Digressions&Impressions

Liberalism, Politics, and the Spirit of Mercantilism (Crisis of Liberalism: IV)

The widely read, widely traveled, superlatively observant author of the Wealth of Nations need not be told so obvious a thing as that self-interest entered also political life....

Smith gave a larger role to emotion, prejudice, and ignorance in political life than he ever allowed in ordinary economic affairs. The mercantile policies directed to the improvement of the balance of trade with particular countries have their origin in “national prejudice and animosity” (I, 497 [441]). The legislation against corn traders is so perverse as to lead Smith to compare it to laws against witchcraft (11, 41 [ 5001 ) ; indeed, “the laws concerning corn may every where be compared to the laws concerning religion” (11, 48 [507]). In fact all unwise economic legislation from which no politically strong constituency drew benefits must be nonrational legislation....

In general, however, Smith’s attitude toward political behavior was not dissimilar to that of a parent toward a child: the child was often mistaken and sometimes perverse, but normally it would improve in conduct if properly instructed...

One may give--for generations of economists have given-advice lavishly without taking account of the political forces which confine and direct policy. In the absence of knowledge of these political forces, the advice must often be bad and usually be unpersuasive. Why tell the sovereign that free trade is desirable, if one has no method of disarming the merchants and manufacturers who have obtained the protectionist measures ? Why tell the French sovereign to abandon the taille and capitations and increase the vintiemes, when only a revolution could dislodge the tax-favored classes? Why believe that better turnpikes await only the appointments of a better class of commissioners (11, 248 [ 684-851 )? George J. Stigler (1971)  "Smith's Travels on the Ship of State" [HT Glory Liu]

This post is part of a larger series on the Crisis of Liberalism (recall here;  here; here; (see also here, here, here, and here).

Here's a useful, undoubtedly mythical narrative about the origins of liberalism: it arose as an ameliorative project in opposition to mercantilism in the seventeenth and eighteenth century. (Yes, there were other targets, including feudalism and certain species of theocracy.) Here mercantilism is understood as a theory of state capture by interested classes who use the state to promote their own economic interests either through so-called rents, conquest (imperialism), slavery, or the tax system (or all of them). In the Wealth of Nations, Smith calls the whole violent ideology against which he hones his fire, "the Mercantile Spirit." From that vantage point, liberalism is a reformist appeal to the interests of other classes as well as enlightened self-interests of the business classes.  The key conceptual move is to turn zero-sum logic into a win-win agenda that promotes, as a political program, a moral vision (the good society) that is all about the expansion of individual freedoms (note the plural). Depending on one's taste one may well come to privilege particular features of the liberal program (free trade, rule of law, individual choice, harm reduction, mutual respect, free press, free speech, elections, separation of powers, freedom of religion, etc.)

Notice that the mythical narrative presupposes the existence of states with non-trivial capacities and societies with complex division of labor and different perspectives on their interests. (This narrative is not identical to ones one finds circulating among some kinds of libertarians.) Notice, too, that what is commonly called capitalism is neutral between liberalism and mercantalism. So, for example, many (recall) of the ills that Marx (and Engels) diagnose in capitalism, are, from the vantage point of a liberal, really ills of mercantile variant thereof (e.g., "the executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.") This is one reason why, for example, social democracy (which borrows from liberalism and Marxism) is conceptually possible.

Now, one historical (stylized) fact is that the very success of liberalism can give rise to forces that make a worse form mercantilism possible. This is really the story of the first wave of liberalism during the 19th century and its collapse in World War I (recall). And this has generated throughout the development of liberalism other important intellectual and institutional innovations, including ideas about anti-trust (to prevent concentrated market power), the progressive tax rate (to prevent concentrated economic power), the promotion of meritocracy in government hiring, the development of international law, and, alongside many attempts at liberalizing the economy, the mobility of people (open borders, etc.), the development of many international institutions (so characteristic of the second wave of liberalism). 

Notice that the mythical narrative now reveals, which was also true at first, that sometimes liberalism entails strengthening the state institutions and their functioning, even attacking (to use a useful term coined by Samuel Bagg) concentrated powers in the private sector (or, as Gorden Arlen reminds me, 'sinister interests') and sometimes entailed strengthening the forces of civil society, including of businesses and religions. (Jacob T. Levy has nicely articulated a more sophisticated version of the tactical vacillation in (recall) his book Rationalism, Pluralism & Freedom.)

At any given time, the ameliorative, mitigating spirit of liberalism demands from us imperfect judgments about what the greatest/most urgent dangers are and what the right way to respond to them might be (see Peter Boettke on that very challenge today). At no point does liberalism expect to destroy the spirit of mercantilism because this would require a reform of human nature and (as anarchists urge) the total abolition of the political power of the state. 

What liberalism then also requires is a theory of how politics operates (which can constrain the judgment). As Stigler notes, the very idea of state capture presupposes that people are self-interested and know what they are doing when they influence or have power.  One may say then that the diagnostic use of public choice economics is co-extensive with the history of liberalism. (Of course, public choice insights were known to critics of democracy and liberal ideas before liberalism was invented.) This was obscured a bit in the long period when utilitarianism was dominant because it often presupposed philanthropic legislators.  Alongside his paper on Smith, in 1971 Stigler published a piece on the nature of rent-seeking, "The Theory of Economic Regulation" on the demand and supply of regulation that itself became  wildly influential (this morning it had over 12,000 citations). For those who wish to amuse themselves, they can compare Stigler's  two brief essays (the Smith one and the one on rents) and note that they include the same kind of examples and the same rhetoric against the mistakes of economists.

