Digressions&Impressions

Covid Diaries (2022)

I have had an eventful two weeks, and so it's time for another entry covid diary. (For my official "covid diaries," see here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; and here). Before I get to the events: the really good news is that my symptoms are under control if and only if I avoid most social contact, avoid contexts with background noise, avoid multi-tasking, go to bed between nine and nine-thirty, and turn off all electronics a half hour before I go to bed. When I don't avoid these I am likely to have what I call head fatigue (which is a leaden feeling from the nose upward). I also spent most of January swimming daily, and during it and the hour after, I would almost feel completely normal.

The bad news is, of course, all this means I lead a very socially isolated existence. I spent too little time with my family. Have stopped hanging with friends, and am excused from work related meetings. For example, one shocking discovery has been that walking together silently is, in fact, also a form of multitasking. As an aside, when you have long covid, minor physical ailments have an outsized impact on well being because they disrupt sleeping patterns and physical exercise. Last Summer, a swimmer's ear threw me back. During the last few weeks, I have struggled with modest but persistent daily pain -- a pinched nerve in my back--  which made it difficult to sit and sleep (luckily I didn't notice it while walking and swimming). Luckily, that's not really bothersome anymore. So much for the status quo before my teaching started (this past Tuesday).

Monday last week I had an appointment at the Long Covid clinic at UCLH. My physician was new to me and a lung specialist. Despite a long delay and lunch time, she took her time to check my past case history with me and to hear about how things were going. She was the first physician I have spoken to who said that my particular symptoms are not unusual. One of her patients, a young mom, is even more noise sensitive than I am and basically can only see her baby a few minutes a day. My physician insisted I should remain hopeful despite the fact that I don't belong to the group of patients that recover after three and nine months. As long as I keep improving, a full recovery is likely in her experience. 

Because of my booster shot, I was not enrolled in various trials they are running. But they are running a trial with Famoridine (an anti-histamine medicine), which has shown improvement in patients that are struggling with cognitive symptoms during long covid. And suggested I try it, too. (I return to that below.) Because there have been quite a few stories about blood-clotting, she also suggested a much wider range of blood tests than ever before.

I walked over to the blood-testing site down the hall. It was a total zoo: people yelling and cheating. There was a number system to queue, but people also could be slotted in with pre-existing appoints. After 45 minutes, I realized that at the rate they were going it would last a couple of hours before it was my turn, and the fighting and anger was not being blocked out with my noise-canceling headphones. I knew I could safely leave the queue to get lunch, but I really didn't want to return to this wild menagerie. Corona lockdowns have really changed national character because I have never seen a queue behavior like this in England. Some asking around landed me with a kind receptionist, and I booked an appointment at the blood bank first thing next morning. The next day, the nurse told me that this kind of behavior is now a daily occurrence at any time of the day. And I suspect that before long the queues will be even longer because of an absence of workers who will put up with this crap. (She also told me that my absence had been noted the day before because apparently some of my blood had been marked for research which surprised me.)

Later that day I went to my GP because I suddenly realized that there was a risk my Famoridine would not be filled before I would leave town. I spent a few days trying to charm the office managers of the practice, and trying to contact a person at UCLH. But eventually I got a text massage from one of the GPs (unknown to me) that if the hospital had wanted me to start the meds at once, they would have given me a script. Now I had to wait for their letter to the GP, and then the GP could write me a prescription. I learned this way, that in the NHS it matters quite a bit which budget pays for your medicine (and hospitals have little budge for non-urgent patient care meds). Lesson learned for next time.

The previous paragraph understates, of course, the powerlessness and energy consuming effort to get care. When I first got covid, when I was in London, I joined my family's GP practice. My London GP had then just (partially) recovered from her long haul. And she was empathic and pro-active. She left -- very clearly annoyed at how her peers had treated her -- and now I am a number in the (very large) GP practice. That same week I was in the practice with my son, and I was on my best behavior to see him get excellent care. 

Because of the hip problems, I didn't feel especially well rested on Tuesday ahead of my lecture first class. (There were also other sources of anxiety unrelated to me that I am skipping.) It's a required, first year, undergraduate-lecture-course with 640 students. Under our corona rules, we're teaching in hybrid format. Class numbers are capped at 75 with a sign in system. When I went to the service desk I was told the hand-held microphone was broken. I felt my heart sink, and I nudged the desk agent to call our service team to try to fix it anyway. When I went to the auditorium, the previous lecturer was running over time. I decided to stand quietly back in the room, but making sure I was in his line of vision. I couldn't believe it that he decided to tag on another ten minutes leaving my crew very little to get me all set up. (We record lectures which is distinct system from the zoom link up we use to broadcast the lectures live.) I had to control my nerves not to give him an earful.

