Digressions&Impressions

Russell and Kant on World Peace

Before the end of the present century, unless something quite unforeseeable occurs, one of three possibilities will have been realized. These three are:

I. The end of human life, perhaps of all life on our planet.
II. A reversion to barbarism after a catastrophic diminution of the population of the globe.
III. A unification of the world under a single government, possessing a monopoly of all the major weapons of war.

I do not pretend to know which of these will happen, or even which is the most likely. What I do contend, without any hesi­tation, is that the kind of system to which we have been ac­customed cannot possibly continue.--Bertrand Russell (1950) "The Future of Mankind" reprinted in Unpopular Essays, (1950) [all references to the 2009 Routledge reprint], p. 33.+

This is the second post on Russell's Unpopular Essays (recall here). I don't quote this to make fun of Russell as prognosticator, or to use it as an example of the fallacy of overlooked alternatives, although it is amusing that such an admirer of Hume misses the option of muddling through altogether. Or more accurately he finds it wholly unattractive: for, unlike the better dead than red crowd, Russell thinks "world empire of either the US or the USSR is preferable to the results of a continuation of the present international anarchy." (37) This reminds us that those who lived through and survived the first half of the twentieth century had every reason to expect more disastrous, political upheaval. For example, while illustrating the scenario that can lead to option I, Russell expects a "next world war" sooner or later. (The extent of the spread and use of atomic weapons is the key variable in this option.)

While illustrating possibility II, Russell sketches a scenario that anticipates A Canticle for Leibowitz:

Imagine each side in a position to de­stroy the chief cities and centers of industry of the enemy; imagine an almost complete obliteration of laboratories and li­braries, accompanied by a heavy casualty rate among men of science; imagine famine due to radio-active spray, and pesti­lence caused by bacteriological warfare: would social cohesion survive such strains? Would not prophets tell the maddened populations that their ills were wholly due to science, and that the extermination of all educated men would bring the mil­lennium? Extreme hopes are born of extreme misery, and in such a world hopes could only be irrational. I think the great states to which we are accuston1ed would break up, and the sparse survivors would revert to a primitive village economy. (34-35)

But most of "The Future of Mankind" is not given over to such gloomy prognostications. Russell's heart is in envisioning the "establishment of a single government for the whole world." (35) And the "most hopeful" scenario he advocates is "an alliance of the na­tions that desire an international government, becoming, in the end, so strong that Russia would no longer dare to stand out." (35) As is well known, Russell was not fond of the Soviet Union, and the "Future of Mankind" explains his reasoning for preferring world domination by America over Russia. His view is not based on an uncritical fondness of the USA (even if, as noted above, he is willing to live with either Russian or American world empire).* 

Strikingly, from our perspective, he thinks there are then "only two fully independent states, America and Russia." (42) And so according to Russell all other states are protectorates, vassals, or dominions of these two in some sense. While for us it is easy to note that he missed the long-term significance of Mao's (1949) victory,  it is especially striking that he understood, what the British government of his own age did not yet, that full British independence had ended (they would discover it in 1956).

His preference for an American empire is rather Millian in character and is instructive about Russell's fundamental values: freedom of speech, academic freedom, experiments in living (etc.). It is not a preference for capitalism over socialism. But he thinks the absence of liberty has turned Russia into an extreme oligarchy.* 

The first step-and it is one which is now not very difficult -is to persuade the United States and the British Common­wealth of the absolute necessity for a military unification of the world. The governments of the English-speaking nations should then offer to all other nations the option of entering into a firm Alliance, involving a pooling of military resources and mutual defense against aggression. In the case. of hesitant na­tions, such as Italy, great inducements, economic and military, should be held out to produce their co-operation. (41)

As I learned from (recall) Or Roisenbom's The Emergence of Globalism: Visions of World Order, and a number of Duncan Bell's writings including (recall)  Reordering the World: Essays on Liberalism and Empire, and especially,  the more recent Dreamworlds of Race: Empire and the Utopian Destiny of Anglo-America proposals for union between the US and the British Commonwealth were quite prevalent in the 1930s.  And Russell was very much aware of these developments. Many of these proposals had a strong imperial flavor with commitments to racial or civilizational (Anglo-Saxon) superiority. Russell's echoing of such proposals is notable because he is cosmopolitan critic of existing empires, and a critic of racial superiority (e.g. "An Outline of Intellectual Rubbish" (82-85) "Ideas that Have Harmed Mankind" (152-153)).

Even so, because of the History of Western Philosophy (1947), it's easy to establish that Russell was also familiar with and admired Kant's Perpetual Peace.** Kant's federalism involved pacific regional (growing) federations of commercial liberal democracies (Kant uses 'republics' but he means, as Russell notes in the History, states with separation of powers).** In Kant, too, the main point is to pool military resources and make foreign aggression unlikely and to eventually creative a world state with a monopoly on violence. And not unlike Kant, Russell wants this to lead to a world in which "laws to control international relations" are "effective." (43) That is, backed up by power and possibility of violence. A world army would then be "like a municipal force." And while one might flinch at the conflation of military force and policing, the underlying point is rather Kantian, I think. The point of the monopoly of force

is a means to the growth of a social system governed by law, where force is not the prerogative of private individuals or nations, but is exercised only by a neutral authority in accordance with rules laid down in advance. There is hope that law, rather than private force, may come to govern the relations of nations within the present century. If this hope is not realized we face utter disaster; if it is realized, the world will be far better than at any previous period in the history of man. (43)

Now, I want to close with four observations about Russell's position. First, when Russell wrote this he cited public opinion in the United States in favor of such a project. (37) But in contrast to the American public, which foresaw "friendly negotiations" as the means to such an imperial federation, Russell -- who had been a heroic pacifist in World War I --, he believes "the use of force, or the threat of force, will be necessary." That Russell is willing to advocate the use of force, given his prior commitments, suggests how seriously he takes the likelihood and disastrousness of the threat of options I-II.

Third, earlier in the essay, Russell, recognizes that world empire might well be world domination. But he assumes that in the absence of foreign enemies, a world elite would eventually soften "freed from fear." (37) And so "gradually more good-natured and less inclined to persecute." (37) He has the Roman example in mind, an he calls attention to their practice of extending citizenship to those they conquered. And it's not difficult here to discern her the Victorian (romantic) understanding of the Romans he would have encountered as a kid.

Finally, and most importantly, I am struck by the fact that Russell tacitly assumes the abolition of politics with world empire. In this, even Russell is very much a man of his own age. Notice that there is no middle term between force and law. But somewhere, somebody has to lay down the "rules...in advance." And presumably this will involve the play or clash of competitive interests; and since the context is a concentration of power, one may well wonder how impartial or unbiased these rules will be. That is, while it is possible that the laws will be administered impartially, a 'neutral authority' seems perhaps a lovely hope, too far.

 

A note on Le Guin and Fanon, and Carl Schmitt

"You are the same species, race, people, exactly the same in every way, with a slight selection towards color. If you brought up an asset child as an owner it would be an owner in every respect, and vice versa. So you spend your lives keeping up this tremendous division that doesn't exist. What I don't understand is how you can fail to see how appallingly wasteful it is. I don't mean economically!"

"In the war," he said, and then there was a very long pause; though Solly had a lot more to say, she waited, curious. "I was on Yeowe," he said, "you know, in the civil war."

That's where you got all those scars and dents, she thought; for however scrupulously she averted her eyes, it was impossible not to be familiar with his spare, onyx body by now, and she knew that in aiji he had to favor his left arm, which had a considerable chunk out of it just above the bicep.

