Digressions&Impressions

On the Aristocracy of Manchester: Richard Bellamy and Cobden on Work Place Relations,

In a typical piece of culture critique, Smiles observed how 'in their pursuit of riches, the English are gradually losing sight of their higher characteristics.' The growth of cities, increased factory size, greater mobility of labour with the new railway system, even improved prosperity, all seemed to be destroying the environment necessary for the Victorian virtues to flourish. As early as 1857, the free trader campaigner Richard Cobden remarked "the social and political state of [Birmingham] is far more healthy than that of Manchester; and it arises from the fact that the industry of the hardware district is carried on by small manufacturers...whilst the great capitalists of Manchester form an aristocracy.' Only competition could provide the necessary antidote for it placed the 'lazy man...under the necessity of exerting itself,' It disciplined businessman and worker alike,  rewarding merit and effort and punishing the indolent.--Richard Bellamy (1992) Liberalism and Modern Society, pp. 11-12

Ever since I read Hobson's (1919) Richard Cobden: the international man, I have been alert to the fact that contemporary discussions of Cobden, if he is mentioned all, treat him primarily, as Bellamy introduces him in the passage quoted above, "the free trader campaigner." Cobden was a gifted political organizer and orator, a critic of slavery, anti-mercantile spirit of war, and arguably one of the key architects of developing international, functional integration as a means toward peace (something now part of the DNA of the EU). I consider him one of the great Smithians of the nineteenth century (which I will illustrate below). As it happens, I have grown very fond of the letter by Cobden (to Palmer) that Bellamy quotes.  

Bellamy's work is an important, somewhat neglected milestone in the development of a more realist sensibility in discussions of liberalism before that became a popular niche in recent political theory/philosophy. I hope to engage with his book more constructively in the future. But sometimes nitpicking can be illustrative, too. I want to suggest Bellamy mispresents Cobden's point, and that Cobden's analysis is a point worth tracking. First, let me quote the full paragraph of the letter as Hobson presents it:

The honest and independent course taken by the people at Birmingham, their exemption from aristocratic snobbery, and their fair appreciation of a democratic aim of the people, confirms me in the opinion I have always had that the social and political state of that town is far more healthy than that of Manchester; and it arises from the fact that the industry of the hardware district is carried on by small manufacturers, employing a few men and boys each, sometimes only an apprentice or two; whilst the great capitalists of Manchester form an aristocracy, individual members of which wield an influence over sometimes two thousand persons. The former state of society is more natural and healthy in a moral and political sense. There is a freer intercourse between all classes than in the Lancashire town, where a great and impassable gulf separates the workman from his employer. The great capitalist class formed an excellent basis for the Anti-Corn-Law movement, for they had inexhaustible purses, which they opened freely in a contest where not only their pecuniary interests but their pride as 'an order' was at stake. But I very much doubt whether such a state of society is favourable to a democratic political movement.^[1]

Cobden's key point is that what we might call 'work-place structure' or if you are more Marxist, the 'organization of capitalism,' permeates social, moral, and political relations. In fact, his bottom line that a steep hierarchy at work is inimical to democratic life has not lost its salience yet. According to Cobden, hierarchy creates a social distance -- it generates the conditions of antipathy -- that undermines social interaction. So, when later liberals treat democracy in terms of "government by discussion," they are not merely making an anodyne point about the significance of talk to civilization, but they are also calling attention to the material pre-conditions of such a practice.

This is especially so when a particular location has uniform work conditions. Anticipating Max Weber's insight, it is such local homogeneity that creates contrasting political perspective with other geographic locations (where work is organized differently). The social clash of values is an effect of different organization of work, and so different material interests and social practices.  Of course, in the quoted passage, Cobden does not hide his own preference for more egalitarian work-place relations. And while his phrasing is gendered, Cobden was hugely influential on the so-called 'first wave feminism' in the UK (including his daughter Jane Cobden).

Notice, too, that Cobden is not averse to talk in the language of 'class.' And, in fact, his understanding of class is not merely economic or based on economic self-interest. He notes that the support for the Anti-Corn-Law movement was not just financial, but also in terms of their collective social status (their "pride"). The problem with Manchester is not the laziness of workers or capitalists, or their ability to avoid the discipline of the market, it is rather the economies of scale enjoyed in Manchester that creates a social hierarchy and, thereby, a political problem. How to deal with the economic and political fruits of economies of scale is, in fact, one of the more enduring challenges in liberal political theory. (This fits one of Bellamy's larger arguments in the book, so it is a bit sad he missed the point.) 

Now, Bellamy's source of this material is Ian C. Bradley's (1980) The Optimists : Themes and Personalities in Victorian Liberalism, p. 59. Bradley does not mention that Palmer is the addressee, and it is natural to read Bradley as suggesting that this is a letter to the other great Liberal politician of the era, Bright. Bradley quotes the paragraph as follows:

social and political state of that town is far more healthy than that of Manchester; and it arises from the fact that the industry of the hardware district is carried on by small manufacturers, employing a few men and boys each, sometimes only an apprentice or two; whilst the great capitalists of Manchester form an aristocracy, individual members of which wield an influence over sometimes two thousand persons. The former state of society is more natural and healthy in a moral and political sense. There is a freer intercourse between all classes than in the Lancashire town...The great capitalist class formed an excellent basis for the Anti-Corn-Law movement, for they had inexhaustible purses, which they opened freely in a contest where not only their pecuniary interests but their pride as 'an order' was at stake. But I very much doubt whether such a state of society is favourable to a democratic political movement.

In Bradley (whose book is on the Liberal party), this letter is introduced in the context of the Liberal party's effort to expand the franchise, and Bright's (1857) election as MP in Birmingham after he lost his seat in Manchester (also in 1857) due to his opposition to the Crimean war (something Bradley does not mention in context, but I think becomes clear later in the book). 

When I looked up Bradley I kind of expected that he would be the source of Bellamy's interpretive mistake. In fact, I don't think there is anything in Bradley's argument that supports Bellamy's use of this material. Bradley's decision to remove "where a great and impassable gulf separates the workman from his employer" from his presentation does change the meaning of the material. And perhaps it was sufficient to mislead Bellamy about Cobden's underlying argument.

 

 

Hayek on Mannheim: Or how One Road to Serfdom Thesis is Used to Block Another Road to Serfdom Thesis

Last week (recall) I noted the significance to Foucault's Weberian reading of Hayek that in The Road to Serfdom (1944) Mannheim's historicist interpretation of the law is one of the official targets of Hayek (especially in chapter “Planning and the Rule of Law”). In the passage from Mannheim's Man and Society (1940) that Hayek cites (without page-number), Mannheim himself calls attention to Weber (and his differences with Weber).* In his (1960) The Constitution of Liberty, Hayek drops the Mannheim reference and near the end of chapter 10 criticizes Weber's (indeed slightly different) historicist interpretation of the law (recall here). In both cases, he offers detailed responses to the historicist. That's not the end of the matter because in Volume II of Law, Legislation and Liberty (1976: p. 86), Hayek then uses the very same Mannheim quote, albeit shortened, as he had used in The Road to Serfdom (but now with page-number reference--see note 33!)

As it happens, Mannheim goes unmentioned in the The Constitution of Liberty. This is quite a difference from The Road to Serfdom, where Mannheim -- and his Man and Society in the Age of Reconstruction in particular, which Hayek calls "a widely acclaimed book" (p. 21) --is really one of Hayek's main negative exemplars.+ Mannheim is presented as holding the "extreme position" which defends "planning for freedom." This position entails, on Hayek's reconstruction, the "collective and "conscious" direction of all social forces to deliberately chosen goals." And Hayek alerts the reader that "we shall have to comment [on it] yet more than once." (p. 21) And on the same page, Hayek lists Mannheim among the German thinkers who have helped perfect "socialism" in the more radical and less radical forms (p. 21-22).

Unsurprisingly, then, later in The Road to Serfdom, Hayek treats Mannheim not just as a defender of legal historicism, but also as somebody who holds that collective planning is compatible with parliamentary control (and so democracy) over the planning process (p. 72). And, in fact, while Hayek doesn't mention this, on the very page he quotes from Man and Society, Mannheim also asserts that by reshaping the separation of powers along "functional lines" these can be "more easily applied to a planned society than to a liberal democratic one." (Man and Society, p. 340) And while Mannheim seems to grant that in a planned society sovereignty may take the form of a dictatorship, he denies that it is "necessary." Interestingly enough, Hayek, in response, does not assert the necessity, but only claims explicitly that such a system "tends toward the plebiscitarian democracy." (p. 72) So, here Hayek and Mannheim actually agree formally about the facts, but we might say have a different risk tolerance.

Finally, in the chapter ("the end of truth"), Hayek returns a final time to Mannheim (in The Road to Serfdom). In order to note that the old meaning of 'liberty' has been destroyed and discarded for a new idea of 'freedom.' (The Road to Serfdom, p. 162) Hayek treats Mannheim's ideas about "collective freedom" as entirely "misleading." (And even compares Mannheim here explicitly to "totalitarian politicians.") For Hayek, such collective freedom merely involves "the unlimited freedom of the planner to do with society what he pleases." (162) I return to this below.

It is worth noting that Mannheim's historicism, leads him to distinguish among three uses of 'freedom' and so three kinds of liberty depending on the three social/historical stage. More important from the perspective of Hayek's criticism, Mannheim explicitly recognizes the worry that under planning there is no restriction on the "powers of the planner." (Man in Society, 378) And so his response to the worry that Hayek presses later is that the "existence of essential forms of freedom" have to be secured by the plan itself. (378) He sometimes also calls for the "creation of free zones within the planned structure." (379) For Mannheim, "the advent of planned freedom [in the third stage] does not mean that all earlier forms of freedom must be abolished." (379) And, in fact, for Mannheim this means that independence of intermediary institutions such as "hospitals, schools, and universities" is preserved. (380) As we have seen, Hayek finds this idea to preserve Burkean platoons under planning impossible to take seriously as a genuine possibility under planning.

