Digressions&Impressions

Hume's odd footnote to Grotius, and Pufendorf

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Readers who come to David Hume through the Treatise may be forgiven for thinking that he wasn't an especially learned or scholarly philosopher deviating from the reigning tendency toward eclecticism. I include myself among these, until I heard a paper (which may still be unpublished) by Ken Winkler on the way Hume carefully edited his notes engaged with Locke through the successive editions of the Enquiries. In fact, Hume's long essay on population exhibits him as quite learned. So much for set-up.

After offering his famous definition of convention in the third Appendix to the Second Enquiry (paragraphs 7-8), Hume adds a note suggesting that this "theory concerning the origin of property, and consequently of justice, is, in the main, the same with that hinted at and adopted by Grotius," (De jure belli & pacis. Lib. ii. cap. 2. §2. art. 4 & 5.) which he then quotes in Latin. There are four peculiarities pertaining to the passage from Grotius that Hume quotes.

First, throughout it his writings, Hume himself had explicitly denied that property had its origin in an explicit/verbal convention (that is, social contract), whereas Grotius explicitly allows that this is a possible source: "Simul discimus, quomodo res in proprietatem iverint; non animi actu solo, neque enim scire alii poterant, quid alii suum esse vellent, ut eo abstinerent, & idem velle plures poterant; sed pacto quodam aut expresso, ut per divisionem, aut tacito, ut per occupationem." (emphasis added.) Yes, Grotius does more than hint at his preferred account of tacit contract of property, so I am not suggesting Hume gets this wrong.

But, second, as readers of Hume would have been quite aware that's developed by Locke (and Pufendorf). In fact, I have been arguing that Hume completely effaces how much of the distinctive details his own definition of convention (including that of property) is already present in Locke (recall here; here; and see here for slightly more scholarly version).

Third the passage from Grotius cited by Hume is utterly banal. He could have cited any number of ancient authors here (from Plato's Laws to Lucretius) as one can readily see in Pufendorf's Of the Law of Nature and Nations, Book IV, chapter IV, paragraphs viii-X.

In fact, in Book IV, chapter IV, paragraph IX Of the Law of Nature and Nations, Pufendorf had partially commented the very passage from Grotius that Hume quotes. I quote Pufendorf in Basil Kennett's translation (from the fourth, corrected 1729 edition which includes Barbeyrac's notes): 

Thus far Grotius is in the right, that were the first negative Communion to continue, without disturbing the general Peace, Men must live with great plainness and simplicity, contented to feed on what they found, to dwell in Caves, and either to go naked or to cover their Bodies with the Barks of Trees, and the Skins of Beasts: Whereas, if they grew more inclined to a Life of Elegance and Refinement, the Conveniences of which must be acquired by Diligence; there was a necessity of introducing distinct Properties. But when he adds, That this Communion might have lasted, had Men lived under the Influence of an eminent Charity and Friendship towards each other; he confounds negative Communion with positive; such as was observed by the Essenes of old, by the primitive Christians inhabiting Jerusalem, and by those who now follow an Ascetic Life: For this can never be constituted nor kept up, except amongst a few Persons, and those endued with singular Modesty and Goodness. When Men are scattered into different places, and fixed at a distance from each other, it would be a foolish Labour to gather all the Provision into one Heap, and to distribute it out of the common Mass. And where ever there is a great Multitude of People, many must of necessity be found, who through Injustice and Avarice, will refuse to maintain a due Equality, either in the Labour required for the getting of the Fruit, or afterwards in the Consumption of them. Plato insinuates as much as this, when he makes only Deities, and the Sons of Deities, Members of the Republic where he would have this Communion absolutely obtain. But 'tis idle to believe, that when Men were divided into numerous Families, they neither actually established, or had any design to establish such a Communion. Lastly, it's a true Remark of Grotius, That things were at first turned into Property, not by the bare Act of the Mind, or by Thought and inward inclination. For neither could others know what any Person intended to keep for his own, to direct them in abstaining from it, and besides, it was very possible that many should be Competitors for the fame thing. There was need therefore of some external Act of the Mind formal seisin [sign?],* which, that it might be capable of producing a Moral Effect, or an Obligation in others to forswear what each Man had thus taken for his peculiar, must necessarily have depended on the force of some precedent Covenant: When things which lay together in Common were to be parted amongst many, then the Business was transacted by express Covenant. But a tacit Covenant was sufficient, when Men fixed a Property in things which the first Dividers had left for waste. For we must suppose them to have agreed, that whatever in the primary Partition had not been assigned to any particular Owner, should belong to him who first took possession of it. [emphases in original; modernized spelling by ES]+

What's neat, given my present purposes, is that Pufendorf praises Grotius for exactly the passage that Hume cites as the origin of his own theory. In fact, Pufendorf's criticism of Grotius here also kind of anticipates Hume's account because Pufendorf implies that Grotius theory is too naïve: because Grotius' approach presuppose a too rosy picture of human nature ("singular Modesty and Goodness") and cannot scale up ("except amongst a few Persons"). That is, the question is, as Pufendorf shows, how can large-scale tacit social conventions be established among potentially self-regarding people? Pufendorf's own answer seems to be: through trial and error and habit/custom.

Building non-trivially on Locke (whose contribution is ignored), Hume's explicit answer is "through a sense of common interest; which sense each man feels in his own breast, which he remarks in his fellows, and which carries him, in concurrence with others, into a general plan or system of actions." This answer may seem to work if one allows, as Hume stipulates, that one generally benefits from the common interest.

However, Adam Smith recognizes that Hume's answer puts the cart before the horse, because it is not obvious how the common interest is recognized before the convention is relatively stable, and so Smith suggests that the convention itself originates in and is stabilized by drawing on our reactive attitudes (especially resentment and gratitude). But that story I have told elsewhere. 

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*A seisin is a possession of a fief. But it seems more likely that 'sign' is intended here in light of Pufendorf's account of the origin of social/moral entities.

+I thank Dario Perinetti for nudging me back to Pufendorf. And I thank Bart Wilson and Vernon Smith for emphasizing the importance (alongside Buckle and Haakonssen) of Pufendorf to the Scots.

On Newton's Refutation of the Mechanical Philosophy

In the recent philosophical reception of Newton there is an understandable tendency to focus on the inverse square law of universal gravitation. I don't mean to suggest this is the only such focus; arguably his views on Space have shaped -- through the good works of Stein and Earman -- also debates over spacetime theories. 

The effect of this telescoping has also impacted, I think, the way in which the debate between the mechanical and Newtonian philosophy has been understood. The former is said to posit a contact model in which contact between very small corpuscles explains a lot of observed phenomena. A typical mechanical philosopher creates a hypothetical model, a machine with pulleys and levers (etc.), that can make observed phenomena intelligible. In the mechanical philosophy, which itself was directed against a variety of Aristotelian and Scholastic projects, efficient causation -- once one of four canonical causes (including formal, final, and material) -- has achieved a privileged status.

The scholarly fascination with the status of action at a distance is, thus, readily explicable because it violates the very model of intelligibility taken for granted in the mechanical philosophy. As Newton notes in the General Scholium (first published in the 1713 second edition of the Principia), universal gravity "operates, not according to the quantity of the surfaces of the particles upon which it acts, (as mechanical causes use to do,) but according to the quantity of the solid matter which they contain, and propagates its virtue on all sides, to immense distances, decreasing always in the duplicate proportion of the distances." 

Before I get to the main point of today's post, I offer two asides. First, with its emphasis on hypothetical explanations, the mechanical philosophers (and here I use the term to cover people as diverse as Beeckman, Descartes, Boyle, and Huygens) also exhibit a deep strain of skepticism about the very possibility of truly grasping nature's innards as it were. Spinoza's natura naturans and even Kant's ding-an-sich are the enduring expressions of this strain of skepticism (allowing that Kant is much less a mechanical philosopher). To put this as a serious joke: the PSR is, thus, not an act of intellectual hubris, but a self-limitation of the knower when it comes to fundamental ontology. Second, by showing that there is something wholly unintelligible about the way motion is supposed to be transferred from one body to the other (Essay 2.23.28), Locke, who gets so little credit among contemporary philosophers, had already imploded the pretensions of the mechanical philosophy on conceptual grounds.  Okay, so much for set up.

The mechanical philosophers were not so naïve to think that models that relied on mere impulse, matter in motion, could create hypothetical models of sufficient complexity to provide hypothetical explanations of the phenomena. This is especially a problem because the mechanical philosophers posited a homogeneous matter. So that in addition to matter and motion, they posited size and shape not merely as effects of motion, but also as key explanatory factors in the hypothetical models of visible phenomena (this can be seen in Descartes, Gassendi, and Boyle, whose "The Origin of Forms and Qualities according to the Corpuscular Philosophy" (1666), I take as a canonical statement of the mechanical philosophy). So that the mechanical philosophy is committed to privileging (to echo a felicitous phrase by Biener and Smeenk [here; and here]) geometric features of bodies.

Even leaving aside the inverse square law and its universal scope, Newton's experimental work on gravity demolished a key feature of the mechanical philosophy: size and shape are irrelevant to understand gravity. I quote from Henry Pemberton's View of Sir Isaac Newton's Philosophy (1728):

It will be proper in this place to observe concerning the power of gravity, that its force upon any body does not at all depend upon the shape of the body; but that it continues constantly the same without any variation in the same body, whatever change be made in the figure of the body: and if the body be divided into any number of pieces, all those pieces shall weigh just the same, as they did, when united together in one body: and if the body be of a uniform contexture, the weight of each piece will be proportional to its bulk. This has given reason to conclude, that the power of gravity acts upon bodies in proportion to the quantity of matter in them. Whence it should follow, that all bodies must fall from equal heights in the same space of time. And as we evidently see the contrary in feathers and such like substances, which fall very slowly in comparison of more solid bodies; it is reasonable to suppose, that some other cause concurs to make so manifest a difference. This cause has been found by particular experiments to be the air. --1.2.24 [emphasis added]

Pemberton (who was the editor of the third, 1726 edition of the Principia) goes on to give Boyle's famous vacuum experiments with falling feathers and stones as evidence for this argument. That is, Pemberton uses Boyle's experimental work to refute Boyle's mechanical philosophy. 

