Digressions&Impressions

Riker on The Calculus of Consent; some Rawls and Strauss and the confused and unproductive state of Political Theory

As numerous writers have pointed out, political theory as a field of academic concentration has been in a confused and unproductive state for at least the last generation. Most of the academicians who have written about it have been either historians of ideas who speculated about the influence of writer A on writer B or literary critics who simply explicated and criticized the texts of A and B. Very few academicians have had the intellectual courage to play the role of A and B themselves; so that, in consequence, most contemporary political theory has been produced by politicians and journalists. Refusing thus to theorize themselves, most academicians have been limited to a consideration of intellectual primitives or of, what amounts to the same thing, the rantings and ideological tergiversations of half-educated modern pamphleteers. In almost no other field of study do the professionals thus abase themselves before the ancients and the amateurs.

    Not unsurprisingly, there has been much dissatisfaction with this state of affairs and in the last decade or so a number of writers have tried to reorient the study of political theory. Some, like Leo Strauss, have urged a return to the great tradition; but unfortunately the process of return, as it appears in the work of both master and students, has turned out to be an even more sterile historicism than that against which they revolted. Others, like T. D. Weldon and Carl Friedrich, have urged a close and systematic study of words; but again unfortunately, word-study, while a useful preliminary to theorizing, has produced no more than literary criticism and is not properly theory at all. Still others, the political behaviorists, have turned to the theories of contemporary psychology and sociology for a new start in theorizing about politics; and, while these writers have undoubtedly succeeded in generating descriptive theories that can actually be tested empirically, still their theories seem to have more in common with social psychology than with the traditional subject matter of politics. Furthermore, their positivistic character, wholly appropriate for descriptive theories, is far from satisfying to those who believe political theory should be at least partially normative. These three attempts at re-orientation have been useful in the study of history, philosophy, and behavioral science; but they have not added much to political theory itself. Indeed, if these three schools were all we had, it would be fair to say that political theory was no better off than before.

    There is still a fourth school, to which the book here reviewed belongs, which offers some hope of a really successful reorientation of political theory. Since its inspiration is more from economics than any other source and since economics is the social science closest to politics both in the nature of the events abstracted for study and in the process of abstraction, it happens that the works of this school are clearly political in nature. Since economics like politics has a long tradition of normative theorizing, these writings contain normative elements alongside of positive ones. Most important of all, however, they seem to be capable not only of reformulating traditional problems in a more sophisticated way but also of dealing with problems beyond the ken of even the great theorists of the past. Some of the main works in this fourth school of re-orienters of political theory are: Duncan Black, The Theory of Committees and Elections; Anthony Downs, An Economic Theory of Democracy; Morton Kaplan, System and Process in International Politics (although this work has its roots as much in sociological as in economic theory); Thomas Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict; and, as an important addition, James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock, The Calculus of Consent.--William H. Riker (1962) Midwest Journal of Political Science, Vol. 6, No. 4 (Nov., 1962) [Reviewing The Calculus of Consent. by James M. Buchanan and Gordon Tullock], pp. 408-409.

Because I am working on a side project (recall here; here) on the (non-)reception of Leo Strauss within analytic philosophy, I stumbled on this passage in Riker's review of The Calculus of Consent. I also want to situate the passage in the black hole in our collective narrative of what exactly political philosophy could be within analytic philosophy and its sister-discipline political theory pre-Rawls (which was re-opened for me by Katrina Forrester's In the Shadow of Justice: Postwar Liberalism and the Remaking of Political Philosophy (recall (recall here; here; here; and here). Somewhat to my own surprise these issues intersect with my interest in neoliberalism and the split between ('positive') economics and ('normative') philosophy.

I suspect most of my readers know who William Riker is (not to be confused with the Star Trek character). He is now widely seen as one of the founders of rational choice theory, and among other achievements introduced game theory and social choice theory into political science. He is, what in an earlier generation disparagingly would have been called (by the sociologist Talcott Parsons [recall]), an exponent of 'economic imperialism.' We call it 'intellectual arbitrage' now. He founded the so-called Rochester School that's associated with the 'behavioral revolution' in political science. When he published the review of Buchanan and Tullock, Riker had just published The Theory of Political Coalitions, which was a major contribution to orientation he promoted.

About half of the review is quoted above. And only after this set-up does Riker discuss the contents of the book. So, the review itself is self-consciously a methodological intervention and cannon creation. 

So, Riker distinguishes four approaches to political theory. First, there is the return to the classics which he (correctly) associates with Leo Strauss. This is treated -- much as Bacon treated final causes -- as sterile. Riker correctly represents Strauss's school as critical of historicism, but then misrepresents, either from confusion or from sincere insult, Strauss as instantiating historicism. (I am unsure he ever engaged with Strauss in substantive fashion elsewhere.)

Second there is a school devoted to "a close and systematic study of words." Riker's criticism of it echoes Isaiah Berlin's (1958) criticism of ordinary language philosophy (recall). T.D Weldon I know primarily as a Kant scholar and as being the supervisor of Wilfrid Sellars. But he is also the author of The Vocabulary of Politics (1953), which in reviews is described as an attempt to apply ordinary language philosophy to politics. A book I, thus, have to read because it is clearly in the event horizon of the black hole of analytic political philosophy whose shadow Rawls has (ahh) blotted out.*

I have to admit that I am puzzled by Riker's inclusion of Friedrich in this category. Friedrich's approach is so eclectic, that I would think he would be hard to categorize. This is not to deny he sometimes focuses on words, too. But this comment (alongside the Strauss as historicist 'mistake') makes me wonder, if Riker actually had carefully studied the schools he is rejecting. Or whether his polemics derive from supreme confidence in his own (sophisticated!) methods. That confidence is not without robust intellectual foundation, but one does wonder if in his polemics with opposing schools there isn't an element of bluster and bluff. (This combination is not unfamiliar to us within analytic philosophy.) I actually suspect that Riker is confusing Friedrich with Felix Oppenheim (who can, perhaps somewhat unfairly, be slotted into this category.)

No exemplar of the third school is mentioned. I suspect Talcott Parsons (or those influenced by him) is one of the targets. This school is also engaged in intellectual arbitrage from other social sciences, but Riker finds them wanting. Riker's two criticisms of this approach (not very far removed from his own) are very interesting: first, they produce work that fits social psychology but is in some sense not properly political. One would have liked an extra sentence here because it would have illuminated his own stance toward the subject (or the discipline). Second, on Riker's view political theory ought to be descriptive/empirical (or at least fruitful in generating theoretically salient empirical generations and be an engine for theorizing) and normative/positive. So, the right kind of theory can help us study the political world and tell us how to improve it. (I return to this in the next paragraph.)

These two criticisms do not apply to the fourth school (which is Riker's own). From my perspective what is most interesting here is that Riker rejects the very firm distinction entrenched within economics (in word, less so in deed) since the time of Marshall, Sidgwick, and John Neville Keynes, and articulated by Lionel Robbins (and Milton Friedman) between the positive and normative projects.+ The final paragraph of the review actually explains Riker's own stance on this:

If it is assumed that most men are rational and that the appropriate rational behavior is transparently obvious, then the analysis is entirely positive. If it is assumed that rationality is a goal rather than a fact, then the calculus is normative. If it is assumed that the logic of the calculus is not obvious until it is deduced, then again the analysis is normative. (411)

Of course, the problem here is not the willingness to combine empirical and normative aims, but (to use scientistic terminology) that how to think about circumstances of what is 'transparently obvious' to the theorist/expert may not be so to (ahh) 'most men' and, more important, if, in a political context, the latter have to rely on the former for the deductions in the 'logic.' [As a slogan: Riker takes the relationship between theorist and theorized for granted.]

Be that as it may, lurking in the final paragraph that I quoted at the top of the post is the sense that the fourth school is generating a scientific revolution: "Most important of all...they seem to be capable not only of reformulating traditional problems in a more sophisticated way but also of dealing with problems beyond the ken of even the great theorists of the past." The fourth school has moved beyond the past and is progressive. (Such claims are common among economists of the age.) Interestingly enough the Nobel committee in economics has also recognized the contributions of this school of 'political theory' (including, in addition to Buchanan, Schelling).

After the polemical first half, the rest of the review of Calculus of Consent "list[s] what are for [Riker] some of the most interesting notions in the essay." (409) One important point is that Riker treats Calculus of Consent (not unfairly) as an advance beyond Downs on the question of what the effect is "of differing intensities of concern about particular issues under the rule of simple majority voting." (410)

From the vantage point of thinking about the nature and evolution of political theory at the middle of the twentieth century, the first, main question is actually rather important:

The main question the authors ask is: On what basis does a rational man, situated in a society created by unanimous agreement, consent to the transfer of a particular activity from private to collective decision-making? This question is, of course, a new and more sophisticated form of the question to which the theory of the social contract provided the answer. (409)

In the spirit of progress (we may say), Riker understands Buchanan and Tullock as having surpassed and made obsolete social contract theory. While the historian in me hesitates to disagree with such a well-informed contemporary of them,  Riker somehow misses (presumably for his own polemical purposes) that Buchanan and Tullock themselves present their own work, en passant (but not obliquely) as a contribution to social contract theory. For, throughout Calculus of Consent, they imply both that individuals cannot withdraw from the social contract, as well as (and  more important) that "Insofar as participation in the organization of a community, a State, is mutually advantageous to all parties, the formation of a “social contract” on the basis of unanimous agreement becomes possible." (ch. 17; the whole chapter is relevant, including for understanding why they frequently use scare-quotes around 'social contract,' but not always.)** So, the main question by Riker's lights is answered in terms of a social contract analysis according to Buchanan and Tullock. (The character of their social contract is worth exploring in a digression some time.)

Two final quick promissory thoughts connected to Rawls, since I click-baited you here with Rawls. First, there was a pre-Rawlsian political analytic philosophy. (Riker's second school.) Weldon is an example of this. (So is, perhaps, Felix Oppenheim.)++  And it was noticed by outsiders. But Rawls did not respond to it in The Theory of Justice.*** Oppenheim is cited once respectfully in TJ, and Weldon isn't mentioned. Rather, Rawls took the fourth school, the re-orienters, as his interlocuters and rivals. In fact, in TJ, Rawls also cites Black, Downs, Buchanan and Tullock, and Mancur Olson as authorities. And whatever else he is doing, he is also trying to offer an alternative to their project.+++ That's partially obscured to later readers because he doesn't name them much as targets. But it is worth noting they inherited their own normative project from utilitarianism, which is Rawls' official target. And partially obscured by the fact that after the mid to late 1970s Rawls himself emphasized the normative project in Kantian terms and so it's much harder to see TJ as building on and in competition with Rochester and Virginia.