Anyway, the disappearance of Mannheim in The Constitution of Liberty after being so important to the rhetoric and argument of the Road to Serfdom was striking to me. I also thought it odd that Hayek only focuses on Man and Society, and the not more famous Ideology and Utopia. This got me curious about Hayek's wider engagement with Mannheim.

And, in fact, in earlier work published as the (1952) Counter-Revolution of Science, but mostly dating to the early 1940s, Hayek had engaged with the idea that consistently pursued historicism leads to a sophisticated sociology of knowledge (p. 76). But Hayek doesn't name anyone in particular. In his edition, Studies on the Abuse and Decline of Reason, Bruce Caldwell plausibly suggests Hayek has Mannheim's Ideology and Utopia in mind here (p. 139 n). 

In another essay, ""Conscious" Direction and the Growth of Reason," in The Counter-Revolution of Science, Hayek explicitly quotes again from Man and Society (p. 213) in order to illustrate the tendency in modern  thought (he also cites Hobhouse and Needham) for "the growth of the human mind itself" under conscious control (p. 88). And he quotes Mannheim as follows: "man's thought has become more spontaneous and absolute than it ever was, since it now perceives the possibility of determining itself." ** So, this echoes (or historically anticipates) the treatment of Mannheim on p. 21 in The Road to Serfdom quoted/discussed above.

Finally, in his chapter, "Engineers as planners" The Counter-Revolution of Science, Hayek writes that "in recent years this desire to apply engineering technique to the solution of social problems has become very explicit." (p. 94) And in the accompanying footnote he cites Mannheim's Man and Society, pp. 240-4 at length:

"functionalism made its first appearance in the field of the natural sciences, and could be described as the technical point of view. It has only recently been transferred to the social sphere... Once this technical approach was transferred from natural sciences to human affairs, it was bound to bring about a profound change in man himself. . . The functional approach no longer regards ideas and moral standards as absolute values, but as products of the social process which can, if necessary, be changed by scientific guidance combined with political practice. . . The extension of the doctrine of technical supremacy which I have advocated in this book is in my opinion inevitable . . . Progress in the technique of organization is nothing but the application of technical conceptions to the forms of co-operation. A human being, regarded as part of the social machine, is to a certain extent stabilized in his reactions by training and education, and all his recently acquired activities are co-ordinated according to a definite principle of efficiency within an organized framework."

This passage is not quoted in The Road to Serfdom. But it is definitely alluded to in Hayek's claim that in a system of collective planning, "The only tastes which are satisfied are the taste for power as such, the pleasure of being obeyed and of being part of a well-functioning and immensely powerful machine to which everything else must give way." (Hayek (1944 [2001]), p. 155) And Hayek's position here relies on the idea (already quoted above) that under collective planning there only freedom that exists is "the unlimited freedom of the planner to do with society what he pleases." (162) And Hayek clearly means to imply that Mannheim's identification with the social planner makes him unreliable on the possible experiences of those whose lives are planned.

So, what Hayek's explicit response to Mannheim in "Engineers as planners" The Counter-Revolution of Science helps explain is that even when Mannheim is not mentioned in The Road to Serfdom, he is still polemically engaged with Mannheim as the exemplary intellectual who advocates planning. I would not be surprised if a close reading of Man and Society in light of The Road to Serfdom would find more polemical points of contact between Hayek and Mannheim.

The reason I think that is because if we look at what Hayek cites from Man and Society (pp. 240-244) in "Engineers as planners," we can discern that at a key moment, Mannheim embraces a species of historical determinism: "The extension of the doctrine of technical supremacy which I have advocated in this book is in my opinion inevitable." (this is from p. 243 in Man and Society.) And in context, Mannheim makes clear that while his "dynamics of history" is indebted to Marx, it's also distinct. And the reason it's distinct, according to Mannheim, is that for Mannheim modern weapons technology alters the nature of warfare and the class system by producing a kind of mind that is neither bourgeois nor proletariat. (This kind of anticipates Burnham by the way.) And this new kind new kind of mind with access to weapons that can shape the economy, will make an entirely different dictatorship (than the dictatorship of the proletariat) possible.  (p. 243) 

And, in fact, if I understand him correctly, it is in order to prevent this new kind of dictatorship that, according to Mannheim, collective planning for freedom is required!++ So, in order to avoid a road to serfdom in which as a consequence of modern technology and social techniques of control (see especially p. 260 of Man and Society), military dictatorships that are immune to revolution -- a view more common in the era -- become entrenched that collective planning is required (pp. 260-261). That is to say, while the idea of a road to serfdom anticipates Hayek's account (we have seen it in Hobhouse, Mises, Belloc, and it has been attributed by Knight to Lippmann), Hayek's road to serfdom is -- inter alia -- a rather explicit response to Mannheim's own road to serfdom thesis.

The Virginia School and Carl Schmitt: Wagner's Entangled Political Economy (pt 1)

    The second type of tension points to some challenging issues of dialectical theorizing. Perhaps most significantly, it appears in Buchanan’s distinction between constitutional and post-constitutional politics. This distinction was central both to The Calculus of Consent and The Limits of Liberty, and it was the dominant theme within his body of work. This tension appears clearly in the Calculus of Consent, and continues in his various subsequent efforts to use the playing of parlor games as serving as a useful framework for thinking about problems pertaining to the organization of human affairs. This scheme of thought is closed and deterministic and not open and creative. Yet there can surely be no doubt that despite his flirtations with closed schemes of thought, the Buchanan (1982) who asserted that order could be defined only through some emergent process was someone who necessarily embraced open schemes of thought that is not reducible to a few people deciding what kind of parlor game to play.
   This tension within Buchanan’s scheme of thought points toward a distinction between sentimental and muscular versions of liberalism. Perhaps nowhere is this distinction illustrated in sharper relieve than in comparing John Stuart Mill’s (1859) On Liberty with James Fitzjames Stephen’s (1873) Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. For Mill, a liberal order was easy to achieve and maintain because personal liberty, equality before the law, and humanity were universal values, so human nature provided a bedding ground within which liberalism could flourish. Stephen agreed with Mill about liberty and equality, but not about the fraternal imperative being resident within human nature. Hence, Stephen thought that force would always be part of a well-ordered society, though he recognized that force could be used to subvert a liberal order as well as to support it. For the sentimental version of liberalism conveyed by Mill and later John Rawls (1971), human governance could be reduced to ethics, law, and commerce, leaving no room for the political insertion of force into society. For the muscular version of liberalism, free societies are not self-sustaining, and can degenerate without the proper use of force. While Stephen illustrated the muscular version of liberalism luminously, James Burnham (1943) traced that muscular version back to Machiavelli, and also associated it with such figures from the early 20th century as Vilfredo Pareto, Gaetano Mosca, and Roberto Michels. Burnham could very well have added Carl Schmitt (1932) and his recognition of the autonomy of the political to his menagerie of thinkers in the spirit of muscular liberalism.

    Buchanan’s position relative to the divide between sentimental and muscular liberalism is ambiguous. Much of this thinking reflected an “end of history” style of thinking whereby political force could be abolished through the creation of the proper constitutional rules. Yet, Buchanan never fully embraced this style of thinking. Sentimental liberalism treats liberty as a universal value. If so, people should readily embrace the challenge of living as free persons. But if a good part of the population is thought to be afraid of living freely (Buchanan 2005), either sentimental expressions of liberalism will transform liberty into servility (Belloc 1912) or political power will be
marshaled to lead protesters into accepting the liberal order. --Richard E. Wagner (2017)) James Buchanan’s "Liberal Theory of Political Economy: A Valiant but Failed Effort to Square the Circle" [published in Buchanan's Tensions: Reexamining the Political Economy and Philosophy of James M. Buchanan Edited by Peter J. Boettke and Solomon Stein , 2018.]

There is persistent strain of scholarship that aims to link important theorists of neo-liberalism -- Hayek, Eucken, Buchanan, Milton Friedman, etc. -- to Carl Schmitt's legal theory in order to unmask or show the true character of neo-liberalism. This is often illustrated with some references to their entanglement with Pinochet's dictatorship. While I do not want to dismiss such scholarship out of hand -- in some neoliberals, especially in Hayek, there is a strain of accommodation with temporary benevolent dictatorship --, but it is often not very illuminating. Sometimes, more rarely really, the point of the exercise is self-consciously to rehabilitate Schmitt as a kind of liberal, although one "free from democratic contamination." The quote is from a fascinating (1984) article in the Canadian Journal of Political Science by F.R. Cristi, a philosopher then at Wilfred Laurier.

I became aware of Cristi because I have been recently reading Richard E. ('Dick') Wagner's late works (at the urging of some of his students and admirers). Wagner is James Buchanan's first PhD student (or among the first), and also among his most prominent ones who played an important role in the development of 'Virginia school' public choice (alongside Buchanan, Tullock, and Nutter). More recently, Wagner has been developing an approach within public choice -- entangled political economy -- which draws on network theory, systems theory, polycentrism, and the Italian elite school (especially Pareto, Mosca, Michel, etc.) as well as the left strain of Austrian economics (associated with Wieser). Wagner also has a fondness for the sociologist, Elias. Wagner is widely read in social theory, and unusually for an economist, does not hide it. One reason to be interested in Wagner's entangled political economy is in its sober analysis of political life. For if corrosive rent-seeking by the powerful and connected is one of the Achilles-heels of liberal democracy then liberalism, or at least a realist liberalism (say of the sort defended by Matt Sleat) needs to come to terms with it. 

