply that people's flourishing is an objective state of affairs.++  

Now, one may worry -- as Shklar evidently did -- that if one asserts that joint flourishing is an objective state of affairs worth promoting that one then may provide "public authorities the unconditional right to impose beliefs and even a vocabulary as they may see fit upon the citizenry." This is a reasonable fear and most of the critics of liberalism who promote a shared project do so to some degree (even if some will abhor an unconditional right). But Shklar and modern liberals ignore, that there is a half-way station between imposing approved beliefs/vocabulary and being neutral.+++  

What matters is that (again echoing Smith) individuals have the security, capabilities, dispositions, and options to make meaningful choices of the sort that will allow them to flourish jointly. Today, in the context of this post, I do not offer a substantive program (which would have to draw on more recent social science and moral psychology). (Such flourishing will probably involve good health, mutual recognition, lack of fear, the opportunity for love, capabilities for meaningful choices, cultural development, etc.)  Rather, all I point out here is that within constraints, the state can promote indirect incentives conducive to joint flourishing and virtue, while generating strong, indirect disincentives that prevent mutual misery while not encroaching on people's individual freedoms.*** What such a liberalism worth having is, is something that, for now, I must leave -- and this is a political invitation, my dear reader -- to your imagination.

 

 

 

Meritocracy and the Crisis of Liberalism

Your point about populism being primarily anti-meritocracy rings true, but raises a problem I can’t my head around: however much resentment (etc.) is felt by those who see themselves as not part of the meritocracy, it seems that in matters of immediate personal concern, they DEMAND meritocracy: they won’t stand for second-rate medicine, bridge-designing, supermarket-stocking, road paving, telephone service, . . .  . . And we are now (I hope) beginning to see very clearly  that if you shun expertise in advisors in government, you end up doing truly stupid things!  It does seem that Trump, for example, doesn’t worry about surrounding himself with expert economists, diplomats, military strategists,  . . . . etc., but still yearns for expert legal advice (which he isn’t getting much of) and expert polling, . . .  --Daniel Dennett (personal correspondence, June 27, 2018), [Quoted with permission.]

Dennett's note is a response to my  recent post on the crisis of liberalism (recall). In the body of the post I did not mention populism. The link between the rise of populism and meritocracy was made by Steve Davies in a comment on the the post; I concurred in response. (My colleagues in comparative political science are debating the relationship between the effects of globalization, educational attainment, economics success/class and populist politics so I do not mean to suggest this is self-evidently true.)

I had made a different claim. I had claimed that all kinds of intermediary social orders  -- e.g., military, law, health, education, research, clergy, trade-unions, press, etc. --, often associated with professions and skilled virtues or with social goals that are in some sense  self-justifying or whose primary purpose often predates the state or commercial society had been transformed by (what I call) 'financialization,' under the guise of meritocracy. That this happened suggests, first, that pre-existing hierarchy and status within such orders must have come to be felt unearned and/or inadequately justified and, second, that these social orders lacked the self-confidence in the justification of their primary mission to resist encroachment (about this some other time). 

The transformation of these intermediary social orders has had an unintended effect: namely that a derivative social function or indirect public good these social orders can provide has disappeared. This public good can be described in many different ways in part because none of them is wholly satisfactory: but these social orders are sites of practical rationality, of dispersed power, of (ahh) social capital, of pursuits of a fundamental ends (health, safety, spiritual belonging, justice, knowledge, etc.), and also a natural source of pluralism in society. In addition to the opinions of individual citizens, it's these social orders that help stabilize, even buffer a liberal society. My thought here is indebted to Adam Smith,* although the idea is associated with Burke; but unlike Burke I do so with less fondness for small platoons and (thanks to Jacob Levy's work [recall]) with due alertness to the local tyrannies the busybodies of these social orders can generate. 

A key point here is that the intrinsic missions of these great social intermediaries is multi-dimensional in what I call (with a nod to Dennett's work) 'value space.' Some of their primary ends cohere naturally with each other, some are sometimes in tension and sometimes complementary. Others are often contradictory. The point is that these ends belong to different fundamental features of human existence which can be incommensurable (but need not be so); it's the multi-dimensionality of value space that makes these social intermediaries natural bulwarks of social pluralism (even if the agents and institutions within each are not so). Financialization threatens the dimensionality of value space.

By 'financialization' I refer, in short-hand, to a number of related, and self-sustaining phenomena: the introduction of new public management, the acceptance of financial leverage as a key 'management tool,' and (facilitated by SAP) the embrace of financial indicators (including profit goals and high salaries for those that climb the ladder) as key guides in the mission of the order. (Often this is treated as the effects of neo-liberalism.) The crucial point is that the joint embraces of financialization flattens the dimensionality of the value-space in  society and makes comparison along a modest number of dimensions possible (and so reduces pluralism).

Financialization also flattens how we think about merit: to simplify, contribution to the (financial) bottom line or earned income become proxies for merit. These would converge if their is an efficient market in professional labor; but government regulation and professional qualifications tend to prevent such an efficient market in the professions. The problem is that financial merit and intrinsic professional quality need not coincide.

Now, I can turn back to Dennett's query. If I ask one of my wife's medical friends -- she is a surgeon -- for the best doctor to treat a friend's condition, I am not asking for the highest paid doctor. In fact, I would be somewhat taken aback and become mistrustful if one of them recommends a physician in virtue of the fact that they were the best paid physician. (Such a financial proxy is meaningless, in fact, when we compare physicians among different countries with different health care systems.) If in addition to his/her degree, the physician had a statement of a private banker hanging on the wall or, more likely (and not infrequently), an air of moral superiority over the patient, this would also be reason for concern about their quality as (say) a caring physician. (I did once get treated by a physician who bragged to my wife how efficiently he saw patients; it did not endear him to me.)

The previous paragraph already makes clear that one can want the best expert for one's needs while being cautious about the system of meritocracy that's developing around us in our society. And I think that's sufficient to answer Dennett's general question. I happen to think people need not be fully coherent in their aims, desires, and judgments (as long as they avoid placing bets with Bayesians). In complex societies like ours I actually think this makes us more responsive, adaptable, and happier, but nothing I say turns on that. But I do want to make one more pertinent point about Dennett's comment.

Social hierarchies are unpleasant and insufferable in different ways. In a social hierarchy that (increasingly) focuses rather narrowly on money and, in turn, treats the hierarchy as merited (both in the sense as being justified and fair as well as also in  the sense of tracking personal quality of the contributions to society) -- so with a low dimensional value space --, it increasingly becomes natural to speak of those on top of the hierarchy as winners and those on the lower rungs as (justified) losers (even the social science literature does this). (This despite the fact that even in perfectly competitive markets -- and few of ours approximate that -- luck plays, as Knight, Keynes and Hayek agreed --  an intrinsic role in outcomes.) In a properly functioning liberal society, by contrast, the value space is multi-dimensional and there are complex ways in which different elements  of the hierarchies interact.

To go through life being thought and internalizing the idea that one is a loser is grounds for (justified, I think, recall this post) resentment. In such circumstances one can still want the best for oneself and rail against the system, perhaps, even wish for its downfall. 

 

On Taboos and Brutal Honesty; on the 'ídeals of academic liberalism' [long read, alas]

Are some ideas so offensive that they shouldn’t be engaged with? That question occupies scholars a lot these days, and tends to generate a predictably polarized set of responses — from those who opine that snowflake millennials are destroying free speech to those who call for the retraction of journal articles for ideological (among other) reasons. Meanwhile, I find myself lost somewhere in the middle, attempting to understand my own decisions...

An idealistic model of academic liberalism says that we should engage with all ideas, no matter what. Truth is its own defense! We have
nothing to fear from ideas, even those we find offensive! And so on. I would love it if this were true, but it has always seemed like nonsense to me.