Now, sometimes liberalism is tempted -- and this Stigler diagnoses -- by two other theories of politics (which are opposed even if the same side of the coin because they tend to black-box politics): one suggests that in politics unreason rules. I think one finds this attitude in some Hayekians, but, as Stigler notes correctly, one can find traces of it going back to Smith (even if I think Stigler misreads some of his own examples). On this view, politics is simply unpredictable and corrosive to any rational ideals (or both)--it often is accompanied by the idea to keep one's distance from politics and reduction of state power. The other [black-box theory] is one that implies that good normative ideas are automatically implemented [by benevolent and truth apt legislators] and then executed by a rule following bureaucracy. As Stigler notes nobody would assent to holding such a theory explicitly, but a lot of policy advice assumes it in practice. 

As an aside, part of the inside-baseball joke of the closing line of the quoted passage by Stigler is not just that economists are volunteering themselves as a particular class of (rent-seeking) job-seekers, the impartial and truth-apt commissioner, who is not to be found in his models, but that Smith -- the apostle of free trade -- himself ended up as a high customs commissioner to the British Crown.

Short of revolution (which liberals tend to abhor), Stigler advocates a different (fourth) understanding of policy. It requires not just the diagnostic features of  public choice, but also knowledge of "the political forces which confine and direct policy." This requires knowledge of the sort that empirical political science and sociology can supply. So, from this perspective, any policy advice must include a constituency or coalition that can promote the policy effectively (and have a grasp of the ways bureaucracies may react to them). Recent political philosophy can treat these as belonging to a certain class of feasibility constraints. Obviously, the promise is that this may increase the chances of uptake; it also makes all policy proposals much more status-quo friendly. Sometimes the concession to feasibility makes liberalism appear as a handmaiden to conservatism even if the path is honorable. 

What Stigler refuses to countenance, and I think here he underestimates Smith, is that morality itself can be mobilized.+ In addition, alongside most readers of Smith, he misses the role systematic theory has in shaping long-term policy. 

Let me wrap up. When liberal solutions to the problem of mercantile spirit (rent-seeking, state violence, etc.) themselves generate worse problems than the one they were aiming to solve then liberalism runs the risk of collapsing and becomes unattractive if not unpersuasive to the young. As regular readers know I think we have reached such a stage in the wake of the great financial crisis. The very survival of the financial system was taken to require great handouts to the rich and powerful. Few believe, when listening to self-described libertarian billionaires plotting interplanetary escape, that capitalism can solve the environmental/climate challenges ahead. It is no wonder that the spirit of mercantilism with its embrace of national state sponsored violence against immigrants and trade barriers with its fondness for grand building projects (etc.), has grown so bold since. But since that is the very ground of the existence of liberalism this is no reason for despair; it's our permanent challenge. 

On Freud, Rawls, Rose, the contrast between Analytic/Continental Philosophy, and Lewis-Kripke

Behind one half of Ferrante’s pen name, Elena, is a tale from Greek mythology. According to a relatively little-known version of the story, Zeus rapes and impregnates, not Leda the swan, but Nemesis, who turns herself into a goose to escape him. She then lays an egg, found by a shepherd and handed to Leda, who nurtures it and out of which Elena is born, who is then raised by Leda, in Ferrante’s suggestive formula, as ‘her daughter-non-daughter’.4 It must be one of the earliest stories of surrogacy, as well as offering a model of motherhood without vested interest because it has embraced a stranger.--Jacuqeline Rose, Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty, p. 146.

One important feature of the distinction between analytical and continental philosophy is that analytical philosophy is when not outright hostile to Freud/Freudianism, in its indifference to it, purportedly untouched by it.* This is most evident in the brief spectacle of the late twentieth century flowering of analytical Marxism--these hard-nosed men (it was really a boys club), which self-consciously set itself against the mushy forms of Marxism found in Paris and Frankfurt (and elsewhere). What's conspicuous about their (the analytical marxist) work is not the elegance and wit of their writings, but their inability to make visible how oppression as a social phenomenon generates, through violence and lies/ideology, the deformation, material and psychic, at the heart of of everybody's lives.+ (Of course, one can state and argue this without Freudian theory, but often without fertility.)

I think I can explain what I have in mind: John Rawls (to be sure no analytical Marxist), who read more widely than most analytic philosophers, discusses Freud briefly several time in Theory of Justice in the context of the significance of moral education. For Rawls Freud is somebody who, first, offers cautionary warnings about taking moral sentiments at face value due to their being rooted in processes of "conflict and stress" (TJ, 459); second, he treats Freud as, we may say,  a Nietzschean, who offers a kind of error theory for the sense of justice (and, in so doing, mistakenly conflates envy and resentment). (Susan Moller Okin has also noticed the first passage. She treats it as evidence of Rawls's blindness to Freud's sexism.) Rawls treats the grounds of the "conflict and stress" as mere psychological process to be overcome in adulthood (with the help, surprisingly enough, of "sound principles" that is, political philosophy) and not as expressing the effects of (ahh) a badly functioning basic structure(s) of society.**  

I have come to think it's not Freudianism's dubious character as a science that accounts for analytic philosophy's hostility/indifference (or early analytic philosophy's flirtation with behaviorism), but rather something that G.A. Cohen mislabels as "acid Freudian skepticism:" that all given identities are at once (too) robust in their fixity and fragile in their vulnerability to fracturing. The effect of this acid is that identity becomes liquid. Such liquidity is played with in Derrida and embraced by Deleuze, and treated at arm's length in the analytic mainstream. For, while one may think that political philosophy and moral education are at the margin's of analytic philosophy's self-understanding -- despite the fact that (recall) the Strawson-Carnap debate pivots on it-- identity is central. I can't, of course, prove this point to you.

However, I think I can make it arresting. I hope you will forgive me if I use Kripke as a representative agent, as an exemplar. I want to return to Kripke's response to Lewis's counterpart theory. This response exhibits more than dispassionate philosophical disagreement. I reproduce most of the relevant footnote from Naming and Necessity:

Lewis's elegant paper also suffers from a purely formal difficulty: on his interpretation of quantified modality, the familiar law (y) ((x)A(x) ⊃ A(y) falls, if A(x) is allowed to contain modal operators. (For example, (∃y) ((x) ◊(x ≠y) is satisfiable but (∃y) ◊ (y ≠ y) is not.) Since Lewis's formal model follows rather naturally from his philosophical views on counterparts, and since the failure of universal instantiation for modal properties is intuitively bizarre, it seems to me that this failure constitutes an additional argument against the plausibility of his philosophical views. There are other, lesser, formal difficulties as well. I cannot elaborate here.