“The slaves of the Colonies revolted, you know, some of them at first, then all of them. Nearly all. So we Army men there were all owners. We couldn’t send asset soldiers, they might defect. We were all veots and volunteers. Owners fighting assets. I was fighting my equals. I learned that pretty soon. Later on I learned I was fighting my superiors. They defeated us.”

“But that—” Solly said, and stopped; she did not know what to say.

“They defeated us from beginning to end,” he said. “Partly because my government didn’t understand that they could. That they fought better and harder and more intelligently and more bravely than we did.”

“Because they were fighting for their freedom!”

“Maybe so,” he said in his polite way.

"So ..."

"I wanted to tell you that I respect the people I fought."--Ursula K Le Guin (1994) "Forgiveness Day" in The Found and the Lost: The Collected Novellas of Ursula K. Le Guin, p. 287.

Because I am about to teach The Dispossessed (recall) again, I am trying to read all the books in the so-called Hainish cycle. "Forgiveness Day" is part of a series of interlocking stories (also collected in Four Ways to Forgiveness) about two planets, Werel and Yeowe. As the quoted passage suggests, Werel is a slave-owning society that treated Yeowe as a colony. In fact, Werel is an extremely patriarchical society, too, which treats its women in the way Athens treats theirs. 

The nameless 'he' is Rega Teyeo, a scion of a rural soldiering elite; conservative and stoic in his ways. He discovers that after the lost war on Yeowe his own people, who are modernizing and shifting toward commerce, have little use for him. So, he ends up a bodyguard to Solly, the alien (female) ambassador to his planet. In many ways it's a humiliating end to his public service. 

The quoted exchange takes place in the turning point in the relationship between Rega and Solly, which itself occurs when they think they are in mortal danger. I am not a big fan of "Forgiveness Day" because the writing is relatively clunky and the characters are relatively stereotypical. Because it's Le Guin, there is still plenty of food for thought about the nature of patriarchy and the interlocking forms of oppression and resistance it generates.

The quoted passage illustrates my complaint about the writing in the novella; that Teyeo respects the people he fought is already abundantly clear before Le Guin makes it explicit ("I wanted to tell you that I respect the people I fought."). 

Having said that, the passage did remind me (no surprise we are in the ambit of Hegel's master-slave dialectic) of a kind of symmetrical point in the famous first chapter of Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth that in the Manichean world colonialism, "At the individual level, violence is a cleansing force. It rids the colonized of their inferiority complex, of their passive and despairing attitude. It emboldens them, and restores their self-confidence." (p. 51)

Le Guin invites us into thinking that when you have been defeated on the battle-field it is difficult to deny the fundamental equality of your victor. She published "Forgiveness Day" when the Vietnam war was living memory. As Le Guin's novella shows, that individual experience on the battle-field need not transform wider social attitudes toward those thought inferior if that society can insulate itself, to some respect, from the military defeat. As a cursory glance at history shows, for every Rega Teyeo whose attitudes are transformed, there may be a lance corporal who prefers a dagger-stab legend. And in her story Le Guin, who is not naïve about such matters, suggests that individual character matters a lot to when a potentially existential experience becomes transformative.

Earlier in the story, after Rega has requested a discharge from his duty to protect Solly, his request is declined by his (and her) employer as follows:

"Love of god and country is like fire, a wonderful friend, a terrible enemy; only children play with fire. I don't like the situation. There's nobody here I can replace either of you with. Will you hang on a while longer?"

What's striking about the response is that it is couched in terms familiar from Schmitt (with its friend-enemy distinction) [recall here and here mediated via Popper]. This is interesting because the employer I have just quoted represents in Le Guin's story, and in the wider Hainish cycle, the Kantian federative ideal of the aspiration toward perpetual peace founded in human equality. And what Le Guin recognizes is that one can accept that in some circumstances the friend-enemy distinction is empirically adequate of people's ('childish') behavior even though one is oneself committed to a different ideal that is supposed to abolish or overcome it.

Now, in light of "Forgiveness Day" it is tempting to suggest that the friend-enemy distinction itself rests, if not conceptually then at least on the battle-field, in a kind of symmetry between the two foes. And this symmetry is itself ground in a kind of equality or mutual recognition. And so, one may be tempted to see in this observation a refutation of Schmitt.

As an aside, this is why 'wars' on cancer, drugs, and on poverty are such strange ways of speaking. (This is extended to the "courageous battle" one wages against a fatal disease.) They do not have the latent possibility of such mutual recognition. Norman MacDonald (who died of cancer) makes the point in a sketch here. His punchline is that, if you die, the cancer dies at exactly the same time in your body. “That, to me, is not a loss. That’s a draw.”

Be that as it may, of course, Schmitt anticipates the point and suggests that the political distinction is orthogonal to any moral interpretation of such mutual symmetry.  It is entirely compatible with his view that one can find one's enemies moral, even beautiful. (I doubt he would grant that they are superior, but it seems logically consistent.)

Now, it is important to Schmitt's analysis that these judgments involve collectivities not individuals (as it is in Le Guin and Fanon). And so there is an important sense that Schmitt can accommodate the point about symmetry or the transformative experience of the battle-field, as long as (and I find this ironic) it is understood in, and limited to, individual terms. 

And, in fact, one of the psychological, perhaps, social conditions for Rega's judgment, or maybe it's an effect of it, is his disenchantment with his own society. And while this turns out to be a pre-condition for his political understanding (he starts to see through slogans) it also leads him to withdraw from it emotionally, politically, and eventually physically. Part of the closing line of the story with him going into a kind of exile is (also) explicit about this: "he had lost his world." And so, while one can read the Hainish cycle as resting on a kind of faith that Schmittianism can be overcome, Le Guin recognizes that there are circumstances in which its logic is impeccable. 

 

 

 

On the Social Workers of Um-Helat (pt II)

So the social workers of Um-Helat stand, talking now, over the body of a man. He is dead—early, unwilling, with a beautifully crafted pike jammed through his spine and heart. (The spine to make it painless. The heart to make it quick.) This is only one of the weapons carried by the social workers, and they prefer it because the pike is silent. Because there was no shot or ricochet, no crackle or sizzle, no scream, no one else will come to investigate. The disease has taken one poor victim, but it need not claim more. In this manner is the contagion contained . . . in a moment. In a moment.

Beside the man’s body crouches a little girl. She’s curly-haired, plump, blind, brown, tall for her age. Normally a boisterous child, she weeps now over her father’s death, and her tears run hot with the injustice of it all. She heard him say, “I’m sorry.” She saw the social workers show the only mercy possible. But she isn’t old enough to have been warned of the consequences of breaking the law, or to understand that her father knew those consequences and accepted them—so to her, what has happened has no purpose or reason. It is a senseless, monstrous, and impossible thing, called murder.

“I’ll get back at you,” she says between sobs. “I’ll make you die the way you made him die.” This is an unthinkable thing to say. Something is very wrong here. She snarls, “How dare you. How dare you.”

The social workers exchange looks of concern. They are contaminated themselves, of course; it’s permitted, and frankly unavoidable in their line of work. Impossible to dam a flood without getting wet. (There are measures in place. The studs on their scalps—well. In our own world, those who volunteered to work in leper colonies were once venerated, and imprisoned with them.) The social workers know, therefore, that for incomprehensible reasons, this girl’s father has shared the poison knowledge of our world with her. An uncontaminated citizen of Um-Helat would have asked “Why?” after the initial shock and horror, because they would expect a reason. There would be a reason. But this girl has already decided that the social workers are less important than her father, and therefore the reason doesn’t matter. She believes that the entire city is less important than one man’s selfishness. Poor child. She is nearly septic with the taint of our world.

Nearly. But then our social worker, the tall brown one who got a hundred strangers to smile at a handmade ladybug, crouches and offers a hand to the child.