 

 

Ernest Nagel vs Anna Alexandrova (& Leo Strauss), PT 2 [and Quine]

[I]t would be absurd to deny that in characterizing various actions as mercenary, cruel, or deceitful, sociologists are frequently (although perhaps not always wittingly) asserting appraising as well as characterizing value judgments. Terms like ‘mercenary' ‘cruel' or ‘deceitful’ as commonly used have a widely recognized pejorative overtone. Accordingly, anyone who employs such terms to characterize human behavior can normally be assumed to be stating his disapprobation of that behavior (or his approbation, should he use terms like ‘nonmercenary' ‘kindly' or ‘truthful’), and not simply characterizing it.
   However, although many (but certainly not all) ostensibly characterizing statements asserted by social scientists undoubtedly express commitments to various (not always compatible) values, a number of “purely descriptive" terms as used by natural scientists in certain contexts sometimes also have an unmistakably appraising value connotation. Thus, the claim that a social scientist is making appraising value judgments when he characterizes respondents to questionnaires as uninformed, deceitful, or irrational can be matched by the equally sound claim that a physicist is also making such judgments when he describes a particular chronometer as inaccurate, a pump as inefficient, or a supporting platform as unstable. Like the social scientist in this example, the physicist is characterizing certain objects in his field of research; but, also like the social scientist, he is in addition expressing his disapproval of the characteristics he is ascribing to those objects.
    Nevertheless—and this is the main burden of the present discussion—there are no good reasons for thinking that it is inherently impossible to distinguish between the characterizing and the appraising judgments implicit in many statements, whether the statements are asserted by students of human affairs or by natural scientists. To be sure, it is not always easy to make the distinction formally explicit in the social sciences—in part because much of the language employed in them is very vague, in part because appraising judgments that may be implicit in a statement tend to be overlooked by us when they are judgments to which we are actually committed though without being aware of our commitments. Nor is it always useful or convenient to perform this task. For many statements implicitly containing both characterizing and appraising evaluations are sometimes sufficiently clear without being reformulated in the manner required by the task; and the reformulations would frequently be too unwieldy for effective communication between members of a large and unequally prepared group of students. But these are essentially practical rather than theoretical problems. The difficulties they raise provide no compelling reasons for the claim that an ethically neutral social science is inherently impossible.-- Ernest Nagel (1961) The Structure of Science: Problems in the Logic of Scientific Explanation, pp. 494-495 (emphasis in original)

I noted the other day that Ernest Nagel's attempt to distinguish between characterizing and appraising evaluations are explicitly directed against a series of arguments by Leo Strauss. From the point of view of the sociology of philosophy the passage is remarkable because it is a rare case where Strauss is treated as a serious interlocuter by an analytic philosopher and where much of Strauss' position is conceded, and the remainder of the differences met by an argument.

As regular readers know, I am a fan of Nagel. But the section is not his finest. First, it's not mentioned by Nagel that Strauss' arguments are an immanent critique of Max Weber. And, as I noted, the way Strauss' arguments are quoted this is obscured. Second, in arguing against Strauss, Nagel makes it seem that Strauss is a critic of objectivity in science. In particular, Nagel makes it seem that the critic of value neutrality in social science must be a critic of the value neutrality of natural science and de facto committed to what we now call the 'strong program.'* Whereas Strauss' position is that objectivity in social science is constituted by a commitment to the value-laden-ness of social science. 

Now, as it happens, and I as I also noted, in a recent and already much cited article, Anna Alexandrova has written critically on Nagel's position (and notes explicitly that it was directed against Strauss). And in what follows I draw on her position. But before I get to that it is also worth noting that there exists a published transcript of Strauss's course, “Introduction to Political Philosophy” offered in the winter term of 1965, open to undergraduate as well as graduate students. It was published as Leo Strauss on Political Philosophy: Responding to the Challenge of Positivism and Historicism Edited by Catherine H. Zuckert (The University of Chicago Press, 2018). In it, Strauss responds to Nagel's criticism and also develops his own criticism of Nagel, too, in quite interesting fashion.+

Let's turn to Alexandrova. She introduces special terminology in order to characterize the claims of interest in the debate between Nagel and Strauss (and, in fact, in the debate about the value-ladenness of social science). I quote her:

• A hypothesis is mixed if and only if:
• 1. It is an empirical hypothesis about a putative causal or statistical relation.
• 2. At least one of the variables in this hypothesis is defined in a way that presupposes a moral, prudential, political or aesthetic value judgment about the nature of this variable.

The key part here is (2). In fact (1) is a place-holder or short-hand for more expansive claims about empirical hypotheses. And one should not be misled by the use of 'hypothesis.' It's okay for Alexandrova's position if one treats a so-called mixed claim as established or confirmed. It's, however,  important to recognize that the values in (2) are not the so-called "cognitive values – simplicity, explanatory power, coherence, generality etc. –" but the "non-cognitive values – moral, prudential, political or aesthetic –....(Longino [1990], Lacey [2005])." (Alexandrova). It is the second kind that figures in mixed claims.

Alexandrova usefully distinguishes mixed claims from other kinds of value-ladenness in science. But her position is -- and here she agrees with Strauss -- that in many contexts, mixed claims cannot be eliminated from social science (although she notes that often their presence goes unnoticed), but that this is not itself a barrier to an objective social science. (To be sure, there are real differences between Alexandrova's position and Strauss, but those I leave aside here today.) 

Okay, ley's now return to Nagel's distinction between characterizing and the appraising judgments. As the passage above makes clear, Nagel allows that in practice scientists may well conflate the two or may well use terms that are treated as descriptive, but that in reality also have some kind of appraisal built into them. (One may add that philosophers often introduce special terminology with the same character.) But he asserts that it is not "inherently impossible to distinguish between the characterizing and the appraising judgments implicit in many statements." (emphasis in original)

Alexandrova herself suggests that "A natural way to implement Nagel’s proposal is to convert mixed claims from regular causal or correlational claims into conditional claims." But as Alexandrova convincingly shows, if that's Nagel’s approach then it "eliminates values at one stage, but it only pushes them to another less appropriate stage." Alexandrova then works through three ways in which converting mixed claims into conditional claims does not work. I found it convincing, but go read her paper!

Interestingly enough, in the quoted passage above, Nagel suggests that there is a vantage point from which one can evaluate and "reformulate" statements used in science and then distinguish between their characterizing and appraising content. In fact, this vantage point is occupied by the Nagelian philosopher of science. This is not obvious from context, but it is the stated aim of Nagel's Structure. As Nagel puts it in his "Introduction:"

However, if the nature of the scientific enterprise and its place in contemporary society are to be properly understood, the types and the articulation of scientific statements, as well as the logic by which scientific conclusions are established, also require careful analysis. This is a task—a major if not exclusive task—that the philosophy of science undertakes to execute. (p. 14)

That is to say, Nagel here comes very close to the idea associated with Quine that one can regiment science and that it is the philosopher of science's task to do so. Today I leave open to what degree Quine or Nagel influenced each other (and questions of priority).

Nagel doesn't say how one should regiment 'mixed claims.' He only claims that for practical purposes it can be done.** That's to say, he thinks there is a vantage point from which appraising value connotations in apparent mixed claims can be kept at arm's length. (This is why Alexandrova's suggestion that he is thinking of turning them into conditional statements is so plausible.) But because he does not explain how that practical (ahh) stance can be achieved -- and why in regimentation we can be properly neutral--, he raises the suspicion that much of the rhetorical work of his argument is being done by the implication that if one insists that social science cannot eliminate mixed claims, then one must be an adherent to the 'strong program' or be a skeptic about the possibility of an objective social science. 

Ernest Nagel vs Leo Strauss, PT 1

3. There is a more sophisticated argument for the view that the social sciences cannot be value-free. It maintains that the distinction between fact and value assumed in the preceding discussion is untenable when purposive human behavior is being analyzed, since in this context value judgments enter inextricably into what appear to be “purely descriptive” (or factual) statements. Accordingly, those who subscribe to this thesis claim that an ethically neutral social science is in principle impossible, and not simply that it is difficult to attain. For if fact and value are indeed so fused that they cannot even be distinguished, value judgments cannot be eliminated from the social sciences unless all predications are also eliminated from them, and therefore unless these sciences completely disappear.
For example, it has been argued that the student of human affairs must distinguish between valuable and undesirable forms of social activity, on pain of failing in his “plain duty” to present social phenomena truthfully and faithfully:

....

Moreover, the assumption implicit in the recommendation discussed above for achieving ethical neutrality is often rejected as hopelessly naïve —this is the assumption, it will be recalled, that relations of means to ends can be established without commitment to these ends, so that the conclusions of social inquiry concerning such relations are objective statements which make conditional rather than categorical assertions about values. This assumption is said by its critics to rest on the supposition that men attach value only to the ends they seek, and not to the means for realizing their aims. However, the supposition is alleged to be grossly mistaken. For the character of the means one employs to secure some goal affects the nature of the total outcome; and the choice men make between alternative means for obtaining a given end depends on the values they ascribe to those alternatives. In consequence, commitments to specific valuations are said to be involved even in what appear to be purely factual statements about means-ends relations.--Ernest Nagel (1961) The Structure of Science: Problems in the Logic of Scientific Explanation, pp. 490-491 (emphasis in original).

It is hard to imagine how influential Nagel's Structure was at one point. (Now it has about 10k in citations on scholar.google. Quine's Word and Object, which appeared the same year, has about 50% more citations.) By the time I was a student, it was associated with 'the received view' and a misguided form of reductionism in science, overshadowed by Kuhn's more influential Structure (which appeared a year later) and by all the exciting, technical work in philosophy of special sciences and the burgeoning movement looking at the metaphysics of science. But when it came to presenting the received view, Hempel's lucidity and brevity was preferred. As a consequence I never read Nagel's Structure as an undergraduate or graduate student, but I did frequently encounter discussions of Nagel reduction (see here for an intro). 

The passage I omitted from the text I quoted from Nagel, is Nagel quoting (as the accompanying footnote states), Leo Strauss, “ The Social Science of Max Weber,” Measure, Vol. 2 (1 9 5 1 ), pp. 211-14. To the best of my knowledge it's one of the few instances where a bona fide analytic philosopher engages directly with an argument by Strauss while he was alive. Strauss (1899-1973) is rarely mentioned by political philosophers of the age, but if he is it is mostly in the context of his claims about esotericism (see Nozick here).* To the best of my knowledge, Rawls and Gewirth never mention Strauss.+

To have a sense of how unique Nagel's engagement is, I offer the following illustration. When specialist, analytic ancient philosophers of the age mention Strauss they do so (see Vlastos) by praising a 1974 review, in Philosophical Review, by Irwin of Strauss' (1972) Xenophon's Socrates. In  the review Irwin devotes about half a dozen lines to Strauss:  

Strauss's "interpretation" consists of a tedious paraphrase with comments or questions on major and minor issues. No coherent line of interpretation emerges from his enigmatic asides. His paraphrase merely reminds us how unexciting Xenophon can be, and even reduces the amusing episodes to a uniform level of dullness.