Strictly speaking, Lewis’s view is not a view of ‘transworld identification’. Rather, he thinks that similarities across possible worlds determine a counterpart relation which need be neither symmetric nor transitive. The counterpart of something in another possible world is never identical with the thing itself. Thus if we say ‘Humphrey might have won the election (if only he had done such-and-such), we are not talking about something that might have happened to Humphrey but to someone else, a “counterpart”.’ Probably, however, Humphrey could not care less whether someone else, no matter how much resembling him, would have been victorious in another possible world.
Thus, Lewis's view seems to me even more bizarre than the usual notions of transworld identification that it replaces. The important issues, however, are common to the two views: the supposition that other possible worlds are like other dimensions of a more inclusive universe, that they can be given only by purely qualitative descriptions, and that therefore either the identity relation or the counterpart relation must be established in terms of qualitative resemblance.

Many have pointed out to me that the father of counterpart theory is probably Leibnitz. I will not go into such a historical question here. It would also be interesting to compare Lewis's views with the Wheeler-Everett interpretation of quantum mechanics. I suspect that this view of physics may suffer from philosophical problems analogous to Lewis's counterpart theory; it is certainly very similar in spirit.

Notice that Kripke repeatedly treats Lewis' position as bizarre. (It is quite amazing, actually, to see a formal difficulty itself be explicated in terms of what seems intuitively bizarre.) The one other time (right at the start) in Naming and Necessity where Kripke treats a view as bizarre is  the denial of the indiscernability of identicals. (Notably he treats the denial of it as on par as the denial of the 'law of contradiction.') My point here is not to claim that Kripke's critique of Lewis isn't well motivated or un-argued.++ Kripke is not cheating. And my present purpose is not to defend Lewis (although regular readers know I think counterpart theory grasps something fundamental about self-identity.)

Rather, I am marking that Kripke's hostility (the repeated bizarre) expresses something that goes beyond mere disagreement. As Freud notes in a very different context (dreams, etc.), treating something as bizarre is a mechanism by which we allow ourselves to ignore something important. It's to Kripke's credit that he explains why Lewis' position must be set aside. Kripke says that the most important point (of disagreement) is that for Lewis the identity relation, including self-identity, must be established in terms of qualitative resemblance.*** Kripke's emphatic ''bizarre" betrays how he recoils from the (ahh) instability this generates. 

On the Crisis of Liberalism IV: Can the History of Defeated Marxism Teach Liberals Anything?

[This is part of an ongoing series of occasion pieces on the crisis of liberalism, recall here, here, here; see also here--ES] 

Some general facets can be discerned at once. Western Marxism, as we have seen, was progressively inhibited from theoretical confrontation of major economic or political problems, from the 1920s onwards. Gramsci was the last of its thinkers to broach central issues of class struggle directly in his writings. He too, however, wrote nothing about the capitalist economy itself, in the classical sense of analysing the laws of motion of the mode of production as such. After him, an equivalent silence typically shrouded the political order of bourgeois rule, and the means of overthrowing it, as well. The result was that Western Marxism as a whole, when it proceeded beyond questions of method to matters of substance, came to concentrate overwhelmingly on study of superstructures. Moreover, the specific superstructural orders with which it showed the most constant and close concern were those ranking 'highest' in the hierarchy of distance from the economic infrastructure, in Engels's phrase. In other words, it was not the State or Law which provided the typical objects of its research. It was culture that held the central focus of its attention.--Perry Anderson (1976) Considerations on Western Marxism, pp. 75-6. [A neat footnote on Sraffa and Gramsci has been omitted--ES.]

Anderson writes before the fall of the Berlin Wall. But his Considerations is a history of defeat in two senses: first, where the revolution occurred and succeeded (Russia and those countries conquered/inspired by it), Marxism itself (or true Marxism) was defeated by what Anderson sometimes calls 'Stalinism' and sometimes call  'bureacratization' (that is, the capture of the party by the bureaucratic interests and the suppression of worker freedom). Second, in lots of places -- including the 'Western' lands that are the focus of his Considerations -- the forces of capital (sometimes in alliance with fascism) were objectively stronger than the would-be-marxist forces. My interest here is not about the sources of defeat, but the sources of the inherent limitations of western Marxism diagnosed by Anderson.

For, Anderson's book is not meant to be defeatist. It is written after the events of 1968, and he has hopeful due to the "re-emergence of revolutionary masses outside the control of a bureaucratized party rendered potentially conceivable the unification of Marxist theory and working class-practice again." (95) This sentence makes clear what Anderson takes to be the source of these inherent limitations: the split between theory -- primarily developed (by philosophers) within the university -- and working-class praxis. (Gramsci is treated as a partial exception.)  

It would be interesting to learn from more knowledgeable others which social movements today have managed to overcome the split between theory and practice. My lack of familiarity with the details with various social movements prevents me from pontificating on this (but recall this post on Dotson; and this guest post on Graeber.)

But Anderson's book did get me thinking about the shortcomings of liberalism of the last few decades. If Marxism became too much of an academic enterprise dis-associated from movement building (and too focused on epistemological and methodological issues), could the same be said about recent liberalism? Surely, the now stalemated debate over ideal/non-ideal theory reflects something of a similar unease. 