What? What surprises you? Did you think this would end with the cold-eyed slaughter of a child? There are other options—and this is Um-Helat, friend, where even a pitiful, diseased child matters. They will keep her in quarantine, and reach out to her for several days. If the girl accepts the hand, listens to them, they will try to explain why her father had to die. She’s early for the knowledge, but something must be done, do you see? Then together they will bury him, with their own hands if they must, in the beautiful garden that they tend between caseloads. This garden holds all the Um-Helatians who broke the law. Just because they have to die as deterrence doesn’t mean they can’t be honored for the sacrifice.

But there is only one treatment for this toxin once it gets into the blood: fighting it. Tooth and nail, spear and claw, up close and brutal; no quarter can be given, no parole, no debate. The child must grow, and learn, and become another social worker fighting an endless war against an idea . . . but she will live, and help others, and find meaning in that. If she takes the woman’s hand.--N.K. Jemisin (2018) "The Ones Who Stay and Fight" in How Long the Black Future Month?, pp. 10-11.

Last week (recall), I focused on the pecularities of the coming of age ritual in Um-Helat (a "postcolonial utopia" (p. 12)). The ritual alluded to, again, near the end of the story (quoted above). Because the daughter of the man executed by the social workers of Um-Helat has not undergone the ritual yet. She is, hence, unaware of her father's crime and the reasons for his sudden death. 

Presumably, this lack of awareness has also spared her life: there is in her no mens rea. Because she did not undergo the coming of ritual, she had no knowledge of the taboo on Earthly (social) media consumption, and the effects that may follow from the violation of it. This despite the fact that she is also infected with the Earthly ideas her father pursued and shared secretly. These ideas involve the denial of equal respect, the advocacy of social hierarchy. But also directed, or exclusive love like the intense love the child feels for her late dad. To be sure, it's okay to love one's children and parents in Um-Helat, but not at the expense of others--so in the ideals of Um-Helat, one should be aunties to many children (p. 1).

Um-Helat is governed by the ideal of mutual, egalitarian respect. But also by a kind of principle of sufficient reason (PSR) because, as the passage quoted above implies, all actions in Um-Helat can be explained (and so justified) to each other. This suggests that Um-Helat does not lack philosophy. The mutual respect ideal and the PSR are defended violently against those that seek out and circulate ideals of social subordination associated with our world. If capital punishment were not shocking enough, Um-Helat's 'social workers' act as secret prosecutors, juries/judges, and executioners at once in defense of certain kind of social taboos. 

The lack of separation in the juridical functions of social workers is presumably rationalized by their commitment to keep the fact of contagion as quiet as possible, and to weed it out as quick as possible. The law and its severe consequences are known to adults, and there is even a kind of consent to it in Um-Helat.* And so, one may think this meets minimal ideals of public reasons. But the execution of the law is not. There is a clear denial of publicity in Kant's sense (e.g., "all actions relating to the right of other human beings are wrong if their maxim is incompatible with publicity"). In addition, the law of Um-Helat does not build into its execution any safeguards against false accusation or mistakes. So, the social workers of Um-Helat are more akin to the guardians of a Government House utilitarian society (than a Kantian one).

The language of 'contagion' reminds us that the social taboo on forbidden knowledge is medicalized. Violation of the taboo on consumption of Earthly (social) media is treated as a disease. And the 'social workers' are Um-Helat's immune system. Strikingly enough, the 'social workers' of Um-Helat are themselves partially infected or "contaminated themselves" (..."it’s permitted, and frankly unavoidable in their line of work") with the very thing they are tasked to fight.

That the angry child is a potential recruit to what we may call the 'guild of social workers' makes a lot of sense upon reflection. She is spirited and loves too-partially, which are, in fact, two key qualifications for the guardians of Plato's Republic (375). So, part of the implied (invisible to us) education of such contaminated young kids into would be 'social workers' of Um-Helat is the redirection, the turning of this angry, powerful directed love into a love capable of serving the common good ferociously. 

In fact, the un-deviant, and unquestioning healthy citizens of Um-Helat are not suitable to the task of social worker. They are basically too happy and too dutiful for the task of defending the psychic health of Um-Helat with extreme measures.+ So, it makes sense that 'social workers' who are central to the survival of the ideology/ideals of Um-Helat are recruited from those like the child, spirited and with intense love. We learn that these social workers can otherwise be anyone (including (recall) a gethen).

The reason I have adopted the language of the Republic, is that the social workers themselves are both an elite of Um-Helat and, simultaneously, may also be controlled by somehow. That they are a kind of elite becomes clear early in the story, when one of them is seen to promote common mutual acknowledgment publicly (see p. 3). And, in fact, the official task of these 'social workers' is "to ensure the happiness and prosperity of their fellow citizens." (p. 7) Those that are entrusted with this noble task are those that have experienced a secret grief and kind of loss of a sort unknown (and unknowable) to the rest of Um-Helat.  

We get a hint about the function of "the studs on their scalps;" at an earlier point in the (very brief) text we were told that these are "implanted." (p. 3.) And it is also implied that all social workers have them (p. 7). Presumably to allow control from afar, a safe-guard. This is a city known for its great technological innovations, so such distant control is not beyond the possible for them. What's left unclear is who controls, who can be entrusted with power over those studs in a city in which every question is supposed to have an answer. 

Leibniz, Clarke, Newton, and Reformation of the Solar System

Thanks to Leibniz, there is a common reading of Isaac Newton in which Newton is committed to the idea that God periodically restores the solar system. I do not mean to suggest Leibniz is solely responsible for this; Clarke's response to Leibniz fails to disabuse clearly the reader of this. And since for a long time Clarke's response was taken to be authoritative of Newton's views the idea has persisted.  

Here is Leibniz's charge right at  the start of the Correspondence:

Sir Isaac Newton and his followers also have a very odd opinion concerning the work of God. According to their doctrine, God Almighty needs to wind up his watch from time to time, otherwise it would cease to move. He did not, it seems, have sufficient foresight to make it a perpetual motion. No, the machine of God's making is so imperfect, according to these gentlemen, that he is obliged to clean it now and then by an extraordinary concourse, and even to mend it, as a clockmaker mends his work; he must consequently be so much the more unskillful a workman as he is more often obliged to mend his work and to set it right. Leibniz to Clarke (November 1715), Letter 1, par. 4 (copied from the Ariew edition).

The charge is curious because [A] Newton never claims that God needs to rewind the universe (or solar system) and [B] Newton never compares, I think, God's work and his creation to a watchmaker and watch. Newton's favored analogy is God as the perfect geometer. There are subtle similarities and differences between the two analogies, but I will explore these in a future post.

In his response Clarke comes very close to noting [B], but he fails to do so unambigiously and simultaneously muddies the waters: "the notion of the world's being a great machine, going on without the interposition of God as a clock continues to go without the assistance of a clockmaker, is the notion of materialism and fate, and tends (under pretence of making God a supramundane intelligence) to exclude providence and God's government in reality out of the world." Clarke's first response, par. 4 (copied from the Ariew edition). It is quite natural to read Clarke as accepting [B] and endorsing [A].

As an aside, that Clarke actually rejects [B] (the clock analogy) only becomes clear indirectly. In the fourth response to Leibniz, in the context of explaining that gravity does no fit the mechanist's conception of causation by contact, Clarke writes: "If the word natural forces means here mechanical, then all animals, and even men, are as mere machines as a clock. But if the word does not mean mechanical forces, then gravitation may be effected by regular and natural powers, though they are not mechanical." (par. 46) The natural powers that Newton has really shown to exist make it impossible, ipse facto, to conceive the universe as a (mechanical) clock. (See also Clarke's fifth reply ad 110-116, which also seems to assume this kind of argument.)