The rest of the review is Irwin describing the questions Strauss should have engaged in. While Irwin's summary is not strictly false -- there is something tedious about Strauss' Xenophon's Socrates -- it is completely uninformative. (More about that some other time.)

As I have discussed, Nagel could be a fierce polemicist, including a public, political polemicist. But the response to Strauss in Structure, does not fit that mold. Rather the section -- it's about five pages -- attributes to Strauss a family of arguments that [A] 'social sciences cannot be value free.' As can be seen from the passage quoted, Nagel treats this as entailing or nearly identical to the thesis [B] that there is no "compelling reasons" that "an ethically neutral social science is inherently impossible." (Structure 495). I am a bit surprised by this conflation in Nagel because ethical neutrality may well be a significant 'value'! To be sure, Nagel himself derives this formulation from Strauss, who attributes the identity of "a "value-free" or ethically neutral social science" to Weber (Natural Right and History (hereafter NRH), p. 40).

Before I get to Nagel's arguments two observations: first, Nagel responds to a version of Strauss's argument published in 1951 in Measure. To the best of my knowledge this journal did not have a long life or wide circulation. (I have requested a copy of it from the British Library.) But Strauss reprinted a version of the article in NRH. The passage that Nagel quotes can be found there in chapter 2, pp. 50-53. The omissions in Nagel are basically all the places where Strauss is criticizing Weber directly. (I return to that below.) Natural Right and History was published in 1953, and famous, so it is a bit weird that Nagel doesn't cite it. Second, a few years ago, Anna Alexandrova published a paper, "Can the science of well-being be objective?." The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science (2020) that has quickly become a classic in its own right. This paper engages with the material I am about to discuss (and even mentions that Strauss was Nagel's target), and expresses my own substantive disagreements with Nagel better than I could.

Now, the discussion by Nagel of Strauss occurs in a chapter 13 on the "methodological problems of the social sciences" in section (V) on "The Value-Oriented Bias of Social Inquiry." This is a rather long, ambitious chapter (over 50 pages). It made Nagel a recognized authority in the philosophy of social science, and got him invited (as I have documented elsewhere) to debates internal to (say) economics. The chapter also includes, for example, Nagel's criticism of Hayek's The Counter-Revolution of Science, which (recall) Nagel partially recycles from a polemical 1952 review in Journal of Philosophy. This section (V) is devoted to the following issues:

Since social scientists generally differ in their value commitments, the "value neutrality” that seems to be so pervasive in the natural sciences is therefore often held to be impossible in social inquiry. In the judgment of many thinkers, it is accordingly absurd to expect the social sciences to exhibit the unanimity so common among natural scientists concerning what are the established facts and satisfactory explanations for them. Let us examine some of the reasons that have been advanced for these contentions. It will be convenient to distinguish four groups of such reasons, so that our discussion will deal in turn with the alleged role of value judgments in (1) the selection of problems, (2) the determination of the contents of conclusions, (3) the identification of fact, and (4) the assessment of evidence. Nagel Structure 485

I quote it for two reasons: first, because it shows that the way Nagel operationalizes 'value neutrality' is in terms of unanimity, or consensus. (To readers of Tom Kuhn's Structure this should be familiar!) The broader context of Nagel's argument shows that the relevant class is "competent workers in the natural sciences" (Nagel Structure, 448). In addition, the question for social science is articulated in terms of the purported "unanimity so common among natural scientists concerning what are the established facts and satisfactory explanations for them." Nagel is aware, of course, that natural scientists don't always agree, but this occurs for him either at the research "frontier" (448) or in contexts where the disagreement is an effect of "alternative formulations" that are "mathematically equivalent" (158).

Second, the response to Strauss falls under what Nagel calls (3) "the identification of fact." In fact, Nagel identifies Weber's position with (1).  He doesn't identify a single author with (2), but in it he treats S. F . Nadel (an anthropologist, who was "a pioneer of multi-sited ethnography,"), his own teacher Morris R. Cohen, and A.E. Burtt (whose work on Newton is important) as typical representatives of it (Nagel's own discussion draws on work by Gunnar Myrdal). Finally, Karl Mannheim is treated as the exemplar of someone who holds (4). What's neat about this list is that it is both politically diverse and reflects views of different kinds of social science(s).

Nagel attributes to Strauss two distinct criticisms: the first is that "the distinction between fact and value.. is untenable when purposive human behavior is being analyzed, since in this context value judgments enter inextricably into what appear to be “purely descriptive” (or factual) statements." The second is that purported "factual claims about means-ends statements" are themselves infected with values.  It's not hard to see that they are similar in kind.

In his response to the views he attributes to Strauss, Nagel emphasizes that Strauss is right about three features: "(a) that a large number of characterizations sometimes assumed to be purely factual descriptions of social phenomena do indeed formulate a type of value judgment; (b) that it is often difficult, and in any case usually inconvenient in practice, to distinguish between the purely factual and the “evaluative” contents of many terms employed in the social sciences; and that (c) values are commonly attached to means and not only to ends." (Nagel Structure, 491--[letters added to facilitate discussion]).

But Nagel insists that Strauss equivocates on two notions of 'value judgment: first, "the sense in which a value judgment expresses approval or disapproval either of some moral (or social) ideal, or of some action (or institution) because of a commitment to such an ideal; and the sense in which a value judgment expresses an estimate of the degree to which some commonly recognized (and more or less clearly defined) type of action, object, or institution is embodied in a given instance." (Nagel, Structure 492) Nagel adds that these notions are often conflated in the social sciences and that sometimes it's not so easy to sort distinguish them. But he concludes his argument that "there are no good reasons for thinking that it is inherently impossible to distinguish between the characterizing and the appraising judgments implicit in many statements, whether the statements are asserted by students of human affairs or by natural scientists." (Nagel, Structure 494).

Now, rhetorically, it's important to see that Nagel's argument -- and this is characteristic of his argument in the whole chapter -- generally has the form 'an apparent problem X in social science occurs also in natural sciences and when X occurs in natural science, X does not prevent the development of consensus in the natural sciences (and, thus has been tamed in the natural sciences) and so X does not pose an in principle obstacle to consensus in social science.' So, for example, Nagel illustrates the two senses of “value judgment” with an example from biology.** And the effect of this move is to turn the critic of value neutrality in social science into a critic of the value neutrality of natural science.  Nagel assumes nobody (not even the sociologist of knowledge he discusses under (4)) will go that far.

Today's post won't be able to evaluate Nagel's arguments, not even as arguments against Strauss. But it is worth saying something about what Strauss is up to. Now, Strauss' argument is directed against Weber, and in particular, because Weber is taken to be a spokesperson for the following position: "Natural right is then rejected today not only because (i) all human thought is held to be historical but likewise because it is thought that (ii) there is a variety of unchangeable principles of right or of goodness which conflict with one another, and none of which can be proved to be superior to the others." (Strauss NRH 36) That is to say, Strauss associates Weber with features of historicism (viz, i) and with value pluralism (viz, ii). To be sure, Strauss recognizes that Weber is not a pure historicist, because Weber recognizes the historical situatededness of the sciences alongside the "trans-historical" nature of its "findings regarding the facts and their causes. More precisely, what is trans-historical is the validity of these findings." (Strauss NRH 39). And because Strauss wants to argue for natural right, or at least, the inherent possibility of the recovery of natural right, he is critical of Weber.

So, Strauss himself is not especially interested in doing social science (although I qualify that below). But he is interested in a kind of self-limitation Weber put on social science: "the absolute heterogeneity of facts and values necessitates [for Weber] the ethically neutral character of social science: social science can answer questions of facts and their causes; it is not competent to answer questions of value." (Strauss NRH 40) But unless values are self-contradictory, the social scientist must be silent about them. Now this position is coherent, and it is not obvious why Strauss cares about social science method at all.

The answer is that Strauss (correctly I think) discerns that Weber is a kind of skeptic about value: "his belief that there cannot be any genuine knowledge of the Ought." (Strauss NRH 41) And so observed value pluralism is a kind of effect of this Weberian skepticism (which according to Strauss naturally leads to a nihilism that Weber obscures from himself). To be sure, Strauss attributes to Weber a kind of formal possession of the norm, "Thou shalt have ideals," (Strauss NRH 44); so on this view Weber is not a radical (second order) skeptic about value. For Weber the content of this norm is, as Strauss notes, "Follow thy god or demon,"  which Strauss reinterprets as "devotion to a cause." (NRH 46). 

As an aside, the really significant observation on Weber's philosophy by Strauss is that "Weber's thesis that there is no solution to the conflict between values was then a part, or a consequence, of the comprehensive view according to which human life is essentially an inescapable conflict. For this reason, "peace and universal happiness" appeared to him to be an illegitimate or fantastic goal. Even if that goal could be reached, he thought, it would not be desirable; it would be the condition of "the last men who have invented happiness," against whom Nietzsche had directed his "devastating criticism."" (Strauss NRH 65) That is to say, Strauss diagnoses how Weber's Nietzscheanism anticipates Carl Schmitt's position. (Schmitt is not mentioned by Strauss in this context.) 

Now, the objection to Weber by Strauss that Nagel cites occurs in the discussion of Strauss' analysis of Weber's sociology of religion, which "presupposes a fundamental distinction between "ethos" and "techniques of living " (or "prudential" rules)." And Strauss suggests that "the sociologist must then be able to recognize an "ethos" in its distinctive character; he must have a feel for it, an appreciation of it, as Weber admitted." (Strauss, NRH 50) Then occurs the passage Nagel (selectively) quotes on 490-491 in Structure as follows:

Would one not laugh out of court a man who claimed to have written a sociology of art but who actually had written a sociology of trash? The sociologist of religion must distinguish between phenomena which have a religious character and phenomena which are a-religious. To be able to do this, he must understand what religion is. . . . Such understanding enables and forces him to distinguish between genuine and spurious religion, between higher and lower religions; these religions are higher in which the specifically religious motivations are effective to a higher degree. . . , The sociologist of religion cannot help noting the difference between those who try to gain it by a change of heart. Can he see this difference without seeing at the same time the difference between a mercenary and nonmercenary attitude? . . . The prohibition against value-judgments in social science would lead to the consequence that we are permitted to give a strictly factual description of the overt acts that can be observed in concentration camps, and perhaps an equally factual analysis of the motivations of the actors concerned: we would not be permitted to speak of cruelty. Every reader of such a description who is not completely stupid would, of course, see that the actions described are cruel. The factual description would, in truth, be a bitter satire. What claimed to be a straightforward report would be an unusually circumlocutory report. . . . Can one say anything relevant on public opinion polls . . . without realizing the fact that many answers to the questionnaires are given by unintelligent, uninformed, deceitful, and irrational people, and that not a few questions are formulated by people of the same caliber—can one say anything relevant about public opinion polls without committing one value-judgment after another?