Much to my surprise, in Wagner's late works, Schmitt repeatedly shows up as an 'authoritarian liberal' and he cites Cristi's work repeatedly as source for this. (To be sure not the 1984 article I quoted above, but Cristi's 1998, book Carl Schmitt and Authoritarian Liberalism. But judging by Wagner's description of the latter the view is close to the 1984 article.) My own view -- which I share with Perry Anderson (no friend of liberalism) is -- that (recall) "Schmitt...never had any truck with liberalism." Leaving aside Cristi's motives and project, the question that I wish to pursue here is to what degree Wagner's position -- with its advocacy for a 'muscular' species of liberalism -- remains broadly liberal. 

The problem is that Wagner inserts his analysis in a historical set of contrasts attached to familiar names in the liberal tradition. On one side are Mill, Rawls, and much of Buchanan. These are sentimental liberals. And they are so called because and now I re-quote Wagner "human governance could be reduced to ethics, law, and commerce, leaving no room for the political insertion of force into society." I suspect that strictly speaking this claim is false about all three purported sentimentalists. But it's also a sufficiently familiar (realist) criticism of the latter two that I will accept something like it for the sake of argument.* In another work, Wagner explains this point (about the reduction of human governance to ethics, law, and commerce) as follows:

To assert the autonomy of the political seems superficially to clash with the traditional or classical notion of a society of free and independent individuals, perhaps still associated most strongly with John Stuart Mill (1863). This notion of liberalism appears to seek to reduce the political to some combination of economics, law, and ethics. The reduction to economics reflects the autonomy of economizing action. The reduction to law reflects the idea of a rule of law as replacing a rule of men, about which Rajagopalan and Wagner (2013) voice skepticism. The reduction to ethics reflects a presumption that humanity can will itself to be governed along the principles of one of those peaceable kingdom paintings where lions are lying with lambs. "The logic of economizing action: Universal form and particular practice" in (2016) Politics as a Peculiar Business: Insights from a Theory of Entangled Political Economy.

Before I get to this, I have to admit I find the way Wagner draws a contrast (in the material quoted at the top of this post) between Mill and Stephen a bit puzzling. While Stephen had many perceptive criticisms of the kind of hypocrisy and ideological blinders required to call Victorian England in any sense 'equal', his own underlying commitment was (as was clear to then contemporary commentators like Morley) un-egalitarian. To quote a key line from Stephen: "Men are fundamentally unequal, and this inequality will show itself arrange society as you like." See Liberty, Equality, Fraternity (LF ed.). Liberty Fund, 1874, pp. 152-153. (This is from the chapter 5, on the 'modern creed' of equality.) I return to Stephen's position below. I also found it odd to see Mill characterized as holding that "a liberal order was easy to achieve and maintain because personal liberty, equality before the law, and humanity were universal values." After all, Mill thought, to simplify, that many societies required English tutelage to be prepared for a liberal order.

Burnham was not confused about these matters during the phase when he was most enamored by Machiavelli and the Italian elite thinkers. In that period he did not think of himself as a liberal (either in the progressive twentieth century sense or the more nineteenth century classical sense that Buchanan ended up identifying himself with). After all, Burnham (a philosophically trained ex-Trotskyite) thought that managerialism would make liberalism (and Marxism) obsolete. One reason why his writings from the 1940s [recall The Managerial Revolution (1941) and The Machiavellians: the Defenders of Freedom (1943)] are so fascinating is that he is extremely insightful on the implosion of early twentieth century liberalism and the contours of the post WWII settlement, while completely missing the possibility of a neo-liberal revival.

I don't mean to suggest that there are no liberal ideas in Burnham. Burnham is explicitly not laissez-faire, and he denies that respect for private property is the end all or be all to defend what he calls 'freedom.' Rather he thinks that what's required for freedom is the possibility to provide criticism of the government, which must be constrained by law. And he thinks (in Madisonian fashion, and certainly this picks up a strain in Machiavelli) that it is competing powers/forces that maintain this freedom (beyond mores/norms). For Burnham the lesson is that concentrated power is dangerous. So, here Burnham is an accord with the ordoliberals of his own age, and trustbusters of the progressive era. But he argues this without much interest in much of what characterizes liberalism. (Burnham's rejection of equality slides into outright racism and sexism in his later work see (e.g. Suicide of the West)).

As an aside, I don't mean to suggest that there is no route into liberalism from Pareto (who was a liberal for most of  his life) and Italian Elite theory (as mediated by Burnham). The French political sociologist, Raymond Aron, read Burnham carefully and did develop a species of liberalism in which responsible elites play an important role.+

If we turn to Wagner's own use of Burnham and Schmitt, we see that what's crucial for him within his development of entangled political economy is what Wagner calls the 'autonomy of the political.' By this he means I think three distinct (but mutually supporting) claims: (i) politics is not reducible to economics or the economy (and so also has a proper form of activity of its own [and that analytically must be captured by its own methods])--sometimes there is an added claim that politics is 'parasitic' on the economy; (ii) the use of force is intrinsic to the political and, ultimately, unavoidable in political life. (The "parlor games" tend to obscure this fact.) Liberals who take liberal values for granted, and democrats who take democratic commitments of the people for granted, ultimately miss this point. (iii) Left to their own devices, the liberal economic order and civil society are not self-sustaining (hence the recurring crises within liberalism). What's needed is political will and force to save the liberal economic order from its own impotence (or crises).

In my view the great significance of Wagner's entangled political economy is its willingness to address the possibility (and dangers accompanying) the fact that liberalism may not be self-sustaining. And I hope to return to it before long. But I do want to register that Wagner's purported realism has slid into illiberalism in two characteristic ways. First, it's bedrock in liberalism, and anachronistically or not, Locke is the godfather of the idea, that force has to be backed by (legitimate) law and that if such law is unavailable, but the survival of individual members of society requires discretion, the use of force can be made accountable after the fact. (I owe this way of formulating it (recall) to Hume and Nomi Claire Lazar's States of Emergency in Liberal Democracies.)

It is by no means obvious that Wagner embraces this bedrock idea because his repeated invocations of Schmitt are meant to convey the idea "that the autonomy of the political within society is bound up in the ability of those who hold political power to act on and grant exceptions to rules and to act on and reinforce distinctions between friends and enemies." (from "Parasitical political calculation" in (2016) Politics as a Peculiar Business.) And accountability is never paired with this principle. 

Second, I have a sneaky suspicion that Wagner agrees with Stephen's rejection of egalitarianism. This is clear from another passage in Politics as a Peculiar Business that I will quote at length:

The autonomy of the political reflects recognition that power is ever present in society, along with recognition that people differ among themselves in both abilities and interests as these pertain to the relative attractiveness of comparatively introversive and extroversive lines of activity. In this respect, participation in political activity seems likely to hold generally stronger appeal for relatively extroversive types who find public interaction to be a source of energy rather than draining it away. While the autonomy of the political appears in the surface impression that a small number of rulers dominate large masses of citizens, that surface impression hides the sub-surface recognition that power is latent in human nature, and which manifests itself in numerous particular ways historically. That latency and its particular manifestation starts from recognition that humans could potentially be studied within the rubric of ethology as the study of the higher mammals, as against being studied as an independent species....While there may be little difference between a street porter and a philosopher (Levy and Peart, eds. 2008) when operating alone in Crusoe-like fashion, differences arise in societal settings, increasingly so as societal complexity increases as represented by an increasingly stratified division of labor, and with those differences both promoting hierarchy and intensifying the autonomy of the political.
To refer to human sociality is not necessarily to refer to something pleasant. Sociality might be pleasant, but often it is not. Sociality refers simply to orientations and activities that involve a multiple of people, and so are not phenomena recognizable to a Robinson Crusoe. The social mammals mostly exist in cooperative packs. A pack of wolves can bring down a moose even though the aggregate weight of those wolves is less than that of the moose. From time to time, quarrels will arise among the wolves in a pack, and with one of the quarreling wolves emerging as the leader of the pack. The social mammals display cooperation, conflict, and hierarchy as inseparable or entangled qualities, and human societies are no different in this regard.

It is possible that Wagner here is merely making a descriptive claim about the inevitability of social hierarchy in societies characterized by an advanced division of labor. But it is notable that he does so while stipulating that Levy & Peart's analytic egalitarianism only holds in small societies. For it is central to their analytic egalitarianism (which I tend to defend) -- which treats humans as broadly equal [in the way that Hobbes does] -- that any observed differences are due to social causes (not necessarily reducible to innate human differences). And so it looks like Wagner wishes to emphasize those features of elite theory that emphasize innate differences and social hierarchies and so implies that the elite that rules (with calibrated force), does so by nature (not law).