Once the auditorium starts filling up, I immediately realized there were a lot more than 75 students. Tim (who runs our canvas pages in the department) counted 150. I decided I didn't have the energy to try to throw half out. But I did aggressively police masking in the front rows (and banning food or drink for them). Most students were excellent about this, and the ones who protested I offered a spot in the balcony. I told the students about my long haul and warned them  that I might struggle with Q&As, and probably the quality of my jokes would suffer.

Much to my amazement the sound technician showed up as I was introducing my TAs, Wais and Tomás, and Tim, and he fixed the hand-held microphones. So, while I started the lecture ten minutes late, this was a great energy boost. The next ninety minutes were a gigantic adrenaline rush. I even fielded questions during break and after. (About which below.) While I talked slower than I ordinarily would -- I had to cut a few slides near the end --, I thought it went well. I received a resounding applause, and while I usually make fun of that, this time I soaked it up. I had to apologize to the lecturer after me, explaining that I had a late start due to our colleague before me.

As a rule I don't share student stories. But the encounter with one of them after class was so memorable I'll repeat a stylized version of it to protect the identities involved. An excited student who shows up with an entourage tells me it was great, but would like to share a reservation about the syllabus. I say, 'please I welcome suggestions.' It becomes clear the student objects to me putting The Communist Manifesto on the syllabus. I say (a bit worried about where this is heading), 'why is that?' The student explains it will give the other students 'the wrong idea about Marx; it's not theoretical enough. It's too popular.' We go back and forth a bit about different genres. Eventually I ask, 'what would you suggest? Excerpts from the Grundrisse?'

'That would be good or Engels' Dialectics of Nature,' the student responds (and saying the title in English) before explaining to me how important Engels is. I ask the student if s/he read Engels in English, which elicits an apologetic affirmative answer. As I start to feel the exhaustion of the day flowing into me, I say 'look if I were to teach the Grundrisse or the Dialectics of Nature, I would have to teach Hegel first, no?' The student agrees, and castigates me for not having Hegel on the syllabus:)

 

I walked home through town, and with a delicious lentil soup I savor the day on the side of a canal. It takes me a few hours to fall asleep. I know I am apprehensive about how I would feel the next day. I am disappointed when I wake up with a headache around five thirty. And I know I won't be able to fall back a sleep. The headache stays with me for most of the day, but it's not as bad as last Fall. There is no nausea or dizziness. I chill doing nothing. During the afternoon I have to go to the hospital to pick up some sleep testing gear. I walk back through the drizzle along a largely unused canal (Noordhollandsch Kanaal), which nowadays turns out to provide cooling for the hospital.  I realize that I am getting blister on one of my toes. Before taking the ferry back into city (see picture below) I break my low carb diet and treat myself to divine French fries with mayo and curry. 

 

The testing gear is too advanced for me, and after futzing around with them fruitlessly I decide to go to bed without them. I sleep better than the night before, but not great; I wake up fatigued but without a headache. I return to the hospital  next morning, and am informed I am not alone in struggling with the stuff. (Later that day, I learned that the test failed unsurprisingly; I will have to return for more invasive set up that they will apply in the hospital.) 

 

By the time I am back at the university, I wonder if I'll be able to complete the lecture. And whether they have to share tapes of me again later in the semester while I am sick in bed. In my vulnerability I  decide to put on a tie (which I always have available in case I have to show up in academic robes for a thesis defense in my office).  As I walk into the auditorium, the previous lecturer (a different one from the dude that annoyed me in Tuesday) is wrapping up.

 

This time there are even more students in the hall. I am a bit more ambivalent about this lecture. The student questions were phenomenal -- always a great sign --, but the ending is a bit messy. I have to skip a few slides on material I think important, and I notice no applause.  As I walk home, and I notice that the weather suddenly has improved. It's warmer and I exhale. I take pictures and grab my lentil soup. I still have trouble falling asleep. I wake up around 4am. I know a headache is lurking, but I fall back asleep. When I awake it's after 7 and I have have slept almost nine hours. I wouldn't call myself well rested -- I'll chill today --, but there is no headache. And while I will be very cautious the next few weeks, for the first time I think I may get some of my life back.

 

Gil Harman (RIP 1938-2021): On Adam Smith, Kuhn-Loss and Historiography

One important type of ethical theory treats moral properties as analogous in certain respects to "secondary qualities" like colors. According to this sort of theory, whether something is right or wrong depends on how impartial spectators would react to it. In the 18th Century, the Scottish philosophers Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, and Adam Smith explored theories of this type.1 In the 20th Century this sort of theory has sometimes been discussed under the name "ideal observer theory."2 Recently, especially in England, there has been renewed interest in this sort of ethical theory and its comparison between moral properties and secondary qualities.3