Now, in the Principia, references to Boyle's experiment got added only to the (1713) second edition in two highly prominent places: Cotes added a reference to it in his editor's introduction and Newton added a reference to it in the General Scholium at the end of the book. In both cases Boyle's experiment is used as a kind of illustration for the claim that without air resistance falling bodies are equally accelerated and for the plausibility of positing an interstellar vacuum. That is, if one reads the Principia superficially (by looking at prominent material at the front and end), it seems as if Newton and Boyle have converging natural philosophies.

Of course, neither Pemberton nor Newton rely exclusively on Boyle's vacuum experiment to make the point that shape and size (or geometry) is not a significant causal factor when it comes to gravity. The key work is done by pendulum experiments with different metals. (These can be found in Book II of the Principia, which is often skipped, although he drives the point home in Book III, Prop. 6 of Principia.) These show that quantity of matter is more fundamental than shape. And, crucially, shape & size and quantity of matter need not be proportional to or proxies of each other. This fact was by no means obvious, and at the start of the Principia. even Newton offers, as Biener and Smeenk have highlighted, a kind of geometric conception of quantity of matter in his first definition before suggesting that 'quantity of matter' is proportional to weight (and indicating his pendulum experiments as evidence thereof).

Let me wrap up. What's important here is that even if Newton had been wrong about the universal nature of the inverse square law, he showed that the mechanical philosophy cannot account for the experimentally demonstrated features of terrestrial (and planetary) gravity. (So, that the mechanical philosophy is not a natural way to understand Galilean fall.) And this means that in addition to Locke's conceptual claim, Newton shows that the mechanical philosophy's emphasis on just one kind of efficient causation, by way of contact, is not sufficient to explain the system of nature. 

What I say here is not surprising to students of Newton. But it's also not really much emphasized. To be sure, Newton, too, accepted a kind of homogeneous matter, but rather than its size and figure, he showed that an abstract quantity (mass) is more salient. Of course, how to understand mass in Newton's philosophy opens new questions, for as Ori Belkind has argued it should not be taken as a property of matter, but rather as a measure.

 

 

The Aristotelian Causes in Hume

When by natural principles we [humans] are led to advance those ends, which a refined and enlightened reason would recommend to us, we are very apt to impute to that reason, as to their efficient cause, the sentiments and actions by which we advance those ends, and to imagine that to be the wisdom of man, which in reality is the wisdom of God. Upon a superficial view, this cause seems sufficient to produce the effects which are ascribed to it; and the system of human nature seems to be more simple and agreeable when all its different operations are in this manner deduced from a single principle.---Adam Smith The Theory of Moral Sentiments 2.2.3.5

Yesterday, I noted that one way to understand Hume's significance to our conceptualization of causation is two-fold: first, that he whittled down four Aristotelian causes to just one kind of cause (previously known as 'efficient causation'); and, second, that he is the source of the modern conception of causation by offering a counterfactual definition of it in the first Enquiry. Hume is also taken to be the source of our modern discussion of convention, (recall here) although a very good argument can be made that Hume is greatly indebted to Locke (see also this more recent post and this one as a follow up). In today's post I suggest that Hume's account of convention itself is greatly indebted to the Aristotelian causes. Let me explain by first re-quoting a familiar passage from Hume: 

But if by convention be meant a sense of common interest; which sense each man feels in his own breast, which he remarks in his fellows, and which carries him, in concurrence with others, into a general plan or system of actions, which tends to public utility; it must be owned, that, in this sense, justice arises from human conventions. For if it be allowed (what is, indeed, evident) that the particular consequences of a particular act of justice may be hurtful to the public as well as to individuals; it follows, that every man, in embracing that virtue, must have an eye to the whole plan or system, and must expect the concurrence of his fellows in the same conduct and behaviour. Did all his views terminate in the consequences of each act of his own, his benevolence and humanity, as well as his self-love, might often prescribe to him measures of conduct very different from those, which are agreeable to the strict rules of right and justice.

In the posts linked above I argued that Hume's analysis of convention has eight parts (most also to be found in Locke's Second Treatise and the Essay):

1. a sense of common interest
2. felt in each person's breast;
3. It (viz, (i)) is observed in others;
4. this fact (the existence of (i&iii) creates collaboration & reliable expectations;
5. the collaboration is structured in non-trivial ways;
6. and this has good consequences or positive externalities for society.
7.  A Humean convention is explicitly contrasted with practices founded in explicit promises and/or in practice regulated by formal governmental law. In addition,
8.  the process (I-III) need not be verbalized at all. It can be entirely tacit.

I call I-VIII: ‘the Humean template,’ and they are jointly sufficient, although (VII) is not necessary.

Now, the Humean template has quite a few moving parts. And given that in Locke the Humean template is used but, as far I am aware, not explicitly analyzed it's worth asking to what degree he would have been fully conscious of the Humean template. It's always a risk with the kind of structuralist analysis I offer here that it is merely a projection of the historian onto an earlier text. Even if that were so it can still be illuminating, of course, but to use the 'Humean template' about Locke would be straightforward anachronism (albeit useful anachronism).

But even though Locke does not explicitly analyze the Humean template, i don't think it's a mere projection on my part for three reasons (the first two of which outlined in the linked posts): first, as I realized by reflecting on work by Martin Lenz (Socializing Minds) Locke is clearly responding to lacunae in Puffendorf's account of the origin and stability of conventions. Second, the Humean template can be found in the second Treatise and the Essay (and is evoked later in the Essay). These two reasons are internal to Locke's project.

In addition, third, we can discern the portfolio of Aristotle's four causes in the Humean template. For, (VI) is the final cause(s) of a convention.  And (I) is the formal cause. In addition, (II-V) are the efficient and material causes of the convention. I mix these causes here because jointly they tie the formal and final cause together in the workings of the convention.

If Locke's use of the Humean template presupposes the Aristotelian causes then it's also no surprise that he doesn't need to offer an explicit analysis of the Humean template. His readers would have noticed it without his saying so. In Hume, the template is made explicit precisely because a reader familiar with Hume's philosophy cannot take for granted that Hume would draw on the non-efficient Aristotelian causes.

That (VI) is a final cause strikes me as uncontroversial. But it is surprising to find it in Hume, who is really an explicit and implicit critic of final causes (see here also for references). Of course, in virtue of providing the mechanism for its functionality one may well say that the Humean template naturalizes or presupposes a naturalized teleology. One may also claim that in human affairs, a certain kind of intentionality and goal directed is inelimenable.

The real question here is to what degree the common interest that a tacit convention secures is fully foreseaable and articulable ahead of time. For example, Adam Smith famously criticized the deployment of the Humean template in Hume's account of the origin of justice in circumstances that echo a state of nature because Hume's account seems to presuppose awareness of the final cause, or at least assume common interest, in a context where this sense of unity or mutual loyalty, seems unlikely. (See here for the full story.)

The passage at the top of the post is near the conclusion of Smith's diagnosis of the error in Hume. Interestingly enough, in Part II of the Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind, Dugald Stewart notes Smith's criticism of Hume, and quotes the passage in order to illustrate "a common error," which Stewart associates with the "dangerous" revitalisation of utilitarianism (he explicitly discusses Paley and Godwin in context). Stewart praises Adam Smith because "he always treats separately of their final causes, and of the mechanism, as he calls it, by which nature accomplishes the effect; and he has even been at pains to point out to his successors the great importance."

To be sure, Smith's criticism does not touch all instances of Hume's use of the Humean template. For, in some contexts the common interest is knowable even known and the efficient and material causes of the Humean template can do their work without presupposing that all the benefits from the convention are presupposed in the mechanism that gives rise to the convention or that these benefits are or would have to be obscure to the agents involved. 

This problem does not even arise in Locke. For, of course, the natural reading of much of Locke's writings is that he embraces a God given providential order. (But recall this post for the debate.) So, in Locke the use of the Humean template is completely natural and without a blemish of inconsistency.* 

Pufendorf and Locke on Tacit Consent (in language and money)

But that the Nature of Discourse may be more throughly understood, it must first be known, that there is a two-fold Obligation respecting Discourse, whether exprest with the Voice, or written in Characters. The first is, that those who make use of the same Language, are obliged to apply such certain Words to such certain Things, according as Custom has made them to signify in each Language. For since neither any Words nor any particular Strokes form’d into Letters can naturally denote any certain Thing (otherwise all Languages and Characters for writing would be the same; and hence the Use of the Tongue would be to no purpose if every Man might call every Thing by what Name he pleas’d;) it is absolutely necessary among those who speak the same Language, that there be a tacit Agreement among them, that this certain Thing shall be so, or so call’d, and not otherwise. So that unless an uniform Application of Words be agreed upon, ’twill be impossible for one Man to gather the Meaning of another from his Talk. By virtue then of this tacit Compact, every Man is bound in his common Discourse to apply his Words to that Sense, which agrees with the receiv’d Signification thereof in that Language: From whence also it follows, that albeit a Man’s Sentiments may differ from what he expresses in Words, yet in the Affairs of Human Life he must be look’d upon as intending what he says, tho’, as was said, perhaps his inward Meaning be the clear contrary. For since we cannot be inform’d of another’s Mind otherwise than by outward Signs, all Use of Discourse would be to no purpose, if by mental Reservations, which any Man may form as he lists, it might be in his power to elude what he had declar’d by Signs usually accepted to that end.--Pufendorf, Samuel and Barbeyrac, Jean. The Whole Duty of Man According to the Law of Nature (1673, 2003). Liberty Fund, 1673.  pp. 120-121

As regular readers know I have been directed toward Pufendorf's account of tacit consent because of my reading of Martin Lenz's entertaining and stimulating Socializing Minds (recall this post, especially; but also this one). Lenz (pp. 138-139) explicitly quotes the passage above, and notes four key anticipations of Locke in Pufendorf:

• • the characterisation of language as the great instrument of society,
  • the anti-naturalist conventionalism and the argument that if language were naturally significant, there would be just one language
  • the use of customary outward signs for inward meaning
  • the tacit agreement that binds everyone to apply words in accordance with the received use (receptus usus).--Socializing Minds, p. 138

Lenz is surely right about this, and I accept his contention that Locke's account of the conventionality of language (especially at Essay 3.2.8 and 3.11.11) is inspired by Pufendorf's  De Officio hominis civis, or at least that it would have evoked it to contemporary readers then.