Saying why, though, is tricky. It’s not merely that I’m confident the conclusion is false. I’m a philosopher — I spend lots of time entertaining ideas I’m pretty sure are false, and it’s part of the ethos of my discipline that this is a worthwhile activity. It’s also not that I think the conclusion is morally wrong or  could have morally bad consequences. That’s true of many ideas that are obviously  worth engaging with...
The pro-rape argument is different because I can’t see how the benefits of discussing it outweigh the harms. Perhaps the argument is clever or original, but let’s be honest — there’s a  limited amount of intellectual value in any one argument. If I want to take up a challenging and interesting argument, I can pick one of the thousands of other challenging, interesting arguments out there. So the benefits of engaging with a pro-rape argument are minimal. The harms, though, are not. Taking seriously an argument that justifies rape has the potential to cause intense pain to victims of rape, not to mention the potential to promote rape. Citing ideas, discussing them, responding to them is a type of scholarly currency. It’s academic signal-boosting...

Most people would, of course, be far too polite to say what Singer says. But Singer’s claims about  the comparative value of disabled lives follow naturally from the casual remarks that disabled people and caregivers hear all the time...
I seriously doubt that the well-intentioned people who say these things would endorse Singer’s conclusions. But Singer is right that his conclusions flow straightforwardly from these sorts of common claims. For this reason, I find myself strangely grateful for the brutal honesty of Peter Singer. He says explicitly what others only gesture at implicitly.
People worry that grappling with offensive views gives them undue legitimacy. But in the case of someone like Singer, those views have legitimacy whether or not I choose to engage with them. To state the obvious, the arguments of the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University are going to matter whether or not I pay attention to them. But more importantly, Singer’s views already have legitimacy because people will continue to think about disability in ways directly relevant to Singer’s arguments regardless of whether progressive academics decide those arguments are simply too offensive to be discussed. (After all, as Singer himself wryly notes, the sales of Practical Ethics tend to increase whenever there are calls to “no platform” his talks.) Even Singer’s views on infant euthanasia aren’t a dystopian  thought experiment. At least one major European country (The Netherlands) openly practices infanticide in some cases of disability.
...
As a full professor, I have an incredible amount of social privilege compared with most disabled people (large percentages of whom are unemployed and live below the poverty line)...Given all this, it’s hard for me to  justify the idea that I shouldn’t engage with Peter Singer. Do Singer’s views make me uncomfortable? Yes, deeply so. But probably not as uncomfortable as they make people living with spinabifida in the Netherlands, given the Netherlands’ policy on infant euthanasia in cases of spina bifida.

And unlike others more directly affected, it is literally my job to think and talk about difficult ideas. The discomfort and hurt when dealing with views like Singer’s are real. But if I’m unwilling to take on a measure of discomfort, given how much privilege I have and how little I have to lose, then I’m not sure I’m using the privilege of an academic life the way I ought to be.
The value of struggling with Singer’s ideas doesn’t negate the real and material costs, but it does offset them. And in a piece of utilitarian reasoning that Singer himself would approve of, to me the trade off seems worth it. Prejudice is often held subtly, implicitly, or without much  reflection. By giving us clear and well-defined arguments, thinkers like Singer lay bare the case  for views which many people hold. Once that case is laid out, it’s much easier to begin the work of pointing out its flaws.--Elizabeth Barnes "Arguments That Harm — and Why We Need Them" The Chronicle Review. [HT Liam Kofi Bright & Justin Weinberg @Dailynous.]

While there is a lot more to Barnes's article, the underlying argument has a few key components:

• (i) there is a cost-benefit analysis of both (a) engaging with particular position/speech and (b) the consequences of leaving some speech/idea unchallenged. Barnes notes (c) that the harms and benefits can fall unequally on society, on vulnerable populations, and individual academics. Conjoined with such cost-benefit analysis is the idea that
• (ii) there are opportunity costs in engaging with a project. Time and attention are scarce resources. So not all ideas can be engaged with it and engaging with some means that other perhaps worthier projects are potentially slowed down or prevented.
• (iii) There is path-dependency/historical legacy: some views are already in the culture and/or have legitimacy regardless of what philosophers do/say.
• (iv) Status plays a role in who puts a particular idea forth and who is worth responding to.
• (v) Professional philosophy is (in part) grappling with difficult (and false) ideas.
• (vi) Privilege or noblesse oblige creates a duty of taking on unpleasant tasks on behalf of (more vulnerable, less secure, etc.) others.
• (vii) Brutal honesty & clarity in arguments are taken as intellectual virtues such that flaws can be exposed.

Each of these steps is cashed out in subtle ways, so that there are a lot of moving but also mutually reinforcing parts in the argument. (That's not meant as a criticism.) It means one can accept Barnes’s conclusions without agreeing with all the moving parts, or demur from some of the conclusions and still accept most of the moving parts. (Again, that’s not a criticism.) There is also another principle which Barnes rejects (as ‘nonsense’):

• (viii) An ‘idealistic model of academic liberalism,’ which says that ‘we should engage with all ideas, no matter what.’

I also reject (viii; which to repeat, Barnes rejects). But I do so because it misrepresents liberalism and also academic liberalism. What I'd like to do here (and, perhaps another post) is ground my response to Barnes in our shared rejection of (viii) and embrace of (i) & (ii). But I will do so on liberal (even classically liberal) grounds and along the way say something about (v; vi; viii). What follows is not meant as a criticism of Barnes's engagement with Singer, but I wish to show that there is something to be said for non-engagement with offensive ideas, even the acceptance of taboos; undoubtedly that will not persuade many, but along the way I would also like to argue for shifting the burdens of who ought to respond to who around a bit (again on liberal grounds).

Liberalism, it’s true, has always been a theory that has been suspicious of government regulation of speech; but it also has been accommodating of exceptions to this (including ones relating to public health, the content of advertising, public safety, incitement to violence, etc.). Of course, the exceptions are contested and differ among broadly liberal jurisdictions and situated liberal political thought. But the exceptions are often motivated by other liberal commitments (including the harm principle (recall), commitments to equality and freedom, and public welfare).

More important, for present purposes, liberalism has also always been welcoming of non-governmental restrictions on speech. This is grounded in prudence, kindness, the harm principle, and the benefits of cooperation. This is so obvious that it is kind of weird philosophers keep forgetting it. For example, even in my famously forthright home-country of the Netherlands, brutal honesty is, in fact, not always encouraged say among business partners, friends, married couples, or teachers and students (more about that below). In ordinary life people everywhere routinely and completely un-problematically engage in self-censorship in all kinds of ways without thereby promoting falsehood or violating any tenet of liberalism. In fact, liberalism assumes that in pluralistic societies, we kind of adopt a live-and-let-live attitude in which we do not confront each other all the time with our sincerely held views. (That's also compatible with rejecting or embracing demands of public reason.) This means that we are expected to self-censor all the time in complex, liberal societies--it is no surprise that the weather, sports, and vapid celebrities are safe conversation starters.

Critics of liberalism, inspired by Foucault and Marcuse, have derogatory names – ‘disciplining,’ ‘bio-politics’ ‘repressive tolerance’ (etc.) -- for such self-censoring practices. And undoubtedly sometimes, perhaps often, the monitoring effects of public opinion, locally and nationally, can be stifling in ways that Mill already diagnosed and alerted us to. But at the same time, norms that restrict speech deemed imprudent or offensive have many positive effects, including reducing coordination costs, facilitating reliable expectations (crucial to justice), and facilitating exchange of ideas and goods. This is not a bug in liberalism, but a core feature of it. For liberalism does not treat speech as harmless or epi-phenomenal to social order—on the liberal view speech is constitutive of our political life (see Levy). But that also means that its impact on others is to be taken seriously; the harm principle is as deeply entrenched in liberalism as the suspicion of government regulation of speech. This is why liberals find nothing silly about concern over, say, systematic micro-aggression (recall here and here). From a liberal's perspective: just because one has a right to offend others does not mean one ought to be offensive.