One possible objection to an impartial spectator theory is that it seems to require an -overly aesthetic conception of morality to take the primary point of view in ethics to be that of a spectator rather than that of the agent.4 If the spectator is taken to be primary, then the agent's aim would seem to be to produce something that will or would please the spectator. But that is just wrong. Such an aim is too "outer directed" to count as a moral motive. Morality is more agent-centered than that. It is much more plausible to take the agent's point of view as primary. In the first instance morality is a matter of the moral reasons an agent has to act in one way or another, where these reasons derive from the relevant moral rules rather than from a desire to gain the approval of spectators.
A few years ago, I pressed this objection myself when I discussed the ideal observer theory in a textbook of ethics.5 But I was too hasty. In reading Adam Smith's Theory of the Moral Sentiments, I discovered that Smith explicitly considers this issue and provides a plausible reply to the objection.
Because 20th Century discussions have tended not to consider such "psychological" questions as why agents might be motivated to act in ways that impartial spectators would approve (or, for that matter, why impartial spectators would care about anything), I will in this paper ignore recent discussion and return to the three great versions of the theory that were developed in the 18th Century by Hutcheson, Hume, and Smith, indicating why I think Smith's version of the theory is superior to the others.--Gilbert Harman (1986) "Moral Agent and the Impartial Spectator" The Lindley Lecture, The University of Kansas, p. 1. [HT: David M. Levy]

For many years, I heard a story about the late Gilbert Harman, who by all accounts was a supportive mentor, that he put up a sign on his door that said, ‘History of Philosophy: Just Say No!’ And I heard the story from folk, who approvingly treated Harman as an authority within the profession, and those (mostly historians of philosophy) that were horrified by the message this sent about the value of their work and the development of curricula across the profession. The story always puzzled me because thanks to my outside reader on my PhD, the economist David M. Levy, I was familiar with Harman's Lindley Lecture, which is a major contribution to the study of Adam Smith (and his relationship to Hutcheson and Hume).

I quietly wondered whether Harman subscribed to the view -- that I am familiar with from (recall) reading, say,  Samuelson's obituary of Viner -- that only disciplinary royalty should work in history of the discipline, while the rest are worker-bees solving particular, localized problems (including puzzles in the presentation of historical works relevant to the undergrad education of the discipline). And I mused on the fact to what degree his colleagues and students even knew about the Lindley Lecture, which was, in fact, very hard to acquire in the early-internet days when I was a PhD student in Chicago in the 1990s. 

And so I always quietly assumed that Harman was on party 'team progress' (familiar from Kuhn): we need a division of labor within philosophy, and with text-book driven education sufficiently shared background commitments as a baseline that will make, just like the practice of the natural sciences, such progress, or the illusion of progress, possible. And that requires a kind of domestication of the past (and, as Michael Della Rocca has argued the rest of philosophy, too). 

At some point, I became aware of Tom Sorrell's correspondence with Harman on this very topic. But I never tried to figure out its contents. Helpfully, the Princeton website records (a good chunk) of the exchange here. And it suggests the sign was put up in the context of a controversy over the undergrad curriculum. In addition, it quotes Harman's own views on the matter:

I believe my views about the history of philosophy are mostly orthodox nowadays. The history of philosophy is not easy. It is very important to consider the historical context of a text and not just try to read it all by itself. One should be careful not to read one’s own views (or other recent views) into a historical text. It is unwise to treat historical texts as sacred documents that contain important wisdom. In particular, it is important to avoid what Walter Kaufmann calls ‘exegetical thinking’: reading one’s views into a sacred text so one can read them back out endowed with authority. For the most part the problems that historical writers were concerned with are different from the problems that current philosophers face. There are no perennial philosophical problems.

On the whole, these views about the history of philosophy are quite close to those of my late friend Margaret Wilson.

For reasons I do not fully understand, I have sometimes upset people by distinguishing between philosophy and the history of philosophy or by noting that philosophy is what the history of philosophy is the history of.

I also think as an empirical matter that students of philosophy need not be required to study the history of philosophy and that a study of the history of philosophy tends not to be useful to students of philosophy. (Note ‘tends’.) Similarly, it is not particularly helpful to students of physics, chemistry, or biology to study the history of physics, chemistry, or biology.

Of course, it may be helpful for students of physics to start with classical Newtonian physics before taking up relativity theory and quantum mechanics. But it tends not to be helpful for them to read Newton.

The playful sign that was once on my office door, ‘History of Philosophy: Just Say No!’ was concerned with whether our students should be required to do work in the history of philosophy.

That is not to say that I have anything against the study of the history of philosophy. I do not discourage students or others from studying the history of philosophy. I am myself quite interested in the history of moral philosophy for example and have occasionally taught graduate seminars in Kant. I have done a certain amount of work on Adam Smith’s relation to Hume and others.

These remarks suggest I was mostly right about Harman. I have spent a good chunk of my blogging here and previously (sometimes in debates with Mohan Matthen) at NewAPPS, explaining why I think the Kuhnian team progress picture is a bad idea for philosophy (and the historians of philosophy), so won't repeat it here. But as Harman himself stresses his adherence to it is only partial; he recognizes and accepts explicitly that sometimes the history of philosophy is useful to the philosopher. And he reminds his interlocuter that he himself teaches history, and has done it.