Notice, too, in his first response to Leibniz, Clarke does not actually concede the mending charge. All he wants to insist on is God's "providence and God's government." And this he is opposes opposes to "materialism" (Epicurean/Hobbesian system) and "fate" (Spinozism).  The key here is their denial of (general) final causes and the idea that there is really a three-way debate among the systems of fate, materialism, and mind/providentialism. Of course, this also turns on what he might mean by 'government.' I also think Kenny Pearce (whose tweets on the topic prompted this post) is right to claim that "Clarke's response to Leibniz's allegation that Newton's God is an incompetent watchmaker depends essentially on Clarke's view that there are no absolute miracles, only relative ones." I'll let him explain why this is so.

As it happens, in my own work on Newton (following Ted McGuire and Howard Stein) I am not inclined to treat Clarke as authoritative on Newton. So, it is worth explaining why I think Leibniz's charge shouldn't have gotten off the ground at all.

It is, I believe, agreed by all that the following passage from Query 31 of Newton's Opticks gave rise to Leibniz's original charge:

For while comets move in very eccentric orbs in all manner of positions, blind fate could never make all the planets move one and the same way in concentric orbs, some inconsiderable irregularities excepted which may have arisen from the mutual actions of comets and planets upon one another, and which will be apt to increase until this system needs a reformation. Such a wonderful uniformity in the planetary system must be allowed the effect of choice.

I included the final sentence in the quote because I think this helps explain Newton's reasoning. Notice, first that Newton does not mention clocks or watches here. Second, the argument is directed against the system of blind fate and in favor of the system of God's (providential) choice. I think this nobody would deny. 

Now, it is natural to assume that [C] Newton is here anticipating the eighteenth century debate over the stability of the solar system. And that [D] his answer is negative. And if one thinks Newton is committed to [C&D] then it's quite natural to assume that Newton thinks that God needs to rewind the solar system regularly. But I don't think Newton should be taken here to be committed to be thinking about [C-D.]

For, notice, that the claim about the system requiring a reformation is offered as a reductio of the system of fate. And the underlying claim is that the particular patterns of motions we see in the solar system, must be the product of intelligent choice.  That is to say, rather than being worried about the stability of the solar system, Newton is interested in cosmogony (the origin and evolution of the system). And the underlying claim is that from the perspective of the system of necessity one cannot device a system of laws that can account for the simultaneous origin and evolution of the irregular motions of the comets and the regular motions of the planets (and their moons) and their interactions. So, the charge is that Spinozism (which, as Clarke and Newton argue elsewhere, lacks a compelling physics) does not provide an account of the particular motions we observe and would be internally inconsistent if it tried. In my view (see here for details) variants of this argument are trotted out by Newton in his exchange with Bentley and in the General Scholium, and by Clarke in his Demonstration (also directed against Hobbes and Spinoza). 

 

International Arbitration, and a forgotten precursor to Liberalism

Suppose for instance that peace is signed to-day, that it is published to the whole world: how do we know that posterity will ratify the articles. Opinions are changeable, and the actions of the men of the present time do not bind their successors. To put an end to this objection, it suffices to  remember what we have said about the causes of war, which not being considerable, for the reasons given above, there is nothing that can occasion the rupture of a peace. Nevertheless, to prevent the inconvenience of this, it would be necessary to choose a city, where all sovereigns should have perpetually their ambassadors, in order that the differences that might arise should be settled by the judgment of the whole assembly. The ambassadors of those who would be interested would plead there the grievances of their masters and the other deputies would judge them without prejudice. And to give more authority to the judgment, one would take advice of the big republics, who would have likewise their agents in this same place. I say great Republics, like those of the Venitians and the Swiss, and not those small lordships, that cannot maintain themselves, and depend upon the protection of another. That if anyone rebelled against the decree of so notable a company, he would receive the disgrace of all other Princes, who would find means to bring him to reason. Now the most commodious place for such an assembly is the territory of Venice, because it is practically neutral and indifferent to all Princes: added thereto that it is near the most important monarchies of the earth, of those of the Pope, the two Emperors, and the King of Spain. It is not far from France, Tatary, Moscovy, Poland, England, and Denmark. As for Persia, China, Ethiopia, and the East and the West Indies, they are lands far distant, but navigation remedies that inconvenience, and for such a good object, one must not refuse a long voyage.--Émeric Crucé (1623) The New Cyneas, translated by Thomas Willing Balch, pp. 102-104 [page-numbers of modern translation].

The perspective of modern liberalism tends to be future oriented and too involved with the problems of governing, that liberals tend to forget key episodes from its own history of social activism. This, more than the framing by their Marxist critics, helps explain why Richard Cobden has become associated with the reductive label ‘Manchester liberal.’ But even when liberals remember free-trade and the corn-laws as victories, the liberal tradition tend to ignore his anti-imperialism[1] and his courageous anti-militarism. In addition, even within free-trade, he was creative and instrumental in making most favored nation status as a key device of a liberal trade order. And, finally, in opposing gun-boat diplomacy and militarism, he was an incessant advocate of international arbitration as an alternative to war.

While you, my dear educated reader, have at least heard of Cobden, I am pretty sure that  Crucé is almost certainly obscure to you (unless you paid attention to my recent blog post). But while it would be anachronistic to call Crucé a liberal – but perhaps less so than calling Locke a liberal --, Crucé definitely deserves attention for articulating many of the best features of a liberal program long before they were popular (religious toleration including non-Christians (pagans, Jews, Muslims, etc.)), the virtues of commerce, the significance of public works, and the rule of law, low taxes, etc. Crucé’s larger program is founded on cosmopolitan principles of common humanity and sympathy.

Because I started this digression with Cobden, today I want to focus on one of the more technocratic devices, his idea of a truly international court of arbitration. The first thing to notice is that he includes non-Christian and non-European sovereigns in the process. This is very much untainted by the kind of racism that plagues so many of such (later) proposals. To be sure, at times Crucé expresses genocidal hatred of barbarians and savages. And while he may sound like Aristotle (“I place among beasts savage people who do not reason” (52)), but, upon closer inspections, these only involve folk who refuse to play nice with others (and so Crucé is not inclined to treat one approach to political life as superior than others). In general Crucé loathes the admiration of conquerors in the European tradition, and wishes honor and admiration to accrue not “by sackings, massacres, and acts of hostility, but by gentle government, a legitimate and regulated power.” (48)

Crucé is not especially interested in the law. And I understand why lawyers have not treated him as one of their own because he asserts early in the book, “Jurisprudence is also not necessary, and a good natural judgment is sufficient to finish lawsuits, without resorting to a multitude of laws and decisions that only con-fuse cases instead of simplifying them.” (82) So, the arbitration council is, perhaps, better seen as an anticipation of the security council than the international court of arbitration.

The point is not so much to build up, and develop an international case law, but rather to prevent war and maintain peace among those – great powers – most likely to resort to war. And to achieve this, what’s required is not so much knowledge of the law, but good worldly judgment. This is also reflected in the composition of the international arbitration council of ambassadors.

Unlike the modern security council, in Crucé’s arbitration tribunal great powers do not arbitrate their own cases. But like the modern security council, there may well be enforcement troubles. Crucé is probably too optimistic in assuming that collective security is possible if a great power is just adamant on going to war. But it is worth noting that that for the vast majority of states declining to obey the outcome of arbitration, and violate international norms, does tend to come with a steep price. An even know, EU member states have come in the habit of resolving all their disputes peacefully either by law, or very much in the spirit of Crucé’s proposal (with ambassadors in Brussels). So, while he recognizes, repeatedly, that his proposal will be treated as utopian (Plato’s Republic not More is treated as the exemplary work), we ought to pause that we live, partially in such utopian world.