From a historical perspective, in the first wave (recall) of liberalism (roughly, recall, 1776-1914), there were many major liberal thinkers who were also active in politics (one just has to mention Mill and Tocqueville, but the list is much longer). During the second wave (from 1945-2008), plenty of liberal thinkers were influential on policy through their status as professional economists or through their role in shaping jurisprudence. But even so, starting perhaps with Max Weber, the major political philosophers/theorists of second wave liberalism (Rawls, Nozick, Raymond Aron, Habermas, etc.)* were not especially active in government.** 

One clear problem that liberals have is our inability to mobilize as liberals against the illiberal (nationalist, racialist, authoritarian) encroachment on liberal practices. This is no surprise because liberal political theory of the second wave is not just an academic enterprise, but one that is, by and large, a liberalism that (as its critics argue) assumes it's the only live option (even Rawlsian political liberalism assumes liberals are hegemonic). Now critics of liberalism have noticed that this has created the tendency of liberals of treating illiberal positions as fundamentally irrational. While I think this is a huge problem, today I ignore it. Rather, I want to call attention to three bad effects.

First, liberal theory has ignored the significance of leadership and mobilization. As I have noted before, modern liberals tend to dislike talk of leadership--we prefer rules, procedures, impartial laws, and public reason. But a lot of collective action and mobilization problems require some kind of organizing and leadership. In addition, the maintenance of a liberal public culture and institutions, even the transmission of power, also requires leadership (recall this post). 

Second, because liberals prefer (emancipatory) rules, procedures, impartial laws, and public reason, we have too often ceded 'democracy' to populists and nationalists. (It has not helped that Stateside, one of the main parties, the Republicans, as Jacob Levy has argued, has also had undemocratic instincts when it comes to dis-enfranchisement, while the other party, the Democrats,  has been eager to work with the courts when it could to achieve major policy ends.) This means that fundamentally illiberal conceptions of democracy in terms of unconstrained majoritarianism or 'the people' have been gaining ground.+ In so far as liberals have a theory of (voter) mobilization, it's a negative one in terms of rent-seeking/capture of special interests (recall here and here). 

The two bad effects combine, third, in the tendency of second-wave liberalism to treat voters as ignorant and to embrace either (among mainstream liberals) technocracy or (among libertarian friendly types) markets (or both) as an alternative to democracy. It's hard to see how to make liberalism a popular political program if it insults those on whose good opinion and support it would have to rely in a crisis. This is not to deny that liberalism is (recall) rooted in the thought that political life requires institutional response(s) to human imperfection (including immorality). But each of these responses/institutions (rule of law, separation of powers, international treaties, role of markets, etc.) could be defended on positive grounds in terms of important values and consequences (without, as it were, reminding the voters of their own immorality/ignorance). In political practice, there is little defense of them.++ 

That liberals lost the political ability to defend their liberal values in the political arena has, I think, become most clear by the authoritarian and polarizing responses to the tendency of some Muslim citizens to radicalize. Rather than treating such radicalization as an invitation to reflect on the ways in which liberal society fails to due justice to the aspirations of its own citizens and falls short of its own ideals, we have welcomed a robust defense of 'Western' culture that through its various manifestations (war on terror, state of emergency, etc.) is increasingly encouraging rejectionism of liberal values by the electorate. We are routinely asked, in zero-sum fashion, to pick sides in a clash of civilizations, rather than (as the liberal sensitivity demands) looking for win-win futures.

Winning the cold war, and the passage of time, left liberalism unprepared for its own fragility. By this I do not mean that liberalism would be un-competitive in great power rivalry with, say, China. But rather, that liberal theoretical development became, in part, unmoored from liberal political practice (in so far as that liberal practice became too closely identified with economic theory/jurisprudence). And while such division of labor is itself a consequence of liberal success, I fear it has also encouraged the idea that we can muddle our way through, each of us doing our own thing.   

 

 

On Marxism and Normative Human Nature

But don’t wrangle with us so long as you apply, to our intended abolition of bourgeois property, the standard of your bourgeois notions of freedom, culture, law, &c. Your very ideas are but the outgrowth of the conditions of your bourgeois production and bourgeois property, just as your jurisprudence is but the will of your class made into a law for all, a will whose essential character and direction are determined by the economical conditions of existence of your class.

The selfish misconception that induces you to transform into eternal laws of nature and of reason, the social forms springing from your present mode of production and form of property – historical relations that rise and disappear in the progress of production – this misconception you share with every ruling class that has preceded you. What you see clearly in the case of ancient property, what you admit in the case of feudal property, you are of course forbidden to admit in the case of your own bourgeois form of property.

....

“Undoubtedly,” it will be said, “religious, moral, philosophical, and juridical ideas have been modified in the course of historical development. But religion, morality, philosophy, political science, and law, constantly survived this change.”

“There are, besides, eternal truths, such as Freedom, Justice, etc., that are common to all states of society. But Communism abolishes eternal truths, it abolishes all religion, and all morality, instead of constituting them on a new basis; it therefore acts in contradiction to all past historical experience.”

What does this accusation reduce itself to? The history of all past society has consisted in the development of class antagonisms, antagonisms that assumed different forms at different epochs.

But whatever form they may have taken, one fact is common to all past ages, viz., the exploitation of one part of society by the other. No wonder, then, that the social consciousness of past ages, despite all the multiplicity and variety it displays, moves within certain common forms, or general ideas, which cannot completely vanish except with the total disappearance of class antagonisms.--K. Marx & F. Engels (1848) Communist Manifesto, Chapter 2. Translated by Samuel Moore

It is often asked to what degree Marxism has a "moral foundation." For example, writing in the venerable SEP, Jonathan Wolff (Oxford) treats this as a "conundrum." I think part of the problem here is a post-Rawlsian artifact that influences Rawlsians and non-Rawlsians alike. For, what is meant by a moral foundation is often (mistakenly!) reduced to 'does Marx think capitalism is unjust? And since Marx seems thinks that 'justice' expresses the ideology of the ruling classes, he can't really think that. And if he did think that, he thought it -- paraphrasing Cohen --  despite himself. Moreover,  one often hears that since historical materialism is supposed to be a scientific theory, there shouldn't be room for moral foundations at all. 