As an aside, the denial of perennial philosophy is a self-aware form of the Kuhnian picture of team progress. Within the sciences, the textbooks will treat the pre-paradigmatic states of the discipline as immature babblings about the same topic. Within philosophy, the status quo will treat much of the pre-paradigmatic states as very imperfect expressions on our topics, or material irrelevant to our concerns. After all, so much was packed into philosophy once that we now ignore (for various reasons).

Okay, and returning to main thread, what's left obscure by the exchange reported on the Princeton website is when it is useful according to Harman to do history. As it happens the introductory material in The Lindley Lecture articulates this: the past can be a source of information on moves that are missed in present professional discussions.

This is especially so, when a particular view or theory is re-discovered or renewed without -- one may add -- much attention to prior discussions. In such circumstances an argument or objection can be taken as decisive by a particular, localized professional community and the argumentative (ahh) dialectic is halted prematurely. And while one can discover this in the armchair, too, this is much harder if one is a partisan to the debate (or swayed by local authority). In those latter cases, a careful, sympathetic engagement with the past, without reading the present status quo back into the past, can help those on top of contemporary discussions discern that one has missed an argumentative turn.  Notice, that this suggests another, related use to history. When discussions on particular topics are renewed/revived, it might be helpful to do a careful survey of previous episodes.

Of course, the uses discussed in the previous paragraph -- let's call them 'The Useful Retrieval Task(s)' or 'TURT' -- require the availability of material/texts and specialist knowledge of where to find such episodes. That is to say, what we may call contextual historians of philosophy are a collective good to the profession that it pays to have a large enough pool to have around. Somewhat amusingly, the more antiquarian and bookish these historians of philosophy are the more useful they might possibly be on the rare occasion that retrieval of a missed distinction or argument can be useful. The same argument applies to historians of philosophy that specialize in (so-called) non-Western philosophy. (I once quoted a plea by David Chalmers to that effect, and discussed it critically in an engagement with Amy Olberding here.) Much of such philosophy will be about different matters (again no perennial philosophy), but that does not prevent multiple discoveries of the same problem at different times and locations far apart.

Now, at this point I wanted to discuss Harman's treatment of Hutcheson, Hume, and Smith as an illustration and examination of what I take to be the practice that he preaches. This is also worth doing because I think I can show some of the limitations of that approach. But since this digression has gone longer than it ought, I won't do that now, and hopefully can return to it some other time. 

So, let me close on another detail of Harman's Lindley Lecture. Near the end of his lecture, he writes that "Smith works this theory out with a mass of detail which I cannot try to summarize. I believe that the book in which he works this out, his Theory of the Moral Sentiments, is one of the great works of moral philosophy." (p. 13). And then he adds a remark (labelled postscript 2):

Finally, it is perplexing that Adam Smith's ethics should be so relatively unread as compared with Hume's ethics when there is so much of value in Smith. What I have talked about here only scratches the surface. Why should Smith's ethics be so neglected? Is it that Hume also had a metaphysics and an epistemology and that Smith did not? Or is it that Smith was a more important economist than Hume? And why should that matter? I do not know.19--Harman (p. 14)

Footnote 19 starts with "I am indebted to David Levy for getting me interested in this project." The older I get the more this footnote amuses me because it turns out that TURT can be outsourced to different disciplines. Of course, since professional economists have actively tried to eliminate professional historians of economics from professional economics (on grounds that look like the party of progress familiarized by Kuhn, and, as I have shown [here and here], actively promoted within professional economics before and after Kuhn), there is a real risk (tragedy of the commons) that no discipline will curate the possibility of TURT.

I am also amused because at my dissertation defense, David Levy asked me Harman's questions. At the time (almost twenty years ago), I already knew that Smith's ethics was constantly forgotten and rediscovered in philosophy. My favorite example of this can be found in C.D. Broad's (1950) review in Mind of A.N. Prior's Logic and the Basis of Ethics. Although, I don't think I realized then, as I do now, that this is itself an older, recurring trope. Levy himself thinks that Harman's use of the trope is distinctive because he is rare in thinking that Smith's ethics is in some key respects superior to Hume's (recall the quote at the top of this post).

In my (2017) book I show that Smith does have a metaphysics and epistemology (one that also crucially deviates from Hume), but they are mostly submerged in The Theory of Moral Sentiments. I reconstructed them primarily (note!) from other texts collected in Essays on Philosophical Subjects. To be sure, I did not write my book to address Harman's questions! And I am unsure if having showed this we can make (ahh) progress on Harman's last three questions in postscript 2.

But if we take a step back, we can see that postscript 2 asks the reader to consider the grounds of what Harman takes to be (what has come to be known as) "a Kuhn-loss." And here Harman clearly recognizes that he is on unsure grounds. He plausibly suggests that Smith's TMS got written out of the discipline (philosophy) in virtue of the fact that Smith became part of economics. And I have noted, these two disciplines became conceptualized as non-overlapping complements in the late nineteenth and twentieth century (see especially this article).