Unlike Kant, Crucé does not think such a scheme is only possible with suitably reformed states (who should be liberal republics with division of powers). From what he writes I suspect Crucé agrees with Kant that such states are more pacific. And much of the book (about which some other time more) is devoted to creating the conditions of peaceful public administration. But from Crucé’s perspective, the urgency of his proposal is precisely that its absolute sovereigns that need to be constrained. This is why it’s clearly more important to have kings and emperors represented in Venice than republics.[2]

I do think there is a democratic sentiment tucked into Crucé’s proposal. For it is quite clear that one ground of inclusion in the arbitration council, is great populous-ness. Admittedly this is easy to miss because shortly after the passage quoted, Crucé addresses the worry about the relative rank of the ambassadors next at great length. But it’s pretty clear  this reflects the preoccupation with hierarchy of his intended audience more than his own sensibility. And one cannot help but think that part of his rhetorical strategy is to make such preoccupation seem like a ridiculous species of superstition. Even so, it is pretty clear that Crucé's proposal is a concession to realism; this is a feature not a bug of his proposal.

Anyway, I often intend my digressions as invitations to read the works discussed, but I hope this post has made you intrigued about Crucé to explore his “little book” (350) The New Cyneas (which is easily found on the internet).

Covid Blues, and Convalescence

During the last ten days there has been a noticeable improvement in the kinds and severity of symptoms: I slept well eight out of ten nights. (Interestingly enough, this coincided with a switch to a slightly lower dosage of melatonin.) Even in the two nights of relative insomnia, I did not suffer from the scary mental cycling in the void I had experienced before. There has also been no recurrence of dizziness. Since this was my initial symptom dating back to early December (recall here; here; here; here; here; and here) this is a great relief. During the last two weeks I lost about four days to incapacitating headaches (which are rarely in same place). But these headaches were less painful than I experienced in January and February (although -- and this was newish -- they were accompanied by weird nausea). Emotionally, they were not always easy because I find it very disappointing, even disorienting, to awake to a headache after a great night's sleep. In the greatest moment of all, on Tuesday I spent a few hours in the Spring Sun reading a science fiction novel (unaided by any devices). Because of that experience I feel that I have grounds for hope to recover most of my cognitive abilities. Bottom line, while I still spend a lot of time in bed, and reading is often exhausting, I am clearly suffering less in lots of ways than before.

The previous sentence also hints at the truth that I still suffer some symptoms. The two most pertinent ones are onset of fatigue/hunger and a general irritability, including noise sensitivity. I have tried to describe the fatigue before, but it now feels as if I had great deal of exercise a few hours ago (but without the accompanying happy hormones) even if I did nothing. This fatigue generates a hunger feeling. Initially, I assumed that my hunger was due to depression/boredom. And while I can't rule that out (since I surely have experienced both), the hunger accompanies the fatigue sensation like clockwork. Unsurprisingly, then, that I have steadily gained weight since I fell ill. (In very serious cases of Covid people tend to lose weight.) And while the fatigue regularly follows modest activity (short walks and reading on my kindle), it also seems to arise for no reason at all. Because it is now the main cause preventing 'normal' being-in-the-world, it is most noticeable to me. But it has been part of my covid from the start.

I have been relieved to learn that irritability is not an uncommon symptom in Covid long haulers. For, there is a kind of folk myth in our culture, I think, that experiencing vulnerability and the fragility of life, is somehow wisdom enhancing and personality improving. And while I certainly have more compassion for the incapacitated and, as I have hinted a few times, a better sense of how ableist many of the norms and structures of professional academic life are (and worth attacking--watch this space!), my self-image has taken a beating. Not, as one may expect, because I rediscovered that I really find too much joy in my work and reading more generally. I don't mind discovering I am more uni-dimensional than I have always strived to be. (Indulge me: using 'uni-dimensional' makes me feel like I am less cognitive impaired.) No, rather because I have been manifestly an impatient and often highly irritable patient. And while it's easy to point to how this is an effect of my inability to do even modest mental multitasking (which is true), it also points to larger distressing truth that my illness has amplified some of my worst character traits. (Yes, I write that despite reading John Doris on character before you did.)

There are still other signs of cognitive impairment. A few days ago, I managed to burn my left hand because I used the wrong cup in the microwave. And while this is the kind of thing that could have happened to me before Covid (I lose my keys and €50 notes regularly), it had never happened before.

Before I wrap up, I want to express my gratitude to all the kind notes, some brief some lengthy, of encouragement I have received. It is really very heartening. So, feel free to keep em coming! One subset of these letters is worth mentioning: a non-trivial percentage of the students in 'my' lecture course, who only 'know' me from watching last year's recorded lectures (that are being used to substitute for me) and my messages on canvas (and corresponding with me about the course), have sent wonderful touching letters. Often they confide their struggles with home learning relating it to how they imagine my experience (they know I have had covid--some even read these digressions). The students seems so much gentler this year.

One letter-writer -- you know who you are -- proposed a joint project on a historically and autobiographically informed pandemic bio-ethics that would get away from the management perspective that pervades medical ethics and would involve what Kant calls our duties to our animal self. This letter made me cry. (I won't try to analyze that now.) This friend allowed me to imagine a future version of me that could incorporate my long haul experience into an image of myself. I have already noted before the significance of my fellowship of long-haulers who in their sharing of their experience help me to cope with my own. But my response to this letter reminded me -- and this is part of my ongoing response to Callard (recall here; here; and here)  -- how important others are in shaping our aspirational selves. As all experienced teachers know (recall) the effects of our shaping our students are often indirect and surprising. Realizing that I can still be shaped like this, too, has helped me come to terms a bit with the gently closed doors because I had to withdraw from some wonderful opportunities and the sheer tedium of being able to do nothing and enjoy so little.

   

  

 

 

 