 

14 March 1979: Foucault on Social Contracts, the welfare state, and American Neoliberalism (XXVI)

The second contextual element is of course the Beveridge plan and all the projects of economic and social interventionism developed during the war. These are all important elements that we could call, if you like, pacts of war, that is to say, pacts in terms of which governments—basically the English, and to a certain extent the American government—said to people who had just been through a very serious economic and social crisis: Now we are asking you to get yourselves killed, but we promise you that when you have done this, you will keep your jobs until the end of your lives. It would be very interesting to study this set of documents, analyses, programs, and research for itself, because it seems to me that, if I am not mistaken, this is the first time that entire nations waged war on the basis of a system of pacts which were not just international alliances between powers, but social pacts of a kind that promised—to those who were asked to go to war and get themselves killed—a certain type of economic and social organization which assured security (of employment, with regard to illness and other kinds of risk, and at the level of retirement): they were pacts of security at the moment of a demand for war. The demand for war on the part of governments is accompanied—and very quickly; there are texts on the theme from 1940—by this offer of a social pact and security. It was against this set of social problems that Simons drafted a number of critical texts and articles, the most interesting of which is entitled: “The Beveridge Program: an unsympathetic interpretation,” which there is no need to translate, since the title indicates its critical sense. Michel Foucault, 14 March, 1979,  translated by Graham Burchell, Lecture 9, The Birth of Biopolitics, 216

I have deliberately gone slowly through Birth of Biopolitics because I did not want to skip straight to Foucault's discussion of 'American neo-liberalism,' (215-216; especially the celebrated treatment of Becker). In this I echo Foucalt's deliberate procedure. When he arrives at lecture nine, he announces, at its start, "Today I would like to start talking to you about what is becoming a pet theme in France: American neo-liberalism." Foucault knows -- and we have seen him repeatedly remind his audience -- that what he has to say about ORDO-liberalism is of little interest to his audience, which he often castigates as being in the grip of cliches. Their real interest is to take on the new ascending, intellectual hegemony located in Chicago and in the public eye associated with Pinochet, etc. Foucault never mentions Pinochet or the Chicago Boys. His interest is not to contribute to cold-war dialectics; he want, as he says repeatedly through the lecture course, more immanently, discuss liberal govermentality toward which liberal democracies are -- and here Foucault exhibits the political sensitivity of a poet -- already moving. And while Milton Friedman has already won the first of the Chicago nobels, in 1979, Thatcher's first election victory is still a few weeks away, it is by no means obvious that a discussion of Chicago, Becker, and Hayek is then simultaneously prophetic.

In the 'banal' (216) part of his lecture, Foucault ties American-neoliberalism to the Chicago school. He writes, "The first, fundamental text of this American neo-liberalism, written in 1934 by Simons, who was the father of the Chicago School, is an article entitled “A Positive Program for Laissez-Faire.” (216) The first remarkable feature here is that Foucault will define the school in terms of a set of fundamental texts. This is a natural move for a philosophical historian, of course. But it is odd claim for somebody focused on practice (i.e., the art of governmentality). So, for example, Foucault ignores the two features of Chicago method, that, in its early self-understanding, can be said to define it as a school: (i) Chicago price theory (the same term is used for a famous introductory course and text-book);* (ii) a commitment to Marshallian partial equilibrium. 

The second remarkable feature is that Frank Knight is completely effaced from the narrative of Chicago. Given Foucault's interests this is no surprise. But it is worth noting: the Chicago legacy of focusing on uncertainty and a kind of meta-methodological sensitivity toward, and the political embeddedness of, the limitations of economics as a science are completely effaced. I don't mean to suggest that the focus on Simons (recall here; here), who was by then long dead and undoubtedly obscure to a European audience, is a mistake.**

The passage quoted at the top is the second of "three" (banal) contextual "elements" against which american neo-liberalism is defined: "Keynesian policy, social pacts of war, and the growth of the federal administration through economic and social programs—together formed the adversary and target of neoliberal thought, that which it was constructed against or which it opposed in order to form itself and develop." (217) But as usual with Foucault, his asides are incredible illuminating. 

It may seem that to oppose the Beveridge plan is to oppose social planning. And undoubted social planning -- collectivism in the jargon of the age -- is one of the targets. But Foucault recognizes that the legitimacy of social planning is ground in a new kind of social contract. In Foucault's presentation the need for a social contract is felt by the elites, who recognize that after a decade of economic suffering calling people up for war may require justification that  goes beyond ordinary war propaganda. 

As an aside, Foucault here subtly historicizes the renewal of the social contract tradition then a decade underway by those who had been foot-soldiers (Rawls) in that great war. Rather than focusing on Rawls' religious roots, one can better understand this renewal as a (renewed) demilitarization of the social contract.

Be that as it may, to oppose Beveridge is not just to oppose social planning, but to oppose the very terms of the war-time social contract. For this social contract trades the non-negligible risk of death (or the death of a loved-one/breadwinner) in war for an obligation toward other forms of (social) security.+ That is to say, to criticize Beveridge is not just to criticize economic policy, but the very conceptualization of the polity. 

Why might one wish to do so? For one, in this hostile perspective (and it seems Foucault kind of endorses it), the very conceptualization of the welfare state is a war-state. This is a trope going back to the Vienna critic of Neurath (and Bismarck), but here it is part of the very conceptualization of the legitimacy of the welfare state. Second, it is by no means obvious that this social contract is liberal. And the problem is not so much the welfare state side of the equation (the benefit), but the war-side (the cost). The very point of a liberal state is the preservation of (bare) life. This is why, as Nick Cowen alerted me, life becomes before "liberty and the pursuit of happiness!"

In his rhetorically charged polemic, Simons (1945) presciently himself calls attention to this, "Written by a nominal Liberal, radical-reactionary in its substantive proposals, libertarian in its rhetoric, thissecond Beveridge Report may forecast or largely determine the course of British postwar policy." (212) Part of Simons' ire is that Beveridge is clothed as liberal, but substantively it is an odd mix of radicalism (that is, as Foucault had already explained in lecture 2, Benthamite utilitarianism) and reactionary-ness (that is, committed to war and hierarchy). And, indeed, Simons recognizes that for all its noble social ends, Beveridge plan is also a contribution to survival of (declining) political imperialism, "England's commercial power is to be mobilized and concentrated, to improve her terms of trade, to recruit satellites for a tight sterling bloc, and to insulate herself and them from unstable, unplanned economies, i.e., from the United States." (Simons 1945: 213)

That is to say, on the Simons interpretation of Beveridge, which Foucault shadows even amplifies beyond Simons' own rhetoric (notice the language of the "demand for war"), American neo-liberalism understands itself not merely as a critique of the welfare state, but it understands itself as a critique of an illegitimate social contract that underpins it; for from a truly liberal perspective, one cannot really, if one has minimal Hobbesian intuitions (one cannot contract away the natural right to mere self-preservation), consent to the pact inscribed in Beveridge. And, in fact, Simons is clear that if executed fully, the Beveridge plan would involve in open-ended trade wars leading to the real kind (Simons 1945: 227-228).** The point had been foreshadowed in lecture 5 (see what Foucault says about Ropke on p. 110).

Let me close with a remark. In what follows, Foucault is largely uninterested in Friedman (the focus is on Becker then still much more obscure). But the 'banal' point he has made in terms of Simons' criticism of Beveridge helps explain the increasing popularity of Friedman in the 60s and 70s. For Friedman was one of the most eloquent and visible critics of the draft (during the Vietnam war). His argument (inspired by Simons but not identical) was as much economic as it was political, "large armed forces plus the industrial complex required to support them constitute an ever-present threat to political freedom."   

 

 

7 February 1979: Foucault on The Road to Serfdom and the image of science (XV)

To summarize all this, the decisive point of the Nazi experience for the Freiburg liberals—and this was their choice of adversary, if you like, the way in which they set up the field of adversity necessary for the definition of their strategy—was that, first, they thought they could establish that Nazism was the product of an economic invariant which is indifferent and as it were impervious to the capitalism/socialism opposition and to the constitutional organization of states; second, they thought they could establish National Socialism as an invariant which, as both cause and effect, was absolutely bound up with the unlimited growth of state power; and third, that the first major and visible effect of this invariant linked to the growth of the state was a destruction of the network, the tissue of the social community, a destruction which, through a sort of chain reaction, a loop, calls precisely for protectionism, a centrally planned economy, and an increase in the power of the state.

Broadly speaking, everything which opposes liberalism and proposes state management of the economy thus constitutes an invariant whose history can be seen throughout the development of European societies since the end of the nineteenth century and, more precisely, from the start of the twentieth century, that is to say, when the liberal art of government became, so to speak, intimidated by its own consequences and tried to limit the consequences that it ought to have drawn itself from its own development. How did it try to limit them? Well, by a technique of intervention which consisted in applying to society and the economy a type of rationality considered valid within the natural sciences. In short, what we can broadly call technology. Technicization of state management, of control of the economy, and also in the analysis of economic phenomena, is what the ordoliberals call “eternal Saint-Simonism,” and they identify Saint-Simon with the birth of that vertigo which takes hold of the liberal art of government and leads it to seek a principle of limitation, a principle of organization in the application to society of a schema of rationality specific to nature, a principle which ultimately leads to Nazism. So, from Saint-Simon to Nazism there is a cycle of rationality entailing interventions which entail the growth of the state, which entails setting up an administration that itself functions according to technical types of rationality, and this constitutes precisely the genesis of Nazism over two centuries, or at any rate a century and a half, of the history of capitalism....