But I do think the answer to Harman's Kuhn-loss question is relatively simple. Sidgwick, who is (recall this post on the effect on Rawls) partially responsible for developing the party-of-progress conception in philosophy, wrote textbooks, including Sidgwick's Outlines of the History of Ethics, in which Smith was clearly presented as a lesser (proto-Utilitarian) Hume.

This happens in two ways, when in the Introduction of that influential book, Smith is first introduced, alongside Hume and Hartley, only Hume's views are briefly summarized and Hume's views are treated as not especially significant for ethical matters. They are treated as psychologically significant. (Sidgwick is here developing and anticipating the manner in which the empirical-normative contrast turns out to prefigure disciplinary salience). So, a natural effect of Sidgwick's introduction is that it looks like there is little in Smith for those interested in ethical affairs.

That Sidgwick actually does not intend this implicature about Smith only becomes clear obliquely. When discussing J.S. Mill, Sidwick notes that Mill's treatment of justice is very indebted to Adam Smith (p. 241 in the 1886 edition). 

But that point itself may not be noticed by those readers especially interested in Sidwick's views on Smith. For earlier, he treats Dugald Steward as a (superior) synthesis of the insights of Shaftesbury and Smith (note 2 on p. 221 in the 1886 edition).

Of course, if one reads the section devoted to Smith in Sidgwick's Outlines, one may well come accross two important features. First, that according to Sidgwick, Smith clearly improves on Hume on what Sidgwick calls the "quality of the moral sentiment" (205). But, this, too, is treated more as a contribution to psychology and the "analysis" of its phenomena (206), than to ethics. 

Crucially, for Sidgwick (p. 207), Hume and Smith jointly anticipate the view of the origin of the moral sentiments "current in the utilitarian school." (A point, as noted above, he clarifies on p. 241 in the context of Mill.) But he goes on to say that jointly their "methods of explanation compare unfavorably with that of Hartley," (pp. 207-208). So, at this point there is really no reason for a reader of Sidgwick's Outlines to come away thinking they should read The Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS). And when he summarizes his view of Hartley, he (Sidgwick) observes that:

Hartley is obviously in earnest in his attempt to determine the rule of life, the systematic vigour which still gives an interest to his psychology, in spite of his defects of style and treatment, is not applied by him to the question of the criterion or standard of right conduct; on this point his exposition is blurred by a vague and shallow. optimism that prevents him from facing the difficulties of the problem. A somewhat similar inferiority appears in Adam Smith's work, when he passes from psychological analysis to ethical construction. He takes care to assure us that the general rules of morality impressed on us by the complicated play of sympathy which he analyzes are "justly to be regarded as the laws of the Deity;" but it can hardly be said that his theory affords any cogent arguments for this conclusion, or in any way establishes these rules as objectively valid. It would seem that the intellectual energy of this period of English [sic] ethical thought had a general tendency to take a psychological rather than a strictly ethical turn. In Hume's case, indeed, the absorption of ethics into psychology is sometimes so complete as to lead him to a confusing use of language.--Sidgwick, Outlines, pp. 211-212.

Again, a natural effect of Sidgwick's treatment is that in so far as Smith's account in TMS is interesting at all, it is primarily as a moral phenomenology or psychology of empirical affairs. But that even in that area, Hartley is more interesting. I think Sidgwick's conclusion is, in part, the result of projecting backwards a particular (anachronistic) version of the fact-value distinction onto Hume and Smith. One that become part of the professional DNA of both economics and philosophy such that a mutual, agreeable division of labor is possible (and in context Sidgwick and Marshall accepted this division).

So, I hope to have answered here Harman's postscript 2 questions (at least in provisional manner). But I also want to note that my answer illustrates one of the dangers of relying on authoritative textbook traditions (which is required by the party of progress). These can shape the self-conception of even advanced students, that even once important and famous books are mistakenly neglected. So, even the party of progress must leave room, as Liam Kofi Bright has suggested to me, for arbitrage opportunities and allow the development of seemingly epiphenomenal intellectual activities (such as history of philosophy and/or economics) that make it possible. 

Kant, Neo-Liberalism, and Migration

This a libertarian must believe, for war is the great threat to his kind of society. There is simply no democratic answer to the problem of external defense, save indefinite extension of federalism, first, into a predominantly powerful supranational federation, and then gradually into inclusive world organiza­tion of all nations capable of responsible participation. Here the important next steps must be taken in the field of com­mercial policies; and the next conspicuous institutional innova­tion will be an international court with compulsory jurisdiction, albeit only among some Western democracies at the start. Libertarian democracy can survive without world order but not without secular movement toward such order.--H. Simons (1948) Economic Policy for a Free Society: A Credo, pp. 15-16 

First, a terminological point. Simons' use of 'libertarian' is a bit confusing. It means, for him, in "the English-Continental sense" liberal (given that in the US context 'liberalism' became associated with the New Deal). In contemporary discourse he would be considered a bleeding heart libertarian. Either way, my interest in Simons (recall) is that he helped shape the Chicago school of economics in crucial fashion.  And that he is one of the founding thinkers of the constitutive schools of twentieth century neo-liberalism, which was at the heart of what I call the second wave of liberalism (roughly 1945-2008).