So, this raises the question to what degree what I call recall 'the Humean template' for analyzing convention is already present in Pufendorf. The elements of the Humean template are: (i) a sense of common interest (i*) felt in each person's breast; (ii) and it (that is, (i)) observed in others; (iii), this fact (the existence of (i&ii) creates collaboration; (iv) the collaboration is structured in non-trivial ways; (v) and this has good consequences or positive externalities for society. (I avoid the language of 'utility' to avoid issues pertaining to utilitarianism.) And (vi) a Humean convention is contrasted with practices founded in promises and in practice regulated by formal governmental law. In addition, (vii), the process (i-iii) need not be verbalized at all. It can be entirely tacit. And I argued (recall) that Locke articulates the Humean template at Essay 2.28.10 in the context of describing how moral terms are structurally the same in each language even though they can refer to locally different moral behaviors and characters/character-traits. (And that we can also find (recall) the template in the Second Treatise, paragraph 50 in his account of the value off money.)

If we then look at the quoted passage from De Officio, we can read that Pufendorf treats the convention in terms of an existing "custom." And while this is fully compatible with the elements of the Humean template, we are left without an account how the custom could arrise. That's to say while Pufendorf makes, as Lenz notes, the obligatory character of the convention quite clear, he leaves its origin quite mysterious. For, earlier, Pufendorf defines custom as "the frequent Repetition of Actions of the same kind does also incline the Will to do certain Things" (pp. 34-35). But why linguistic practices get repeated in particular patterns is simply contingent now. 

This absence of a mechanism of how tacit consent arises is actually notable when Pufendorf explicitly treats of the practice:

Consent is usually made known by outward Signs, as, by Speaking, Writing, a Nod, or the like; tho’ sometimes it may also be plainly intimated without any of them, according to the Nature of the thing and other Circumstances. So Silence in some Cases, and attended with some Circumstances, passes for a Sign expressing Consent. To this may be attributed those tacit Contracts, where we give not our formal Consent by the Signs generally made use of among Men; but the Nature of the Business, and other Circumstances make it fairly supposable. Thus frequently in the principal Contract, which is express, another is included which is tacit, the Nature of the Case so requiring: And it is usual, in most Covenants that are made, that some tacit Exceptions and imply’d Conditions must of necessity be understood.--pp. 111-112

Pufendorf is undoubtedly correct that even in explicit covenants lots of tacit exceptions and implied conditions are presupposed and understood. (In a later passage he treats as plainly resulting "from the Nature of the Thing." (p. 127)) That there is often a social scaffolding on which a formal contract is built is pretty much a shared insight of all critics of Hobbes. But how we should think of the character and sources of this 'necessity' is left opaque in Pufendorf.

I don't mean to suggest Pufendorf never has a mechanism when he is discussing custom. So, for example, when it comes to price formation of prices in the market place (so called vulgar prices) he writes the following. 

But the Vulgar Price, which is not fix’d by the Laws, admits of a certain Latitude, within the Compass whereof more or less may be, and often is, either taken or given, according to the Agreement of the Persons dealing; which yet for the most part, goes according to the Custom of the Market. Where commonly there is Regard had to the Trouble and Charges which the Tradesmen generally are at, in the bringing home and managing their Commodities, and also after what manner they are bought or sold, whether by Wholesale or Retail. Sometimes also on a sudden the Common Price is alter’d by reason of the Plenty or Scarcity of Buyers, Money, or the Commodity. For the Scarcity of Buyers and of Money, (which on any particular Account may happen) and the Plenty of the Commodity, may be a Means of diminishing the Price thereof. On the other hand, the Plenty of Buyers and of Money, and the Scarcity of the Commodity, inhanses the same. Thus as the Value of a Commodity is lessen’d, if it wants a Buyer, so the Price is augmented when the Possessor is solicited to sell what otherwise he would not have parted with. Lastly, it is likewise to be regarded, whether the Person offers ready Money, or desires Time for Payment; for Allowance of Time is Part of the Price.--pp. 143-144

Here it is quite clear that the customary price itself reflects underlying costs and even disutility of production and procurement ("the Trouble and Charges which the Tradesmen generally are at, in the bringing home and managing their Commodities") and also reflects supply/demand conditions ("plenty or scarcity"/"plenty of buyers...wants a buyer") in the market-place as well as what we would call inflation, but in Pufendorf's time is felt in terms of the availability of coins [say because the local gold/silver/copper value of coins has made it attractive to melt them down or export them], or "ready money." Interestingly enough buying on credit ("time for payment") is not treated as pure equivalent for buying with coin, presumably not just in virtue of the delay ("allowance of time"), but also the implied risk.  Here Pufendorf has a relatively clear account of the mechanism by which the vulgar price can change, but again, he has no account of how it can become customary (except that conditions  of change are not operative).

I have not done an exhaustive survey of Pufendorf. (You go read, Of the Law of Nature and Nations: Eight Books!--Seriously, I welcome suggestions.) But Locke deserves some credit for recognizing that Pufendorf's account of convention and tacit contract left too much unexplained. And while I have not defended the adequacy of the Humean template, the fact that Locke adopts it in non-trivial ways is no small advance over Pufendorf's analysis.

Lenz and Locke (and Hume) on Semantic Convention

Thirdly, it is not enough that men have ideas, determined ideas, for which they make these signs stand; but they must also take care to apply their words as near as may be to such ideas as common use has annexed them to. For words, especially of languages already framed, being no man's private possession, but the common measure of commerce and communication, it is not for any one at pleasure to change the stamp they are current in, nor alter the ideas they are affixed to; or at least, when there is a necessity to do so, he is bound to give notice of it. Men's intentions in speaking are, or at least should be, to be understood; which cannot be without frequent explanations, demands, and other the like incommodious interruptions, where men do not follow common use. Propriety of speech is that which gives our thoughts entrance into other men's minds with the greatest ease and advantage: and therefore deserves some part of our care and study, especially in the names of moral words. The proper signification and use of terms is best to be learned from those who in their writings and discourses appear to have had the clearest notions, and applied to them their terms with the exactest choice and fitness. This way of using a man's words, according to the propriety of the language, though it have not always the good fortune to be understood; yet most commonly leaves the blame of it on him who is so unskilful in the language he speaks, as not to understand it when made use of as it ought to be.--Locke An Essay Concerning Human(e) Understanding, 3.11.11

In his entertaining and instructive book, Socializing Minds (recall yesterday's post), Martin Lenz calls attention to (and partially quotes) the passage quoted above. For Lenz the passage describes what he (Lenz) calls the "acceptance conditions" as "consolidated by other members of the speech community." (p. 130; see also. p. 131.) Lenz emphasizes, correctly, that for Locke the meaning of words is, in part, established by their proper common use. There is -- as Locke's use of 'propriety' signals -- something normative about this 'proper'. And this normativity is the effect of the desire to be understood and the fact that the correct usage (see below on 'speaking properly') has already been established.

Of course, at 3.11.11, the situation is a bit complicated because Locke defines 'propriety of speech' that 'which gives our thoughts entrance into other men's minds with the greatest ease and advantage.''And the 'advantage' here is to us (the speaker) and not to the community. So, that Locke is not merely describing acceptance conditions in 3.11.11 (although I do not deny that this is involved in the proper significantion and use of terms), but also the rthe art of persuasion (again not the role of skill in speaking) here. So, in context, Locke is not merely discussing acceptance conditions, but the role of such acceptance conditions in (a poetics of) rhetoric. (I don't think Lenz needs to disagree with this, but he doesn't mention it; and later in the book (p. 174) Lenz draws a a perhaps too sharp contrast between Locke and Hume on the significance of rhetoric to their account of language.)