The essential thing is the conclusion the ordoliberals drew from this series of analyses, namely: since Nazism shows that the defects and destructive effects traditionally attributed to the market economy should instead be attributed to the state and its intrinsic defects and specific rationality, then the analyses must be completely overturned. Our question should not be: Given a relatively free market economy, how should the state limit it so as to minimize its harmful effects? We should reason completely differently and say: Nothing proves that the market economy is intrinsically defective since everything attributed to it as a defect and as the effect of its defectiveness should really be attributed to the state. So, let’s do the opposite and demand even more from the market economy than was demanded from it in the eighteenth century. In the eighteenth century the market was called upon to say to the state: Beyond such and such a limit, regarding such and such a question, and starting at the borders of such and such a domain, you will no longer intervene. This is not enough, the ordoliberals say. Since it turns out that the state is the bearer of intrinsic defects, and there is no proof that the market economy has these defects, let’s ask the market economy itself to be the principle, not of the state’s limitation, but of its internal regulation from start to finish of its existence and action. In other words, instead of accepting a free market defined by the state and kept as it were under state supervision—which was, in a way, the initial formula of liberalism: let us establish a space of economic freedom and let us circumscribe it by a state that will supervise it—the ordoliberals say we should completely turn the formula around and adopt the free market as organizing and regulating principle of the state, from the start of its existence up to the last form of its interventions. In other words: a state under the supervision of the market rather than a market supervised by the state.

I think this kind of reversal, which the ordoliberals were only able to carry out on the basis of their analysis of Nazism, enabled them in 1948 to try to resolve the problem they faced of finding a way of giving legitimacy to a state that did not yet exist and that had to be made acceptable to those who most mistrusted it. Well, let’s adopt the free market and we will have a mechanism that will found the state and at the same time, by controlling it, will provide the guarantees demanded by those who have grounds for mistrusting it. This, I think, was the reversal they carried out. --Michel Foucault, 7 February 1979,  translated by Graham Burchell, Lecture 5, The Birth of Biopolitics. 114-117

The philosophically inclined reader may wish to go straight to either the drama of the Ordos vs Frankfurt School as competing, fraternal twins; heirs of Max Weber or to Foucault's analysis of the Ordos as applied Husserlian phenomenologists. And I won't leave lecture 5 until I have done so. But much of lecture 5 is devoted to analyzing the function and functionality of what is now known as the Road to Serfdom thesis. And he does so without actually naming the title of the famous book, although Hayek (who did not (recall this post on Lippmann and Mises) originate the thesis) is mentioned in the lecture (104) as a definer of neoliberalism.

And what Foucault shows is that the Road to Serfdom is not a prediction, but an analytic tool. It is not a prediction because it cannot be, say, falsified; rather it is not a prediction because it has already happened. As an analytic tool, really -- and this, in part, the point of the nod to Weber -- an ideal type, it helps explain and characterize an invariant political economy and processes.

The cold war, with its opposition between capitalism and socialism has occluded the very nature of the Road to Serfdom. For it was received, even launched, in the Anglo world as a sally in a manichean fight with communism (as a kind of capstone to the socialist calculation debate). And while Foucault is not a Skinnerian-contextualist, he restores the Road to Serfdom to its original meaning. That is quite striking because in 1979 there is little reason to think the manichean fight is not eternal.

A further point Foucault is making, and this is in the first quoted paragraph, is that alongside the liberal art of government, there is a genuine theoretical innovation in history of political philosophy. That in addition to the traditional typology of constitutions (monarchy, aristocracy, democracy and the variants), there is also another form of statism that is, in a way, without a constitution altogether, "unlimited growth of state power," that is, totalitarianism (a word he used the week before but only starts exploring a month later).* And again, this is not a prediction but lived reality for the ORDOs. 

As Foucault sees clearly, once one adopts this ideal type framework, "(a) everything which opposes liberalism and (b) proposes state management of the economy" (emphasis added) is part of the Road to Serfdom. Of course, one can embrace (a) without (b) and vice versa, although often they entail each other. But as Foucault shows, for the ORDOs, the embrace of (b), associated with Keynesianism (which understands itself as saving liberalism, after all), often produces (a). 

The Road to Serfdom thesis in Foucault's rendering also has an arresting analysis of the failure of the earlier "liberal art of government" which can be traced back (recall here; here; and here) to Locke. Such an analysis is needed genealogically because Nazism seems to follow liberalism (as Karl Polanyi argued). Superficially the claim is that it involved a failure of nerve ("intimidated by its own consequences and tried to limit the consequences that it ought to have drawn itself from its own development.") The more fundamental version of this failure is that the liberal art of government became enchanted by an image of science that allowed technological interventions on society as a kind of inert subject.

That is to say, the Road to Serfdom thesis presupposes, and here is one version of the  manifestation of Weberianism, a distinction between the human and natural sciences and with it a distinction between the kind of rationality or management apt for it. This distinction, in Hayek's hands, received a withering (1952) review by Ernest Nagel (which I think accounts for the very delayed interest in Hayek in analytic philosophy). The key point can be stated without such a distinction; Saint-Simonism presupposes one understands the machinery of society and so one can calibrate and engineer its working parts for improvement whereas Hayek is aware that one lacks the synoptic vision to grasp all the working parts in real time.

There is also a moral criticism lurking here. The failure of nerve that results in Saint-Simonism, entails that the liberal art of government cannot treat humans as autonomous ends who have the dignity to make their own errors and to refuse participation in experiments with their lives. 

So, the echt liberal art of government requires an analysis of the image of science, which contains (a) a list of characteristics that function as short-hand for representing science when (b) these characteristics are used in debates where one side (or more) appeals to the (epistemic) authority of science to settle debate, and (c) such an image is often accompanied by privileged list of scientific virtues, and (d) a kind of cost-benefit analysis of these characteristics and virtues when science wishes to be policy-apt.

And so, the Road to Serfdom thesis entails a constitution of science that can serve the needs of liberal art of government. Unusually for Foucault, he does not stop to pause what this entails for scientific enquiry or the art of government.  Or to put the point in terms of the main point of this lecture. A regress looms once one recognizes that the government most constitute the free-market and, in turn, be modeled on the market. But one of the partial players in this regress is science, and it has a position necessarily orthogonal to the market-state dichotomy that defines it.

 

Climate Change: Central Bankers are Worried about Insurance

More frequent or severe extreme weather events and/or a late and abrupt transition to a low-carbon economy could have significant impacts on the financial system, with potential systemic consequences. Extreme weather events could lead to damage of physical assets, including real estate, productive capital and infrastructure, and loss of life with consequent property and casualty insurance losses, damage to balance sheets of households and firms, increases in defaults, and potential financial sector distress. A late and abrupt transition to a low-carbon economy could lead to a sudden repricing of climate-related risks and stranded assets, which could negatively impact the balance sheets of financial institutions....

Real estate and agriculture suggest themselves as sectors that are both particularly important and more immediately exposed to physical impacts of climate change, which could affect banks and insurers exposed to these sectors on both the asset and liability sides of their balance sheet. Furthermore, as physical risks rise or become more unpredictable, insurers will most likely increase premiums or stop insuring some risks. The implied decrease in coverage leads to increased uninsured losses (‘protection gap’) in case of a catastrophic event which could negatively impact the collateral value of properties, leaving banks exposed to credit risk. Understanding the trends in insurability, the cost of insurance, the protection gap, and their spillovers to the banking sector and the economy more broadly is an important direction of research. This requires an analysis of insurers’ role and behaviour, including the effectiveness of the catastrophic risk market. (p. 4)  "The Macroeconomic and Financial Stability Impacts of Climate Change Research Priorities," June 2020  NGFS: Central Banks and Supervisors Network for Greening the Financial System[HT Anne Kervers]

The "NGFS Technical document" quoted above is worth reading because, while it names no names, it is a forthright exploration of the limitations of existing scientific approaches to understanding the impact of climate change on the financial system and it contains several calls for more research in lots of areas that have become politically and morally salient. Here I am interested in using it as a granular, but useful window into what we may call the central bankers' consensus view about how to think about the significance of climate change to their jobs. So, before I get to insurance and reinsurance, let me just provide a two paragraph summary of that.

What is immediately noticeable is that the central bankers view their job as handling, that is anticipating and mitigating, the impact of "shocks" to the economy. And it is quite clear that they view the economy as a kind of autonomous system with a trendline, and their role is to mitigate and ameliorate the deviations to that trend line  caused by shocks external to the trend line. Behind the fancy language we can still discern the  idea that ordinary "fluctuations in economic activity are seen as the result of small, white noise shocks-impulses-that affect the economy through a complex dynamic propagation system," (127) and that major fluctuations have to be understood in terms of large demand or supply shocks.*

Crucially, in the central bankers' perspective, "demand shocks are typically manageable from a monetary policy perspective, [while] supply shocks are generally more challenging as they generate a trade-off for central banks between stabilising inflation and stabilising output fluctuations." (6)  The significance of climate change is viewed through the lense of a destabilising series of supply shocks that potentially overwhelm monetary policy. Strikingly, in the report this is viewed as a danger to the central banks' ability to fight inflation (6-9). Somehow, and this is remarkable in light of recent experience, the risks to deflation are apparently not worth noting at all.** 

There is, of course, plenty be said about the utility and normative significance of treating the economy in terms of deviations from a trendline, but let's turn to quoted passage(s). The first thing to notice is that the 2020 report highlights insurance and reinsurance. I noticed it before looking at last year's report, which is longer (and more detailed engagement with scientific literature); there insurance and reinsurance are entirely absent. Second, central bankers admit that from their perspective, at the moment, some of the best research on the effects of climate change on the economy is taking place in the insurance world, especially, I gather, integrating climate modelling with economic and geographic analysis. ("To this end macroeconomic modellers could borrow well-advanced methodologies used by (re-)insurance firms to quantify the economic impact of physical risks from extreme weather events, including spatial analysis.") I know nothing of this research, but will try to learn about it before long.