It does not mean, of course, that such norms (including ones that regulate sexual affairs, dress-codes, civility etc.) can’t be interrogated or challenged [regular readers know (recall here and here) that, inspired by work of Ed Kazarian and Leigh Johnson, I am no friend of civility when it is imposed by institutions], but it does not follow that norms restricting speech are de facto illiberal. In fact, the liberal spirit encourages experimentation with different norms alongside a strong norm of individual responsibility. Obviously, that’s not the end of the matter; it’s quite clear that liberal political economy, and the profit motive (alongside political aspirations) in particular, have encouraged the media to promote all kinds of valuable forms of self-expression as well as irresponsible speech by individuals on social media and internet. This raises important and uncomfortable questions for liberalism and liberal democracy; but the response is not limited to faith in providence that in the long run speech works out fine.

As an aside, it's important that Barnes reminds the reader of the real world consequences of philosophical ideas. It's undoubtedly true that public policy in the Netherlands has a pro-eugenic bias*--one promoted, in fact, not so much by ethicists but by the medical community of OBGYN practitioners and pediatricians (although there is always an ethicists available to lend a hand) -- and that Dutch public policy on disability is problematic--in Holland disability is made invisible in lots of ways. But it's also the case that due to cheap and easy access to various forms of screening and abortion, "infant euthanasia in cases of spina bifida" (which is indeed allowed under the so-called Groningen protocol) is now de facto non-existent in the Netherlands because parents choose not to bring such infants to term.

Okay, let me return to the main argument. I have noted above that liberalism does not embrace (viii). The same is true for academic liberalism. Building on work by Jacob Levy (recall), I have argue that the mission of academic life and education is compatible with a whole range of limitations of speech. These limitations need not be uniform; they can be varied in the classroom, seminar settings, public debates, commencement addresses (etc.) and the particular local missions of the academic institutions. In fact, even universities that pride themselves on their freedom of thought are careful not to be seen as places where, say, astrology or Cartesian vortex theory and a whole bunch of other discarded or wacky ideas are discussed and debated in all seriousness. (That’s compatible with promoting scholarship about them!) Universities self-censor in the curriculum and are very attentive to reputational costs. The same is true of all kinds of noxious political ideas—a cranky professor with insipid views can be tolerated, of course, but colleagues and administrators are careful to avoid amplifying their platforms all the time. People exercise good judgment in these matters all the time. This – restraint and good judgment -- are not just compatible with academic liberalism; the whole point of liberalism is to promote institutions where individuals and communities can exercise good judgment. (Of course, one generation’s good judgment may well be the next generation’s discarded dogma.)

In fact, and this gets me to (v) academics of all disciplines recognize that (academic) taboos make progress possible (recall here; here, and here).+ Journals and disciplines often treat some issues as closed or not worth engaging with. Graduate advisors steer people away from unpromising projects all the time. As Kuhn taught philosophy, a paradigm may well include commitments that are only challenged in  extreme circumstances but otherwise ignored (and legitimately ignored according to standard Kuhnianism); I have expressed reservations about the legitimacy of ignoring objections or treating some heterodox views as worth excluding. But the practice exists widely. Professional philosophers ignore objections all the time (often based on considerations of status or of perceived signficance of the objection) including in Q&A. In fact, I have come to suspect that one way one becomes a high status professional philosopher is to learn to ignore smoothly objections from lower status peers rather than to try make sure that the best objection to one's views is jointly articulated. If you have never witnessed this, you probably engage in it yourself.:)

What does this amount to? Academic liberalism embraces the legitimacy of taboos and norms of responsible speech. More recent liberalism (thanks to work by Fricker, Dotson, etc.) is increasingly attentive to how the benefits and costs of speech are distributed; we frown on punching down and victim blaming; we worry about speech that puts further (social, political, and economic) burdens or opportunity costs on those that lack resources or skills; thanks to Heather Douglas we worry again about social consequences of even truthful scientific speech.

Let me now turn to (vii). Professional philosophy has been rather self-indulgent during the last century: leading journals have allowed and even rewarded (perhaps sincere) debate on infanticide, disenfranchisement, torture, etc.; our profession has lionized conceptions of international justice, technocratic solutions to environmental problems, and humanitarian interventions where the down-side risks of implementation are always put on (poorer, darker-skinned, etc.) folk who do not have a seat at the table (recall). When one complains about this, a philosopher's instinct is to claim that she has no responsibility for the application of her ideas--that entirely predictable misapplications of ideas are irrelevant to (core) philosophy. Cui Bono?

Our pedagogic practices have embraced the value of presenting carefully argued papers for morally shocking conclusions as a means to ‘stimulate conversation’ in the class room. Not unlike the media we often prefer to teach by way of polarized debate. It's such a pedagogic culture that welcomes the class room discussion of powerful arguments for awful conclusions. I could see why this is good training for future lawyers and top 20 philosophers; but it really is not a good training for citizenship or the art of living (even if it can be instrumentally useful at times); we learned from Eric Schwitzgebel it does not promote ethical behavior.   

We constantly forget it is not a virtue but a deformation of professional philosophy that it often accords so much respect to arguments and clarity that if one argues carefully one's views are taken seriously regardless of the social consequences of these views or, for that matter, the moral truth of these views. (Of course, if one thinks -- as I do not -- that only argument can establish a moral truth, so much the worse for you!) To note this is not to be a critic of argument (or a friend of Heidegger or poetic philosophy). But as Barnes notes often the only benefit of taking an argument seriously is one internal to the credit economy of the profession or the academy (iv). But no profession is self-justifying in that way. (That's to say I distinguish between the profession and philosophy.)

Barnes seems to think that because (recall (iii) & (vii)) Singer systematizes and articulates clearly what people already think in our culture (and that he has high status (iv)) his views on disability should be taken seriously. This I find very peculiar. Lots of ordinary views do not merit systematization or articulation. There is nothing wrong with ignoring ordinary folk's commitment to various forms of astrology and soothsaying; some of these have a great impact on people's moral lives. [And, yes, I am aware that Singer has been very important in teaching all of us the significance of animal welfare.] Lots of people are racists in various ways. What's the benefit of articulating the view in clear steps? Why should we grapple with racial eugenics (outside of its history and political economy)? There is no obligation to continue every debate with, say, Charles Murray, especially because he has never really responded to the important technical criticism of his work. Singer is, of course, a much better and more honest thinker than Murray. But given the distribution of power and resources, the responsibility to engage with critics and to prevent dangerous uptake of his ideas is clearly on Singer's side not the more vulnerable populations.

Let me close (for today). Barnes has every right to engage with Singer and she may well be right that good will come out of it. I wouldn't be surprised it will make her views (which, recall I admire)** more subtle and fine-grained. But I wonder why we really need to engage in intellectual activities that will continue to entrench his views on disability as central and worth grappling with when there is so much constructive and policy work to do.

 

A working definition of political theory (and five main tasks)

In this post I articulate a working definition of 'political theory.'  I aim at capturing the distinctive practice that covers an extremely wide variety of thinkers throughout history and across cultures and civilizations who practiced their craft in competing ways in very heterogeneous circumstances.* I do so, in part, by piggy-backing on existing definitions of 'politics' (and 'theory'). The post was prompted by my desire to offer some such working definition at the start of my course on the history of political theory next week (see description here).

I call it a 'working definition' because it is provisional and is not meant to offer necessary and sufficient conditions that cover each and every case. It is meant to recognize that the concept is contested.  Speaking of contested, the working definition is not meant to distinguish sociologically political theorists from political philosophers (recall my post, itself a response to Jacob T. Levy's famous piece); in fact, it is meant to cover some of the central activities of both groups. Okay, with that out of the way, let me start.

Politics is the practice or site (or institution(s), etc.) where power is, or could be, exercised in decision-making over collective ends.

This is a fairly broad understanding of politics because it suggests that politics is pretty much intrinsic to all groups (so not just states and governments, but also churches, clubs, corporations, families, classrooms, unions, etc.) It is broad, in another sense, because politics so understood is not restricted to humans. That's deliberate because I want to do justice to the recurring temptation to treat human politics in light of the politics found in our animal relatives (bees, bonobos, horses, and sheep show up regularly in the history of political thought) or the other way around (and to allow that Martians or Angels could also have politics).