In Nagel's hands it is completely unclear that Strauss is offering an immanent critique of Weber.

And if one reads Nagel then it is natural to think that Strauss's rejection of ethical neutrality of social science is an obstacle to consensus or unanimity in social science. And so that lurking in Strauss' argument is a kind of denial of social scientific objectivity. But it is worth noting that for Strauss the whole point of recognizing values in social science is to make social scientific and historical objectivity possible. This is actually completely explicit in Strauss. For, Strauss concludes his own argument against Weber (at least the present one that Nagel is focused on) as follows:

The rejection of value judgments endangers historical objectivity. In the first place, it prevents one from calling a spade a spade. In the second place, it endangers that kind of objectivity which legitimately requires the forgoing of evaluations, namely, the objectivity of interpretation. The historian who takes it for granted that objective value judgments are impossible cannot take very seriously that thought of the past which was based on the assumption that objective value judgments are possible, i.e., practically all thought of earlier generations. Knowing beforehand that that thought was based on a fundamental delusion, he lacks the necessary incentive for trying to understand the past as it understood itself. (Strauss NRH 60-61)

That is to say, establishing the possibility of establishing natural right just is the possibility of establishing a trans-historical consensus/agreement or unanimity in social science. (To avoid confusion: all agree that history is at least partially part of social science.) So, somewhat ironically Nagel and Strauss agree about what we might call the formal aims of social science, that it involves a species of objectivity that makes fundamental consensus possible. This fundamental agreement is completely obscured by Nagel's presentation. To be continued.

 

A puzzle about a footnote in Pippin on Strauss on Hume

[Leo Strauss] is clearly most worried that any position that links the right with what the will legislates for itself quickly slips down the slippery slope toward legal positivism, historicism, relativism, and finally nihilism....

Note 15: NRH, 17. 1 should note here that Strauss only asserts that "the historical school had obscured the fact that particular or historical standards can become authoritative only on the basis of a universal principle which imposes an obligation on the individual to accept." Depending on what Strauss means by "authorative," [sic] such a claim is either a tautology or begs the question at issue. Some principle can be authoritative for me if, in some situation it counts as a reason for me to act; to claim otherwise would require a much more serious confrontation with a figure who Strauss (and, as far as I can see, most of his students) neglect: David Hume.--Pippin, R. B. (1992). "The modern world of leo strauss." Political Theory, 20(3), and note 15 on p. 453 & p. 468

After my paper on Ernest Nagel, Sander Verhaegh kindly asked me to contribute a paper to a collection on how exiles shaped analytic philosophy Stateside (or something like that). And because Nagel is one of the few analytic philosophers to have engaged Strauss in a substantive way (and so I am well placed to discuss it), and because I tend to think analytic philosophy's polemics are at least partially constitutive of its professional identity, I thought it would be illuminating to write a chapter for Sander on how Strauss and his school ended up being conceptualized as not philosophy/philosophical by analytic philosophy. And this last point would also also allow me to reflect a bit on the role of that strange hybrid, José Benardete, in the upstate NY revival of metaphysics within analytic philosophy.

But I have had to confront a scholarly problem. Within analytic philosophy nearly all the writing about Strauss and his followers is excessively polemical (and often not very good, alas). Much of the remaining scholarship in English on Strauss is by his students (and almost inevitably apologetic in character) or by people interested in tracing the misdeeds of neocons to Strauss or tracing the reception of Heidegger's views. And so while there is huge amount of material on Strauss reception (which is, perhaps, all I need), there is remarkably little sober scholarship on Strauss and his school. In fact, Robert Pippin has corned the market in that niche with three papers: in addition to the paper quoted above, there is a companion piece, "Being, time, and politics: The Strauss-Kojève debate." History and Theory (1993): 138-161, and a more recent work,"The Unavailability of the Ordinary: Strauss on the Philosophical Fate of Modernity." Political Theory 31.3 (2003): 335-358.+ (Feel free to nominate other work!)

All three papers are sober engagements with Strauss and repay study in their own right. They are not, if that were possible, impartial scholarship because each is written from the perspective of a kind of Hegelianism that is explicitly being defended against Strauss (and from Kojève's corruption of Hegelianism). In fact, Pippin generally suggests (and my quote above is exemplary in this respect) that Strauss has missed an (Hegelian) alternative in his (that is, Strauss') diagnosis of a philosophical situation or that Strauss has posited a slippery slope, which may be halted along the way. That is, Pippin's response to Strauss tends to engage in genuine philosophical disagreement where the details matter. Pippin also recognizes that one of Strauss' characteristic modes of argument -- something about modernity (say its 'crisis') is the effect, even inevitable fate, of philosophical assumptions of some past thinker -- is non-trivially Hegelian (e.g., "The Unavailability of the Ordinary:" 341). Finally, Pippen recognizes (and articulates nicely) how odd Strauss seems in light of the "usual way[s] of a professional philosopher in a modern university," ("The Unavailability of the Ordinary: 342) despite the fact that Strauss generated a quite successful school in the modern university.

Okay, with that in place, I want focus on a puzzle that reading Pippin raised for me (and perhaps for me alone). In his 2003 article, Pippin suggests that one of the main themes of Strauss' Natural Right and History (hereafter NRH), and "the central theme of all modern European philosophy since Hegel," is the "relationship between philosophy and experience." (336) In fact, Pippin makes point of reminding his audience that this is also a theme found "in the later Wittgenstein, Austin, Cavell" (344) that is, analytic philosophy (on p. 352 he adds Bernard Williams to the list).

Now, within analytic philosophy, it's Hume that is treated as the philosopher who first problematized the relationship between philosophy and experience (if you don't trust me on this go re-read Quine or Russell). Hume is not explicitly mentioned in Pippin's 2003 piece, but his language is adopted even quoted by Pippin at one key point when he explains that for Strauss the recovery of natural right (that we are said to "need" by Strauss) "would seem to require a dualism, a nonteleological science of the universe and in some way a different, teleological “science of man.” Strauss considers this the Thomistic solution but he clearly rejects it, boldly insisting, “An adequate solution to the problem of natural right cannot be found before this basic problem has been solved,” unmistakably implying that it has not yet and appearing to promise that he will solve it, in the book to follow." (344) What's interesting about this formulation (other than it being Humean terminology) is that there is by now a academic cottage industry, at least since Allison Simmons' 2001 paper showing that various early moderns (Descartes, Spinoza, and Hume) proposed nonteleological science of the universe, and yet somehow produced (consciously/intentionally or not) a teleological science of man. 

With that in mind, in note 15 (in the 1992 paper) quoted above, Pippin is explicitly commenting on NRH; p 17. In that book, Strauss explicitly mentions Hume twice. First, a few pages later (p. 20), in the context of a discussion of historicism, Hume is treated (alongside Kant) as an originator of a "philosophical critique of a philosophic and scientific thought" that leads to skepticism. And Strauss uses the occasion to distinguish the philosophy of skepticism from historicism. Importantly, the contrast is drawn in the sense of how skepticism and historicism view themselves: skepticism is a permanent possibility for humanity (it is "coeval with human thought)," whereas historicism is indexed to specific historical situations. And even if one does not know anything about the larger project of NRH, the manner -- which is not historicist -- in which Strauss draws this distinction implies that Strauss identifies more with the skeptical self-understanding more than the historicist one (Pippin would not disagree, I think, see below).

It should be noted that near the end of the book, Strauss notes that historicism itself is an effect of skepticism about theoretical metaphysics. And this is a "skepticism which culminated in the depreciation of theory in favor of practice." (NRH 320) That is to say, Hume (and Kant) are treated both as contrasts to skepticism as well as the philosophical roots or sources of historicism. (We might say then that for Strauss historicism is at the bottom of the slippery slope from Hume.)

Second, near the end of NRH, in the context of analyzing Burke's defense of practical wisdom against the encroaches of theoretical philosophy, Strauss points out there is a connection between Burke's strictures on (and against) metaphysics and "the skeptical tendencies of his contemporaries Rousseau and Hume." And Strauss goes on to offer Burke's "theoretical work" [sic], A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, as evidence for this claim. 

Let's stipulate that these two mentions are not a "serious confrontation." But they do suggest that in so far as Strauss discusses skepticism, and especially where it shades into philosophy's critique of itself and science, it's legitimate to explore how he may well be drawing on, or engaging with, Hume. I don't mean to suggest this is always the case. For, Strauss also thinks there are different kinds of skepticism. For, 'Socratic wisdom' is in virtue of being self-knowledge of one's ignorance, explicitly "a kind of skepticism," albeit of an "involuntary" kind (NRH: 262). Such skepticism is "not dangerous."* Somewhat confusingly if one is unfamiliar with Strauss, in context it is not just Socrates, but also Rousseau who is being described as an exemplar of Socratic wisdom. Importantly, in Rousseau, Socratic wisdom also has an important effect: it allows for science that is compatible with virtue. (In that scheme, metaphysics is the science that is incompatible with virtue.) And Strauss treats Rousseau (but not Socrates) as somebody who thinks that science can be made to serve virtue (although the way this can be institutionalized is by no means obvious).

As it happens, (an)other kind(s) of Socratic wisdom is possible -- one not wedded to natural science (NRH: 277) -- so this kind of skepticism itself comes in kinds. Strauss clearly admires Socratic wisdom, which is philanthropic in character, and this suggests that in NRH, skepticism does not (always) have a negative connotation.

Rousseau is also treated as a source of insight on a "dangerous kind" of skepticism which is a consequence of the search for truth in modern science. And this is caused whenever scientific truth is useless or unattainable. (NRH 258) It is dangerous because in modernity science has discredited faith and opinion and is meant to replace faith and opinion, and so when science fails it leaves society with nihilism. (258). 

Socrates, Hume, Kant, and Rousseau are not the only kinds of skeptics in NRH. Strauss treats Cicero as an Academic skeptic (155). In addition, Strauss recognizes that from the perspective of seventeenth century philosophy, in "traditional" philosophy (prior to the seventeenth century), there is also a form of skepticism that is a kind of natural accompaniment of dogmatism (NRH 171). I think this is clearly meant to be Pyrrhonean skepticism. And, as it happens, such Pyrrhonean skepticism is transformed in seventeenth century philosophy in NRH. For, Strauss treats Hobbes, Spinoza, and Descartes as sharing in the following commitment (one that is often attributed to Descartes alone based on a reading of the Meditations):

To guarantee the actualization of wisdom means to eradicate skepticism by doing justice to the truth embodied in skepticism. For this purpose, one must first give free rein to extreme skepticism: what survives the onslaught of extreme skepticism is the absolutely safe basis of wisdom. The actualization of wisdom is identical with the erection of an absolutely dependable dogmatic edifice on the foundation of extreme skepticism.  (NRH 172)

The significance of this modern strategy to attain wisdom is not just epistemological. For, in raising a central challenge to Hobbes' philosophy (and the manner of the challenge is rather Schmittian as is also clear in the footnote I am about to quote) in his own voice, Strauss adds a curious footnote:

One may state this difficulty also as follows: In the spirit of the dogmatism based on skepticism, Hobbes identified what the skeptic Carneades apparently regarded as the conclusive refutation of the claims raised on behalf of justice, with the only possible justification of these claims: the extreme situation—the situation of the two shipwrecked men on a plank on which only one man can save himself—reveals, not the impossibility of justice, but the basis of justice. Yet Carneades did not contend that in such a situation one is compelled to kill one's competitor (Cicero Republic iii . 29-30): the extreme situation does not reveal a real necessity. (NRH 196 note 39)

This explicitly treats Hobbes' philosophy as erected on, derived from, a skeptical foundation. Now, to be sure, this kind of skepticism is not at all like Socratic wisdom. In fact, it is the explicit denial that a good life is good in virtue of being in accord with nature (NRH 95), which is the truth embodied in skepticism (that is the basis/foundational step on which Hobbes' dogmatic science is built).