Third, the central bankers explicitly worry that in light of climate change insurance and reinsurance (henceforth when I use 'insurance'  and its cognates I mean both insurance and reinsurance) will become more expensive and, subsequently, cover less of economic activity. I think they are identifying a number of distinct concerns. And it may be useful to list them. [I] If insurers misjudge the underwriting risks because they are now in the realm of true uncertainty ["unpredictable"], they may go bankrupt. Since historical data are becoming less useful, underwriting is becoming more art than science reliant on the sensitivity to assumptions in complex modeling. If major insurers cannot pay out, or are perceived not to be able to pay out, then significant bits of the financial and real economy are exposed to serious damage [" financial sector distress."], if not collapse. Since AIG this is not just science fictions.

In fact, [II] the central bankers are worried about the future of insurance as a profitable enterprise ["longer-term climate change implications for the profitability/viability" (6)] What they do not say is that most risk modeling and portfolio management in finance presupposes that profitable insurance is possible. So, the significance of this concern is much wider.

[III] As premiums increase the central bankers assume that ordinary firms and individuals will be exposed to inflationary pressures and the decision to forego coverage. Strikingly the central bankers do not assume (a) that these will stop economic activity in the exposed areas; or (b) that governments will step in to provide insurance or to mandate/subsidize insurance. On (a) this means the central bankers assume that say due to path dependencies economic agents will persist in their activity without insurance and will tolerate considerable more uncertainty in their lives. And this will percolate through the system because a lack of insurance in one sector will impact its interactions with others. On (b) this strikes me as unrealistic. Governments will be lobbied extensively. Of course, at some point governments will have to make tough decisions about which parts of the economy to cover or not.

[IV] Central bankers are still very worried about bank balance sheets. Here the main concern is that the collateral that itself becomes worthless and is under-uninsured. It's one thing if the waves topple a hotel tower in Southern Florida and makes a loan non-performing; another if there is no insurance to pay back the principle of the underwriter. That leads to write-downs and deleveraging, etc. ["the collateral value of properties, leaving banks exposed to credit risk. Understanding the trends in insurability, the cost of insurance, the protection gap, and their spillovers to the banking sector and the economy more broadly "]

[V] The central bankers assume that the effects of climate change are not felt uniformly ["climate change could impact geographical/economic areas differently within a country or currency area." (7)] In particular, throughout the document they show awareness of the significance of  (what is known as) spatial economics; and that their existing models and policy instruments sit uneasily with a spatial or geographic approach to the financial system.

Finally, [VI] it is noticeable that whole areas of insurance that impact the vast majority of consumers and citizens directly (medical, car, travel, home-owner/renters, etc.) are either discussed obliquely or not mentioned at all. And while in many cases this will not matter much, it is important that somebody alerts the central bankers to the risks of cognitive capture by various industries. In the end they must be servants of the wider public, too. 

To sum up. Catastrophic risk insurance is a part of the financial system that generally is ignored by the public. Given the centrality of insurance in modern political economy, it is a good thing that central bankers are starting to reflect on what happens when agents start to wonder if they cannot count on insurance in a crisis.  The danger is, of course, this will very thought accelerates the possibility.

 

 

On Foucault on 24 January 1979: On Enlightened Despotism (IX)

    I have tried to indicate three features: veridiction of the market, limitation by the calculation of governmental utility, and now the position of Europe as a region of unlimited economic development in relation to a world market. This is what I have called liberalism.
    Why speak of liberalism, and why speak of a liberal art of government, when it is quite clear that the things I have referred to and the features I have tried to indicate basically point to a much more general phenomenon than the pure and simple economic doctrine, or the pure and simple political doctrine, or the pure and simple economic-political choice of liberalism in the strict sense? If we take things up a bit further back, if we take them up at their origin, you can see that what characterizes this new art of government I have spoken about would be much more a naturalism than liberalism, inasmuch as the freedom that the physiocrats and Adam Smith talk about is much more the spontaneity, the internal and intrinsic mechanics of economic processes than a juridical freedom of the individual recognized as such. Even in Kant, who is much more a jurist than an economist, you have seen that perpetual peace is not guaranteed by law, but by nature. In actual fact, it is something like a governmental naturalism which emerges in the middle of the eighteenth century. And yet I think we can speak of liberalism. I could also tell you—but I will come back to this—that this naturalism, which I think is fundamental or at any rate original in this art of government, appears very clearly in the physiocratic conception of enlightened despotism. I will come back to this at greater length, but, in a few words, what conclusions do the physiocrats draw from their discovery of the existence of spontaneous mechanisms of the economy which must be respected by every government if it does not want to induce effects counter to or even the opposite of its objectives? Is it that people must be given the freedom to act as they wish? Is it that governments must recognize the essential, basic natural rights of individuals? Is it that government must be as little authoritarian as possible? It is none of these things. What the physiocrats deduce from their discovery is that the government must know these mechanisms in their innermost and complex nature. Once it knows these mechanisms, it must, of course, undertake to respect them. But this does not mean that it provide itself with a juridical framework respecting individual freedoms and the basic rights of individuals. It means, simply, that it arm its politics with a precise, continuous, clear and distinct knowledge of what is taking place in society, in the market, and in the economic circuits, so that the limitation of its power is not given by respect for the freedom of individuals, but simply by the evidence of economic analysis which it knows has to be respected. It is limited by evidence, not by the freedom of individuals.
    So, what we see appearing in the middle of the eighteenth century really is a naturalism much more than a liberalism. Nevertheless, I think we can employ the word liberalism inasmuch as freedom really is at the heart of this practice or of the problems it confronts. Actually, I think we should be clear that when we speak of liberalism with regard to this new art of government, this does not mean that we are passing from an authoritarian government in the seventeenth century and at the start of the eighteenth century to a government which becomes more tolerant, more lax, and more flexible. I do not want to say that this is not the case, but neither do I want to say that it is. It does not seem to me that a proposition like that has much historical or political meaning. Michel Foucault, 24 January 1979,  translated by Graham Burchell, Lecture 3, The Birth of Biopolitics. 61-62

Liberalism's complex relationship to despotism is a major sub-theme of the Birth of Biopolitics, which he introduces (recall) in the first lecture. And not to put too fine point on Foucault's diagnosis: enlightened despotism is a recurring even natural temptation and possibility within liberalism. And according to Foucault this is so in virtue of liberalism's occasional self-identification with or embrace of a particular image of science, of political economy. Foucault calls this the privileging of 'naturalism' over 'freedom' within the tradition. 

To Foucault's audience -- aware of the controversies connected to Friedman's Nobel after his visit to Pinochet's Chile --  the connection between enlightened despotism and liberalism need not be emphasized much, although Foucault is not subtle about its French roots. The audience of the third lecture might easily miss that in the quote above Foucault already distinguishes between the physiocrats and Adam Smith on this very issue (note how he first groups them together: "the freedom that the physiocrats and Adam Smith"; he then moves "the physiocratic conception of enlightened despotism.") He makes the contrast more explicit in lecture eleven, 28 march, 1979 (286).

So, we can see that Foucault is diagnosing a dynamic within liberalism, with one pole pulling toward despotism, and the other pole (recall here on Mill, who is battling a trend within utilitarianism itself); here on Buchanan; and Shklar, also here, and here) pulling away from it sometimes focused on rights. That is to say, there is a permanent risk in liberalism's struggle with older forms tyranny (associated with feudalism, the Church, Royal absolutism) and its more recent struggles with new forms of collectivist despotisms, and in its attempt to ameliorate and mitigate mercantile tendencies, that it gives rise to its own form of despotism. 

It is important to note that both (a) the connection between what Foucault calls 'naturalism' and despotism  as well as (b) the dynamic opposition between two poles of top-down systemic order and a bottom up spontaneity order predate liberalism (in his sense). We find (recall), as Abe Stone first noted to me, (a-b) already articulated in the second part of Descartes' Discourse on Method with Descartes himself expressing a tendency toward despotism. (The connection between naturalism in Foucault's sense and Descartes need not surprise.)

It is easy to discern (recall) that with the cost of computing low, with the wide availability of massive data, and the lure of automatic AI, the despotic tendency has reasserted itself. For, previous limitations on evidence may now seem feeble to the scientist. And, so the promise that "the government must know" society's "mechanisms in their innermost and complex nature" now seems eminently reasonable again. 

Let me close with an observation. If one's vantage point is to extend the liberal tradition, yet honor Foucault's warning to us, there are two strategies: one -- and it is the one he emphasizes -- is to strengthen the (undoubtedly fallible, recall Isaiah Berlin) countervailing tendencies away from despotism. (In my blogging I tend to associate this, both the dynamic understanding of liberalism, and the stratetic significance of adopting countervailing tendencies, with Jacob Levy's writings.) Another strategy is to conceptualize scientific evidence in such a way such that the tendency toward despotism is minimized within what Foucault calls naturalism; on may understand Frank Knight's deployment of uncertainty and, more recently, methodological analytical egalitarianism [MAE]  (inspired by Levy & Peart) as  attempts to develop that insight. Given the magnitude of the challenge, these two strategies must be pursued simultaneously.