Otto Bauer and the Origin of the Functionalist Account of European Federation

But because it is precisely from the progress of social production and the international division of labor that the principle of nationality emerges, it is soon confronted by its own limits. Already within capitalist society, ever-closer interaction links the different states; a generally valid form of regulation of this interaction becomes even more necessary, a legal system the validity of which extends beyond the borders of the individual states. The increased interaction between states resulting from the development of the capitalist economy, the emergence of the great modern states, and the expansion of the power of the European nations over the colonial territories abroad has given rise to international law. In the first instance, the states regulate their relations through treaties. To the old pacts of alliance and peace are added agreements concerning the laws of land and naval warfare. Economic relations also gradually come to be regulated by agreements between states. Thus emerges the diverse system of treaties that constitutes the foundation of modern international law: agreements concerning inland and maritime shipping, trade and customs duties, railway traffic, postal and telegraph systems, and measures, coinages, and weights. But international law soon reaches beyond the sphere of immediate economic interests. Thus, today agreements between states regulate the policing of sanitary conditions, in particular in regard to the struggle against epidemics, and the struggle against both the white and black slave trade; thus, there is the attempt to initiate through agreements parallel systems of regulating civil and procedural law.
Out of all these agreements there emerges a series that creates a quite new structure, the international authority. Wherever the foundation of common administrative activity is to be established, the states create a common organ, an authority that, by virtue of its international mandate, is permanently to fulfill the tasks assigned it by the treaties between states. Such a character is borne by the international health commissions, the international commissions for the monitoring of the financial administration of individual states, the international rivers commissions. These are granted rights that are otherwise accorded to sovereign states and that even the theory of the state has therefore attempted to construe as a particular form of the state, as riverstates.
But by far the most important among the international authorities are the so-called administrative communities. These have been emerging since the 1860s and are based on agreements to which every state is in principle free to accede. Among them are, for example, the International Postal Union, the International Telegraph Union, the Community of States for the Protection of Commercial Property, the Association of States for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works, the Union of States for the Struggle Against the Seizure of Slaves, the Central Office of International Transport, the Office of the Standing Sugar Commission, and so on. Some of these authorities have already been granted judicial power, for example, the Health and Rivers Commissions, the offices of the International Postal Union and the Community of Railways; in addition, since 1899 The Hague has housed the permanent Court of Arbitration.
As imperfect as these individual structures are, they carry within them the healthy seed of new social organisms. The interaction between the different states has already become so close that the law and organs of the state are proving to be no longer enough. The direction of development is toward a legal system that stands above state rights and binds the states themselves; it is creating organs the activities of which will no longer be hindered by any state frontier. State treaties and international authorities today satisfy this need. But they are beset by an internal contradiction. The community of international law has statutes and organs, but has not itself yet been constituted as a legal entity. We have statutes and are ignorant of the collective will that establishes them and whose power guarantees them; we have international organs  and are ignorant of the body whose organ they should be.
In socialist society, the agreements between the polities and the international organs will without doubt rapidly grow in number. At the same time, the increasing interaction between the different polities will in the first instance compel the implementation of the international division of labor.
However, international regulation to a far greater extent will become possible and necessary only when the social processes that are today composed of innumerable decisions and actions of individuals are consciously regulated by the different polities. For example, large migrations will be possible only on the basis of international treaties. Finally, in socialist society the planned regulation of international interaction will also be necessary due to the fact that every disappointed expectation, every inappropriate calculation affecting the individual merchant, the individual emigrant, will quite directly affect the whole society. One can imagine, for example, the consequences when a socialist polity organizes itself for the production of a good that is to be exchanged against the products of the other nations and finds this expectation disappointed. The international division of labor is impossible if the exchange of goods and interaction is not directed and regulated on an international basis.
Interstate agreements and administrative communities will thus ultimately not be able to meet the needs of the society of the future. Statutes that are not guaranteed by an organized collective will and organs that cannot be regarded as the organ of any entity will not suffice for this society. It will ultimately have to constitute the community of international law as a legal entity and provide it with permanent representatives. This will come about the day the national polities establish an international office to which they entrust supreme authority over the exchange of goods between the polities and thereby indirectly also supreme authority over the production within every polity. Just as the development of capitalist commodity production linked the manorial estates and the towns isolated during the Middle Ages to form the modern state, so too will the international division of labor create in socialist society a new type of social structure above the national polity, a state of states, into which the individual national polities will integrate themselves. The United States of Europe will thus be no longer a dream, but the inevitable ultimate goal of a movement that the nations have long since begun and that will be enormously accelerated by forces that are already becoming apparent.-Otto Bauer (1907 [1924]) The question of Nationalities and social democracy, [Die Nationalitätenfrage und die Sozialdemokratie]. translated by Joseph O'Donnell, University of Minnesota Press  pp. 412-414 (emphases in original).*

A few months ago Christopher Brooke alerted me to the significance of Bauer's work, and the passage above in particular, in the context of a series of posts on the historical and conceptual roots of modern federalism and its complex relationship to modern imperialism. When the book appeared Bauer was not yet a leading political figure and much of the excitement and turmoil of his life was still ahead. He was not, however, obscure, because Lenin makes a point of alerting his reader to the fact Bauer is one of his targets as one of “most prominent theoreticians” of the (bankrupt) Second International in his Preface to the French and German Editions Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism A Popular Outline.

It is noticeable that Bauer does not mention Hobson's Imperialism because there are many striking similarities in their analysis of the economic roots of (nationalist forms of) imperialism (recall here; here). And while Bauer is clearly marxist/socialist (as Hobson is not), not unlike Hobson, he sees in imperialism the possible seeds of something better. And in so doing Bauer articulates what we may call a functionalist account of the rise of federalism. And such functionalism is one of the ongoing, ruling commitments of the political and bureaucratic class of the EU. (I am unsure how well known Bauer's influence on this is--feel free to send literature my way!) So, it is worth taking a look at. 

Bauer's book has its roots in Bauer's PhD in law at the University of Vienna. And this is visible in the crucial passage quoted above. Internal law is rooted in capitalist development which gives rise to international trade. International trade generates the demand for international law along multiple dimensions (regulation of warfare and commerce). And with growing commerce, including commerce as a consequence of imperial conquest (this is part of Bauer's larger argument in the book), the range and complexity of international commercial law expands. 

Interestingly enough, it is the complex nature of some of modern commerce that gives an impulse to new forms of international collaboration, a "new structure, the international authority. Wherever the foundation of common administrative activity is to be established, the states create a common organ, an authority that, by virtue of its international mandate, is permanently to fulfill the tasks assigned it by the treaties between states." These international authorities have important characteristics: (i) they are created by states (ii) who create or delegate juridical authority to them; (iii) they are functionally, that is domain specific, organized;  (iv) they are technocratic in character, that is, a place where under the guise of authoritative law experts meet to solve coordination and standard setting problems; (v) they rely on the member states (with juridical/military power) for enforcement; (vi) they are heterogenous in character (not all have the same juridical power and internal structure). And (vii) in virtue of their existence, the character of states and their self-conception (that's the point of some turning into 'riverstates') and state sovereignty changes.

Crucially, for Bauer, the effect of (vii) is also to make room for, (viii), that is, there is a teleology toward both (a) a larger edifice of international law built into these new structures and (b) a (minimalist) federal state. It is pretty clear this directedness is a consequence of the economic forces of capitalism as it has turned into globalization and imperialism. 

Strikingly, the teleology is not automatic. For while, a spontaneous order ("innumerable decisions and actions of individuals") gives rise to the need for coordination and standardization, political guidance is needed for the organization and transformation of the state system ("consciously regulated by the different polities.") And what he has in mind is not just more treaty-making, but the establishment of a political (and federal) representative structure ground in international law ("constitute the community of international law as a legal entity and provide it with permanent representatives.")

If I understand him right this higher authority is also limited in character. Its jurisdiction is fundamentally economic ("the exchange of goods"). Now, the glue that would hold such a limited European Union together is, on the one hand, socialism, and, on the other hand, economic-juridical integration. 

What's striking about Bauer's approach is that it is quite clearly not wholly modeled on (say the way Kant and Adam Smith are inspired by) The United States of America, where republican/representative government comes conceptually first (or close to first alongside commercial connectedness). In Bauer's approach, politics remains in a sense nationalist (and socialist), but integrated in (and subordinated to) a larger juridical structure devoted to coordination and problem solving. (Kind of what Austrian liberals were hoping from the empire.) I use 'in a sense' because in socialism there are no incompatible ends, so it (the higher authority) need not do more (and certain kinds of politics are abolished). In addition, although this is not explicit in Bauer, socialism provides a common civic religion that ties the whole together.

It would be worth exploring what the pre-history of Bauer's ideas are. Brooke has given me hints to suggest that Cobden may be very important for this part of the story. But I close with the thought that one way to understand the present tragedy of the EU is that even more than Hayek (recall here; and here) or Mises (recall) and Kautsky (here; and recall Luxemburg's criticism) it has de facto adopted Bauer's vision (he died in 1938) without a glue like socialism that can help coordinate ends and act as a civic religion. 

 

On Crooked Timber.

The last two months have been challenging for me, hence my lack of blogging. They aren’t limited to losing my advisor. But what I have seen running throughout many of these challenges is a kind of a deep psychological that I will call wounds of the heart.