So, I was a bit surprised to see such a clear statement of the  Kantian program (recall) for perpetual peace. Kant thought that growing regional federated commercial liberal democracies (which he called 'republics' because the term 'democracy' was still reserved for direct rule by the people) were the key to world peace. (The idea that liberal democracies don't fight with each other can also be traced back to Kant and Addison.) 

Simons is clear that such supranational federations -- the idea anticipates the EU -- would be committed to internal free-trade and, ideally, to external free trade. A free trade regime will generate international policy coordination and international laws. That is to say, Simons thinks that international institutions will develop functionally out of a joint commitment to free trade among like-minded peoples. I put it like this to do help explain his relativizing the scheme to 'Western Democracies.'

The point is not that Simons thinks non Western peoples are incapable of democratic federation. Rather, Simons thinks any such democratic, liberal and commercial supranational federation presuppose a"moral consensus." So, shared values are presupposed in any stable government. (This idea has a powerful afterlife in the ideas of his students, Milton Friedman and George Stigler.) While tacitly drawing on Max Weber (Simons' Chicago colleague (recall) Frank Knight had introduced Weber to US readers), he puts it as follows: 

The basic function of central government is to sustain domestic peace. Internal order is prerequisite to external defense and, of course, is the essence of world federation. The good central government will represent a monopoly of violence; it must sustain that monopoly against both its constituent political units and all extra-governmental bodies. It must promote all kinds of peaceful intercourse, intellectual and commercial. It must articulate the prevailing moral consensus and promote enlargement of that consensus by organized, free discussion and legislative-judicial experimentation. (16)*

That is to say, one of the goals of the liberal state (itself ideally a federated state) is to promote moral consensus by being the site of reasoned debate, and by engaging like-minded states to create the international infrastructure that will facilitate more trade and more moral consensus, including a legal regime.

Now, Simons is clear that these are ideal types. The real world is messy and imperfect. And he explicitly acknowledges that liberalism must be possible without it existing everywhere. But he does think movement toward such a Kantian order is required to keep faith in liberal progress. The EU has internalized this idea in its ordinary self-conception. The fact that Brexit has become truly thinkable will be an interesting test case for the survival of this idea (and the EU).

That liberalism must be possible without it existing everywhere is not obvious. Because Simons is clear that the very possibility of war is a threat to a liberal state. For it requires considerable preparedness; and such preparedness involves planning and subordinating individual freedoms to collective survival. The idea is worked out at greater length in an earlier text by Von Mises (1927; unmentioned by Simons), who is clearly indebted to Kant (whom he cites in relevant context a few times in the text):

One would think that after the experience of the [first] World War the realization of the necessity of perpetual peace would have become increasingly common. However, it is still not appreciated that everlasting peace can be achieved only by putting the liberal program into effect generally and holding to it constantly and consistently. "Liberal Foreign Policy" in Liberalism: in the Classical tradition (110-111)

This would be a natural place to end. 

But Mises also complicates the situation. One may well wonder, and critics of Liberalism have wondered, why if Liberalism promotes peace the first wave of liberalism ended in the disaster of first world war.+ Mises himself suggests that it is the rise of nationalism and zero-sum colonial competition that is to blame.+ Mises is quite capable of divorcing colonial/imperial projects from liberalism. But the situation is not so easy when it comes to liberalism's relationship to nationalism:

As long as nations were ruled by monarchical despots, the idea of adjusting the boundaries of the state to coincide with the boundaries between nationalities could not find acceptance. If a potentate desired to incorporate a province into his realm, he cared little whether the inhabitants—the subjects—agreed to a change of rulers or not. The only consideration that was regarded as relevant was whether the available military forces were sufficient to conquer and hold the territory in question. One justified one's conduct publicly by the more or less artificial construction of a legal claim. The nationality of the inhabitants of the area concerned was not taken into account at all.
It was with the rise of liberalism that the question of how the boundaries of states are to be drawn first became a problem independent of military, historical, and legal considerations. Liberalism, which founds the state on the will of the majority of the people living in a certain territory, disallows all military considerations that were formerly decisive in defining the boundaries of the state. It rejects the right of conquest. It cannot understand how people can speak of "strategic frontiers" and finds entirely incomprehensible the demand that a piece of land be incorporated into one's own state in order to possess a glacis. Liberalism does not acknowledge the historical right of a prince to inherit a province.