While I do not mean to be exhaustive let me offer brief working definitions of 'power' and 'decision-making:'

• Power is a means (or cause) to achieve ends (or aims).
• Decision-making involves: (i) aims; (ii) means; (iii) some procedure/norm/practice.

So, on this conception, in politics, power allows one to settle or influence questions/issues related to the aims, means, and manner of decision-making.* It is also inherently teleological--it is inherently (even if often tacitly/latently) oriented toward some aim or another. The exercise of power may well require considerable organization, triggering, or communication, but when it is so exercised it is directed. So, this conception of power, which is just a cause among many, allows one to distinguish among various background and enabling conditions and power as such. Of course, the content and nature of power varies hugely (from material goods to beliefs,** money, faith, numbers, bullets, swords, technology, love, etc.). 

A background assumption here on the nature of political decision-making is that there is always some scarcity that requires some prioritizing (which is reflected in the aims,  means, procedure, etc.). Otherwise, the conception is deliberately vague in order to allow a wide variety of practices (voting, coercion, rational deliberation, networked distribution, marketing, revelation, habit, etc.) to be understood as parts of and contributing to collective decision-makings.

Theory is an abstract or conceptual entity that has or may have systematic relations among its principles, components, and inferential basis.

This is meant to be inclusive and so to make room for self-consciously scientific treatises as well as narratives/epics/dialogues/revelation. What matters is not the way theory is presented, but rather if there is an underlying account that abstracts away from mere contingent description and offers ways to project beyond a moment in time and place. 

Importantly, maxims and proverbs are not themselves theory. But if they are or could be collected together, they may form the basis of theory. A policy brief or (to give a historical example) advice to the prince are not themselves theoretical, but they may presuppose theory or point the way to one.

So, Political Theory is an abstract (and potentially systematic) account of the ways (or means), conditions of, and constraints on which power(s) is or could be exercised for (its) collective ends.

While the phrase 'political theory' is derived historically from the book-title of Aristotle's Politics (Πολιτικά) which can be translated as "affairs of the cities," one finds political theory in many cultures, ages, and disciplinary environments (including, but not limited to, Ancient Egypt and Ugarit [recall], the Hebrew Bible [recall], classical China [recall]  etc.). While one cannot rule out some intercourse among major civilizations far apart and the preservation of insights through historical apocalypses, my present understanding entails that at least until the last few centuries there are historically distinct traditions of political theory.

So understood Political theory has at least three main distinct roles:

• (1) Normative guidance
  •    This ranges from utopian projects to reform the whole of society and ideal theory to focused policy advice.
• (2) Explanation
  • This can be offered in terms of (a) causes, (b) statistical regularities; (c) process tracing; (d) functional explanation  (etc.)
  • Or can be done in terms of making something intelligible by way of (a) rational/historical reconstruction; (b) sympathetic interpretation, etc.
• (3) A tool in empirical research
  
  • Theory tells you what data and phenomena to pay attention to
  • Helps one turn data into evidence

Since Max Weber and John Neville Keynes (see here for defense of that claim)+ the first (1) and latter two (2-3) tend to be separated with the latter two finding their home in the social sciences, socio-biology, network theory, while the first is often treated as distinctly philosophical or (if allowed in a social science faculty) housed in a separate political theory chair. Obviously, in practice 1-3 can be mingled in all kinds of ways as illustrated by the history of political theory. For example, normative political theory (1) often presupposes commitments about, say, the causal structure of the world (2), which may be the product of (3). But we may also be focused on some area of study (3) because of some normatively salient background theory (1), in order to generate an explanation (2), etc.

This intermingling is no surprise because of the nature of (political) power. Because power is inherently teleological, that is, when exercised directed at some aim(s), it is impossible to completely ignore human ends in political science--these ends are just what is taken to be valuable. Of course, on many conceptions of doing empirical research and offering explanations, the researcher should set aside his/her own commitments (but recall **) when describing/explaining or studying these values.++

There are two more distinct roles that political theory can take on, and these can, often, be intermingled with the first three:

• (4) Unmasking the status quo
  • This can involve genealogy, ideology critique, etc.
• (5) Clarification of (contested) concepts
  • By way of conceptual analysis (what is 'democracy;' 'freedom;' 'justice;' 'equality', etc.)
    

I treat unmasking projects (4) as distinct from (1) because while these often are informed by a deep (and morally informed) sense of outrage or indignation, they tend to be suspicious of morality (as it is theorized) and to be disinclined to present themselves in theoretically rich, normative terms. Rather, they aim to cast the ruling orthodoxies or even quite tacit habits of thought/behavior in a new, troubling light that remove their self-evidence. In so doing such projects can draw on or offer new (2) explanations of political phenomena (even point to the presence of politics/power where it was previously unnoticed) or (3) stimulate new empirical research on various phenomena. 

Finally, conceptual clarification is in some sense the least ambitious way in which political theory can manifest itself. For conceptual clarification is not sufficient for a political theory.*** (A political theory is more than its clarified concepts.) But while there are many forms of constructive (and destructive!) ambiguity in political practice, conceptual clarity is an important virtue (with evolving standards, etc.) when comparing political theories and, in many traditions, articulating one. If somebody objects that this (5) is really a method (and then one of many [see, for example, Blau's fine collection)], fair enough. Theory can be messy like that.

 

On the American Malaise; private wealth, public failures

Taken together, all of this suggests that, at best, the United States is wasting time that it, quite frankly, may not have. I know some readers here will think this is all for the best, because they don’t care for both the theory and practice of American leadership. But I submit that global economic and political interconnectedness makes it increasingly difficult to achieve progressive goals within the borders of individual states.

The weaker America’s hand, the more likely we are to get a more minimal variant of liberal order, one with open trade and plenty of multilateralism, but little in the way of ‘baked in’ preferences for human rights and democracy. A China that fills the vacuum will do so as a totalitarian party state—quite likely constituted around individual leaders with cults of personality—and with a hybrid of capitalism and socialism quite different from what liberals or progressives would find attractive. It’s not that the United States should be preparing for an inevitable Cold War, but that it needs to remain engaged, credible, and primus inter pares in a web of alliances composed of most of the world’s advanced industrial states.--Dan Nexon. "Xi Jinping’s China, Trumpism, and International Order" @'Lawyers, Guns, and Money [HT Jacob T. Levy]

Even the smartest commentary on US domestic and international politics rarely escapes from partisan evaluation. By  'partisan evaluation' I equivocate between both (i) evaluating from a partisan standpoint as well as (ii) evaluating partisan achievements or failures. Of course, it is possible to do (ii) in a Weberian neutral fashion, but it's hard to pull off given that attention to such failures or achievements often contributes to (i). (Nor do I wish to deny that some administrations/parties screw up more than others or are responsible for some good or bad political outcomes.) What follows is an attempt to avoid both (i-ii), you can be the judge if I succeed.

The US suffers from a crisis of governance. By this I mean a hollowing out of US state capacity. Before you start to laugh -- after all the US Government is not just capable of mobilizing enormous power, but actually does so every day in deployment of troops, incarceration of citizens, capacity to tax, redistribution of wealth, and providing rents to insiders, etc. --, let me remind you of a few facts: first, what is notable about hurricanes of, say, the last thirty years, Andrew, Ike, Katrina, Sandy, Harvey, and Irma is not just the often incompetent response, but the utter lack of preparedness. (See also the series of guest post by Daniel Hogendoorn.) Preparedness involves the routine and politically boring elements of governance: drawing up long range plans, creating consensus procedures, drilling, failure testing, etc.  It requires complex coordination of different levels of government and different kinds of agencies. While Federalism generates routine challenges on governance, it also generates opportunities (for creative experimentation and citizen involvement, etc.).

Second, the maintenance of US Public infrastructure is often dismal. This includes an astounding number of deficient bridges on the US Highway System. Maintenance, repair, and inspection are politically un-sexy and while they may involve serious technical challenges, they are really not complex decisions. They often require earmarking a percentage of the capital budget and smart decisions when projects are planned (which may involve willingness to do 20-40 year projections, etc.). Obviously, there is politics here: do you invest in road or public transit; green options vs cheap, etc. But again the underlying issues are connected to capacity to coordinate, plan, and execute.