The contrast between private property and a common measure (about which more below) that Locke invokes (at 3.11.11), of course, echoes his treatment of convention. And Lenz had prepared the reader to notice it not just by quoting these words, but because earlier he had discussed Locke's account of convention and tacit consent when he introduced the idea of 'speaker consolidation' (p. 110) which is how linguistic conventions are themselves established and (now I quote Lenz again) "set the standard for use." (p. 111). Lenz appeals to Locke's earlier account at 3.2.8, which I quote in full:

Words, by long and familiar use, as has been said, come to excite in men certain ideas so constantly and readily, that they are apt to suppose a natural connexion between them. But that they signify only men's peculiar ideas, and that BY A PERFECT ARBITRARY IMPOSITION, is evident, in that they often fail to excite in others (even that use the same language) the same ideas we take them to be signs of: and every man has so inviolable a liberty to make words stand for what ideas he pleases, that no one hath the power to make others have the same ideas in their minds that he has, when they use the same words that he does. And therefore the great Augustus himself, in the possession of that power which ruled the world, acknowledged he could not make a new Latin word: which was as much as to say, that he could not arbitrarily appoint what idea any sound should be a sign of, in the mouths and common language of his subjects. It is true, common use, by a tacit consent, appropriates certain sounds to certain ideas in all languages, which so far limits the signification of that sound, that unless a man applies it to the same idea, he does not speak properly: and let me add, that unless a man's words excite the same ideas in the hearer which he makes them stand for in speaking, he does not speak intelligibly. But whatever be the consequence of any man's using of words differently, either from their general meaning, or the particular sense of the person to whom he addresses them; this is certain, their signification, in his use of them, is limited to his ideas, and they can be signs of nothing else.--John Locke An Essay Concerning Human(e) Understanding, 3.2.8

What's neat about Locke's account is that he inscribes his account of linguistic convention into his political theory in two explicit ways. First, and less significantly, he argues that once a linguistic convention is established even an absolute ruler has very limited power to tinker with it. In fact, Locke goes much further than this and has Augustus deny that he cannot innovate in language by stipulation. A moment's reflection does allow one to recognize that on Locke's account, Augustus' power allows one to corrupt (by force law) existing words and disassociate them from established ideas.* (This is a sufficiently common phenomenon in political speech that I will leave it to the reader to find some examples.)

Second, the linguistic convention the implied measure or the existing common use of words and its stability, in particular, rests, and this might be thought paradoxical, on the inviolable liberty each and every one of us has to make words stand for any of our ideas!  Notice, first, that this is a commitment to an egalitarianism of a sort that is akin to Locke's account of our relative status in the state of nature. Second, the analysis of the convention rests on a kind of methodological individualism. It is in virtue of the fact that 'naturally' all individuals have the power to innovate that Augustus is denied once the convention is up and running (in linguistic social life)! This fact (a kind of natural equality to innovate) is ground in the fact that 'naturally' we don't have access to each other's ideas (which are inacessible to others without some mediation of language or other signs).

What 3.2.8 adds is that convention isn't just needed for what Lenz calls speaker 'consolidation' or 'acceptance conditions' in making us adhere to pre-existing standards of use, but also helps explain why there can be different language communities. Because once there is (say) some geographic or political (or religious) distance between different language users, acceptance conditions can stabilize in locally different equilibria. Once they interact again (through trade or migration) these conditions may well shift given the needs of exchange and social persuasion. (From here, it's really a very small step to Adam Smith's account of certain kinds of language use as non-servile persuasion.)

Given all these appeals to property and credit in the passage(s) above, it is tempting (recall) to look at Locke's account of convention in the second Treatise. But today, I postpone this and focus on an earlier passage in the Essay, where Locke explicitly appeals to tacit consent. And this passage makes explicit (in the context of discussion moral terms) the role of convention in linguistic diversity:

Thirdly, the LAW OF OPINION OR REPUTATION. Virtue and vice are names pretended and supposed everywhere to stand for actions in their own nature right and wrong: and as far as they really are so applied, they so far are coincident with the divine law above mentioned. But yet, whatever is pretended, this is visible, that these names, virtue and vice, in the particular instances of their application, through the several nations and societies of men in the world, are constantly attributed only to such actions as in each country and society are in reputation or discredit. Nor is it to be thought strange, that men everywhere should give the name of virtue to those actions, which amongst them are judged praiseworthy; and call that vice, which they account blamable: since otherwise they would condemn themselves, if they should think anything right, to which they allowed not commendation, anything wrong, which they let pass without blame. Thus the measure of what is everywhere called and esteemed virtue and vice is this approbation or dislike, praise or blame, which, by a secret and tacit consent, establishes itself in the several societies, tribes, and clubs of men in the world: whereby several actions come to find credit or disgrace amongst them, according to the judgment, maxims, or fashion of that place. For, though men uniting into politic societies, have resigned up to the public the disposing of all their force, so that they cannot employ it against any fellow-citizens any further than the law of the country directs: yet they retain still the power of thinking well or ill, approving or disapproving of the actions of those whom they live amongst, and converse with: and by this approbation and dislike they establish amongst themselves what they will call virtue and vice.-- Locke An Essay Concerning Human(e) Understanding, 2.28.10

Locke here anticipates the Humean observation (in the appendix to the Second Enquiry) that there is remarkable stability in moral terminology while there is enormous diversity what the content (qua behavior or character) applies to. And this is an effect of the fact that the meta-ethical measure that regulates the local linguistic conventions just is local approval and disapproval (not again the role of credit here). 

Again, at 2.28.10 Locke uses the contrast with an explicit political social contract to illustrate the nature of the tacit convention. And he claims that this convention operates orthogonally to the official political social contract. And that there are practices of approval and disapproval that are not regulated by law, but by independent judgment presumably in light of one's interest (like/dislike/approbation) and evaluation of what is (to use Smithian language) praiseworthy. The point echoes Hobbes's and Spinoza's observation that the law cannot fully control (although certainly corrupt) the minds of the ruled, and these maintain a kind of informal credit economy (or score in a language game) that tracks local judgments of merit. So, here, too, we see that the privacy of ideas is presupposed to maintain the conventionality of the shared linguistic social world.

I am struck, anew, how much of Locke's account anticipates Hume's official treatment of a convention, which has (recall) seven (or eight) parts: (i) a sense of common interest (i*) felt in each person's breast; (ii) and it (that is, (i)) observed in others; (iii), this fact (the existence of (i&ii) creates collaboration; (iv) the collaboration is structured in non-trivial ways; (v) and this has good consequences or positive externalities for society. (I avoid the language of 'utility' to avoid issues pertaining to utilitarianism.) And (vi) a Humean convention is contrasted with practices founded in promises and in practice regulated by formal governmental law. In addition, (vii), the process (i-iii) need not be verbalized at all. It can be entirely tacit.

Of these, all are explicitly present except (i-ii), although (i*) is in Locke's account of linguistic conventions in the Essay (and so kind of entails (i)). And (ii-iii) are implied once the convention is up and running (as the example of Augustus illustrates). The fact that in his account of convention Locke embraces (i-vii), while being a bit ambigious about (i-iii) is as I noted (recall) also true of Locke's account of the conventions of property and money in the Second Treatise. So, that is to say, Locke has an internally consistent 'template' of what a convention is that he applies to a number of large scale social institutions, and this template anticipates in crucial ways Hume's account who refines it by making some features (and implied mechanisms of stability) more explicit. 

That's enough for today on this topic. TBC with a nod to Pufendorf.

 

Lenz's Contact Problem with some reflections on Condorcet and Rousseau

Especially early modern explanations seem to construe the mind as something that is tucked away in a body and thus inaccessible by other minds. If this is correct, how could we even begin to think of a way that my thoughts influence yours? Are there ways of transmission or other modes of influence between different minds? I would like to call this the contact problem. Intersubjective explanations, it seems, must specify ways in which one mind can affect another mind. As I will argue, at least some early modern philosophers addressed this problem and provided intersubjective accounts of the mind. What is more, they relied on different models of intersubjectivity. To present three different but crucial explanatory models, I will focus on Spinoza, Locke and Hume: Spinoza will be shown to opt for a metaphysical model, Locke as resorting to a linguistic model and Hume as relying on a medical model that combines assumptions about contagion and sympathy.
Before we take a brief look at these models, let us take a step back and look at the contact problem again. Taking human minds as individual units hidden inside a body suggests that a direct contact between minds is impossible. I can tell you what I think, but in doing so, it’s not my thought that is transmitted. Getting at the thought seems to require an inference on the part of the listener. By contrast, if I endorse a view of the mind that takes mental states to be ingrained in behaviour, such that my mental states are not hidden but part of behavioural patterns, then my mind does seem to be more directly accessible. It seems, then, that the contact problem poses an enormous obstacle for the former but not for the latter view of the mind. On this assumption, intersubjective explanations work well in a behavioural view of the mind but not on what has been called “mentalism”. Martin Lenz (2022) Socializing Minds: Intersubjectivity in Early Modern Philosophy (Oxford University Press), pp, 93-4 (emphases in original)*

I have to admit that when I first started to read Lenz's very entertaining Socializing Minds, I was a bit dubious about the so-called contact problem. It seemed to me, and sometimes still seems to me, an artifact of behaviorialism and some of Ryle's more dubious historiographic moves (which, alas, he was not immune to). But because Lenz's book is so much fun -- it mixes contemporary insights with very erudite and clearly written history of philosophy in refreshing ways easily moving between Avoerrism and memes-- I decided to revise my view. Reflecting on the contact problem is generative and so (by my lights) cannot be a mere artifact (which are sterile).

I have to admit that I don't understand why inference is thought to be a barrier to contact -- the contact problem seems to be rather the no unmediated contact problem --, but obviously for the contact problem to have real bite, by inference here (in this context) is meant something like 'not truth preserving' inference or distorting. And clearly it's true that many if not most early modern philosophers thought that language and other mechanisms of social contact are distorting of reality (and don't do full justice to our ideas of it). Lenz shows that despite this commitment, Spinoza, Locke, and Hume have different kinds of theories in which our minds are, de facto, dependant on other minds, although -- he may disagree with this -- the effect is that in interacting with others the vulnerability to embracing the false remains. (Perhaps, in Locke the vulnerability is also simultaneously the grounds for possibility of reaching some truths. About that some other time.)

Anyway, that the no contact problem seems so much an artificat of behavioralism made me wonder if one couldn't generate it in an alternative framework. This made me consider whether there are circumstances in which no contact is desirable. I immediately thought of Condorcet's Jury theorem which, formally, requires that voters do not communicate with each other and make up their own minds on a decision problem. Without such independence the result that (with rather weak assumptions about human nature) more folk do better than fewer would be unsurprising (and not so unsettling to the elitist and hierarchical mindset).+ Of course, the formation of Rousseau's general will also requires such independence.