To simplify: while nations pre-exist liberalism, liberalism makes nationalism politically feasible. (It is worth comparing (recall) Mises with Herzl.) As Mises points out (on the next page) the key mechanism is the plebescite or referendum. Moreover, where national identities must co-exist, and mutual trust is low, the democratic impulse of liberalism also makes nationalism a permanent political problem. Mises is quite frank about this. For Mises cultural and ethnic pluralism is a source of tension. 

Mises' solution to the problems of a multi-national democracy is to double-down and to suggest minimizing government functions to bare (liberal) necessities (rule of law, defense of property rights, and some coordination functions, etc.) such that gaining power becomes of little value to people of ill will. As regular readers know I don't think Mises, nor any of his modern libertarian heirs, can explain how in the eternal presence of rent-seeking, one can attain such a nightwatchman state without a massive change of popular opinion (and the political dis-empowerment of those that benefit from spoils and rents who are by definition very well organized politically). So I view this as unstable. 

But, where liberalism generates homogeneous nation states, and has what Simons will call moral consensus, Mises allows that public provision of public goods (like education) need not cause internal strife. I think this helps predict and explain why in relatively homogeneous liberal democracies welfare states are less controversial (than in the more pluralistic ones). In homogeneous states the moral consensus can be broader. But if they engage in free trade and maintain a liberal economy, these tend to be wealthy and growing and so become, as Mises emphasizes, very attractive to immigrants and, thereby, become multicultural/national. So, by Mises' own lights -- he is for open borders [Simons is more reserved about this]-- this is a recipe for more internal tension and so turns out not to be stable either.**

I have gone on long enough. But the problem is that the early neo-liberals did not develop a genuinely pluralist conception of moral and political life; and so their commitment to open borders and democratic liberalism are a source of tension.     

 

A Theorist (Arrow) Does History as a Moral Enterprise, and Therapy

Like Schumpeter, Marshall saw himself in a very superior position in the whole world of economics, and even towards his hero, Ricardo, there is more than a touch of condescension. Ricardo is given to an excessive love of abstraction, no doubt, says Marshall, the result of Ricardo's "Semitic" heritage. great biological developments of the nineteenth century had their dark side in the use of science to justify racism, and this example is far from the only one in Marshall.) (3)

...

Keynes did not confuse an antiquarian interest in seeing Sraffa produce a good edition of Ricardo with any excessive respect for an obstacle to what he saw as correct thinking. His understanding of past economists was primarily dictated by their consistency with his current thought. (6)

...

It would be too far from the aim of this essay to examine whether or to what extent the criticism of Ricardo by his successors was motivated, consciously or unconsciously, by the fear of giving aid to the enemies of capitalism. Like any historical inquiry, it would have to be conterfactual, and it is not very clear what would count as relevant evidence.

Instead let me make a few remarks about the fundamental character of Ricardo's system, as I see it. I am a practicing theorist, not a scholar in the history of economic thought, and my reactions are no doubt influenced by my own views. Indeed, it is hard to write intellectual theory and, for that matter, any kind of history, without framing the past through the perspective of the present. It can justly be remarked about history that it is as revealing about the time when it was written as about the time which is its ostensible subject matter. Nevertheless, it is morally incumbent on us to try as far as possible to put ourselves in a position contemporary with that of our author. (8) K. Arrow , "Ricardo's Work as Viewed by Later Economists,"

The great theorist, Arrow (recall yesterday and last week, and here), treats the writing of history as, in part, a moral exercise. He does not explain why he thinks this, but it's clear that he believes that what economics is about is, in part, not just focused on ideas or theories, but also the evaluation of authors. Throughout the essay, Arrow shows an interest in authors' (and their critics') motives, which are linked up to their political, ideological, and even racist commitments. Even in the quoted passage above, where Arrow self-consciously does not explore the motives of the critics of Ricardo, he makes a point of mentioning them anyway. But the core historical method he embraces is that qua historian, we have to "try as far as possible to put ourselves in a position contemporary with that of our author." Note that Arrow is not claiming that we have to put ourselves in the shoes of the author, but rather we have to take up a kind of counterfactual position that makes us a kind of contemporaneous observer when we evaluate the quality of an author's thought. But in so doing we bring along, as it were, our knowledge.

Arrow, in  fact, exhibits this methodological stance throughout the essay. He is very careful to avoid Whiggish criticism (and criticizes others for doing so), but he always takes up two perspectives while writing the past: he shows the strengths and limitations of an author's thought both (i) from the hypothetical then contemporary perspective (noting what could have been criticized and appreciated with the technical tools at hand) as well as (ii) from the present perspective in which the implications of some tools are better known or new concepts have been introduced to make theoretical relations more  transparent.*

As an aside, Arrow is frank about the fact that the counterfactual that goes into (i) is really itself a kind of art: it is, after all, (a) "not very clear what would count as relevant evidence." He does not note another problem with his stance toward (i); it is not entirely clear (b) what counts as contemporary -- how long is the present? -- especially, if there is not a historical agent that can be connected to the perspective. It is worth noting that the complications involving (b) especially have been explored by critics of Quentin Skinner in recent (!) discussions about the methodology of the the history of philosophy (see, e.g., Laerke and my observations on Koen Vermeir).