Third, the response to the ZIKA virus epidemic, left not just allies and poor countries unprotected, but needlessly endangered the lives of US citizens and babies. (Think about that; a country that obsesses over the status of fetuses, basically could not get its act together to protect the unborn.) Strikingly enough, the one municipality that got it right (while the US Government was bickering) was Miami--not exactly known for its high  quality governance. I used the previous three examples of lack of effective governance-- disaster planning & relief, infrastructure maintenance, and public health -- because these are not normally thought of as partisan issues, they impact the welfare of citizens often directly, and they involve long term coordination and planning by government of societies intellectual, financial, and workers's resources. (I could have added examples about the state of US Dams, airports, etc. I am inclined to think that there is by now overwhelming evidence that US local police forces are badly trained.)

Now I do not want to glamorize the past. But for most of the twentieth century, the US has been the de facto leader in developing the frameworks for and implementing effective governance. I don't deny, first, impressive feats by other countries (e.g.,the Swiss were capable of putting trains in impossible places and (post 1953) the Dutch created a comprehensive approach to water-management). Nor, second, that some of the US achievements themselves causes and reinforced racial patterns of oppression, and often involved brutal class warfare.

My current pet-theory that helps explain this erosion of governance is rooted in the end of the cold war. I consider the fall of the Berlin Wall the greatest political moment in my life. Even so, Mutually Assured Destruction created a sobriety in US governance that is lacking ever since. Because of overwhelming  US power, since then our political elites have behaved recklessly (culminating in the second Iraq war and the way the invasion of Afghanistan was handled) and at home (as Nexon notes, continuously allowing Wall Street to extract rents). I do not deny that the US behaved foolishly before, but there was always a multi-dimensional check on the extent of the folly. My underlying intuition is that democratic regimes do badly when they understand themselves as (locally) hegemonic and unchallenged: think classical Athens, the Dutch in the Far East before second world war, France in Vietnam after, Israel since the Egypt peace accords, etc. <--Obviously, this should be tested more rigorously.

Notice that I have not mentioned President Trump. I don't think what I am describing is a partisan issue (in the two senses above). Regular readers know I treat Trump as a symptom of the malaise not its cause (recall for example here and, going back to december 2005, here). I am open to the argument that in fact the meaning of his rise involves a very sizeable part of US electorate's repudiation of the elites from both parties that had governed (or not) the US during the last generation. (This was symbolized by the repudiation of candidates with the name 'Bush' and 'Clinton.') And while it is too early to tell, it is notable that one-party control of nearly all levers of US government has only revealed the extent of dysfunctionality.*

I close with three thoughts: first, it is possible that there has been a displacement effect. That is, that in so far as the US federal government has become enamored by (un)-funded mandates during the last few decades, governance capacity has been simply overwhelmed at all levels.* (Perhaps the war on drugs also played some such role.) Second, I am inclined to discount the currently popular idea that partisan polarization is the underlying cause here. (If anything I suspect it is also the effect.) For polarization has entrenched incumbents, and so should, in principle, make long-term governance easier. Third, I honestly don't know what is causing the corrosion of governance. I believe it involves a failure of democratic leadership -- a topic too ignored by theorists and empirical scientists --, and I am pretty sure it also involves a failure of our for-profit media landscape, but I do not know the solutions.  It is astounding, however, perhaps unprecedented, that a country as wealthy, youthful, educated, and as dynamic as the US is incapable of righting the ship of state. It is not that I welcome a future global rivalry with China, but one is almost tempted to long for it.

 

Pateman On the Shaky Foundations of Liberal Contractualism

Exploitation is possible precisely because...contracts about property in the person place right of command in the hands of one party to the contract....The genius of contract theorists has been to present both the original contract and actual contracts as exemplifying and securing individual freedom. On the contrary, in contract theory universal freedom is always an hypothesis, a story, a political fiction. Contract always generates political right in the form of relations of domination and subordination....Carole Pateman (1988) The Sexual Contract, 8

In re-reading, because teaching, Pateman's Sexual Contract, I was struck by the claim that contract always generates 'political right in the form of relations of domination and subordination.' As I was contemplating her 'always,' I suddenly realized that I had not quite grasped the depth of her challenge to liberal contractualism. For, I had always (falsely) assumed that she was making the non-trivial, albeit limited, point that given empirical conditions of social hierarchy and unfairness, existing contracts re-inscribe forms of domination and subordination. That insight is indeed what explains the idea behind the first sentence quoted above: contracts produce inequality of power (income, status, etc.) because, regardless of the nature of formal (abstract) equality that is presupposed in the making  of any contract, in the real world contracts always tend to reflect the relative bargaining positions of the parties to the contract. Or they tacitly create out-groups not party to, and subordinated by, the contract. This is why even commercial contracts can, and generally do, reinforce economic and political/social hierarchies, even if over time they may shift them in unexpected and unintended ways. Pateman is right to call attention to sexual and commercial exploitation grounded in contracts.

But while the limited point reveals that historically contractualism is compromised by the many injustices it legitimates, the point is itself not fatal to a liberal contractualism worth having. All it requires, in response, is more stringent conditions on the material and social/economic (etc.) pre-conditions of a legitimate contract. While this may be a step too far for many folk who are attracted to (say a Lockean) contractualism, so much the worse for them. (That's to say if you want to be an apologist for hierarchy, good for you.) 

I now recognize that Pateman's point is more thoroughgoing. To grasp the more fundamental insight, it is worth being reminded of the conceptual difference between your average contract and your standard promise. The key distinction is that a promise has no enforcement mechanism outside the promising parties. A contract worth its name, by contrast, doesn't merely bring parties to it together, but also introduces a credible, enforcement mechanism (a binding arbiter, judicial review, etc.). This enforcement mechanism has to be a stronger (in the relevant sense) power such that enforcement is credible.

Thus, conceptually every genuine contract -- even when we only think of it as a source of justification --  presupposes subordination to some higher authority. (The absence of such higher authority – as in some international treaties – make some contacts more akin to promises than to contracts.) While sometimes one of the parties to the contract may well be able to supply the power and thus credibility of enforcement (alliances with a hegemonic power are like this), this does not undermine Pateman’s insight. While it's not the main point of most contracts, all contacts legitimize the contracting parties' subordination to a higher party.+ In most contracts this higher power is the judiciary, but in the founding contract this is the state/sovereign (etc.).

Now, for Hobbes – and unlike most critics (and friends) of Hobbes, Pateman understands the strengths of his approach -- (civil) subordination to the state is a feature not a bug. The whole point of the contract is the generation and simultaneous subordination to a higher power, a mortal god, in his fine words. Of course, Hobbes does not advocate subordination for its own sake; they are supposed to make possible the 'fruits' of peace. And if one has sympathy for consequentialist justifications that may be well good enough. (Obviously it ought not be good enough once one has confronted, say, Pateman’s or Mills’s reminders of the many ways in which both hypothetical and actual contracts have inscribed gendered and racial (etc.) patterns of exclusion and domination.)

Hobbes is no liberal so for him subordination to another is a price worth paying. But it is peculiar that subsequent liberals would sign up for a way of conceptualization the political order that at its core presupposes subordination to a stronger party. Whether one thinks liberalism as, at heart, a program that is in the business of preventing harm, or promoting freedom, or the preservation of human dignity (etc.), it has, in practice, an instinctive abhorrence of systems of hierarchy. This is, at heart, liberalism’s argument against feudalism and slavery. (They are not primarily opposed for their bad consequences.) Even the defense of commerce is, at heart, not utilitarian or focused on economic growth (or on the virtues it promotes)—it is rather grounded on the desirability of mutual exchange, which presupposes, if not always mutual recognition and the legitimacy of each side’s desires and longings, at least acknowledged indifference to these.

As a non-trivial aside, it is, of course, perfectly possible – I believe Jacob Levy taught me this -- that as a historical fact, liberalism arose as a mitigating project against an existing strong state (say, Tudor absolutism, French despotism, etc.).* That is, it’s the reality of a certain species of existing subordination that generates the liberal project. So, it may well be the case that practices of certain kind of subordination are the historical-social preconditions for the very desirability of liberalism.** So, liberalism may well be the bastard-child of state power, and aims to diminish it or re-direct it to less dangerous ends.