Now, while Rousseau's account of the general will has non-trivial formal similarity with Condorcet's jury theorem -- and I would be amazed if it didn't shape Condorcet's thinking --, it is worth signaling that the nature of their independence pushes in different directions: (i) and skating over many interpretive disputes, in Rousseau's general will set up, independence is really designed to create a kind of impartiality not tainted by self-interest (and irrelevant personality features). And this is why this kind of independence is compatible with a kind of representative agent approach (familiar from, and perhaps an ultimate source of, Rawls' original position).

A representative agent approach would undermine the force of the Condorcet jury theorem; in it independence is really about a kind of authenticity of one's judgment. Other minds are corrupting (because they undermine independence). Now, I don't mean to deny that the previous two sentences are things Rousseau himself might say. I am just trying to track a conceptual distinction. (To be sure I think both directions have roots in Spinoza's debts to stoicism--but about that in a future post.) 

That is, the no contact problem is no problem in two contexts: first, one requires or needs authentic judgments that give each of us weight. That is, if one takes democracy seriously. (And lurking here are also protestant ideas about conscience that I have not touched upon above.) Second, one is dealing with a decision problem that is best handled by an impartial agent that represents (the true interests of us) all. That is, if one takes a certain species of objectivity/impartiality seriously. Put like that the two sources of the desirability of no contact seem to be a feature and not a bug of a certain conception of modern political life. And so, to put it as a serious joke, Wittgenstein and Ryle are untimely.

 

Hobson's Statecraft, World Federation and the Nature of his Racism

I have set the economic compulsion in the foreground, because in point of history it is the causa causans of the Imperialism that accompanies or follows.

In considering the ethics and politics of this interference, we must not be bluffed or blinded by critics who fasten on the palpable dishonesty of many practices of the gospel of “the dignity of labour” and “the mission of civilisation.” The real issue is whether, and under what circumstances, it is justifiable for Western nations to use compulsory government for the control and education in the arts of industrial and political civilisation of the inhabitants of tropical countries and other so-called lower races. Because Rhodesian mine-owners or Cuban sugar-growers stimulate the British or American Government to Imperialism by parading motives and results which do not really concern them, it does not follow that these motives under proper guidance are unsound, or that the results are undesirable.

There is nothing unworthy, quite the contrary, in the notion that nations which, through a more stimulative environment, have advanced further in certain arts of industry, politics, or morals, should communicate these to nations which from their circumstances were more backward, so as to aid them in developing alike the material resources of their land and the human resources of their people. Nor is it clear that in this work some “inducement, stimulus, or pressure” (to quote a well-known phrase), or in a single word, “compulsion,” is wholly illegitimate. Force is itself no remedy, coercion is not education, but it may be a prior condition to the operation of educative forces. Those, at any rate, who assign any place to force in the education or the political government of individuals in a nation can hardly deny that the same instrument may find a place in the civilisation of backward by progressive nations.

Assuming that the arts of “progress,” or some of them, are communicable, a fact which is hardly disputable, there can be no inherent natural right in a nation to refuse that measure of compulsory education which shall raise it from childhood to manhood in the order of nationalities. The analogy furnished by the education of a child is primâ facie a sound one, and is not invalidated by the dangerous abuses to which it is exposed in practice.

The real issue is one of safeguards, of motives, and of methods. What are the conditions under which a nation may help to develop the resources of another, and even apply some element of compulsion in doing so? The question, abstract as it may sound, is quite the most important of all practical questions for this generation. For, that such development will take place, and such compulsion, legitimate or illegitimate, be exercised, more and more throughout this new century in many quarters of this globe, is beyond the shadow of a doubt. It is the great practical business of the century to explore and develop, by every method which science can devise, the hidden natural and human resources of the globe.

That the white Western nations will abandon a quest on which they have already gone so far is a view which does not deserve consideration. That this process of development may be so conducted as to yield a gain to world-civilisation, instead of some terrible débâcle in which revolted slave races may trample down their parasitic and degenerate white masters, should be the supreme aim of far-sighted scientific statecraft.---Hobson (1902) Imperialism, A Study, Chapter 7, "Imperialism and the Lower Races,"

Duncan Bell once pointed out to me that while Hobson is a genuine and fierce critic of really existing imperialism, he is in favor of what we now call white 'settler colonialism' (with this qualification that the colony needs to occupy is thinly occupied). In addition, Hobson clearly argues for a European federal entity that, if it can be properly designed, will take on global responsibilities, and, in turn, even be the foundation for a world-federation.

One of these potential global responsibilities is to engage in a kind of eugenics (which Hobson calls echoing Pearson, 'rational selection'): "If progress is helped by substituting rational selection for the struggle for life within small groups, and afterwards within the larger national groups, why may we not extend the same mode of progress to a federation of European States, and finally to a world-federation?" As he puts it, "Biology furnishes no reason for believing that the competition among nations must always remain a crude physical struggle, and that the substitution of “rational” for “natural” selection among individual members of a nation cannot be extended to the selection of nations and of races." 

Now, in general when an author freely uses language of 'lower races' and simultaneously argues for eugenics, it's safe to conclude one is in the company of scientific racism. And there are plenty of passages in Imperialism that if quoted in isolation in today's climate would lead to cancelation on a college campus and a lucrative substack column. Even so, throughout Imperialism Hobson engages in immanent criticism, but frustratingly to the modern reader, he doesn't always carefully distinguish between his own position and the one he is criticizing by way of, say a reductio. (His work seems like a good one to motivate use/mention and scare-quote techniques.) And so selective quotation from Imperialism may mislead about his position.

So, for example, I strongly doubt Hobson's race theory, such as it is, involves commitment to a fixed racial hierarchy. That's actually visible in the final paragraph of the passage quoted above, where Hobson warns against the possibility that a certain form of hegemonic rule engenders the conditions for racial 'degeneration.' (In larger context he suggests such degeneration seems to be the fate of imperial rulers on a regular basis.) And, in fact, that point is preceded in the quoted passage by the suggestion that any present advantage is the effect of "a more stimulative environment" (that is, their institutions and, perhaps, climate) not their stock. Near the end of the chapter, Hobson leaves no doubt that existing "white rulers of these lower races" is "parasitic." So, if Hobson were to believe his own racial theory, he is effectively predicting the demise of white stock!

In fact, Hobson tends to draw from Pearson's eugenics all kinds of conclusions that unsettle the very desirability of fixed racial hierarchy. For example, near the end of part I of the chapter on "The Scientific Defence of Imperialism," Hobson deserves with delicious irony, "Whether a nation or a society of nations will ever proceed as far as this, or, going farther, will attempt the fuller art of stirpiculture, encouraging useful “crosses” of families or races, may be matter of grave doubt; but if the maintenance and improvement of the national stock ever warranted such experiments, we are entitled to insist that logic would justify the application of the same rule in the society of nations." That is to say, Hobson suggests that if breeding (rational "stirpiculture") of populations were to take off as social policy (which, notice, he doubts), then international racial hybridity would be a natural and desirable outcome. In general, racial supremacists get rather anxious about such hybridity.

I don't mean to suggest Hobson is not a supremacist of sorts. In the passage I quoted at the top of the post he clearly implies that some of the conquered peoples in Africa and the Caribbean can be likened to children. (I put it like this because in a later chapter on "Imperialism in Asia," he clearly marks off Asian civilizations from the discussion that preceded it.) And, in fact, his position evokes John Stuart Mill's in which a proper imperialism would guide the lower civilizations. But the tendency to treat other peoples as childlike and uncivilized is one of Locke's really terrible ideas (see Essay 1.2.27) that badly shaped European intellectual culture (despite (recall) contestation of folk like Adam Smith).

Unlike, say, Mill, Hobson offers no defense of existing imperial practice (and when he praises individuals he tends to praise their intentions not the outcomes). In so far as he offers a normative account of statecraft it is one that would generate a world civilization in which the lower civilizations end up as 'developed' as the ones that understand themselves as higher in his time. Now, I am not interested in defending Hobson if only because he seems unambiguously open to the legitimacy of forced/compulsory economic development even if only when the proper conditions obtain for it.

But Hobson goes on to suggest that in practice these proper conditions simply do not exist:

While it is generally agreed that the progress of world-civilisation is the only valid moral ground for political interference with “lower races,” and that the only valid evidence of such progress is found in the political, industrial, and moral education of the race that is subjected to this interference, the true conditions for the exercise of such a “trust” are entirely lacking.

The actual situation is, indeed, replete with absurdity. Each imperialist nation claims to determine for itself what are the lower races it will take under its separate protection, or agrees with two or three neighbours to partition some huge African tract into separate spheres of influence; the kind of civilisation that is imposed is never based on any sober endeavour to understand the active or latent progressive forces of the subject race, and to develop and direct them, but is imported from Europe in the shape of set arts of industry, definite political institutions, fixed religious dogmas, which are engrafted on alien institutions. In political government progress is everywhere avowedly sacrificed to order, and both alike are subservient to the quick development of certain profitable trading industries, or to the mere lust of territorial aggrandisement. The recurrent quarrels of the armed white nations, each insisting on his claim to take up the white man’s burden in some fresh quarter of the globe; the trading companies seeking to oust each other from a new market, the very missionaries competing by sects and nationalities for “mission fields,” and using political intrigue and armed force to back their special claims, present a curious commentary upon the “trust for civilisation” theory. 