But according to Strauss, Hobbes (not Descartes) generates a form of skepticism, too: "It is this fact that ultimately accounts for the persistence of skepticism and justifies skepticism to a certain extent. Skepticism is the inevitable outcome of the unintelligible character of the universe or of the unfounded belief in its intelligibility." (NRH 174; in my own research I tend to attribute this view to Spinoza, but it's not clear to me that Strauss does so.) Hobbes here is treated, thus, as the ultimate source of a "philosophical critique of a philosophic and scientific thought" that Strauss links to Hume and Kant (and their role in generating both the kind of skepticism coeval with thought and modern historicism).

Let me take stock of where we are because I am fast reaching the limits of a Digression. Running through NRH is a classification of different kinds of skepticism. This matters for the argument of NRH because some kinds of skepticism are treated as wise and as exemplary of the (partial) rejection of historicism that Strauss endorses. In fact, Pippen (largely correctly in my view) treats Strauss as a kind of skeptic: "The radically sceptical, incomplete, or zetetic character of Strauss's version of Socraticism."  (note 12 of Pippin's 1992 article). To put my own exegetical cards on the table, I think the word 'radically' is a bit misleading because the tenor of Strauss skepticism is not Pyrrhonean but fideist (about which another time).

And so the question of skepticism in NRH is also a question of classifying Strauss. And as it happens in NRH, in this classification of skepticism, Hume plays a central role as a source , perhaps partially derivative of Hobbes, of modern historicism while simultaneously standing for the non-historicist always living possibility of skepticism in which the question of the relationship between philosophy and experience is central. In fact, what's notable about NRH is that Strauss invites the question which skeptics, if any, have Socratic wisdom, and leaves it to the reader to figure out the answer.** 

It's worth noting, in closing for today, that according to Strauss (and he is right about this) Hume rejected -- what he claims Hobbes, Spinoza, and Descartes accepted -- that is, the skeptical denial that a good life is good in virtue of being in accord with nature. This Strauss notes in a different work in which he explains the difference between Hume and (modern) positivism(s) (see The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism: 21-22). And so my provisional, tentative conclusion is that Strauss does not have a serious confrontation with Hume because, while Strauss generally sounds like the student of Heidegger he was, in key respects he agrees with Hume (or so I claim ex cathedra). And this somewhat perverse result actually makes the vehement rejection of Strauss and Straussianism by analytic philosophy more interesting than I initially thought.

 

 

 

Huizinga on Schmitt and the Collapse of the Whole System of International Law

    Though there may be abundant traces of play in domestic politics there would seem, at first sight, to be little opportunity for it in the field of international politics. The fact, however, that these have fallen to unheard of extremes of violence and dangerousness in political life among nations does not in itself exclude the possibility of play. As we have seen from numerous examples, play can be cruel and bloody and, in addition, can often be false play. Any law-abiding community or community of States will have characteristics linking it in one way or another to a play-community. A system of international law is maintained by the mutual recognition of certain principles and maxims which, in effect, operate like play-rules despite the fact that they may be founded in metaphysics. The explicit acknowledgment of the pacta sunt servanda principle is a de facto recognition that the integrity of the system rests on a  willingness to play along. Once a party withdraws from the rules of the system, the whole system of international law must, if only temporarily, collapse unless the outlaw is banished from the community as a "spoilsport." 
   The maintenance of international law has always been dependent on the [continued] validity of principles such as honour, decency, and good form. An important part of European rules of warfare developed, after all, out of the code of honour proper to chivalry. International law tacitly assumed that a defeated state would behave like a gentleman and a good loser, even if it seldom did. The duty to declare war officially, though often violated, belonged to the good form of warring states. In short until quite recently modern European war included and still retained the ludic elements of war, which we have uncovered in all archaic eras, and on which the absolutely binding character of the rules of war in large part rested. 
   A common phrase in German speech speaks of the entry of war as "Ernstfall". In strictly military parlance the term is correct. Compared with the sham fighting of manoeuvres and drilling, 'real' war is undoubtedly what seriousness is to play. But it's altogether different when he term "Ernstfall" is understood politically. It would entail that foreign policy has not attained its full degree of seriousness, her real effectiveness, until the state of war is reached. This view is confessed by some. [In the Dutch, but not English, there is a note to Huizinga's (1935) In the Shadows of Tomorrow.] For them all diplomatic intercourse, insofar as it moves in the paths of negotiation and agreement, is only a preface to war or a transition between two wars. It is logical that its adherents, who regard war and its preparations as the sole form of serious politics, should deny that war has any connection with contest [Huizinga uses 'wedkamp' here which as he notes earlier, signals the rolling of betting in legal and athletic contests--ES] and hence with play. The agonistic factor, they tell us, may have been powerfully operative in earlier eras, but contemporary warfare is elevated above the old contest. It is based on the "friend-enemy" principle. All real political relationships among nations and states, so they say, are dominated by this principle. [Here Huizinga cites Schmitt's Der Begriff der Politischen in Dutch and English editions.]** The other group is always either your friend or your enemy. Enemy, of course, is not to be understood as inimicus or εχθρός (echtros), i.e. personally hated, or though wicked, but only as hostis or πόλεμιος, i.e. the stranger, who is in your group's way or about the stand in its way. Schmitt refuses to regard the enemy even as a rival or adversary. He is according to him just an opponent [tegenstander] in the most iteral sense and is thus to be liquidated [uit de weg ruimen]. If ever anything in history has corresponded to this gross reduction of the idea of enmity, which turns it into an almost mechanical relationship, it is precisely that archaic antagonism between phratries, clans or tribes where, as we saw, the play element was of considerable significance, and from which the growth of culture has carried us beyond. In so far as there is a glimpse of correctness in Schmitt's inhuman delusion, the conclusion has to be: war is not the 'Ernstfall,' but peace is. Only by conquering that pitiable friend-enemy relationship will humanity lay claim to the recognition of her dignity. With everything that evokes or accompanies it, war always remains ensnared in the daemonic witchcraft of the game.--J.H. Huizinga (1949 [1944]) Homo Ludens: A Study in the Play-Element in Culture, London Routledge pp. 208-209. {With corrections by Eric Schliesser in bold.}*

Homo Ludens appeared in Dutch in 1938. After the Von Leers incident (recall), Huizinga was effectively black-listed in Nazi-Germany (see Gossman's "Afterword" to Otterspeer's article). Somewhat amazingly the English translation was translated from the German edition, which, according to the English translation,  is supposed to have appeared in Switzerland in 1944. But, in fact, Huizinga was also pretty effectively black-listed in neutral Switzerland. The book first appeared in German with Pantheon (a small press) in Amsterdam in 1939. Pantheon, which was not a Jewish firm, continued operation during the war. In Switzerland, the book was finally republished by Burg-Verlag in Basel, including a 1944 edition, which seems to have been a source of the English translation. I write 'a source' because the (anonymous to me) English translator appended the following note to the book:

THIS edition is prepared from the German edition published in Switzerland, 1944, and also from the author's own English translation of the text, which he made shortly before his death. Comparison of the two texts shows a number of discrepancies and a marked difference in style; the translator hopes that the following version has achieved a reasonable synthesis. (vii)*

While it is tempting to turn swiftly to Huizinga's argument against Schmitt, it is worth noting that in Dutch the sub-title of the book is, "Proeve Eener Bepaling van het Spel-Element der Cultuur." In contemporary Dutch, a 'proeve' primarily means a 'tasting,' but in the past it is often used in terms of a 'trial' or 'assaying' (or 'essay'). It shares a root with the English 'proof'. And if you read the book, it's pretty clear that Huizinga intents to convey that the book involves taste and assaying. The first word ("Essai") of the sub-title French translation ("Essai sur le fonction sociale du jeu") captures these resonances by using 'Essai', although interestingly enough the rest of the sub-title is rather over-interpretive (even reductive). But I also suspect, as (also) passages that I quoted above from near the end of the book imply, Huizinga means to suggest that in his own day the play-element of culture is being challenged if not in danger of collapsing (a proeve in the sense of a beproeving--an ordeal or test).

Okay, with that in place let's turn to Huizinga's argument. It is no surprise that writing in an age of the collapse of the League of Nations into farce that Huizinga would have thought that the system of international law was rather fragile--that a single defection could make it collapse unless the rest is strong enough to banish the rule-breaker altogether from the system. We now know that this is need not be the case. The international system can survive considerable rule breaking by even its vital and leadings members and, what is more amazing, can maintain many of its norms with important rule-breakers while they are knowingly violating international law. So, for example, even while countries are putting sanctions on Putin's regime, Russia participates in an enormous range of international commercial and technical practices that are regulated by international law that nobody will consider revoking. Obviously, there is a tipping point where that may not be true anymore.

One way to understand Huizinga's diagnosis of Schmitt's position is that according to Huizinga (and I have a distinct feeling that this anticipates Foucault's interpretation of liberalism), and in a reversal of Clausewitz's famous dictum, Schmitt treats ordinary politics and diplomacy as a continuation and extension of war. It's in this fact that, according Huizinga's Schmitt, the paraphernalia of diplomacy and politics have their true significance.   

Now, the position attributed by Huizinga to Schmitt that ordinary politics and statecraft are just the continuation of war and preparation for it implies that on the Schmittian picture there is no escape from the Hobbesian state of nature at all. So, it is worth noting that Huizinga converges on a crucial agreement with Strauss's criticism of Schmitt: (recall) that Schmitt remains, despite his own self-understanding, in the Hobbesian ambit. (I have no evidence that Huizinga was familiar with Strauss' reading of Schmitt.)

In addition, Huizinga attributes to Schmitt an ideal of progress. (Again, this is accord with Strauss, who discerned the existential providentialism in Schmitt, who is for all his rejection of liberalism a committed modernist.) But according to Huizinga, Schmitt's idea of progress presupposes the overcoming of the ludic and agonic ideals that were once inherent in the conceptualizations of war. And, on Huizinga's account this makes modern warfare the true barbarism because it mechanically promotes the killing of enemies.