Arrow recognizes that (ii) runs the danger of generating a superior position that is to be avoided. He does not explain how this is done, and he recognizes, remarkably (recall also my post on Marshall's criticism of Ricardo), that science itself can be a source of -- let's say -- unjustified or unearned feeling of elevation. (It's allied to expert-overconfidence, and mistaken self-understand as magnanimous but not the same to each.) Presumably by engaging in the practice of (i), one can learn to avoid the hubris associated with (ii) or (iii) the kind of sectarian yet Whiggish interest in the present that Arrow associates with Keynes's treatment of the past (see the quote above).

Often, when one reads the other two great historians of economics who also were Nobel-laureates, Samuelson and Stigler, one gets the sense that they recognize that maintaining control over history matters (in ways Kuhn has described) for the identity of the present paradigm. (They were both intimately familiar with Kuhnian ideas before Kuhn wrote Structure [see here and here])** It's not impossible that Arrow also thought this. But I wish to entertain another speculation.

Strikingly, Arrow does not treat being a theorist in such moral terms. Yesterday, I noted that Arrow has a tendency to treat theorizing, in part, as a form of intellectual combat in which opposing views are destroyed. (That's perfectly compatible with him being a generous and kind person in all kinds of ways.) One may speculate (and Arrow explicitly recognizes the legitimacy of such speculation) that for Arrow writing and teaching history of thought was, in part, a kind of intellectual therapy to guard against his own intellectual vices. (Recall also my exchange with Susan James.) As he himself noted the historian's craft can also be quite revealing "about the time when it was written" as well as its author.

 

Gary Becker and Economic Imperialism

I learned this week-end that Gary Becker had died. It's a testament to his significance that general philosophy blogs mentioned this fact (here and here in respectful fasfion). Outside of economics his work is known for two (very) connected features: (a) he is one of the Godfathers of what has become known as neo-Liberalism and the technocratic conception of Politics (recall my post on Becker). As Kieran Healy reminds us, Foucault was prescient and insightful about all of this (see also here). (b) The University of Chicago obituary captures another aspect of his significance by claiming that "He crossed disciplinary boundaries to apply core economic tenets—maximizing behavior, market equilibrium, stable preferences, and rational choice—to subjects thought to be the domain of sociology, psychology, law, and other fields." That is to say, Becker's work is what people had in mind when they speak of 'economic imperialism.' (Wikipedia's brief entry on the topic is full of references to Becker.) As the distinguished philosopher of economics, Uskali Mäki. writes, "as paradigmatic examples of the trend, one may cite works such as Gary Becker’s The Economics of Discrimination (1957)..." (he also mentions Becker’s (1981) A Treatise on the Family as another such paradigmatic work; Mäki's piece is very fair to Becker and worth re-reading.) And, again, Healy's selections show that Foucault also has understood this.

In the passages quoted by Healy, Foucault calls attention to the significance of a essay by Robbins in preparing the conceptual ground for Becker's project (on Robbins, recall, here, and here.) Interestingly enough, one influential observer-participant-critic, discerned Foucault's point, but with a twist--it's people attacking Robbins that reveal the imperialistic inclinations of economics! Here's Talcott Parsons, writing, as he announces in the first sentence, as "a sociologist, not an economist" in 1934 in The Quarterly Journal of Economics (while criticizing Souter's criticism of Robbins): this "leads him [Souter] into an "economic imperialism" (to borrow his own phrase), which results not only in enriching these neighboring "countries," [that is in Parson's terms, "neighboring sciences"--ES] which of course it does, but in putting some of them into a strait jacket of "economic" categories which is illsuited to their own conditions." (512; I thank Rachel McKinnon for helping me get my hands on a copy of this article.)

Now, in his piece, Parsons traces the logic of economic imperialism back to Alfred Marshall (522). The connection to Marshall is not a coincidence because Marshall was revered by Becker's teacher, Milton Friedman, who wrote a major piece on Marshall. (On Marshall, see also here.)* Parsons sumps up his own argument:

the real result of Souter's empiricism, like Marshall's, is the tendency to attempt to extend " economic" categories to cover the whole of concrete life. This is the objectionable "economic imperialism" of which I spoke above. If pushed far enough it will result in the same kind of harmful lack of perspective of which Marshall was guilty. (He thought of India simply as a "backward country" for instance.) It is a tendency against which the sociologist, as well as other scientists, must stand up and fight for his scientific life. It is a tendency against which the sociologist, as well as other scientists, must stand up and fight for his scientific life. (Parsons, 535)