Now, one might think this is the end of the matter. But, anticipating Mises (recall), it turns out Hobson goes on to advocate for a system that came to be associated with trust/mandate system of the league of nations: "until some genuine international council exists, which shall accredit a civilised nation with the duty of educating a lower race, the claim of a “trust” is nothing else than an impudent act of self-assertion."  And while he recognizes that "one may well be sceptical about the early feasibility of any such representative council," he clearly seems to think it would be a proper function of a well functioning world federation. Why such a council would escape the problems he diagnoses as "inherent in the nature of...domination" is left unclear. As I have suggested elsewhere, it seems that such a position was respectable among left and right liberals until the 1940s.

Hazony on Conservatism, Part IV

[S]uch expressions of traditional Anglo-American nationalism and public religion would soon come to an end. In the wake of the Second World War, America, Britain, and other Western countries underwent a dramatic change in self-understanding. Somehow, a war fought to defend God-fearing democracy inadvertently ended up destroying the religious foundations of the victorious Western nations. Within a few years, the God-fearing democracies came to see themselves as liberal democracies, and liberalism replaced Christianity as the perceived source of whatever was good about America and other Western nations.
We can see the beginning of this change immediately after the Second World War in the American Supreme Court’s determination, in Everson v. Board of Education (1947), that state governments could no longer support and encourage religion—whether a particular religion or any religion. In theory, this decision is deduced from the First Amendment of the Constitution as applied through the Fourteenth. But the Fourteenth Amendment, passed after the Civil War to protect black Americans from violations of their right to due process under the law, had by this point been on the books for seventy-nine years without anyone supposing that support for religion by the states was a violation of anyone’s right to due process.
What had changed in the interim was not the letter of the law, but the narrative framework through which the justices of the Supreme Court, as representatives of elite opinion, understood the relationship between Christianity and the American nation. That there had been such a change is obvious from the fact that, in the aftermath of the Second World War, Justice Hugo Black felt he needed to provide a new story of the American founding—one broadly hostile to government encouragement of religion. Among other things, he writes:

It is not inappropriate briefly to review the background and environment of the period in which that constitutional language was fashioned and adopted. A large proportion of the early settlers of this country came here from Europe to escape the bondage of laws which compelled them to support and attend government favored churches. The centuries immediately before and contemporaneous with the colonization of America had been filled with turmoil, civil strife, and persecutions, generated in large part by established sects determined to maintain their absolute political and religious supremacy. With the power of government supporting them, at various times and places, Catholics had persecuted Protestants, Protestants had persecuted Catholics, Protestant sects had persecuted other Protestant sects, Catholics of one shade of belief had persecuted Catholics of another shade of belief, and all of these had from time to time persecuted Jews. In efforts to force loyalty to whatever religious group happened to be on top and in league with the government of a particular time and place, men and women had been fined, cast in jail, cruelly tortured, and killed.

In Black’s retelling, religion is no longer the source of American democracy and independence, as it had been in Roosevelt’s State of the Union address eight years earlier. On the contrary, religion is now portrayed as a danger and a threat to democratic freedoms. Indeed, the very form of the American Constitution is now said to have resulted from the excesses of religion that drove the first Europeans to settle in America. It is in the Everson decision, in other words, that we find some of the first intimations of the transition from a God-fearing democracy to a liberal democracy: one in which religion is perceived as being so great a threat that the federal government must act to safeguard every child in the country from being taught religion in a publicly supported school.--Yoram Hazony (2022) Conservatism: A Rediscovery, Part III" pp. 264-266,

This is the fourth in a series of posts on Hazony's Conservatism (recall the first one here; here the second one on Hazony's post-feminist conception of the family; and here the third one on Hazony's account of statecraft). In this series, I mix exposition with immanent critique (even if sometimes I am bad at hiding my own skeptical liberal commitments). 

The quoted material is part of a chapter, "Liberal Hegemony and Cold War Conservatism," that introduces Hazony's intellectual  history of the post WWII conservative 'fusionist' movement. It has major treatments of Russell Kirk, Hayek, Leo Strauss, and Frank Meyer. (Burnham is notably missing.) The first of these is, in many ways, closest to Hazony, but Kirk's defense of states' rights (and the racialism supporting it) are criticized by Hazony. (As I have noted, before Hazony is a fierce critic of ethnic and genetic accounts of nationalism.) The latter three are all treated as liberals, and criticized for their one-sided defense of individual freedom. The cumulative effect of the chapter is, to simplify, to show how the intellectual, 'fusionist' movement organized by and around Buckley's National Review somewhat unintentionally contributed to 'liberal hegemony.' For present purposes what matters is a common thread in these thinkers that in different degrees they are willing 'to privatize' (a phrase Hazony uses in context of Meyer) religion to a relatively domestic sphere.

Now, Hazony treats World War II as a major rupture, or a triggering cause, for the retreat from public religion Stateside. (He resists the temptation to throw this on the sixties youth culture.) His explanation for this change is that elite opinion -- shocked and shamed by the racial Nazi atrocities -- correctly retreated from Jim Crow and other forms of state enforced, domestic racial oppression, and then mistakenly treated other forms of state sanctioned distinctions as on par with the racial kind. By contrast, Hazony does not "believe these aims are substantively similar at all. However, it is important to recognize that the U.S. Supreme Court did fid them comparable. Indeed, it is fair to say that these two goals—erasing distinctions based on race and religion—were the principal engines driving the establishment of liberal-democratic government in America after the Second World War." (267) And this led to the mistake of "instead of engaging in a focused effort to assist black Americans in overcoming the racial barriers that had been placed in their way, the constitutional revolution of the 1960s set out to reconstruct America in the image of the social-contract theories of Enlightenment rationalist philosophy." (270)

My interest here is not to contest the historical accuracy of this narrative. But it is worth noting an important irony. As I have noted before, Hazony treats Locke as the key 'rationalist,' who is foundational to the 'Enlightenment liberalism' (and 'liberal democracy') that Hazony treats as a rival to his own conservative/federalist nationalism. And Hazony implies throughout his argument that the Lockean liberals are to blame for the retreat of public religion. The irony, of course, is that Locke thought only protestants ought to be tolerated, and that Catholics and atheists not. And while Jews could be tolerate in Locke's day, and in the American Founders' era, the thrust of his argument is that no such toleration is possible once there is a Jewish state (due to possibility of divided loyalty, which is the argument to reject toleration of Catholics).

The point here is not that Locke was a bigot, or even to suggest that the "spirit of old the Protestant republicanism" Hazony suddenly extolls in the context of Reagan's presidency, is rather Lockean in character (and so there is something off in Hazony's conceptual framework), but rather to look again at Justice Black's rationale (and by implication of those American elites) to change the relationship between 'government 'and 'Christianity.' And to point to a surprising equivocation in Hazony's position in which 'Christianity' is treated as a kind term and 'religion' or 'religious practices' a kind of synonym for it. We see this in how Hazony advocates for what he calls 'conservative democracy. I first quote the principle on which it rests:

Principle 3. Religion. The state upholds and honors God and the Bible, the congregation and the family, and the religious practices common to the nation. These are essential to the national heritage and indispensable for justice and public morals. At the same time, the state offers toleration to religious and social views that do not endanger the integrity and well-being of the nation as a whole. (337; this is repeated from pp. 30-1, end of chapter 1)

While Hazony rejects Locke's views on consent, in the practical effects this account of toleration (to tolerate 'religious and social views that do not endanger the integrity and well-being of the nation as a whole') is, thus, actually remarkably Lockean. And while Locke might emphasize more than Hazony the right to exit from one's congregation, Hazony, too, allows this as we have seen in his account of the nature of 'loyalty groups.'

Anyway, the principle is rather vague. And is to be balanced with a number of other principles. But the practical pay-off is articulated as follows: 

Public religion. Conservative democracy regards biblical religion as the only firm foundation for national independence, justice, and public morals in Western nations. In America and other traditionally Christian countries, Christianity should be the basis for public life and strongly reflected in government and other institutions, wherever a majority of the public so desires. Provision should be made for Jews and other minorities to ensure that their particular traditions and way of life are not encumbered. The liberal doctrine requiring a “wall of separation between church and state” is a product of the post–Second World War period and is not an inherent feature of American political tradition. It should be discarded both with respect to majority religion and to minorities. (341)

That biblical religion is (in 'Western' contexts) the only firm foundation for 'national independence, justice, and public morals' might raise protests from liberals (like myself). But that does not concern me here. Rather I am interested in the consequences for religion to Hazony's view that a (local or national) "majority of the public" can impose their religious views on minorities. And I do so by returning to Hazony's treatment of Everson vs Board of Education quoted above. 

In the passage quoted from Black's opinion of Everson v. Board of Education, justice Black is fundamentally concerned about the political effects of sectarianism that is repeated almost staccato like in the opinion: (i) 'escape the bondage of laws which compelled them to support and attend government favored churches;' (ii) 'the colonization of America had been filled with turmoil, civil strife, and persecutions, generated in large part by established sects determined to maintain their absolute political and religious supremacy; (iii) he power of government supporting them, at various times and places, Catholics had persecuted Protestants, Protestants had persecuted Catholics, Protestant sects had persecuted other Protestant sects, Catholics of one shade of belief had persecuted Catholics of another shade of belief, and all of these had from time to time persecuted Jews;' (iv) 'In efforts to force loyalty to whatever religious group happened to be on top and in league with the government of a particular time and place.' And the implication is that such sectarianism has also shaped American political life, or is a danger to it.

Of course, for much of American history, Protestantism was the majority religion. But Justice Black is writing in the aftermath of a huge, century long demographic shift toward Catholicism, and consequent increasing Catholic, political emancipation. The series of legal rulings that make the state retreat from enforcing religion in public life, can be understood as an attempt to pacify the potential for non-trivial sectarian strife not the least among Catholics and protestants, and among different protestant sects. In fact, liberals of the age (including Isaiah Berlin and John Rawls) suddenly start to emphasize (it's an innovation) the significance of religious wars as a foundational myth in the growth of liberalism.