A wound of the heart is an emotional hurt that generates intense, seemingly unbearable psychic stress and that can create long-term damage to one’s personality due to overpowering negative moral emotions, like resentment and hatred, and that may last for the rest of one’s life. They are typically caused by some act by one’s close friends, family, or community. The wounded person believes the act signals that the offending group bears him or her bad will, and that the group does not love or support the wounded person in the way he or she had counted upon in the past. It can overwhelm the wounded person’s agency, leading them to lash out and creating a new harm, and perhaps wounding the hearts of others. When multiple parties to a relationship have wounds of the heart, that can spell the death of the relationship, even if the relationship continues pro forma.--Kevin Vallier The Wounds of the Heart

Because one of my entries into the history of philosophy was by way of Isaiah Berlin, I have always associated his quotation from Kant that "Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made" with an important truth. To this day the core idea informs my own skeptical liberalism.

But as always the story has wrinkles.

So for years I shared Ingrid Robeyns' sense, appropriately shared at the mother of all philosophical blogs, CT, that Berlin's translation improved on the original, Aus so krummem Holze, als woraus der Mensch gemacht ist, kann nichts ganz Gerades gezimmert werden. I still do. However, it is not often remarked that Kant added a footnote, to this very sentence; and it is worth noting it, too:

The role of man is very artificial. How it may be with the dwellers on other planets and their nature we do not know. If, however, we carry out well the mandate given us by Nature, we can perhaps flatter ourselves that we may claim among our neighbors in the cosmos no mean rank. Maybe among them each individual can perfectly attain his destiny in his own life. Among us, it is different; only the [human] race can hope to attain it."*

There are really two fine issues here: first, that we may be part of a larger family of planetary denizens. This is an idea that excited Huygens and Newton. And from Kant's pre-critical writings we know (recall) that Kant was much impressed by Newton's ideas on this point. And Kant assumes that, once we get into the habit of  this, we will adopt a perspective in which we are judged by such aliens. Maria Pia Paganelli has suggested -- in commenting on a similar idea in Adam Smith -- that this can be traced by to Fontenelle's Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds. It's plausible this also influenced Kant because Kant's earlier Universal Natural History is clearly shaped as I argued (based on a suggestion by Martin Schönfeld) by Fontenelle's work. So, Kant's cosmopolitanism here is truly cosmopolitan. I assume this is known among Kant experts, but the thought always delights me. 

Second, in the note Kant articulates the thought that that any attainable future worth having is a collaborative or shared project. I can think no better way of characterizing the liberal project in that it simultaneously holds that we should assume the unreformable weakness of individuals and that as humanity we're in it together. This is why, the more I reflect on it, the more I recognize that global, maybe cosmic (yeah for Star Trek!) federation is the liberal political destiny. 

This morning, in a wistful, apprehensive mood,  I returned to Seneca Letter 50. The letter is really about the comic-from- without-maddening-from-within realization that the more we run away from our problems, and disown them, the more we find them not just sneaking up on us, but defining us:

For what else are you busied with except improving yourself every day, laying aside some error, and coming to understand that the faults which you attribute to circumstances are in yourself? We are indeed apt to ascribe certain faults to the place or to the time; but those faults will follow us, no matter how we change our place.

And yet, I was in no mood to be preached to by Seneca that the way forward is a regimen of self-improvement. My mind drifted back toward's Vallier's post quoted above. As the reach of life has shrunk during this pandemic, and in my solitude, I more easily and directly encounter evidence of how my past wounds create new harms; I re-read, and I recognize myself in the self-portrait he draws. Kevin writes of 'soldiering on.' I wince at the bellicose nature of the phrase, despite seeing the tenderness in the rest of Kevin's words. The soldiering on reminds me of the bit of the part of Seneca -- preparing for death -- I like least.    

Without realizing it I had read on in Seneca. And there, I was surprised to read (in  Richard Gummere's 1917 translation), There is nothing that will not surrender to persistent treatment, to concentrated and careful attention; however much the timber may be bent, you can make it straight again.  [Nihil est, quod non expugnet pertinax opera et intenta ac diligens cura; robora in rectum quamvis flexa revocabis. Curvatas trabes calor explicat et aliter natae in id finguntur, quod usus noster exigit; quanto facilius animus accipit formam, flexibilis et.]

    Of course, Seneca must believe that self-improvement is possible, I think.

But, as I re-read I realize that Seneca thinks this, too, is a collaborative project: "we begin to mold and reconstruct our souls before they are hardened by crookedness" ["ante animum nostrum formare incipimus et recorrigere quam indurescat pravitas eius]. In Kevin's vocabulary, we soldier on in a platoon. Of course, the larger context of the Letter suggests that Seneca thinks we do this under the guidance of a mentor. 

I then remembered Kant. And now looking at what I have written, I am struck by the thought that I have been eavesdropping on a great debate between the two wings of cosmopolitanism: disagreeing about the means, but both claiming that we're in this together. My gloom dissipates. 

 

 

John Locke on Money, National Greatness and the Liberal Art of Liberal Government,

Silver is the instrument and measure of commerce in all the civilized and trading parts of the world.

It is the instrument of commerce by its intrinsic value.

The intrinsic value of silver, considered as money, is that estimate which common consent has placed on it, whereby it is made equivalent to all other things, and consequently is the universal barter, or exchange, which men give and receive for other things they would purchase or part with, for a valuable consideration; and thus, as the wise man tells us, money answers all things.--John Locke (1695) "Further Considerations Concerning Raising the Value of Money"

It is no doubt a bit odd to read that X is intrinsic of Y and that X is (a) an estimate of Y (b) and it (the estimate) is product of common consent. But it is less odd when we remind ourselves that X is not the intrinsic value of silver as such, but the intrinsic value of "silver, considered as money." And money here is a mechanism for the (possible) buying and selling of infinite diversity of (possible) goods.

In commenting on this passage, and Further Considerations more generally, Christine Desane writes, in her fascinating (2014) book Making Money: Coin, Currency, and the Coming of Capitalism, Locke's "argument put sovereigns in a place peripheral to international trade." (346) This matters to Desan's more general argument because Locke is the main source of what early in her book she describes as "the conventional creation story"* which she attributes to Marx and Menger alike (27-28).    

My interest here is not in the metaphysics of value,+ or the details of the implied mechanism, although both are important topics. Rather, I want to reflect a bit on Locke's underlying political vision. It is easy to imagine why Desan thinks that for Locke the origin of money is a convention  (350), and, with a nod to the Two Treatises, "an act of agreement prior even to the political consent that created society" (351; emphasis in Desan; for my analysis of the material in the Two Treatise see here). That is to say, on Desan's interpretation, "money's foundation" is "not political, not legal, but social." (353) By "locating agency over money in the consensus of strangers or people without politics, Locke offered the image of a medium that needed no collective engineering. (353) Since this fits with a certain kind of libertarian interpretation of Locke, one may well assume that Desan gets Locke right even though the argument of her book is that money is the product of collective engineering.

Now, before I criticize this account of Locke, it is important to note that Desan recognizes that Locke's account of the origin of money is not identical to his account of the maintenance of money. In particular, on her treatment of Locke, the sovereign does have one "certifying" (346) role in facilitating the use of money in commerce: "the ascertaining of its quantity by a public mark, the better to fit it for commerce," (quoted on p. 346 of Desan). As Locke puts it, the mark is a kind of "a public voucher, that a piece of such denomination is of such a weight, and of such a fineness, i. e. has so much silver in it." That is to say, for Locke the sovereign's role is to provide a collective good, by guarding over the quality of money and providing a public signal of it. 

As an aside, we see here Locke recognizing that the state (bureaucracy/institutions) needs itself to possess high quality skills. And the state's role is to secure common measures (by "public authority warranted") and accurate information about them. 

More important, one of the explicit goals of the state is to promote commerce. So, it is a bit odd to treat Locke as depoliticizing money when he articulates his account of money in terms of quite specific political aims (namely the promotion of commerce).  But so far, I have said nothing that Desan might disagree with.