Here, Huizinga echoes the practice -- from Thomas More forward, but reaching its peak in Enlightenment thought -- of treating modern Europeans as the true barbarians. And this is supposed to meet Schmitt on his own terms because according to Schmitt it's those very humanitarian ideals -- which turn the enemy into a inhumane monster -- that lead to total war. 

At first sight, it might seem that Huizinga misses in his analysis of Schmitt is that enemies are symmetrical to each other: that there is a moment of existential choice in which some are recognized as friends to which one belongs and other social unities as enemies. This parity is absent in social domination and subordination. So, something of the agonic element is maintained even in Schmitt's analysis. And, in fact, I think this is Huizinga's position ("war always remains ensnared in the daemonic witchcraft of the game"), although it's unclear if Huizinga also thinks this is an immanent critique of Schmitt.

Be that as it may, while it's true that there is a sense in which Huizinga's response to Schmitt is question-begging (humanity is not common ground), it is not silly, and strikes me as coherent.+ In particular, Huizinga promotes the idea that the overcoming of the friend-enemy distinction is a real possibility and once this overcoming is associated with humanity's dignity (there are Kantian deals lurking here) a worthy ideal. In this, Huizinga echoes Ortega Y Gassett (recall) and he anticipates Popper's argument (recall). This is something that cannot be denied by Schmitt because the enemy-friend distinction itself presupposes an existential choice; and so could be otherwise. (Again, Strauss who parts ways with these liberals had noticed that Schmitt shares common ground in such matters with his liberal opponents.) Huizinga's position does not deny that politics plays a role in culture or in games, but rather that such activities, even when fully immersed in them, can reach beyond themselves to something ethical (or sittlich in a soft-Hegelian sense).

Huizinga does not claim that all of culture is play. In fact, he invites us to consider the renewal or development of a political art in all seriousness: this is the art of peace, how to achieve it and how to maintain it. (And given the Kantianism, this is really the art of world-federation.) And Huizinga claims here (and at the start of Homo Ludens) explicitly the authority of Plato's Laws 803:  "It is the life of peace that everyone should live as much and as well as he can." And matching Schmitt's Christian political theology, with Plato's, we learn that in order to be serious about the art of peace, we must learn to understand ourselves, looking up, as God(s)'s playthings. 

 

 

On Dutch War Crimes and Perry Anderson on Schmitt, Hayek, Strauss, and Oakeshot.

    After the debacle of the First World War, and the victory of Bolshevism in Russia, the old political world of landed rulers and limited electorates, modest budgets and stable currencies, had crumbled away. A new kind of mass enfranchisement and expectation gripped Europe, the arrival of a democracy capable of brushing aside, in the pursuit of security or equality, traditional barriers between the tasks of government and the affairs of business - a semi-oligarchic state and a still-hierarchic civil society. Where would popular sovereignty without social liability lead? Communism was, of course, the first and greatest danger. Fascism, which looked to some as if it might be an antidote, proved little better - indeed, in German guise at least, all but identical. But even when these were seen off, there was still the welfare state, a creeping version of the same disease. In the course of six decades, political judgements of this changing scene varied. Strauss and Oakeshott, scornful of liberalism before Hitler came to power, were more circumspect after the war; Hayek, who described himself as a classical liberal during the war, repudiated the term as compromised beyond recovery when he got to America; Schmitt, who never had any truck with liberalism, moved from Catholic authoritarianism to National Socialism, before ending as an informal doyen of the most respectable post-war constitutionalism. But beyond the discrepant local sympathies of these careers - with their splay of temporary identities: Conservative, Zionist, Nazi, Old Whig - they reflected a common theoretical calling....

    But the Stygian cap fits the collective effort of this cluster of thinkers. For these were indeed constructions designed to hold something back. What they all in the end sought to restrain was the risks of democracy - seen and feared through the prisms of their theories of law, as the abyss of its absence: to misterion tes anomias, the mystery of lawlessness.

Each put up their own barriers against the danger. The dichotomies which are the signature of their work - the esoteric and the exoteric, the civil and the managerial, the friend and the foe, the lawful and the legislative - are so many cordons. Their function is to hold popular sovereignty at bay. The different gifts displayed in this enterprise, whatever view is taken of it, were remarkable. For all his later tendency to textual dressage, Strauss's range and subtlety as a master of the canon of political philosophy had no equal in his generation. Schmitt's moral instability never impaired an extraordinary capacity to fuse conceptual insight and metaphoric imagination in lightning flashes of illumination around the state. Hayek could seem tactically ingenuous, but he fashioned a theoretical synthesis out of his epistemology and economics whose scope and strength has yet to be supplanted.
    Oakeshott was the literary artist in this gallery.--Perry Anderson (1992) "The Intransigent Right" in Spectrum: From Right to Left in the World of Ideas, p. 25-27 [HT Jonathan Kramnick]

The other day (recall here), I quoted the conclusion of Anderson's essay (which contrasts Rawls with the four horseman of the Intransigent Right) in order to introduce my digression on Katrina Forrester's In the Shadow of Justice. And before I turned to my serious engagement with Forrester, I made a snarky remark about Anderson's 'acrobatics' in order to lump Schmitt, Hayek, Strauss, and Oakeshot together. I don't plan to withdraw the remark here, but I do regret making it for two reasons: first, I wouldn't want to discourage  anyone from reading Anderson's essay, which is, in fact, very perceptive about these four thinkers and their relations. In fact, at times Anderson practices a kind of judicious, esoteric reading to reveal their core commitments. Along the way he draws on chapter 24 of Leviathan in illuminating ways.

As an aside, when Kramnick (a distinguished literary scholar) mentioned Anderson's essay to me he remarked (I am paraphrasing) that Anderson was more charitable of these four than Rawls (something characteristic of certain kind of Marxists more generally). The veracity of Kramnick's remark can be readily judged not just by comparing the quoted passages above with the paragraph I quoted from in my digression on Forrester, but also by reading his self-standing scornful essay, "Designing Consensus: John Rawls," primarily on Rawls' Political Liberalism.  Nothing like the praise of Hayek's "theoretical synthesis" can be found in Anderson about Rawls.

Second, while lumping people together with Schmitt is generally a sign that we're in the ambit of rhetorical delegitimation, it's not true (as I kind of implied) that these thinkers have nothing important in common. For, I agree with Anderson that the specter that haunts all of them, at a certain of level of abstraction is indeed "the risks of democracy," especially if that is understood in terms of "popular sovereignty." And this is not a trivial communality nor is it something that by itself deserves criticism.

It's worth noting that anyone that worries about minority or civil rights and, say the respect for the kind of rights that are associated with human rights or a bill of rights, or the division of powers is ipse facto also worried about popular sovereignty and the risks of democracy. And there is widespread theoretical agreement that such rights ought to be respected. Yet, one problem that pollutes a lot of contemporary theorizing about democracy is that proponents of popular sovereignty, deliberative democracy, and (alas) public reason tend to take for granted, on some fundamental level, that these rights are respected, or that they are in accord -- I am now using the words of Rawls -- with "the most deep-seated convictions and traditions of a modern democratic state."*

Just yesterday, the Dutch government admitted, after commissioning a new formal historical study in 2017,  that the Netherlands had engaged in all kinds of war crimes toward innocent civilians and enemy combatants in what was Indonesia's war of independence (concluded in 1949). And subsequently these facts were covered it up, and for decades public opinion did not permit these facts to be aired (often under pressure of not especially large groups of veterans), or to be taught in history classes (not even by my teachers who were rather progressive by Dutch standards). This despite the steady drip of materials that suggested the official narrative was hopelessly flawed, and the accumulating evidence of the non-trivial trauma for those that actually witnessed and perpetrated the atrocities. The time it took to admit any of this formally, and to offer (modest) compensation to victims, is of biblical proportions: the generations that experienced had to die off first for a sober and truthful discussion to be possible.

A friend of popular sovereignty may well respond that the Dutch inability to acknowledge their war crimes just shows that our liberal democracy -- which tends to get incredibly high marks for democratic freedom --  is fatally shaped by our colonial heritage. I am by no means unsympathetic to the charge. But I see little reason to believe that popular sovereignty unmediated by parliamentary institutions will do much better (given that it public opinion never really wanted to know the truth).

My reason for mentioning the case is straightforward. From afar the entrenched, small liberal democracies of Scandinavia and the North Sea are often treated as and seem paragons of democratic virtue (with robust proportional representation and reasonably generous welfare states). But even these exhibit the non-trivial democratic risks and rights violations that ought to concern friends of popular sovereignty. (Google, "Compulsory sterilisation in Sweden" or "Denmark xenophobia.") While it's true that all these places have not abolished capitalism (on the contrary they also tend to do well in economic freedom rankings), they are kind of limit examples that illustrate that even in the best circumstances democracies may misfire greatly. 

To be sure, the claim in the previous paragraph does not require to accept the road to serfdom thesis. While I am not inclined to treat the road to serfdom thesis as an empirical prediction (spoiler: I think Hayek's work belongs in the genre philosophical prophecy), if one were to treat it as an empirical prediction then the small liberal democracies of Scandinavia and the North Sea have clearly falsified it. And while I am much less sanguine about the state and character of British liberal democracy, its current state also stands as a falsification of it 70+ years after the fact. 

The explicit or implicit theoretical denial of the risks of democracy and popular sovereignty strike me as instances of irresponsible theorizing. (When I am polite I call it 'democratic innocence.') And it is a peculiar feature of far left critics of those concerned with the risks of democracy and popular sovereignty, that they then have to treat Leninism and Stalinism as contingent perversions of the ideal  or, -- and now I am speaking of Anderson -- and criticize Rosa Luxemburg, who almost alone among the friends of popular sovereignty recognized its risk, for lacking a "theory of the conquest of power by the proletariat."**

The problem is, of course, that once one has diagnosed the risks of democracy and popular sovereignty it's very hard to avoid solutions that are inimical to democracy (as the example of Mill's Considerations on Representative Government shows). And it is no surprise that those who do emphasize the risks of democracy and popular sovereignty are often reactionaries of some sort or don't reject temporary despotism. But what follows from this is not that a true friend of democracy should wish away the risks of democracy and ignore the dangers of popular sovereignty in order to avoid being tainted by the charge of 'right-wingism.' Rather, it's incumbent to find ways of navigating these risks in ways in accord with if not the letter then the spirit of democracy. But about that some other time other time more.

 

A note on Le Guin and Fanon, and Carl Schmitt

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Because they were fighting for their freedom!”