Be that as it may, Pateman’s conceptual point should give contractarian liberals pause: it may – let’s stipulate -- be legitimate to choose one’s self-subordination. But it is peculiar to inscribe one’s subordination (to a higher power, etc.) in the very ground and justification of the political order. That's, in fact, what nationalists do (recall). And it is especially peculiar if such self-subordination is inevitable given that one understands the order as a contract. (This is no less peculiar than the obsession of some contemporary liberals in finding justification for the use of state power against others.)*** That is to say, if liberalism is de facto a normative enterprise that presupposes the state and seeks to ameliorate it by promoting fair and just (and harm-reducing) institutions, we should avoid conceptualizations that commit us to hierarchy from the start--that's just asking for trouble.

 

On Realist Political Theory, Immanent Critique, and Systematicity

Second, realists deny that we need such a regulative idea to guide us here and now: just because we cannot have certainty about what perfection demands, it does not follow that we cannot pick out injustices that ought to be remedied (Sen, 2010). There is no reason to believe that such an anti-theoretical approach must engender a worrying complacency towards the status quo (contra Nussbaum, 2000). If we recall that our ways of life and our ethical and political concepts have a history, there is little temptation to assume that our political world ‘is a satisfactorily functioning whole’ as ‘some widely accepted parts of it may stand condemned in the light of perfectly plausible extrapolations of other parts’ (IBWD: 36–37). Working from within, we can therefore reinterpret ‘what is ethically significant, so as to give a critique of existing institutions, conceptions, prejudices and powers’ (IBWD: 37).17 Conflict between our moral sentiments is a ‘historically, socially, and probably psychologically conditioned phenomenon’ – a result of the pluralistic nature of modernity and the cultural changes that have accompanied it – and it is not a rational requirement that it be avoided (PHD: 162). Rather than attempting (unsuccessfully) to resolve such conflicts theoretically, the most useful thing philosophical reflection may do is to explain why they have a basis in various sentiments we hold dear (PHD: 164)....

We all have prevolitional or pre-reflective concerns; commitments to actual states of affairs and courses of action among actual people which will give our prescriptive political arguments their purpose. While philosophical enquiry can help us to understand them better, there is not a great deal it can do to either systematise them or justify them in the ways political moralists typically desire. If we take seriously the idea that we must make sense to those whom we speak, there is little reason to assume this activity cannot guide political action. As a result, realists ‘should not concede to abstract ethical theory its claim to provide the only intellectual surroundings for such ideas’ (ELP: 198 [quoting Bernard Williams--ES]).--Edward Hall "How to do realistic political theory (and why you might want to)" European Journal of Political Theory, Vol 16, Issue 3. [Emphases in original]

Realism in recent political theory (drawing on a long history going back to Thucydides and quite a bit of Nietzsche), a movement centered on analytic political theory as practiced in Britain, is inspired by the writings of Bernard Williams and Raymond Geuss and their rejection of  Rawlsian ideal theory [although G.A. Cohen and Ronald Dworkin often make more convenient targets]. Realists dislike moralism in political theory -- and especially symbolic moralism, they often invoke the image of Kant at the Court of King Arthur -- and dislike the 'applied ethics' sensibility that permeated political philosophy for the last few generations.* A central example of this is the desire to resist treating legitimacy as reducible to questions of justice; and to see the question of political authority and order as fundamentally a political issue first. It does not follow that realists are non-normative; but they tend to prefer, when they turn to normative questions, as the quoted passage reveals, immanent critique with references to historical and social conditions that are politically salient and accessible to existing political communities. (And so reject moralizing with abstract, ideal theories relatively far removed from political life).

As regular readers will know, I share with the realist a resistance to treating political philosophy as a species of applied ethics. I also dislike the moralism of our political philosophy and also reject the assumption of full compliance because, as I once noted in a controversial piece, if people  were moral, we could do away with a lot of our liberal, democratic practices; liberalism is a set of institutional responses to human imperfection (including immorality). It should not presuppose moral behavior (even if it encourages it in various ways). 

Even so, realists have a tendency -- it's not a necessary entailment -- to dislike and reject the demand for systematic theory. They much prefer reliance of contextual judgment (because realists have a healthy and admirable suspicion of the technocratic tendency in much contemporary liberal theory). But even if one were to fully grant their criticisms of ideal theory, one need not throw out systematic theory.  One can embrace the fruitfulness of systematic theory without becoming technocratic. And that's because systematic theory has three political virtues (recall also this piece on Adam Smith and Jacob Levy):   

1. A system can allow one to risks of always acting in ad hoc fashion and, thereby, allow one to grasp which compromises are worth accepting and which undermine one's political, strategic, and (yes) moral  aims.
2. That is, some kind of system is required to guide (not control) long-term planning and to allow trade-offs to be modeled and, where possible, foreseen. 
3. Being guided by a system generates the possibility of consistency over time.  

Now, obviously 1-3 are connected in various ways. One underlying connection is a kind of rationality requirement that is most obvious in 2-3. And so obviously some of these virtue can also can be claimed by the technocrat or the central planner. (This is where realists come surprisingly close to Hayekians who also reject systematic theory because they worry it will become a source of social control.) But this kind of rationality is very different from the expectation that individuals or collectives are by nature or by inclination rational (which realists are rightly suspicious off) or moral.** 

For, it is worth noting (and I close here) that by being able to model these trade-offs transparently one need not have to trust the expert (and her hidden wisdom, practice, knowledge etc.) That is to say, an overarching, systematic theory can also be a way to combat reliance on local experts because it provides the constraining guidance/constraints in which they (say) optimize. 

As I said above, the rejection of systematic theory is not a necessary entailment of realist political theory. So, one may understand this post an invitation to realists to reconsider their instinctive dislike of systematic theory.

 

 

 

On Supporting Groups Wholeheartedly, Without Full Agreement

Yesterday, I wrote that:

For even the Economist (echoing  Jacob Levy (here)) understands that BLM's "supporters oppose police brutality, mass incarceration, America’s drug war, police militarisation and civil-forfeiture abuses. All of those are causes that liberals, libertarians and conservatives—anyone who fears unchecked state power—ought to cheer." That is, lovers of liberty, least of all Jews, have nothing to fear from the success of BLM in promoting its primary aims.

I went on to suggest, pragmatically, that (i) even a wildly successful Black Lives Matter poses no threat to Zionism and (ii) vilification of BLM will only back-fire and prevents/halts lots of win-win opportunities for cooperation. I also suggested, more idealistically, that rejectionism toward BLM  prevents much needed mutual recognition.

As my former student Phoebe Maltz Bovy reminded me, my response was a cop-out. First, it fails to acknowledge and scrutinize the moral grounds of BLM's critique of Zionism (and what/how Zionists may respond).  Second, it tacitly concedes too much to those that insist that one must choose between (would be) rival views of the world. Because I am  having trouble finding BLM's statement/critique of Zionism --I only found a lot of descriptions by hostile press (I welcome suggestions and leads) --, I focus here, briefly, on the second point.

For, BLM deserves suppport for many reasons. I think the Economist (inspired by Levy) above gets its right, although it is notable that it fails to mention White supremacy, that is, that BLM needs to exists because "Black lives are systematically and intentionally targeted for demise." (Whether BLM welcomes my arm-chair support and sympathy is another matter.) It is shameful that half a century after the civil rights movement this still needs to be debated and pursued in real life. That BLM also pursues some ends I might disagree with does not prevent me from supporting it wholeheartedly. Even if, at the end of the day, BLM turns every American into an anti-Zionist I would support it. (That's because I don't see that as an existential threat to Zionism and BLM's would-be-success improves America even if .) By analogy: I support the legitimacy of Zionism, including the imperfect, real world Zionism we have (even at moments when it is really falls short of minimal decency), but I also diagnose some strategic failures in Zionism and I reject a lot of Israeli policies, including its many cruel and inhumane policies toward Israeli Arabs and Palestinians.