That is to say, if sects can justly try to control government, this means that religious life will be politicized and factionalized permanently. Now, I think Hazony accepts that loyalty groups are intrinsically political (and hierarchical), although he underestimates what kind of leaders will rise to the top within religion if religion is a means to political spoils. But the dangers of sectarianism are obscured in Hazony's argument because he kind of tacitly assumes that 'Christians' will agree with each other. Of course, he is not unfamiliar with the history of sectarianism and political religious persecution. But because contemporary conservative Christians understand themselves, rightly or wrongly, as embattled against, and unified in opposition to, the near victory of (secular) Enlightenment liberalism/rationalism, Hazony never has to confront the dangers of doctrinal and factional sectarianism.

Let me close. In a way the problem of sectarianism makes the problem of statecraft I diagnosed in the previous post on Hazony's book worse. For in order to maintain peace among different religious sects, the wise politician must not only navigate a complex commerce of honors (and interests), as Hazony advocates, but s/he must also navigate a complex set of doctrinal and theological religious disputes founded on by no means durable majority opinion. This is a recipe for permanent political strife. 

 

Hazony on Conservatism, part III

Regardless of its scale, the introduction of the state alters the order of tribes and clans in one decisive way. The ability of families, clans, and tribes to conduct independent policies in matters of war, peace, and the punishment of major crimes is brought to an end. The competition among families, clans, and tribes, which constantly led to bloodshed in the pre-state order, becomes, in the state, a competition in which violence is proscribed, thereby establishing a sphere of domestic peace over a certain territory. While rivalry among loyalty groups continues unabated within this domestic sphere, it is now conducted in accordance with norms of speech and behavior that have been adopted to assure a certain measure of honor and influence to all sides. So long as this balance of honor and influence is maintained, the peaceful coexistence and alliance among the families, clans, and tribes living under the state can be maintained.

The state thus introduces a profound transformation in human life. But the fundamentals of human nature are not changed by it. Human beings continue to form families, clans, and tribes. And while these loyalty groups are to various degrees domesticated—meaning that they become more peaceable among themselves—they nonetheless retain their hierarchical structure, their tendency to adopt a common judgment based on the views of leading figures within the hierarchy, and their intense competition for honor and influence. All this continues, along with the insult and anger that occur when one’s family or tribe has been disregarded or dishonored and its influence slighted. And if the norms of domestic speech and behavior, which have been established to guarantee a measure of honor and influence to all sides, are not upheld, then the peaceful coexistence and alliance among the tribes will quickly disintegrate. At such times, the old order of tribes and clans inevitably reasserts itself. Then the competition among the tribes becomes violent again, and their assertions of independence from one another grow more strident, until finally the state exists in name only or not at all. Yoram Hazony (2022) Conservatism: A Rediscovery, Chapter: V "The Purposes of Government,"pp. 234-235)

This is the third in a series of posts on Hazony's Conservatism (recall the first one here; and here the second one on Hazony's post-feminist conception of the family). And as should be clear by now, I mix exposition with immanent critique (even if sometimes I am bad at hiding my own liberal commitments). Hazony starts the fifth chapter with the claim that "Enlightenment liberalism" -- by which he means an ideology that originates in what he calls a "rationalist manifesto," Locke's Two Treatises of Government (1689) -- has, in virtue of a one-sided focus on the "freedom of the individual," no place for "the national interest, or of the general welfare of the nation, or of the common good of the nation, or of the good of the commonwealth" (p. 223 emphasis in original).

The claim would have surprised Locke, who, after all, put the Latin phrase "Salus populi suprema lex esto" [that is, The health/welfare of the people should be the supreme law"] on the frontispiece of the Two Treatises. Locke goes on to remind the reader (at II.158) that  it "is certainly so just and fundamental a rule, that he, who sincerely follows it, cannot dangerously err." Even Jefferson -- who is the high priest of Enlightenment liberalism in Hazony's book -- appealed to the principle in a 1810 letter to John B. Colvin (28 September) in order to explain that the executive sometimes can ignore written law (and offering several examples of this behavior from one of Hazony's heroes, George Washington).*

I do not mean to suggest there is no genuine contrast between liberalism in all its varieties and Hazony's conservatism. One cluster of contrasts becomes clear if we look at how Hazony describes the purpose of government and the function of statecraft in it. As the quoted passage shows, the state transforms the state of war (constant bloodshed) into a situation of "intense competition for honor and influence." (At another point, Hazony describes a "bitter" competition. (p. 237)) The Hobbesian or Spinozistic state of nature is always a latent possibility within the ordinary life of the polity. Hazony doesn't mention Spinoza, but his view is actually rather close to Spinoza.** Unlikes Hobbes and Spinoza, Hazony understands the state of nature and peace not in terms of individuals, but in terms of hierarchically organized loyalty groups (families, congregations, tribes, clans, nations, etc.).

As a crucial aside, for Hazony such loyalty groups are not primarily organized around genes or race. He makes this clear in a crucial note attached to the introduction where he distinguishes his views from those of "the “white identity” movements of the extreme right, which seek a politics based on biological race."  His loyalty groups share a "heritage, usually including a common language or religious traditions, and a past history of joining together against common enemies." In the note, Hazony emphasizes his is "the traditional Anglo-American conception of the nation, inherited from the Bible." In context he does not explain what he means, but there is a passage (recall here), drawing on Talmud Megillah 13a,  in his earlier God and Politics in Esther, centered on an interpretation of the daughter of the Pharao's actions at Exodus 2: 5-6, which shows that for Hazony through one's actions one can become part of, and be adopted by, a loyalty group. (In Graeber and Wengrow's Dawn of Everything one finds (recall) a description of such a mechanism in their account of pre-Columbian conquest practices of the Turtle and Bear clans.)

It's worth noting that the mechanism of inclusion (and exit) from a loyalty group is ground in a kind of individual conscience that the pharaoh's daughter exercises. Conscience is emphasized in Hazony's (protestant and American) sources, but Hazony ignores it in Conservatism. But the freedom to act on conscience -- and some room for exit -- is crucial for Hazony's scheme if one wish to avoid loyalty groups to become despotic. This is tacitly recognized in the moving, concluding autobiographical personal chapter. But it does not have a comfortable theoretical place in his general argument (because it would move his stance too close to Locke's and presumably open the door to a species of liberalism.)

Be that as it may, a key function, then, of statecraft or the art of government in Hazony's political theory is to manage or balance the intense competition for honor and influence among the hierarchically organized, social pillars of state. The point of managing it is to generate internal cohesion, so as to allow not just domestic peace, but also for a "unified front...[and] power projected" against foreign rivals. (p. 237) Without such proper management the cohesion and "bonds of loyalty" will quickly fall apart.

Hazony explicitly recognizes that the skill-set involved in managing honor and influence among traditional loyalty groups is distinct from the leadership within traditional loyalty groups. But Hazony treats the problem as one involving issues of scale due to lack of repeated personal interaction. When one has a liberal sensibility one immediately recognizes a further problem for such statecraft in Hazony's account. Honor is intrinsically zero-sum. This is a feature and not a bug within traditional loyalty group in Hazony's account, but it turns into a dangerous impediment to stability in the interactions among loyalty groups, absent a common enemy. 

Hazony rejects the liberal solution which, roughly, is to displace the political onto non-zero-sum 'growing the pie activities' (increase trade -> wealth and cosmopolitan structures). So he offers an alternative:

To put this matter as simply as possible: The state and government are traditional institutions of certain societies. Their continued existence therefore depends entirely on the cultivation of bonds of mutual loyalty among the rival tribes that constitute the nation; and these bonds, in turn, depend on the conservation and transmission of particular traditions of speech and behavior that allow rival tribes and parties to compete, while at the same time honoring one another. There is, in other words, a causal relation between the cultivation and transmission of certain traditions within society and the existence of the state and state government. If appropriate traditions are not intensively and successfully cultivated, then the alliance among these rival tribes will end, and both the state and its government will cease to be. (237)

One effect of this is that political management becomes an intense task not just for the leadership of the state but also the leadership of the loyalty groups. And the glue that holds them together is constituted by traditions (including nationalism and a national religion(s)).

This is not incompatible with democratic life and constitutional parliamentarianism (as Hazony emphasizes). In fact, in principle, it can also be characterized by pluralism (which Hazony ignores). Some version of such an approach is familiar from, say, Lijphart's account of the social pillar system of Dutch Consociationalism. This is characterized by quite intense elite interaction (as Hazony emphasizes, too). Hazony's account does not really emphasize the pluralist possibilities. (The word 'pluralist' occurs, I think, only once in a reference to Isaiah Berlin's analysis of Selden, who is, in fact, a key progenitor of Hazony's intellectual thought.) In a later post, I discuss the motives and grounds for as well complications of Hazony's rejection of a pluralist consociationalism, and his insistence on adopting Christianity as a public religion. 

The problem here is that the existence of such glues does not solve the zero-sum nature of honor. Hazony himself kind of recognizes this because he returns to it again as follows:

What is needed above all else is to do the practical political work of cultivating ties of mutual loyalty among the various tribes and parties. This involves constantly balancing their interests and needs against one another, and ensuring that this balance leads to a renewed exchange of honors among them. Where the national political leadership has cultivated such mutual loyalties among the differents [sic] tribes and factions that constitute the nation, then the state can be firm and its government effective. (p. 239)

So, the domestic art of government requires constant political management of interests and needs of loyalty groups. The cultivation of "ties of mutual loyalty" is -- echoing Hume, who is self-consciously echoing Montesquieu -- in the service of the national spirit of unity. But the spirit of unity can only be stable if the loyalty groups have a commerce in honors among them. The problem is that such a commerce (it's the nature of the beast) has winners and losers.  