More subtly, Desan treats money (and she is here echoing in part Locke's opponent Lowndes) as an "emphatically domestic"  affair. (348) It would, thus, be tempting to see in Locke's politics a cosmopolitan project because (and now again quoting Desan about Locke) "exchange was an international matter, and he evidently assumed that money was as well," (349).

And, indeed, in one sense Locke's ideal is cosmopolitan: "perhaps it would have been better for commerce in general, and more convenient for all their subjects, if the princes every-where, or at least in this part of the world, would at first have agreed on the fineness of the standard to have been just one-twelfth alloy, in round numbers; without those minuter fractions which are to be found in the alloy of most of the coin of the several distinct dominions of this part of the world." (partially quoted on p. 346 and p. 348 by Desan) It is not silly to see in Locke as the hypothetical forefather of the Euro (or, at least, the EMU/EMS). But notice that here Locke ascribes to princes/sovereigns political agency. And this is Locke's (counterfactual) ideal. 

Of course, in practice this did not happen. But it alerts us that Locke's argument may be more political than Desan (and certain libertarians) let on.** And, in fact, Locke's argument about the role of money in commerce is itself intrinsically political: 

Money also is necessary to us, in a certain proportion to the plenty of it amongst our neighbours. For, if any of our neighbours have it in a much greater abundance than we, we are many ways obnoxious to them. 1. They can maintain a greater force. 2. They can tempt away our people, by greater wages, to serve them, by land, or sea, or in any labour. 3. They can command the markets, and thereby break our trade, and make us poor. 4. They can on any occasion ingross naval and warlike stores, and thereby endanger us.

In countries where domestic mines do not supply it, nothing can bring in silver but tribute, or trade. Tribute is the effect of conquest: trade, of skill and industry.

By commerce silver is brought in, only by an overbalance of trade.

An overbalance of trade, is when the quantity of commodities, which we send to any country do more than pay for those we bring from thence: for then the overplus is brought home in bullion.

For, Locke's argument is that a strong currency is connected to a high wage ("greater wages"), productive labor force ("skill and industry"), export driven ("overbalance of trade") political economy, which allows for a growing population and, thereby,  a greater military (and more powerful economy).++ What's really new here -- judging by Desan's larger narrative -- is not the strong currency part. (It seems the UK elites were all in on a strong currency for close to half a millenium prior to Locke.) But rather that in virtue of a strong currency one can pay high wages and support a growing population. 

This not ad hoc in Locke. It echoes Locke's more instrumental defense of property rights as conducive to consumption and rising standards of living. In particular, it fits quite nicely with the details of Locke's 'Art of government' (recall my treatment of sections 41-42 of Second Treatise, chapter 5): (i) open borders that facilitate immigration, abundance in food, fertility/family friendly policies. (ii) And we can take him to be committed to policies that improve the skill-set of the workforce that is the stimulation of public or private provision of education. In arguing for Jewish emancipation (and immigration), Toland (recall) explicitly picks up on Locke's argument, but rather than focusing on high wages he focuses on falling prices for mass produced goods. 

So, let me wrap up. I have not here evaluated Locke's economics. And I also grant that it's possible that Locke was a bourgeois ideologue supporting mercantile Whig elites at the expense of everybody else (Desan relies heavily on Macpherson) with any argument available. But it strikes me that the more natural and consistent reading is that Locke thought that state policy should enrich the population. If done right (by focusing on a hard currency, educating for the right skills, and yes defending property rights) this would lock Britain into a virtuous cycle of growing trade, growing wages, growing populations, and growing political might. This is not a cosmopolitan argument in favor of trade (of the sort Kant or Smith might try out); rather it is a second-best argument for national greatness because the international sphere is characterized by power politics. Since Locke's approach puts Britain on the path of zero-sum, great power politics, it is an open question whether this can be called 'liberal' (cf.  411 in Desan; but that's for another occasion).

 

Benjamin Franklin, Adam Smith, Kant and Gov. Pownall on Federation

SIR ,
The following objection against communicating to the colonies the rights, privileges, and powers of the realm, as to parts of the realm, has been made. I have been endeavoring to obviate it, and I communicate [it] to you, in hopes of your promised assistance. If, say the objectors, we communicate to the colonies the power of sending representatives, and in consequence expect them to participate in an equal share and proportion of all our taxes, we must grant to them all the powers of trade and manufacturing, which any other parts of the realm within the isle of Great Britain enjoy.-- If so , perchance the profits of the Atlantic commerce may converge to some centre in America; to Boston, New York, Philadelphia, or to some of the isles :- if so , then the natural and artificial produce of the colonies, and in course of consequences, the landed interest of the colonies, will be promoted; while the natural and artificial produce and landed interest of Great Britain will be depressed, to its utter ruin and destruction; and consequently the balance of the power of government, although still within the realm, will be locally transferred from Great Britain to the colonies. Which consequence, however it may suit a citizen of the world, must be folly and madness to a Briton. My fit is gone off; and though weak, both from the gout and a concomitant and very ugly fever, I am much better. Would be glad to see you. Your friend, J. POWNALL. to Benjamin Franklin, in Memoires of the Life and Writing of Benjamin Franklin, volume 3, third edition (1818) 295-296

Gov. Pownall's letter is mentioned in Hobson's Imperialism, which cites Bernard Holland's (1901) Imperium et Libertas, 78-78. Holland claims the letter is from 1767. Thomas Pownall was then a former governor of Massachusetts. Among Adam Smith scholars he is known for an insightful, early, and critical review of Wealth of Nations. I name-drop Smith because from this letter I learned that the idea ("we communicate to the colonies the power of sending representatives, and in consequence expect them to participate in an equal share and proportion of all our taxes,"*) of what Smith calls (recall) an Atlantic "parliament" or "the states general of the British empire," was clearly already circulating in London,+ while Smith was finishing up his book. (So, I now wonder to what extent Pownall and Smith knew each other.) It is not a minor issue for Smith; the Wealth of Nations culminates in the idea of an Atlantic federation.

Pownall recognizes that with parliamentary power, such a Atlantic federation would likely be a giant free trade zone (that becomes a virtue not a bug in Smith's system). But because Pownall views the world in Mercantilist zero-sum terms, he conceives of trade in terms of economic winners and losers, and consequently political winners (i.e, the colonial elites) and losers (British elites). And so he foresees that the economic and political winners of free mutual trade within an Atlantic federation would be Stateside. Smith would object to Pownall's economic argument on multiple grounds not the least to the presupposition that profits are central to a people's enrichment.** 

But my interest here is not in economics. I just want to call attention to Pownall's recognition that a federated structure is cosmopolitan in character.1 And he recognizes that from such a cosmopolitan perspective pacific, Atlantic federation is to be welcomed. (Yes, I think the logic of this argument looks ahead to Kant.) That is to say, he recognizes that from a certain impartial perspective such a federated political project is a net good. (After all even he can recognize that while the profits may go to the colonies, British consumers would benefit.) It is just that from his own theoretical perspective and his local attachments prevent him from adopting such a cosmopolitan stance.

And so, to return one more time to Smith's argument in Wealth of Nations.++ We may understand it as addressing, in part, the theoretical misconceptions that prevent somebody like Pownall from seeing that true interests of the Brit and the Cosmopolitan can be made to coincide in ambitious political project of a gigantic political and economic federation that would make the North Atlantic a domestic great lake. That is to say, I had already suspected that the Kantian idea of a cosmopolitan expansive, federated commercial republic was indebted to Smith; but it is not original to Smith and, given his relatively long stay in London ahead of the (1776) publication of Wealth of Nations, I would expect him to be familiar with these debates  in the run-up American independence.