That is to say, one can support, and warmly support, a group's aims while disagreeing with tactics and some/many of its specific goals.+ (As it happens, I don't disagree with BLM's tactics, and I think it has been unfairly maligned by hostile critics and those that should know better.)* To expect and demand full agreement with a group's aims and tactics is, in fact, totalitarian. It is totalitarian both when the group demands such extreme loyalty from its members and supporters, and it is totalitarian when outsiders insist that one's support for group X entails support for everything that X does or aims for.

For example, I have long ardently supported Ajax the the professional Amsterdam soccer team. I think its management and business  practices are insipid and a species of insider rent-seeking. I am a card-carrying analytical philosopher (although it has been denied by others) in so far as I wish to extend the tradition, but I detest our smugness, historical amnesia, and the brutal hostility toward alternative philosophical approaches. In many respects I am a liberal (albeit NOT a liberal Zionist), but I know that my tradition has been implicated in, and many of its strands fully invested in, racialized imperialism. I am married, but have expressed misgivings about the institution. etc.***

I fully grant that each of the examples of the previous paragraph can be the start of a charge of hypocrisy or inconstancy and inconsistency. Maybe if I thought harder about the critique of Zionism I, too, would be cured from my support (or I would be more entrenched in it). But in our imperfect world, when it comes to our allegiance to groups, institutions, and ideologies we should allow, if we wish to avoid the vice of fanaticism, for less-than-complete buy-in while granting the possibility of wholehearted (or lukewarm) support.

 

On the role of Systematicity in an Impure Theory of a (Pluralistic) Liberalism worth Having

The man of system, on the contrary, is apt to be very wise in his own conceit; and is often so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it.--Adam Smith (1790) The Theory of Moral Sentiments

The quoted passage from TMS is one of the epigraphs to Jacob T. Levy's (2015) Rationalism, Pluralism & Freedom (RPF). The other is to a passage from Mill's (1862) Centralization, in which Mill warns against local despotism. Levy's inspiring book, which is both a mitigated defense of the significance of intermediaries to a liberalism worth having as well as a fascinating re-visionary history of liberalism* in which the tradition of reflection on the so-called 'ancient constitution' is an independent stream, is framed by the often competing dangers and aspirations emanating from the so-called 'man of system' and the 'bussybodies.' The man of system represents the rationalistic impulse that in the name of justice and efficiency tends toward homogenization, (Weberian) rationalization, and a controlling, strong central government suspicious of local powers. Levy's discussion is useful to the scholar because he nicely brings out the ways in which Smith is clearly indebted to Montesquieu (and joins him in defending the significance of intermediaries) and especially astute about the ways Smith diagnoses the dangers of both central power(s) and local elites. Levy's book is so good that I regret not reading it before I completed my own, while  recognizing that if I had down so (it appeared when mine was under review) it would have caused lengthy delay.+

Before I get to a critical digression, I want to make two preliminary comments. One personal pleasure in reading Levy's book is that it provides a nice background to Levy's more general views familiar to regular readers of his essays (which often inspire me to figure out what I think); Levy has that rare capacity to speak to the political moment in an intellectual fashion with a distinctive, moral compass without falling victim to partisanship. While reading the book I felt I was visiting a friend in his home environment showing me his study and, thereby, allowing me to connect some dots about him. Second, Levy's book is self-consciously a contribution to impure political philosophy (a term borrowed from Williams). It is, thus, worth reflecting on RPF as an exemplar in that genre (not unlike Sabl's Hume's Politics). Some other time, I'll say more about Levy's contribution to the nature of such impure theory. What follows is a kind of indirect comment on that topic, too.

As noted above, Levy draws generous inspiration from Smith's critique of systematicity. He returns (66) to the passage from TMS quoted at the top of this post, and quotes it (alongside Montesquieu) more fully:

The man of system, on the contrary, is apt to be very wise in his own conceit; and is often so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it. He goes on to establish it completely and in all its parts, without any regard either to the great interests, or to the strong prejudices which may oppose it. He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board. He does not consider that the pieces upon the chess-board have no other principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them; but that, in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might chuse to impress upon it. 

Levy rightly resists the hungry temptation (familiar from those inspired by Hayek) to turn Smith into a mere critic of social planning. Smith here is defending not just gradualism, but also the political dangers in trying to eliminate intermediaries, that is, "the great interests." In the paragraphs just before the one that Levy quotes, Smith discusses these in terms of "the great orders;" the core upshot of that discussion can be summarized as follows, "The man whose public spirit is prompted altogether by humanity and benevolence, will respect the established powers and privileges even of individuals, and still more those of the great orders and societies, into which the state is divided" (emphasis added). As Levy correctly notes Smith's political theory is both a great critique of the moral abuses of intermediaries (including guilds, imperialistic monopolies, state religions, etc.) and aims at defending the rights of these. Social intermediaries are worth preserving and are, in fact, not simply reducible to the the desires and interests of those that compose them (recall)--they have a principle of motion of their their own (that is also resistant to outside imposition).** While I would emphasize more (than Levy does) the significance of aesthetics (apparent "beauty") to the "madness" of fanaticism that is a danger in Smith's "man of system," so far so good.

But Levy's analysis of Smith and the nature of systems is also partial. I say this not to deny that for Smith "love of system" tends to generate not just fanaticism or expert-overconfidence. But that Levy omits something important starts to become clear if we also quote the closing sentence of the paragraph, which Levy fails omits:

If those two principles coincide and act in the same direction, the game of human society will go on easily and harmoniously, and is very likely to be happy and successful. If they are opposite or different, the game will go on miserably, and the society must be at all times in the highest degree of disorder.

Here we see that what Smith is after, and this is something that Levy explicitly recognizes  (when discussing Montesquieu): that social reformers are more likely to succeed, and less likely to generate dangerous, political "disorder," if their reforms work with the "grain" of society, that is, the interests and commitments of intermediaries (and individuals). Social reform is not left to the market or only to bottom up processes; it can be influenced and guided by the center if it (the center) is capable of understanding its own limitations and taking into account the interests and aims of social actors.

In addition, the center must be guided by a system. For Smith claims, in the first sentence of the next paragraph, that “some general, and even systematical, idea of the perfection of policy and law, may no doubt be necessary for directing the views of the statesman.” Such a system allows it to avoid acting in ad hoc fashion and also be able to grasp which compromises are worth accepting and which undermine its moral and political aims. That is, a system is required to guide (not control) long-term planning and to allow trade-offs to be modeled and foreseen. For, while “the judgments of mankind [can be] perverted by wrong systems,” Smith actually explicitly defends systematicity--this should come as no surprise because throughout his life, Smith called attention to (a) the systematicity of his own works (say, here and here) and (b) he refers to his own project as a "system of natural liberty." More important, Smith thought that (c) a proper, (aestheticized) “love of system” can activate the most “noble and magnificent” political and philanthropic projects and the right sort of “public spirit.” In particular, a system-inspired public spirit can even compensate for an absence of the love of humanity or “pure sympathy” in a political agent.++ (Smith is often treated as a sentimentalist, but throughout his writings rules and the reflections of reason can compensate for lack of feeling.) For the a system that can or does generate such “public welfare” is a system worth having. (An important element in a right sort of system is Smith's concern to address inductive risk, but about that another time more.)

Let me wrap up. Levy's book attunes the reader to the the frequent dissonances between the "freedom to associate"" and the "freedom within (or from) group life."  (I write "frequent" because Levy is is equally astute about the ways such freedoms can reinforce each other.) Levy is, however, a skeptic about the ability of a normative and impure system that can do full justice to such dissonances. I think this is due to the fact that the most influential systems we have either rationalize these away (toward one side, often favoring the state or justice at the expense of other important liberal commitments) or contain non-trivial (Rawlsian) "wobbles" from  the point of view of coherence and reason. But what makes Smith especially notable today, or so I argue in my book, is that he is an exemplar in offering such a system without the (one-sided) rationalization or the wobble. That's not because Smith squares a theoretical circle (overlooked by Levy and the tradition), but because he embraces deviations from reason and coherence as an endemic feature of social life and internalizes it in his system (or so I argue). This generates its own tensions, of course, but about these another time.