The problem for Hazony's scheme is not, as one might suspect I'll argue, that a system of hierarchy ground/founded on honor is intrinsically unstable (although it is always teetering on the brink of violence), but rather that it requires unusual if not rare and rather demanding skill to manage it properly. And as far as I can tell, he offers no mechanism such that the nation or the leaders of the nation can recognize and regularly elevate the right sort of leader into the position. (For as he notes this is not a skill that is exhibited in the life of loyalty groups themselves.) If anything, since in his scheme such leadership accrues non-trivial honor, one should expect the honor loving to seek it in particular. But there is no reason to believe that honor loving and the practical judgment needed to manage the honor loving are naturally conjoined. 

Yolton's Polemics with Strauss, PT 1

I learned a few days ago -- [HT Michael Kremer] -- that (see here) Gilbert Ryle was the supervisor was of John William Yolton (1921-2005). This made me decide that I should treat Yolton as 'analytic.' That he is an analytic philosopher is by no means obvious when one reads his (1955) "Criticism and Histrionic Understanding" (Ethics (65):3) with its learned references to Hegel, Collingwood, Santayana, Croce, and Cassirer even if one allows that, unlike so many other Analytic partisans, Ryle was himself widely and deeply read in non-analytic philosophy of the age, especially (as Ami L. Thomasson (2002) summarizes) the phenomenological tradition. 

In the 1955 article, Yolton explicitly takes on a claim that he (not implausibly) attributes to Strauss' (1953) Natural Right and History (hereafter: NRH):

For Strauss, there are just two alternatives: either we are able to ground moral criticism in natural rights, or we are faced with moral nihilism. By extension, the same alternative could be posed in aesthetics and social criticism. While Strauss's defense or plea for natural right seems anachronistic, the fears which he expresses are genuine. But though genuine, they are misplaced, based as they are upon a misunderstanding of both the implications of the relativistic analysis of criticism and of the possibilities of criticism in general. There is nothing in cannibalism or civilization, in communism or democracy, which compels us to accept either. Every critical point of view rests upon certain accepted values which are valuable because they are accepted. But to urge that such a view opens the danger of moral chaos is simply to overlook the nature of moral conviction as well as to misunderstand the relation between criticism and values. (206)

That Yolton was familiar with Strauss' NRH, even a critic of it, surprised me greatly. And it is worth explaining why. This post is part of a series -- (recall here; here; here; especially this one; here; and here; here; here) -- on the reception of Strauss by analytic philosophers in the post WWII era (triggered by an invite by Sander Verhaegh). The (1952) dissertation Ryle supervised, was clearly the basis for Yolton's influential book (1956) John Locke and the Way of Ideas (OUP). In its "preface" Ryle is explicitly thanked for his "many critical suggestions" and guidance (p. x).  

I didn't recall any mention of Strauss in the book, so I went back to search for it and found none. Since Strauss' interpretation of Locke is so important to the argument of NRH, and Yolton clearly was highly familiar with it, I was rather puzzled by the situation. Even more so, because Yolton's key claim about Locke's Essay (highlighted in the preface), it that "its philosophical doctrines were almost always directly related to the moral and religious disputes of the day." (viii) And that is Strauss's territory (especially the first two chapters of Yolton's book which deal, inter alia, with the law of nature).

One hypothesis I entertained was that Yolton had decided he didn't need to engage with NRH after (say) reading the highly critical (1955) review of Strauss' NRH in The Philosophical Review 64(2) by John Plamenatz (1912–1975). Plamenatz was (quoting Berlin's entry in ODNB) "trained in the use of the methods of such British thinkers as G. E. Moore, Bertrand Russell, H. A. Prichard, C. D. Broad, and W. D. Ross which dominated the Oxford scene in the 1920s and early 1930s."* And, Jo Wolff includes Plamenatz in his influential survey of the history analytic political philosophy. In his review (which, to be sure, is not only critical), Plamenatz had claimed that "Dr. Strauss's assertion that Locke's conception of natural right is fundamentally the same as Hobbes's is easily refuted." (p. 301). In fact, Plamenatz closes his review with a swipe at Strauss' method:

In several places Dr. Strauss suggests that one or other of the philosophers discussed by him was exercising caution in keeping his real opinions hidden from the vulgar, and that that is why he has been misunderstood. The reader is given the impression that he is being taken into the confidence of some of the greatest thinkers of the past. Whether he finds this impression flattering will depend on what he thinks of Dr. Strauss's book. (302)

But, of course, that a reader is flattered -- and surely Plamenatz is right about the effect of Strauss' writing on some -- is not itself an argument that Strauss' hermeneutics is unreliable or that the interpretations are false.

Anyway, my current guess is that Yolton's book went to the press before he read NRH. But that Yolton recognized Strauss' views were an alternative to his own, and worth refuting, is indisputable. For, in 1958, Yolton published "Locke on the Law of Nature" in The Philosophical Review 67(4). In it, Yolton explains that one of the main reasons "a reappraisal of Locke on the law of nature is" needed is in virtue of "the violently distorted interpretation recently advanced by Leo Strauss." (p. 478; he then cites NRH.) In his (1958) paper Yolton draws on his own book.+ And, in fact, the 1958 article is one long argument that Strauss' method is bogus and his reading of Locke (as, inter alia, a kind of Hobbesian) utterly misleading.

My current view is that Yolton's 1958 essay, marks a sharp distinction in the reception of Strauss by analytic philosophers.** Although its impact was really felt, only after Peter Lasslett's edition of Locke's Two Treatise, which strongly condemns' Strauss' reading of Locke and appeals to Yolton's essay, started to circulate widely. (Yolton's essay is itself barely cited before the mid 1970s.) I return to this paper in a follow up digression.

Okay, with that in place let's return to Yolton's earlier (1955) engagement which is much more respectful and also, de facto, an immanent critique (and also one that kind of anticipates Gadamer's philosophy).

Let's grant on Yolton's behalf  that his position embraces a circularity ("Every critical point of view rests upon certain accepted values which are valuable because they are accepted.") It's not a vicious circularity because the value is, in part, to use anachronistic language that accepted values help solve coordination problems; knowing the wide acceptance of certain values helps predict behavior and also helps organize political life. (This is among the reasons why they are valuable because they are accepted.) This is a kind of Humean point (although Yolton doesn't cite him here.) My reason for mentioning Hume should be clear below.

Okay, how does Yolton respond to Strauss? (Much of the article is a working out of Yolton's own view on the complex relationship between relativity of one's values and possibility of mutual criticism.) Here's what he says after developing his own views (which can be intuited from what I quote which is the final closing paragraph(s) of the paper):

Then it is time to set forth with boldness and firmness the criticism entailed in our position. Histrionic understanding, while being an indispensable condition for worth-while criticism, does not (as it first seems) render criticism impotent; rather it discloses its only valid habitat.

The bias and externality which are provincial and objectionable without histrionic understanding lose their discreditability [sic] when combined with a careful, sympathetic understanding. For some time now the critical problem has been resolved by the historicist emphasis upon the relativity of understanding viewed as conditioned by one's time and place. Such emphasis is obviously overstated since we can transcend our cultural context and understand other points of view internally. Criticism needs to be harnessed to such histrionic understanding, but it is necessary also to free ourselves from the either-or position of assuming, as Strauss does, that either criticism is based upon some absolute, such as natural right, or we end in moral nihilism. The kind of criticism which we make of other points of view is controlled by the kind of values inherent in our own position. Once the other position is understood intrinsically, our own commitments compel us to criticize. Since all criticism must be thus rooted in a point of view, the kind of placid change into cannibalism suggested by Strauss will be avoided simply by vigilance, by speaking and acting in defense of our own point of view. Criticisms cannot be made in vacuo; we must look to some set of values, to some basic convictions in order to determine what criticisms are appropriate in any given situation. Such a recognition of the intimate, dependent relation between accepted values or convictions and criticisms will not, of course, take care of the other problem that bothers Strauss: how can we say that our position should triumph over cannibalism? But the problem here is ill-stated, and the anticipated solution frustrating. The only solution for this problem tolerated by Strauss is some totalistic or some indisputable point of view which can legislate between right and wrong, while itself being immune to such ethical decisions. The desire to solve the issue of such moral and social tensions is urgent and important. But if we assume, as has been done so often in the past, that the solution of this problem must either be justified philosophically (in the sense of finding some absolute basis from which to resolve the conflict) or else degenerate into brute force or moral nihilism, we have misconceived the nature of this particular problem. The resolution of such moral or social conflict cannot be done in the manner required by Strauss simply because it is not a dispute which has that sort of solution: there is no point of view which is itself immune from criticism. Important as this area of ideological tension is, it cannot be solved by theory. We can only trust to reason and the council table for a peaceful coexistence. (211-212)

If I understand Yolton correctly here, his solution to the dilemma posed by Strauss, is to deny that it is capable of philosophical resolution (" it is not a dispute which has that sort of solution.") This has a Humean sensibility. I believe this is also Strauss' all things considered point of view.++ But rather as understanding that as a concession to Strauss, Yolton thinks it is an alternative and he opens the door to wise statecraft: "we can only trust to reason and the council table."

It suspect that Yolton means here to invoke the United Nations' Security Council. But it might be also understood as a metaphor for either great power discussions (this is how I understand what he is saying) or be understood for more general commitment to civilization as peaceful coexistence, that is, (recall this post on Khan; this one on Coetzee) of keeping the conversation going (rather than resort to arms). Either way, while philosophy may not be absent around the council table (recall 'reason') in the end it's a kind of prudence and skill -- Locke might see this as part of the 'art of government' - that maintains co-existence between incompatible viewpoints. While I have some practical sympathy for Yolton's position (and by no means hostile to his kind of relativism), having a seat at the table cannot be taken for granted in the manner he does. To be continued.