Even so, again quoting Wolff, it "simply seems obvious that Marx’s critique [of capitalism] is a moral one. One way to to go is to suggest that Marxism involves an immanent critique. But this strikes me as unpersuasive because the whole tendency of immanent critique is to reform the status quo not to overthrow it. (In political terms: think of the Rawlsian theory of civil disobedience.)  

Another, more persuasive route, is to suggest that the ethically rich language we find in Marx's writings is supposed to work on our reactive attitudes and promote political action, even revolution. This seems clearly the case. But it would involve a kind of bad faith, if simultaneously these reactive attitudes are to be unmasked as themselves ideological. 

A better way to go is to note that in some crucial ways Marx's thought is more akin to eighteenth century philosophy. In particular, he has a view of human nature that in our terminology is normative: he offers an account of (what we may dub) proper human functioning in which there are fundamental, even "essential" human needs that any society ought to meet. This is in Norman Geras' useful terminology the "ethical standpoint" of Marxism. That ethical standpoint is compatible with the thought that the content of these needs may be culture-relative, determined by historical forces, or trans-historical. (My own understanding of Marx inclines to the former, but there is evidence for the latter.) And the ethical standpoint is compatible with the thought, and seems to imply, the idea that when our essential needs are met human flourishing becomes possible.  

This is akin to eighteenth century philosophy in three ways: (i) their science presupposes such an account of proper functioning. It is a mistake to project on to them the idea that science must abhor such a proper functioning account of human nature because (a) it is too Aristotelian, and they are known critics of Aristotle or (b) it mistakenly mixes facts and values. On (a): it is true they (and Marx) are critics of Aristotle in some senses, but proper functioning accounts can come in many varieties and even the ones influenced by Aristotle (need not inherit Aristotle's factual or normative mistakes). On (b): this is a species of pernicious anachronism. In addition, (ii) the idea that there are basic human needs which require development is, in fact, a core agreement between Marx and Enlightenment thought (which are both emancipatory; for references to wide variety of Marx's texts, see p. 85 of Geras' Marx and Human Nature: Refutation of a Legend).* And (iii) in proper functioning human nature, the reactive attitudes are indicative of a shared normativity. 

So, while the ethical standpoint of Marxism is not exhausted by its theory of human need (grounded in human nature) this is one of its foundations. (It is not exhausted because there are also other normative commitments (recall)). This is not to say there are no tensions at all. Part of the (Marxist) drama of human history starts when production becomes the means of satisfying needs (Geras: 69). 

Yet, the manner in which our needs are expressed as "wants" is determined by the constantly evolving production process. [There are, in fact, times where Marx comes close to suggesting all wants are adaptive (in the sense of Stockholm syndrome).] For Marx it is important not to conflate our objective needs with our socially developed wants. The adoption of the ethical standpoint mentioned above prevents this conflation in so far as our needs are objective (and objectively conducive to proper functioning, even human flourishing). 

I would want to close here. But let me make two points: first, even if it is not grounded in a theory of justice, Marx's ethical standpoint is not beyond normative (or properly self-aware scientific) criticism. Second, this ethical standpoint is not far removed from ideals prevalent within liberalism, even the skeptical liberalism of bourgeois theorists like myself. I am not bothered by this, but that's because liberalism is an emancipatory, even revolutionary project. 

On Repetition, Politics, and Science

He exchanges pound notes for the letters M.P. As the dominant cultural fiction of developed societies, money is the ideal nonsensical sign. I have always found it amazing that in exchange for paper I can get a book or a dress, that the stock market actually rises and falls on rumor — mere talk — and that people trade in something called Futures, as if such a thing were possible. I accept that all this is part of my world, and yet I continue to find it bizarre. Dickens obviously shared this bafflement. As powerful as it is, money refers to nothing real. Currency floats. Dickens reiterates Marx’s idea of money as society’s founding gibberish, as “the general confounding and compounding of all things — the world upside down.” When money is hoarded, it becomes even more meaningless because it buys nothing. It just accumulates like so much wastepaper.

Why money should be so precious to an ass so dull as to exchange it for no other satisfaction, is strange; but there is no animal so sure to get laden with it, as the Ass who sees nothing written on the face of the earth as the three dry letters L.S.D. not Luxury, Sensuality, Dissoluteness, which they so often stand for, but the three dry letters.

In an age when designer labels and celebrity names are used to sell everything from cars to lipstick, when meaningless slogans and lyrics and acronyms are constantly beamed and displayed and written on screens and billboards and the covers of magazines, when right-wing politicians hammer out the same empty phrases ad nauseam, corrupting words like freedom and truth until they are no longer recognizable and refer to absolutely nothing,--Siri Hustvedt "Charles Dickens and the Morbid Fragment" in (2006) A Plea for Eros, pp. 166-7

One often hears economist say with respect, that is, without irony, put your money where your mouth is (see here Cowen and Tabarrok). The underlying idea is not just that money is more solid than cheap talk, but that staking money is a form of serious agency -- skin in the game -- whereas mere talking is prattle. (I consider the epistemologist, who treats betting as the sine qua non of rationality, in the same boat.)

Hustvedt, a terrific novelist and even better essayist, helps us note that this disdain for talk is puzzling not only because (i) talk often moves markets (and so is causally efficacious, one is tempted to say talk better be treated as an endogenous variable), but also because (ii) money is ultimately grounded in some gibberish.+

As an aside (for those who follow recent high profile debates surrounding modern monetary theory (hereafter MMT [see here for Krugman, here my friend Alexander Douglas (who used to be more in favor)], one reason I suspect why modern monetary theory seems so attractive to some is that in it money is not grounded in nonsense (nor the labor theory of value) but in the very real power of the state (which can demand payment in its  own I.O.U.s.)* MMT is ultimately grounded in a kind of Hobbesian intuition.** 

Let me return to Hustvedt, in virtue of the fact that money originates in gibberish and floats, she is inclined to suggest that it cannot refer to something real. The underlying idea is hitched to the (correct) thought that signs are arbitrary. (Given how philosophically sophisticated Hustvedt is, one may even say that the PSR is lurking behind her position.) Unlike Hustvedt I think that money can refer to something real even if (as I grant her) it is founded in the arbitrariness of nonsense and tracked with something arbitrary (a sign).  