At the Dusk of Liberalism; Spinoza, the Unraveling of NATO, and Liberal Institutions

This "contract" remains so long unmoved as the motive for entering into it, that is, fear of hurt or hope of gain, subsists. But take away from either commonwealth this hope or fear, and it is left independent (Chap. II. Sec. 10), and the link, whereby the commonwealths were mutually bound, breaks of itself. And therefore every commonwealth has the right to break its contract, whenever it chooses, and cannot be said to act treacherously or perfidiously in breaking its word, as soon as the motive of hope or fear is removed. For every contracting party was on equal terms in this respect, that whichever could first free itself of fear should be independent, and make use of its independence after its own mind; and, besides, no one makes a contract respecting the future, but on the hypothesis of certain precedent circumstances. But when these circumstances change, the reason of policy applicable to the whole position changes with them; and therefore every one of the contracting commonwealths retains the right of consulting its own interest, and consequently endeavours, as far as possible, to be free from fear and thereby independent, and to prevent another from coming out of the contract with greater power. If then a commonwealth complains that it has been deceived, it cannot properly blame the bad faith of another contracting commonwealth, but only its own folly in having entrusted its own welfare to another party, that was independent, and had for its highest law the welfare of its own dominion.--Spinoza Political Treatise (translated by Elwest) 3.14.

This post was prompted by Andrew Sabl's fine restatement (at Niskanen) of the nature and use liberal institutions in light of the fact that when "the core institutions of liberal democracy are threatened, it is necessary—as it usually isn’t—to examine why they exist and why they are valuable." It's an important, creative, and original piece, and it makes me think that now that we're confronting the possible collapse of liberal project, some of the best theorizing about (let's call it) non-ideal liberal theory is possible. But not unlike Jacob Levy's recent essay (recall my discussion), Sabl's piece not does discuss the international dimension in which liberalism operates.  (This may be due to the fact that Niskanen seems to be a think-tank oriented toward American domestic politics.) That's a problem because I want to discuss the unraveling of NATO.

Even so, it's useful to draw on Sabl's insights when discussing NATO, and it may help us formulate a better liberalism for the future.  Sabl identifies six features of modern liberal institutions. What follows is all quoted from his essay (but in abbreviated format, so don't blame him for any confusion):

1. a modern institution must be large-scale and anonymous; it must allow us to benefit from the contributions of strangers, not just intimates. It must operate by managing conflict and diversity rather than wishing it away. And it must be open to steady improvement, either by learning and reform within a society or—a source of improvement neglected by much political theory—by observing and borrowing other societies’ best practices.
2. modern liberal institutions owe their past development and present stability to their ability  to serve the interests of all members of society (by promoting in some sense equal opportunity.)
3. a modern liberal institution promotes indefinite and multiple values and purposes, rather than giving priority to any one (or none);
4. modern liberal institutions value diversity and conflict up to a point; and their first preference in dealing with agents who threaten to bring about truly dangerous conflict is to marginalize and discredit them, limiting their influence and impact, rather than resorting to direct coercion;
5. modern liberal institutions need not reflect a prior plan, nor a post-hoc consensus: they typically arise largely accidentally, and persist in the face of sharp disagreement (or, more commonly, mere ignorance and unconcern) as to their essential nature and proper working.
6. modern liberal institutions occupy controverted jurisdictions: each has partisans who want to expand its turf at the risk of impinging on others’.
   

It's clear at once that NATO does not really fit feature (i), but remarkably and surprisingly enough it does fit the other features quite well. (I won't argue this here, and open to challenge.) Now, I treat NATO as one of the key, constitutive institutions that made the liberal order (Pax Americana) since 1950 possible.* That is, I see it as a liberal mechanism to escape, perhaps temporarily, the state of nature that characterizes international politics by way of a mutual contract (recall this piece on Sabl and Hume). It secured American, transatlantic hegemony, and thereby prevented the possibility of a rival military power, and it provided collective security against external threats (primarily the USSR) and internal threats (primarily communist revolutions) while tolerating quite a few dictatorships in its midst. It's this security arrangement that by reducing political uncertainty and regulating and constraining would-be-conflicts made possible all the huge, collective gains from the evolving liberal economic orders since and, en passant, created a fairly captive market for US arms. (Thus this is not to deny a reciprocal relationship in that economic interests promoted NATO, and that American economic and intellectual power were a cause of its military power, etc.)

As Spinoza teaches (see above), it is very difficult to maintain an alliance when a common enemy disappears (no fear) or when individual gain seems unlikely. With the collapse of the USSR, fear disappeared. (NATO was not just founded in opposition to USSR, of course; it was also designed to keep the Germans down.) But that's almost 30 years ago (wow I am getting old). And while it tried to define new missions for itself, inertia and the win-win liberal economic order kept it going. 

Now, by the time of the end of the Cold War nearly all of its members were liberal democracies or aspiring to become one, so one may well have responded to Spinoza by suggesting that common values can also keep an alliance together. (There is a whole literature on the claim that liberal democracies don't go to war with each other [recall my post on the pre-history of this meme in Addison and Kant].) That claim does not rely on other liberal commitments. (For example, Marxists were once happy to assume that Marxists would be friendly to each other; absolutist monarchies were known to support each other against all kinds of uprisings, etc.) I think shared values can be a strong tie, but as we're learning liberal democracies may, in fact, evolve such that their values seem to be conflicting/inimical to each other. I think that's happening.

For, we're witnessing the unraveling of NATO in front of our eyes: this week Germany decided to withdraw some of its troops from a Turkish airbase, after the Turks refused access to the base by German parliamentarians. A few months ago a Turkish minister was refused access to a campaign rally (involving the Turkish referendum) and evicted from the the Netherlands. These days European journalists are routinely detained in Turkey on some charge or another. Nominally, these are all NATO allies. It's hard to say what is cause and effect but ever since the Taxim square crackdown, European clear reluctance to let Turkey start final, EU accession talks, the EU and Turkey have been moving increasingly far apart and Turkey is sliding into petty tyranny.** This matters because in the Syria civil war, the proxies supported by various interested NATO allies (primarily Turkey, USA, and France) were effectively fighting each other.

The previous paragraph all describe issues that have developed during President Obama's tenure, so this is not a bash-Trump-post. But if the US had an interest in keeping the NATO alliance together we would not see this increasing escalation of friction over differences. Yet, throughout his campaign, President Trump has been -- to put this politely -- lukewarm over the future of NATO; his recent unwillingness to reaffirm article 5 (the core commitment to mutual defense) means that the mutual trust presupposed in NATO is evaporating. Officially, Trump wants to renegotiate the financial terms of NATO, but that de facto entails a willingness to walk away from it (recall my recent post that rationalizes Trump's foreign policy). This is not just idle speculation, for Trump's actions are being interpreted as such most prominently by the German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Let me wrap up by returning to Sabl's list in light of NATO's development and present crisis. I think (ii) needs to be rephrased in terms of belief (so: modern liberal institutions owe their past development and present stability to their ability  to serve the perceived interests of all). I think (v) is right, but in his piece, Sabl overlooks the significance of some level of mutual trust (or, if one prefers, social capital). Nationalist-liberals (like Mill) or nationalist critics of liberalism (recall Haivry & Hazony) tend to point to the nation as a source of such trust. The nationalists are wrong in thinking that the nation is the only or best source of such trust (religions and other sources of shared value may be equally capable), but I think too many contemporary liberals have forgotten that dispositions that allow us to maintain some sense of unity need to be cultivated on an ongoing basis (recall) and cannot be left (and this builds on Sabl) to the market or to ideals of justice un-grounded in reactive attitudes. This requires effective (and potentially collective) leadership. And, finally, this shows (iv) really presupposes that none of the agents (or group of the agents) has effective veto-power or are indispensable to the functioning of the institution as the USA is in NATO.***