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

"So ..."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

Plato on Dangerous Truths

“When anyone images badly in his speech the true nature of gods and heroes, like a painter whose portraits bear no resemblance to his models.”...“There is, first of all,” I said, “the greatest lie about the things of greatest concernment, which was no pretty invention of him who told how Uranus did what Hesiod says he did to Cronos, and how Cronos in turn took his revenge; and then there are the doings and sufferings of Cronos at the hands of his son. Even if they were true I should not think that they ought to be thus lightly told to thoughtless young persons. But the best way would be to bury them in silence, and if there were some necessity for relating them, that only a very small audience should be admitted under pledge of secrecy and after sacrificing, not a pig, but some huge and unprocurable victim, to the end that as few as possible should have heard these tales. “Yes, and they are not to be told, Adeimantus, in our city, nor is it to be said in the hearing of a young man, that in doing the utmost wrong he would do nothing to surprise anybody, nor again in punishing his father's wrong-doings to the limit, but would only be following the example of the first and greatest of the gods.” ”--Plato Republic 377e-378a, translated by Paul Shorey [emphases added]

It is only natural, I suppose, that the noble lie (414c-415e, and anticipated at 382a-d) told by Socrates near the end of Book 3 is more attention grabbing than what we may call the doctrine of dangerous truths mentioned, really in passing, in 378ab.

In context, Socrates is articulating the best education of the guardians of the luxurious city. And he uses this as an occasion to both offer a critique of the standard stories told about the Gods by great variety of poets and to propose a kind of purification (even moralization) of public religion or theology (that is, the most important things). Hesiod's stories about Uranus, Cronos, and Zeus (the "son" of Cronos) involve castration, forced abortion, cannibalism of children, and parricide among the gods.

Hesiod's depiction is not just about the gods acting viciously with each other. It also involve a failure of orderly political succession. And so, while it is not unnatural to think that by 'the things of greatest concernment,' -- Shorey may be over-translating τὸ μέγιστον, but given the repeated 'greatest' with 'lies,' it's not silly -- Socrates means here talk of the gods (especially if one is all in on Socrates' piety), it is not impossible that what he really means here is talk about the nature of (properly ordered) political life. Is theology or political philosophy the most important  topic? My more cheeky Thomist readers will quickly say, that's an unnecessary or false choice.

I mention the political reading of this material because -- and now I get to the heart of today's digression, I find it startling that at the start of 378b, Socrates is explicit that in the kallipolis that he and Adeimantus are founding, there will be no dangerous truths. And because of this remark, I read the doctrine of dangerous truths mention in 378a as confined to second (or n-th best) cities. 

Now, it's true that I think this -- that the doctrine of dangerous truths is confined to second-best cities -- because it seems to anticipate elements of the nocturnal council at 961B in Plato's Laws (a book that was important to me in graduate school). And part of the point of the nocturnal council is to try to help reform those of who have violated the laws on impiety in Magnesia. (Magnesia is a nth-best city.) Of course, I accept the tradition that suggests Laws was written well after the Republic, so I don't think this would settle the matter. 

However, it is important to recall that Socrates had articulated the idea of a dangerous truth in his initial exchange with Cephalus at 331D (recall here). There, it was used to undermine Cephalus' definition of justice (speak truth and repay one's debts), which (to speak anthropologically) we may call the definition of justice apt for commercial society. And Socrates had explained that there are circumstances where, if one takes consequences seriously (as one is wont to do in commercial society) then one is not always obliged to repay one's debts or always to speak the truth.

Alex Douglas has treated the debt case brilliantly in his book (and recall), so I won't elaborate here. At 331D Socrates expects Cephalus to agree to the claim one should not always speak the truth to the mad. They are (to foreshadow Hobbes, Foucault, and Deleuze) to be placed not just outside the realm of valid contracts, but also outside the realm of (possible) persuasion (and so political life). I do not mean to suggest that Socrates himself agrees with Cephalus about any of this. I think it is really unclear to what degree Socrates has to affirm anything when he is engaged in immanent criticism.

While the doctrine of dangerous truth is explicitly rejected in the best city, the exchange with Cephalus shows that is part of the common sense or a natural extension of it of a commercial polity. So, given that, it is not so strange that in 2nd-Nth best cities Socrates permits some such doctrine. 

An impatient reader may well think, 'sure, Socrates used the doctrine of dangerous truths in his refutation of Cephalus, but there is no evidence here that he is thinking about anything other than the Kallipolis.' I have to admit that I don't have a knockdown argument against this. But notice that the select few who are allowed to be in on the dangerous secret, have to be not just among the aged, but also fabulously wealthy because they have to be capable of sacrificing something great and very scarce.*

Now, shortly after 378a, it becomes clear that there will be wealthy folk among the non-guardians in Kallipolis (419ff). But also that this should be clearly delimited (422a). So, that in 378a Socrates cannot be speaking of his own city, but only be referring about places where great riches are permitted and also where possession of such dangerous truth would not corrupt the person holding it because they are already corrupt in some non-trivial sense (and, hence, a nth-best city).**

I do not mean to suggest Socrates' position here is very attractive: that in an oligarchic context, only Jeff Bezos is, if he is willing to forfeit a non-trivial amount of his fortune, allowed access to dangerous, secret knowledge about the truth about the lack of morality or ethical grounding governing divine rule.  The very wealthy, who benefit from the status quo in n-th best cities, are not inclined to encourage a revolution in religious or political manners and so promote corrupting stories that threaten their influence. 

Why does this matter? I think it's one of the places in the Republic (recall 351-352) -- well before Book 8 -- where Socrates shows an interest in the permissible mechanisms or functioning of non-optimal states (which are governed by the interests of their ruling elements). These are by definition unstable. In such places there will, thus, be always some truths dangerous to their functioning. And so 378a articulates its corollary: the circulation of dangerous truths must be restricted to those with an interest not to act on, or share, them. We may call this doctrine (with a wink): Straussianism for those that benefit most from status quo.

 

Newton and Passivity of Matter

In an unpublished manuscript sheet, which was part of Newton’s preparations for the second edition of the Principia, Newton recorded that the most wise order of things could not have arisen “from matter alone and motion or from the nature of things [a materia sola et motu aut a rerum Natura].”102 Newton argued that God regulates the natural world by means of certain “active Principles,” which cause—inter alia—gravitation, fermentation, and cohesion.103 Correspondingly, in an unpublished draft version of what was to become Query 31, he wrote,

Whence it seems to have been an ancient opinion that matter depends upon a Deity for its ↓laws of↓ motion as well as for its existence. The Cartesians make God the author of all motion & its as reasonable to make him the author of the laws of motion. Matter is a passive principle & cannot move it self. It continues in its state of moving or resting unless disturbed. It receives motion proportional to the force impressing it. And resists as much as it is resisted. These are passive laws & to affirm that there are no other is to speak against experience. For we find in or selves a power of moving our bodies by or thought ↓Life & thinking ↓will↓ are active Principles by wch we move our bodies, & thence arise other laws of motion unknown to us↓==Newton [CUL Add. Ms. 3970, 619r [drafts prepared for Opticks (1717)].]

The above remarks square nicely with Newton’s denial that motion results from qualities that are inherent to matter itself and with his belief that for their motions bodies require divinely governed secondary causes, which serve as the immaterial sources of activity and motion. Steffen Ducheyne, "Newton on Action at a Distance." Journal of the History of Philosophy 52.4 (2014): 691-692

As I noted yesterday, inspired by, and partially correcting, Howard Stein, according to my interpretation of Newton, as Newton developed the ideas of the Principia in the 1680s, Newton came to the following position: a body has (at least) two dispositions: (i) a “passive” disposition to respond to impressed forces which is codified in the second law of motion; (ii) whereas an “active” disposition to produce gravitational force is treated as a distinct interaction codified in the third law of motion. And the “cause” of the action is “the conspiring nature of both” bodies. For the “conspiring” to occur, the bodies must share a “nature.” (For the full defense of these ideas see here and here.) And I argue that for Newton the disposition to gravitate is a universal, albeit contingent, relational quality of matter.  Despite grounding my views in a textial analysis Treatise of the System of the World (a work that appeared shortly after Newton died), my view has not generated consensus.

Among my critics, Ducheyne is most inclined to draw on archival material. And the passage quoted above is especially important to his (2014) attempt to refute my position. He refers back to it twice more (on pp. 692-693). The reason why it is important to Ducheyne's argument is that it seems to give him the smoking gun he needs. It's one of the few places where Newton explicitly says that matter is passive.

Now, I had already (in 2011) responded to this passage, in a (2009) criticism of Hylarie Kochiras (who had criticized an early version of my argument). (Looking back, I am quite amazed by how polemical we all were!) I wrote (now quoting myself): "Yet, the published version of the Opticks, is agnostic on this matter. In Query 31 he contrasts the “passive principle by which the bodies persist in their motion or rest, receive motion in proportion to the force impressing it, and resist as much as they are resisted” with “active principles, such as are the cause of gravity, by which planets and comets keep their motions in their orbits, and bodies acquire great motion in falling; and the cause of fermentation,” and so on. Shortly thereafter, he lists “gravity, and that which causes fermentation, and the cohesion of bodies” among the “active principles” (Newton, 1952, pp. 400–401)." 

My response to Kochiras clearly did not convince Ducheyne (who cites Kochiras' exchange with me, so he is aware of it). So, normally I would now throw up my hands and leave it to others to figure out who gets the better of the burden shifting. But two distinct new, additional arguments occur to me. The first argument would be to concede Ducheyne's (and Kochiras's!) reading of this passage, and fall back on the acknowledgment that Newton changed his mind and that after 1700 he was more inclined to accept the passivity of matter as the draft suggests. This response would be open to me because officially I am primarily committed to attributing to Newton the view sketched above to the mid 1680s (as he was drafting the Principia). In the Principia itself he is explicitly agnostic, after all--and this is agreed by everybody.

This (first) concessive response fits would also allow me to take on board some of Ducheyne's arguments about the theological significance of embracing the passivity of matter; or at least recognizing that Newton actively distanced himself from being taken to embrace active matter after the initial reception of the Principia. These theological issues and the question of the nature of mature are related to the challenge to Newton being taken as a kind of neo-Epicurean (and Kant and Adam Smith hint) or a(adherent of "blind fate") crypto-Spinozist (as Leibniz suggested at the start of his correspondence with Clarke). I have explored this connection in various places; see here & and forthcoming.

But as Ducheyne correctly notes in his paper, I have been greedy; I have also used other passages from different periods in Newton's life as converging evidence for my  interpretation of his view in the mid 1680s. And so I have kind of suggested that except for when Newton toys with ether theories, my reconstruction of his dispositional account of gravity is Newton's fall-back position. And so now I would have give up on that material.