How so?

As any Connecticut poet (hoobla-how, hoobla-hoo, and hoo), or Humean-Deleuzian, can tell you, repetition can turn gibberish into something causally efficacious. And as Spinoza teaches, to be is to be a cause (and vice versa). This fact, that some of our beings/causes are grounded in nonsense, is an affront to those who think our starting points should be clear propositions. Be that as it may, because it has causal powers, money is as real as talk.++

In The Summer Without Men (Husvedt's 2011 novel), her narrator writes, "Repetition. Repetition, not identity. Nothing is repeated exactly, even words, because something has changed in the speaker and in the listener, because once said and then said again and again, the repetition itself alters the words." (51) I think the intuition -- the power of repetition -- is sound even if I am uneasy about Husvedt's manner of expressing it. While above I noted that repetition can generate identity, Husvedt is clear it can also, in the opposite direction, as it were, undermine identity. 

In her comment on Dickens, Hustvedt makes the point in stark fashion: repetition can create gibberish from truth. Her claim is not the familiar one associated with the theory of propaganda that through repetition lies can become thought true,*** but rather that one can debase words, even true and respected ones, by repeating them in certain ways. That is, certain forms of repetition vacate truth.

That is it for now. But I add a perhaps puzzling paragraph as a promissory note (and explication on my first paragraph above). As regular readers know, I think (recall) Arendt is right that only a limited number of institutions (related to science and justice) are capable of producing truth in a reliable fashion.+++ (It's now a familiar thought that replication is important in some of their practices.) The slide from [A] 'X=true' to [B] 'X=true if and only you are willing to take a bet on X' is made possible, I suspect, by a certain form of such vacating, that is, pernicious repetition.

 

 

The Communist Manifesto: On Bugs vs Features of Capitalism

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.

The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere.

The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of Reactionists, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilised nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes.--Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (1848) The Communist Manifesto, translated by Samuel Moore in cooperation with Frederick Engels, in 1888.

In his introduction to a recent edition of The Communist Manifest, Jeffrey C. Isaac notes (25) that the manifesto diagnoses what Schumpeter would call the "creative destruction" of global capitalism. In the quoted passage this is a force of constant change within not just the economy ("the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production"), but also "whole relations of society."

In so doing, self-preservation, the conatus of all beings (to adopt Spinozist terminology),  changes its character. In previous societies, the conatus of the ruling class, the constitution of a society, the ruling ideologies, entailed a conservatism with regard to tradition.  Self-preservation of being meant to preserve what one was bequeathed. From the Marxist perspective this is a truth that transcends most historically conditioned features of a political order.

But with the rise of capitalism, the inherent conservatism of the ruling classes is undermined, or self-undermined. Self-preservation now means adaptation to constant change. The response to novelty becomes a Darwinian survival of the fittest ("new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question.")

This evolutionary perspective on itself, generates two crucial features of capitalist self-understanding in light of such permanent change: first, the entrenchment of "everlasting" uncertainty as a feature not a bug of the modern economy; second, desires are not given, but 'wants"are shaped by the very process of permanent change (recall this post on Knight). 

It is notable that these themes (creative destruction, uncertainty, permanent change, shaping of wants, darwinian struggle), while not wholly new with Marx and Engels, are, I think, first brought together by them in the space of a few passages. They are now commonly associated with names like Schumpeter, Knight, Alchian (see here), and Milton Friedman, are central to the liberal, perhaps even neo-liberal, response to the catastrophe of the 1920s and 30s. 

More subtly, Marx and Lenix also diagnose what liberals of all ages have called (recall this post on Stigler) rent-seeking and state capture by partial interests as (recall here) public choice economists (Buchanan and Tullock) have analyzed ("the executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.")  

There is, in fact, also a moral agreement. For, while Marx and Lenin are extremely critical of moralized conceptions of politics in the manifesto (they ridicule many moral, purported "eternal truths" as class prejudices), they do appeal to the (Kantian) idea that it is very bad to be treated as a means. The effect of mass industrialization is that labourers become a "commodity, like every other article of commerce." This and the subsequent vulnerability of being exposes to the "fluctuations of the market," is treated as self-evident bad; it's quite clear that Marx and Engels presuppose here something like the Kantian idea that humans should be treated as ends and not as means.*  

I don't mean to suggest that Marx and Engels wholly anticipate the twentieth century liberal self-understanding of the economy and society.+ A key difference is the nature of the business cycle. For Marx and Engels periodic crises are inevitable and caused by a mixture of overproduction and concentration of wealth. (It's worth asking if by their own lights, a progressive tax with re-distribution would prevent Capitalist business cycle from causing crises.) They were writing in the wake of the 1847 panic (itself a response to overbuilding of railways). The resolution of these crises (by way of a mixture of austerity and write-offs of productive potential, expansion of markets, and reinvention) creates the seeds for worse crises down the road, until they make possible a revolution that ends the bourgeois rule.

Even liberals who reject the idea of the economy as always self-equilibriating are not, generally, tempted by the idea that each crisis is worse than the previous one. That is, liberals think most crises may be contained and overcome. (After all Keynes thought of himself as a liberal saving liberalism.) And, in fact, most recessions are, while seriously unpleasant, not catastrophic. But it is notable that liberal faith also survives The Long Depression of 1873–1896, the Great Depression of 1929-1940, and the recent Great Financial Recession. That liberalism survives so many devestating crises is, I think, inexplicable to the Marx and Engels of the manifesto. But it is worth noting that the faith it will do so, must be a mystery to the Liberal, too. 