On Foucault on 17 January 1979: On Dynamics of Liberty or Method and Enemies (V)

Undertaking the history of regimes of veridiction—and not the history of truth, the history of error, or the history of ideology, etcetera—obviously means abandoning once again that well-known critique of European rationality and its excesses, which has been constantly taken up in various forms since the beginning of the nineteenth century. From romanticism to the Frankfurt School, what has always been called into question and challenged has been rationality with the weight of power supposedly peculiar to it. Now the critique* of knowledge I would propose does not in fact consist in denouncing what is continually—I was going to say monotonously—oppressive under reason, for after all, believe me, insanity (déraison) is just as oppressive. Nor would this political critique of knowledge consist in flushing out the presumption of power in every truth affirmed, for again, believe me, there is just as much abuse of power in the lie or error. The critique I propose consists in determining under what conditions and with what effects a veridiction is exercised, that is to say, once again, a type of formulation falling under particular rules of verification and falsification. Michel Foucault, 17 January 1979, lecture 2  The Birth of Biopolitics. translated by Graham Burchell, 35-36

One strain easy to miss in the fascinating ambitions of lecture 2, is Foucault's polemic with the Frankfurt school. That is to say, I missed it when I taught last year it only to be taken by surprise (looking ahead) in lecture 5. His main criticism above seems to be that ideology critique lacks originality (it goes back to romanticism) and is tired old hat ("etcetera;" "once again;" "well- known;" "constantly" "always"). The more subtle criticism, which is a consequentialist argument from authority ("believe me") is is that if the effect of ideology critique is a regime of unreason or error, it is no better. That is to say, and this has been noted by critics of Foucault, there is a kind of status quo bias built into Foucault's methodology; it is not sufficient to show that the status quo is problematic if you don't have a path toward a better outcome. 

It would be tempting now to turn to Foucault's methodology, but, as it happens, the polemic with Frankfurt is not finished yet. A few pages (or since these are lectures, minutes) later he claims that:

We should keep in mind that heterogeneity is never a principle of exclusion; it never prevents coexistence, conjunction, or connection. And it is precisely in this case, in this kind of analysis, that we emphasize, and must emphasize a non-dialectical logic if want to avoid being simplistic. For what is dialectical logic? Dialectical logic puts to work contradictory terms within the homogeneous. I suggest replacing this dialectical logic with what I would call a strategic logic. A logic of strategy does not stress contradictory terms within a homogeneity that promises their resolution in a unity. The function of strategic logic is to establish the possible connections between disparate terms which remain disparate. The logic of strategy is the logic of connections between the heterogeneous and not the logic of the homogenization of the contradictory. So let’s reject the logic of the dialectic and try to see—this is what I will try to show in these lectures—the connections which succeeded in holding together and conjoining the fundamental axiomatic of the rights of man and the utilitarian calculus of the independence of the governed. (42-43)

The heterogeneity he has in mind (recall) is liberalism's two traditions/concepts of liberty -- the contractualist-republican and utilitarian ones. And the significance of his claim, to liberalism, and this anticipates structurally something Jacob Levy has recently emphasized (recall;and recall) in a slightly different fashion, is the creative tension, a dynamics of liberty, within liberalism of these non-identical yet coexisting conceptualizations of liberty. And strikingly, Foucault wants to adopt a logic of inquiry that does justice to and can convey precisely these dynamics, "the connections which succeeded in holding together and conjoining the fundamental axiomatic of the rights of man and the utilitarian calculus of the independence of the governed. " As I signaled earlier in the week, by adopting what he calls strategic logic, Foucault's rewriting of the tradition is simultaneously a means of extending it because it facilitates the expression of this creative dynamic. 

At this point it is unclear whether Foucault thinks that by so doing one gives liberalism a new lease on life or one helps to push it over the precipice. But he is explicit that dialectical logic (which I take him to associate with the Frankfurt school, especially Horkheimer and Marcuse [both mentioned later in the lecture series)) is both simplistic and incapable of respecting the creativity lodged within the liberal tradition. De facto he is saying that the unity they offer is not worth having.

I could stop here, but it is worth noting what liberalism's rule of reason he is willing to apply strategic logic to is. He writes:

Governmental reason in its modern form, in the form established at the beginning of the eighteenth century with the fundamental characteristic of a search for the principle of its self-limitation, is a reason that functions in terms of interest. But this is no longer the interest of an entirely self-referring state which only seeks its own growth, wealth, population, and power, as was the state of raison d’État. In the principle to which governmental reason must conform, interest is now interests, a complex interplay between individual and collective interests, between social utility and economic profit, between the equilibrium of the market and the regime of public authorities, between basic rights and the independence of the governed. Government, at any rate, government in this new governmental reason, is something that works with interests....In its new regime, government is basically no longer to be exercised over subjects and other things subjected through these subjects. Government is now to be exercised over what we could call the phenomenal republic of interests. (44...46)

The rule of reason is thus the rule of interests, and this is, quite clearly, itself in constant motion a moving target. And in part it is a moving target because as interests are both shaped and pursued, perceived needs and how these perceptions are constituted evolve. So, we  may say that in this phenomenal republic there is lodged a further complex dynamics that has, in turn, a complex interplay with the dynamics of liberty. 

These complex, multi-faceted dynamics come together in the market which is (recall) a stupendous machine that helps coordinate the pursuit of our needs. I put it like this because here in lecture 2, Foucault has already signaled, without mentioning his name, that Hayek is not an aberration from liberalism but central to the tradition. But the lecture ends on alerting to the reader to the significance of James Buchanan's research program (e.g. Calculus of Consent):

The fundamental question of liberalism is: What is the utility value of government and all actions of government in a society where exchange determines the true value of things? this question encapsulates the fundamental questions raised by liberalism. With this question liberalism posed the fundamental question of government, which is whether all the political, economic, and other forms which have been contrasted with liberalism can really avoid this question and avoid formulating this question of the utility of a government in a regime where exchange determines the value of things. (46)

This is, of course, precisely the research agenda of public choice theory (Buchanan, Tullock), which goes unnamed in the Birth of Biopolitics (and perhaps everywhere in Foucault's work). And, of course, if we look at Buchanan's research project closely it mixes the two traditions noted by Foucault. The contractualist-republican element is (recall) exhibited in the significance to Buchanan of the constitutional moment; this is the part of Buchanan where he is very close to Rawls.  But within the constitutional order Buchanan inherits (what Foucault calls) the radical tradition and applies in Foucaults terms the utility value of government and all actions of government in a society where exchange determines the true value of things.* That is to say, Foucault helps explain why the Virginia school is, itself, an expression of the central problematics of liberalism. 

 

On Station Eleven, Civilizational Collapse, and the PSR

We have been blessed...in so many ways, have we not? We are blessed most of all in being alive today. We must ask ourselves, 'Why? Why were spared?'...I submit...that everything that has ever happened on this earth has happened for a reason....For it has been revealed to me that the plague of twenty years ago was just the beginning, my angels, only an initial culling of the impure, that last year's pestilence was but further preview and there will be more cullings, far more cullings to come. Emily St. John Mandel (2014) Station Eleven, 59-61 [HT Neil Levy]

Pandemics are never welcome. But the present pandemic is badly timed because the Anglophone and cultural heartland of liberal thought, which for better and for worse is the military and financial epicenter of our civilization, has been struggling with a badly bungled aftermath of a massive financial crisis that ended up reinforcing the advantages of the rich and well-connected by impoverishing state capacity and threatening the privileges and self-confidence of those that formed the bedrock of conservative majorities. These have put state power in the hands of celebrity demagogues and political adventurers with no sense of public welfare and common good, and who strategically try to entrench the politics of zero-sum, and with noxious efficiency try to reduce mutual trust in which they thrive. And so the very powers that were left standing after the cold war, are now more fragile than they have been in two centuries. 

The conceit behind Station Eleven, which has a resolutely Canadian orientation, is that a deadly pandemic, much more deadly than Covid-19, arrives in the aftermath of an "economic collapse, or so everyone called it at the time," (218); I quote from an elegiac moment, in fictional time it is supposed to resonate where we were half a decade ago, when Miranda, a shipping executive who had once been married to a famous actor (Arthur Leander), is looking at "the largest shipping fleet ever assembled...fifty miles east of Singapore Harbor" just before she receives word of the death of Arthur and the first inkling that "the fabric" of civilization would be "unravelling" for a true collapse (239). In her marriage, Miranda had been a kept woman and she sublimated her sense of isolation and entrapment with a cartoon entitled, Station Eleven. The cartoon appears in a limited edition and is the plot device that  ends up connecting the main characters of the story and the invitation to have us reflect obliquely on the meaning of the story told.  

Arthur Leander, by then a faded star, dies while performing Lear in Act 4 of Lear. He dies just as he has been asked (by Gloucester) "Dost thou know me?" And one of the very clever conceits of the novel is that the answer to that question, and the double-life between representation or acting and reality, is unfolded as we try to put the pieces together of the intersections of many lives as if they are a scrambled jigsaw puzzle with constant oblique references to the play and the cartoon. 

And just as a version of the principle of sufficient reason (PSR) -- "Nothing will come of nothing" -- structures the action of Lear, so, too, the PSR drives the action of Station Eleven (in addition the passage quoted above, see also p. 96) as we follow along a traveling troupe of musicians and actors (who perform Shakespeare), the so-called Travelling Symphony. And just as there are many oblique angles in the jigsaw, so the PSR has a multiplicity of meanings. For example, for some characters it entails that no moment has special standing and that "everything passes" (249). For others it is the ground for a new vision of life, such as Tyler (249, spoiler alert: "the prophet" quoted above). The vision is propelled by the explanatory demand "to know that" great suffering "happened for a reason." (259)

I read Station Eleven a month ago and it was uncanny how prescient the early pages of the book were then to the unfolding news. And while aesthetically Cormac McCarthy's The Road hangs like a shadow over the book,* and at times Station Eleven insists on making things too explicit -- "Shakespeare had lived in a plague-ridden society with no electricity and so did the Travelling Symphony"  --, there is plenty to admire in St. John Mandel's narrative. And I thought one of the (Sartre inspired) lines captures nicely what makes the present lockdown so harrowing: hell is the absence of the people you long for. (144).