However, another position, is not to be concessive at all. So, second, I can also simply deny that in the unpublished draft version of what was to become Query 31, Newton is presenting his own view about the passivity of matter at all. For it seems to me that one can read the italicized passage (the italics are Ducheyne's [here is an image of the manuscript; [here is a transcription] as Newton simply reporting or summarizing the Cartesian position on matter. Before I explain that let me quote a wider version of the passage (with a lot of editorial markings removed--Newton obsessively corrected his own texts): 

Qu. 23. By what means do bodies act on one another at a distance. The ancient Philosophers who held Atoms & Vacuum attributed gravity to Atoms without telling us the means unless perhaps in figures: as by calling God Harmony & representing him & matter by the God Pan & his Pipe, or by calling the Sun the prison of Jupiter because he keeps the Planets in their orbs. Whence it seems to have been an ancient opinion that matter depends upon a Deity for its laws of motion as well as for its existence. The Cartesians make God the author of all motion & its as reasonable to make him the author of the laws of motion. Matter is a passive principle & cannot move it self. It continues in its state of moving or resting unless disturbed. It receives motion proportional to the force impressing it. And resists as much as it is resisted. These are passive laws & to affirm that there are no other is to speak against experience. For we find in our selves a power of moving our bodies by our thought Life & will are active Principles by which we move our bodies, & thence arise other laws of motion unknown to us.

So, Newton here is taking on the question of action at a distance. And he first describes the innate gravity position of the ancient atomists. He also calls attention to the possibility that they used esoteric and figurative speech to explain the mechanism behind their position. (This sentence inspired one of the most famous papers by McGuire and Rattansi in contemporary Newton scholarship.) He sums up his treatment of the ancients by suggesting they thought God was needed to account for the laws of motion and the existence of matter.

As an aside, something of this view of the Ancients survives in the General Scholium added to the second (1713) edition of the Principia. Against the evidence of the Ancients, who freely speculated about to what degree God/Gods are dispensable to the Epicurean natural philosophy (and who claimed that the Gods were introduced to modify larger population), Newton reads them here as natural philosophical theists of a certain sort.  My own view is that he is doing this in order to try out saying that the a-typical epicureanism people are attributing to him need not be "Atheists" in character. (And he may have even sincerely thought that this was a solid reading of the Epicureans.) That fits a lot of other material in this manuscript (which offers a robust assertion, inter alia, for the reality of final causes in experience).

He then moves on to describing the cartesian position. Now on the reading advanced by Ducheyene (and Kochiras) the description of the cartesian position is a sentence: "The Cartesians make God the author of all motion." This would attribute to the Cartesians, in effect, Malebranche's interpretation of Descartes (or at least his own preferred position) being a kind of occasionalists such that God is the author of all motion. But there is an equally respectable Cartesian interpretation in which occasionalism is not the proper Cartesian position, but rather that  God is responsible (or the author of) the laws of motion, that's the next half of the sentence ("its as reasonable to make him the author of the laws of motion.")

And on the reading advanced by Ducheyne and Kochiras, Newton then moves on to state his own view. But it is equally plausible, and in fact, I think more plausible (yes, really), that here Newton gives a summary of the Cartesian metaphysics of nature: "Matter is a passive principle & cannot move it self. It continues in its state of moving or resting unless disturbed." So, pace Ducheyne and Kochiras, I think the natural reading here is that what they take to be Newton's position is really just Newton giving a quick and dirty summary of the Cartesian natural philosophy he rejects! 

To be sure, I do not mean to deny that in this manuscript Newton does shift to explaining features of his own position--he regularly invokes the authority of experiments. And where exactly he does that is a matter of judgment. But at the same time he also keeps shifting toward describing alternative views he rejects. 

So, if we read the manuscript in the way proposed by Kochiras and Ducheyne then Newton draws a sharp contrast between entities with minds, who can be active, and passive entities that lack such power. In fact, Kochiras and Ducheyne end up treating Newton by implication as a property dualist (with living things being the only kind of entities that can be substances). 

But Newton himself is much more cautious than that in the manuscript quoted. He makes it clear that all living things are active. And it is, for Newton in this very document, an open question whether (as the Stoics thought) all of nature is alive in that relevant sense: "We find in our selves a power of moving our bodies by our thoughts ] & see the same power in other living creatures but how this is done & by what laws we do not know. We cannot say that all Nature is not alive. not know her laws or powers any further then we gather them from Phænomena." (Emphasis added.) Nobody has doubted that this is Newton's own position. And this suggests to me that Newton is  much more agnostic about the nature of matter in this document than Kochiras and Ducheyne have allowed. Because Newton allows (as Spinoza did) that there may be as of yet undiscovered principles and laws that can explain the materiality of living things. On my reading, these would also be laws and principles of matter.

What Newton does explicitly deny is that vis inertia can explain the generation of (new) motion: "vis inertiæ they continue in their state of moving or resting & receive motion proportional to the force impressing it & resiste as much as they are resisted, but they cannot move themselves; & without some other principle hen the vis inertiæ there could be no motion in the world." For reasons I do not fully understand Ducheyne thinks this shows that for Newton matter is passive. But that's not right. For even I assert -- and this also follows naturally from the second law of motion -- that vis inertiæ is a passive principle, but does not constitute the whole of Newton's matter theory in the Principia. 

 

 

 

 

Popper, Schmitt, and Friend & Foe

It cannot, of course, be denied that human individuals are, like all other things in our world, in very many respects very unequal. Nor can it be doubted that this inequality is of great importance and even in many respects highly desirable.12 (The fear that the development of mass production and collectivization may react upon men by destroying their inequality or individuality is one of the nightmares13 of our times.) But all this simply has no bearing upon the question whether or not we should decide to treat men, especially in political issues, as equals, or as much like equals as is possible; that is to say, as possessing equal rights, and equal claims to equal treatment; and it has no bearing upon the question whether we ought to construct political institutions accordingly. ‘Equality before the law’ is not a fact but a political demand based upon a moral decision; and it is quite independent of the theory—which is probably false—that ‘all men are born equal’. Now I do not intend to say that the adoption of this humanitarian attitude of impartiality is a direct consequence of a decision in favour of rationalism. But a tendency towards impartiality is closely related to rationalism, and can hardly be excluded from the rationalist creed. Again, I do not intend to say that an irrationalist could not consistently adopt an equalitarian or impartial attitude; and even if he could not do so consistently, he is not bound to be consistent. But I do wish to stress the fact that the irrationalist attitude can hardly avoid becoming entangled with the attitude that is opposed to equalitarianism. This fact is connected with its emphasis upon emotions and passions; for we cannot feel the same emotions towards everybody. Emotionally, we all divide men into those who are near to us, and those who are far from us. The division of mankind into friend and foe is a most obvious emotional division; and this division is even recognized in the Christian commandment, ‘Love thy enemies!’ Even the best Christian who really lives up to this commandment (there are not many, as is shown by the attitude of the average good Christian towards ‘materialists’ and ‘atheists’), even he cannot feel equal love for all men. We cannot really love ‘in the abstract’; we can love only those whom we know. Thus the appeal even to our best emotions, love and compassion, can only tend to divide mankind into different categories. And this will be more true if the appeal is made to lesser emotions and passions. Our ‘natural’ reaction will be to divide mankind into friend and foe; into those who belong to our tribe, to our emotional community, and those who stand outside it; into believers and unbelievers; into compatriots and aliens; into class comrades and class enemies; and into leaders and led.---Karl Popper The Open Society and its Enemies (one volume edition), 439-440 (emphasis in original)

Yesterday Jerry Gaus (1952-2020), who was the greatest theorist of the open society in our life-time, died. This post is an imperfect homage to his memory. 

Nearly every word in the passage quoted above is a response to Schmitt's Concept of the Political (perhaps mediated by Strauss' commentary). This is easy to miss because in a rare moment of self-command, Popper does not name the target nor attaches a lengthy discursive footnote.* My present interest is to discuss the significance of this, rather than to offer complete proof of the claims in the first sentence of the present paragraph. The quoted passage occurs in chapter 24 of The Open Society. And it helps clarify Popper's decision to call the critics and alternatives to liberalism/Open Society -- which he describes and criticizes with a mixture of polemics and admiration -- 'enemies.' 

In the Concept of the Political, Schmitt claims (recall) that "there is a specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy.'" In German it is 'feind' which can be translated as 'enemy' and as 'foe.' There is some debate among readers of Schmitt, no doubt encouraged by writings by Schmitt after the war, that there is an important distinction between enemy and foe in Schmitt. But such a distinction is unavailable to Popper in 1943. 

In the quoted passage, Popper twice echoes Schmitt's distinction between friend and foe, and he treats the genesis of the distinction in our emotions ("the division of mankind into friend and foe is a most obvious emotional division.")  That he has Schmitt in mind is clear from the second use of 'friend and foe' which marks those recognized to "belong to our tribe" (compatriots) and not to those outside of it, or as Schmitt would put it, "the other, the stranger."

For Popper the embraces of the Schmittian distinction facilitates the emotional rejection of what Popper calls equalitarianism. Because from the vantage point of our emotions, our differences are highly salient. As Schmitt puts it, "emotionally the enemy is easily treated as being evil and ugly," (emphasis added).

That Popper is shadowing even trolling Schmitt is obvious from his next move -- which one can only describe as chutzpah -- in which he points out that the distinction is recognized by the Christian commandment. Schmitt by contrast had insisted that the Christian love in the commandment is not reserved for the "political enemy."+ 

It is important for Schmitt to make his distinction compatible with Christianity because for Schmitt his rejection of liberal universalism, ultimately rests on his submission to a providential (Christian) faith opposed to the liberal's "anthropological profession of faith."** Strikingly, and as a good Kantian, Popper grants Schmitt the claim that at bottom the choice, for or against liberalism, rests on a species of faith (this is crucial to Strauss' interpretation of Schmitt and Strauss subsequent  historiography).

As Popper puts it, "the choice with which we are confronted is between a faith in reason and in human individuals and a faith in the mystical faculties of man by which he is united to a collective." (450) The second option is the Schmittian outlook. The former option, the "right kind of faith" is Popper's liberalism, which "frankly admits its origin in an irrational decision." (437; emphasis added.) That Popper thinks that there is a faith in individuals as an alternative to a faith in the collective begs the question against Schmitt's insistence that always, a "collectivity of people confronts a similar collectivity," (which begs the question, too). 

I do not mean to claim that for Popper, the choice between himself and Schmittian is reducible to such an existential Kierkegaardian leap (while rejecting any belief in providence). He also thinks the consequence of the Schmittian choice is that it "must lead to an appeal to violence and brutal force as the ultimate arbiter in any dispute." (440)*** That is to say, Popper claims (and here he echoes Strauss again) that Schmitt returns us to a kind of state of nature not worth having. 

Now, the significance of all of this is that it allows us to raise the question how the open society should treat its enemies? In fact, I already noted that Popper thinks a kind of defensive violence, even tyrannicide, is permitted (recall), even obliged, in order and only in order to restore democracy. But the more challenging question is, how should the open society treat its enemies before they have succeeded in overthrowing it? And part of Popper's answer is: make sure you can (conceptually) recognize that there are enemies. What follows from this recognition I explore before long.