 

 

On European (Intellectual) Ethical Correctness (ca 1945-1965)

During the years 1945-1965 (I am referring to Europe), there was a certain way of thinking correctly, a certain style of political discourse, a certain ethics of the intellectual. One had to be on familiar terms with Marx, not let one's dreams stray too far from Freud. And one had to treat sign-systems—the signifier—with the greatest respect. These were the three requirements that made the strange occupation of writing and speaking a measure of truth about oneself and one's time acceptable.
Then came the five brief, impassioned, jubilant, enigmatic years. At the gates of our world, there was Vietnam, of course, and the first major blow to the powers that be. But here, inside our walls, what exactly was taking place? An amalgam of revolutionary and antirepressive politics? A war fought on two fronts: against social exploitation and psychic repression? A surge of libido modulated by the class struggle? Perhaps. At any rate, it is this familiar, dualistic interpretation that has laid claim to the events of those years. The dream that cast its spell, between the First World War and fascism, over the dreamiest parts of Europe—the Germany of Wilhelm Reich, and the France of the surrealists—had returned and set fire to reality itself: Marx and Freud in the same incandescent light.
But is that really what happened? Had the Utopian project of the thirties been resumed, this time on the scale of historical practice? Or was there, on the contrary, a movement toward political struggles that no longer conformed to the model that Marxist tradition had prescribed? Toward an experience and a technology of desire that were no longer Freudian. It is true that the old banners were raised, but the combat shifted and spread into new zones.
Anti-Oedipus shows first of all how much ground has been covered. But it does much more than that. It wastes no time in discrediting the old idols, even though it does have a great deal of fun with Freud. Most important, it motivates us to go further.---Michel Foucault (1977) "preface" Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972) by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari,

I believe that Foucault's preface was added to the English translation. This indicates, I believe, how famous Foucault was becoming outside 'Europe' in the 1970s, and how little known, relatively speaking, Deleuze (and Guatarri) still were in the broader academy. [Of course, the previous two sentences are nonsense if the preface already existed in the French edition!]

One of the key functions of Foucault's preface is to announce and, thereby, to promote (ahh) a rupture in European thought. He does so by implying that the period between 1945-1965 was non-Utopian (or even anti-Utopian) in character; and dominated by (politically correct) conceptual references to Freud, Marx, and (what one may call) structuralism. While I was born after that period, if i recall correctly, as late as the early 1990s, Jay Cantor -- then a recent MacArthur prize winner -- would offer courses on modernism (ahh) structured around Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche. 

Part of Foucault's proposed change is more subtle; rather than adopting the stance of speaking truth to power (which we may associate with Sartre then, and Chomsky today), Foucault insists here on a difference stance regarding that "strange occupation", of "writing and speaking a measure of truth about oneself and one's time." (Of course, this may include speaking some truth to power.) This presupposes that one is capable of grasping some such self-knowledge (there are hints of Socrates here) and could somehow comprehend (elements of) one's time. 

In his preface, Foucault claims that the intellectual edifice of the 1945-1965 was undermined not by contradictions in its internal logic or by other intellectual means, but in virtue of changed historical even political circumstances. One may say that Foucault presupposes that the "powers that be" structure intellectual thought, and that blows to that (political-financial) base undermine the intellectual superstructure. 

A more jarring feature of Foucault's (ahh) analysis is that he treats 1965-1970 as a "jubilant" period. What's jarring about this is that while Foucauth mentions 'war' later in the paragraph, one of the key explicit causes of the "impassioned period,' Vietnam, can be best described as a carnage. Of course, these deaths were not European;* I am not one to take away the sense of warm nostalgia from the generation of 1968. But it is also notable that Foucault treats the period as enigmatic and he, thereby, volunteers that he is capable of speaking some truth about his own time (and so applying for the strange occupation).

As an aside, Foucault asserts here a European consciousness with its own self-understanding. This is, of course, quite standard for French intellectuals after Hegel (go read Sartre's (1961) preface to Fanon's Wretched of the Earth). But he does so without noting the -- recall Spivak's criticism of Foucault/Deleuze and defense of Derrida-- subaltern. 

In Foucault's narrative Anti-Oedipus, is a (ahh) material sign-post on, an invitation to join the path beyond Freud, Marx, and the sign. (See here for some fun ngram data.) With some temporal distance, we can say that Foucault invites to a beyond-modernist intellectual landscape.+ What's notable, however, is that it is left unclear what has happened in the five jubilant years, was it (i) an attack on "social exploitation and psychic repression" (the old banners) or (ii) did new kinds of political struggles and new  experience/technology of desire get developed? It's clear, I think, that Foucault believes (ii) is more likely, and that he thinks (i) involves some kind of self-deception. With the benefit of further hindsight, we can see that nostalgic social democratic interpretations (for whom Reagan, Thatcher, and Hayek are the Antichrists) conform to (i), whereas identity theorists and even (capitalist/technological) anarchic futurist theorists tend to conform more to (ii).    

What's notable, however (again look at the NGRAM), is that while Marx and Freud indeed declined in significance (indeed a trend that developed between 1965-1975), and Foucault himself became rather important (after the 1980s), Marx and Freud continued to be more widely mentioned than Foucault.** That is to say, while undoubtedly somebody who spoke a measure of truth on the period (say) 1975-2015 could mention reasonable familiarity with Foucault and Deleuze, it is not obvious that they were constitutive of our correctness in thought. Some other time, I return on what these requirements might be, although I welcome suggestions by readers.