The book stays far from the politics of the pre-pandemic period. A key political point exhibited is that in collapse human diversity reasserts itself; in the state of nature we are shown different kinds of social experiments in human living. At one point the narrator, who turns out to be less omniscient than one realizes, says:

Civilization in Year Twenty was an archipelago of small towns. These towns had fought off ferals, buried their neighbors, lived and died and suffered together in the blood-drenched years just after the collapse, survived against unspeakable odds and then only by holding together into the calm, and these places didn't go out of their way to welcome outsiders. (48)

I don't betray much when I note that in Year Twenty in addition to these towns, there there are more sinister forms of communal life and that one of the most idyllic spots of the former American midwest is a regional airport with enough tranquility and safety to develop a Museum of Civilization.

The book suggests that pandemics unsettle previous commitments about transcendence. The most unsettling new religious vision we're presented with, a veritable "death cult," originates in the grave explanatory demands of the PSR, when a boy searches for the hidden meaning behind his lucky survival "why did they die instead of us." (259; see also 260-261.) The boy's creativity is channeled into a new theology: "A new world requires new gods." (261) And, of course, this new theology will draw on familiar elements. Because in the search for meaning, there is also a desire for the safety we associate with (romanticized) childhood ("we long only for the world we born into." 302))  And I wouldn't be surprised to learn, if I am around in twenty years, that away from the current headlines a new popular religion has originated in our midst. As viruses spread death, deadly memes spread alongside them ("insanity is contagious" (261)). 

Like much of dystopian fiction (recall), Station Eleven presents us less with an image of the future and more with an oblique mirror of our times. I would betray its message if I claimed that civilizational collapse is foreseeable. In the book and, presumably, in reality collapse happens when one is making other plans. But what the history of civilizational collapse also tells us (recall here on Sallust; and more abstractly here) is that it is thinkable in advance and often occurs when the knowledge to prevent it is available yet can't be acted on. In the narrative of Station Eleven, such knowledge is lodged in the surviving plays of Shakespeare, which return from palatial theatres to the circulating knowledge of people in deserted landscapes. But it reminds us, too, that whatever may survive from us beyond collapse, may just be be mere ephemera among the interstices of the cult and culture of celebrity. 

On The Origin of Capitalism: Meiksins Wood, The Ordos, and Walter Lippmann on Productivity of Property

In fact, capitalism, in some ways more than any other social form, needs politically organized and legally defined stability, regularity, and predictability in its social arrangements. Yet these are conditions of capital's existence and self-reproduction that it cannot provide for itself and that its own inherently anarchic laws of motion constantly subvert. To stabilize its constitutive social relations - between capital and labour or capital and other capitals - capitalism is especially reliant on legally defined and politically authorized regularities. Business transactions at every level require consistency and reliable enforcement, in contractual relations, monetary standards, exchanges of property. The coercions that sustain these regularities must exist apart from capital's own powers of appropriation if it is to preserve its capacity for self-expansion. (178-179)

England's particular process of feudal centralization produced a legal and political order more unified than was the European norm. So...England had long had a unitary national parliament; ...England had a more nationally unified legal system, especially its 'common law' adjudicated by royal courts, which had become the preferred and dominant legal system very early in the development of the English state.....Instead, state formation took the form of a cooperative project, a kind of division of labour between political and economic power, between the monarchical state and the aristocratic ruling class, between a central political power that enjoyed a virtual monopoly of coercive force much earlier than others in Europe and an economic power based on private property in land more concentrated than elsewhere in Europe. (172)

Here, then, was the separation between the moment of coercion and the moment of appropriation, allocated between two distinct but complementary 'spheres', that uniquely characterizes capitalist exploitation. English landlords increasingly depended on purely 'economic' forms of exploitation, while the state maintained order and enforced the whole system of property. Instead of enhancing their own coercive powers to squeeze more out of peasants, landlords relied on the coercive power of the state to sustain the whole system of property, while they exercised their purely economic power, their concentrated landholdings, to increase the productivity of labour, in conditions where appropriators and producers were both becoming increasingly market-dependent. Ellen Meiksins Wood [1999/2017] The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer view,  172-3

Yesterday, I noted that according to Meiksins Wood and Adam Smith, the origin of agricultural capitalism can be found in a change in the character of land-leases (which became fixed-term, but lengthy) such that tenants and landlords submitted, mediated by the estimations of surveyors, to the discipline of the market-place which internalized a practice of unceasing improvement. As Smith noted this system was made possible, in part, by a change in legal practice in which the state provided legal remedies to  tenants.

This last point also fits a key strain in Meiksins Wood's argument: that agricultural capitalism is made possible by the state's capacity and willingness to maintain "order" and enforce "the whole system of property." In particular, on her view it also meant a willingness to give preference to a notion of property right that itself both encouraged improvement and, in part, is ground in or justified by such improvement. While she claims the account of property precedes Locke, she treats Locke (and by ignoring Grotius) as its greatest spokesman of a view she calls the "productivity of property" (111).

While her view skips the intrinsic defense of property rights (beloved by libertarians), that is, what Locke has to say about natural rights, I am not unsympathetic (recall) to her more instrumentalist and consequentialist reading of Locke's account of property (as an interpretation of Locke). This latter, more instrumentalist account is also (recall) visible in Toland's argument for Jewish naturalization and emancipation. Meiksins Wood is not inclined to see the productivity of property approach as emancipatory. Rather, she sees it rooted in the original sin of enclosure and the violation even "extinction of the customary rights of English commoners" (159) on which "many people depended for their livelihood" (108). 

My  interest today is not to debate the merits of the charge. Rather, I assume the 'productivity of property' is a doctrine that has entered and become entrenched in aspects of legal practice and statecraft; we see it, for example, in the practice of eminent domain (even though Locke has historically been associated with the natural law inspired criticism of eminent domain). This 'productivity of property' two important characteristics the first familiar, the second less so to liberal thought. First, as Meiksins Wood notes, the productivity of property presupposes independent state capacity to create a stable system of property rights that can shape expectations. And she is right to note that capitalism itself may create the institutional conditions -- rent-seeking, state capture, etc. -- that also create the incentives under which the impartial rule of law is undermined. One need not be a marxist to recognize she is onto something; the past two sentences describe the central obsession of the Ordoliberals (ORDOS), who worried that without both independent judiciary and independent civil service with esprit des corps, democracy provided a fast-track to the mechanisms by which the productivity of property was undermined. 

This is all familiar enough. But there is also a second feature, which she notes in the following paragraph:

We need to be reminded that the definition of property was in Locke's day not just a philosophical issue but a very immediate practical one. As we have seen, a new, capitalist definition of property was in the process of establishing itself, challenging traditional forms not just in theory but also in practice. The idea of overlapping use rights to the same piece of land was giving way in England to exclusive ownership. From the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, there were constant disputes over common and customary rights. Increasingly, the principle of improvement for profitable exchange was taking precedence over other principles and other claims to property, whether those claims were based on custom or on some fundamental right of subsistence. Enhancing productivity itself became a reason for excluding other rights. (114-115)

Now, Meiksins Wood's rhetorical point is to give a reader a sense of the unfairness or suffering that accompanies the exclusion of other rights. But lurking in it is the seminal point that to embrace the 'productivity of property' also means embracing unseizing conflict over property rights. That is, it is not just accepting the friction that accompanies a change in legal regime (from, say, common and customary rights to the productivity of property). But once the productivity of property is hegemonic even more legal friction is to be expected.*

To the best of my knowledge, writing in the midst of the Great Depressions (1937), Walter Lippmann (no Marxist) was the first to really grasp this point (although surely elements of it are in Marx); entrenched technological change would help drive open ended possible improvements in productivity, and, thus, constant relative changes in productivity of different factors of and property in production, but technological change would also drive a constant reconceptualization of what counts as property (and commodity), as witnessed by recent debates inspired by changes in artificial intelligence, financial innovation, and the status of genetic code of (say) plants and animals.

The elements of the second features give rise to the need for what (echoing Lippmann) one might call the 'spirit of adaptation' in government and law. The legal and political system can't merely stand back, but must "adapt itself successfully to the intensely dynamic character of the new technology.” (Lippmann's The Great Society: 16) Drawing in part on Adam Smith, Lippmann notes that this dynamic character of technology and property involves showing “how law and public policy may best be adapted to this mode of production which specializes men's work, and thereby establishes an increasingly elaborate interdependence among individuals and their communities throughout the world.” (174)

That is to say, Meiksins Wood is right that the productivity of property generates innumerable sites and constantly new forms of legal conflict. The rise of capitalism puts great, perhaps too great, demands on state capacity. It must provide a legal and tax framework that can generate reliable expectations, and simultaneously the governing elites must be willing, despite great temptations to profit from or steer it to partial ends, to adapt that framework in light of the friction generated by the practices shaped by it in open ended fashion. And it must do so while pursuing other political goals (connected to defense, public health, public goods, etc.)

Meiksins Wood closes her book with the observation that "as capitalism spreads more widely and penetrates more deeply into every aspect of social life and the natural environment, its contradictions are increasingly escaping all our efforts to control them." (198)  As should be clear, I agree that the contradictions are real; they are features not bugs. This suggests, in fact, that the marxists are right in thinking that political and economic crises are intrinsic to capitalism, despite their shape and content being often wholly new or genuinely uncertain. Writing in the pandemic, with living memory of the financial meltdown of 2007-9, this fits the lived experience of adult life under capitalism. But despite repeated and entirely justified collapses of confidence in the liberal project (broadly defined), it has also shown enormous resilience under adversity. And this resilience is also ground in lived experience. What's needed is a firmer grasp and critical evaluation of the spirit of adaptation that is itself shaped by the forces unleashed by the productivity of property, and that shapes these in turn.