 

 

 

 

On Realism, Theoretical Modesty, Systematicity, and Prefiguration

We have now seen how realists, especially through their focus on legitimacy, tend to be committed to strongly contextual approaches to political normativity. Contextualism also provides a way into the last and so far least developed focal point of realism, namely, the rejection of ambitious attempts to formulate grand theories from which to derive prescriptions for any possible political scenario and in reference to which we can judge political behaviour, in favour of a normativity that is appropriately sensitive to the specific conditions under which political decisions are taken and agents act. Enzo Rossi & Matt Sleat "Realism in Normative Political Theory" Philosophy Compass (2014), 694.+

l have noted before (recall here and here) the realist suspicion of theory as a set of systematic relations that can guide policy. By 'realist' I mean the tradition of thought that takes its immediate cue from Bernard Williams and Raymond Geuss, but that purports to find its world-historical inspiration in Machiavelli, Thucydides, Hobbes, and Schmitt. If Rawls and/or ideal theory is the only conception of grand theory that's available, and these, in turn, are constructed in terms of a (technocratic) ideal of consensus formation,* one can understand the realist distaste (given their other commitments), especially if such theories are (exclusively) -- to quote another, more recent paper by Rossi --  "inferred from overarching, pre-political values or principles." 

Now, one may wonder why this prevents one from embracing grand theories that are inferred from or constructed with attention to political values and principles (if one grants the realist that there is a distinction between ethical and political values). To the best of my knowledge, this is not addressed by contemporary theorists, but one can infer the suspicion of it from the following passage quoted approvingly and commented on by Rossi:

we cannot describe, that is, picture, in the concrete, any state of society of which the world has had no experience. For into the reality of a society, even in its broader details, there enters a large element of contingency, of alogicality, of unreason, with which no general principles will furnish us. (Belfort Bax 1891, Preface)**

radical realism is empirically informed, and so while it can let the political imagination run free of feasibility constraints, it is wary of letting it go down the dark alleys of precise prescriptions that balance an unwieldy amount of variables. The realist can be politically ambitious but must be theoretically modest enough to leave those details to politics: there are aspects of politics not amenable to philosophical domestication.--"Being Realistic and Demanding the Impossible"

We see here that Bax embraces a number of interrelated points: first, the embrace of radical (Knightian) uncertainty in political life; second, the idea that society itself contains internal contradictions, even (third) non-eliminable superstition. Fourth, that because of these facts any coherent and systematic theory of what an as-of-yet-non-existent society should look like, will be, as it were, falsified by the new world.

Rossi's endorsement of Bax infers from Bax's diagnosis that one should reject a baroque theory (with many variables [there are shades of Duhem here]) that purports to offer detailed policy prescriptions either to get from the bad status quo to the desirable end-state or to legislate the character of the end state. From the vantage point of realism, such Baroque theory is comic. Now, from the rejection of "blueprints" (technocratic and utopian), Rossi's recent work does not end up with mere (Schmittian) decisionism, nor with a focus on contextual judgment (which he had seemed to endorse while writing with Sleat); rather Rossi recognizes, that his rejection of grand theory still allows some place for (ahh) small theory (in the sense of 'small is beautiful'). He does so in describing so-called 'prefigurative politics' in sympathetic fashion:

one can create microcosms supported by alternative, not (or less) ideologically flawed legitimation stories, irrespectively of whether similar structures are feasible at the level of the whole society. To be sure, prefiguration is often understood as a way to enact what one hopes or expects to eventually extend society-wide. But it doesn’t need to be understood that way. Small-scale structures may simply be the best we can hope for, and that is all the more reason to pursue them.

I agree with Rossi (who himself aspires to a more Maxist position than I would) that realists should not reject prefigurative politics out of hand. But it is peculiar that Rossi does not stop to pause at the danger that small scale improvements may well entrench larger scale (bad) structures (say, by making these more robust). This is not a mere oversight. From the contemporary realist's perspective, there is no theoretical ground to make the evaluative claim (or prediction) about the effects on the larger structure. That's because he (and contemporary realists more generally [with the notable exception of our colleague, Paul Raekstad]) have rejected grand theory. I want to close today's post by gesturing at what I mean.

As regular readers know, I share much of the grounds that lead the realist to reject of Baroque theory (of both the technocratic and utopian kinds) with its detailed blueprints. But it does not follow that the realist must reject non-Baroque grand theory that sketches a politically desirable end point without offering a detailed recipe. So, for example, at the end of the Prince, Machiavelli proposes a plan for Italian unification:+

Italy, left as without life, waits for him who shall yet heal her wounds and put an end to the ravaging and plundering of Lombardy, to the swindling and taxing of the kingdom and of Tuscany, and cleanse those sores that for long have festered. It is seen how she entreats God to send someone who shall deliver her from these wrongs and barbarous insolencies. It is seen also that she is ready and willing to follow a banner if only someone will raise it.

The unification of Italy is an ideal that means to combine (i) the elimination of really existing  injustices ("ravaging and plundering;" "swindling and taxing;" "wrongs and barbarous insolencies") and so be an enteprise that really is "great justice" and (2) a call to a magnanimous soul to engage on a great heroic enterprise worthy of lasting fame. While much of the Prince is full of insight on how to go about such a great enterprise, it does not go into the details how to get from here to there. 

There are two features worthy of comment here. First, Machiavelli recognizes that ideals, including highly normative ideals, are politically motivating. Unlike more modern realists, which (to simplify) tend to embrace a kind of political facts vs ethical ideals distinctions, Machiavelli recognizes that values (and ideologies) motivate (great) collective action that, second, may themselves become constitutive of political union. Obviously, Machiavelli's ideal is rooted in already existing (geographic and historical) realities, but these do not predetermine the shape of the ideal. There is a more important point lurking here. Once such an ideal is motivating, then it creates a whole bunch of conceptual-social necessitations that constrain future paths while recognizing that in practice politics will be full of contingency.

Now, Machiavelli's sketch of a grand theory is extremely thin. And I mention it only because Machiavelli is a realist in excellent standing. But a realist grand ideal can be elaborated systematically and immodestly without falling into the trap of an overly detailed, Baroque blueprint. (I have analyzed in my book such a realist, but relatively un-Baroque grand theory by Adam Smith; I have in mind not his argument for the system of natural liberty, but rather his plan to 'complete' the constitution of the United Kingdom in order to ameliorate the wrongs done to the Irish wrongs and to prevent war with the American colonies.) Such a systematic theory, which -- let's stipulate in honor of the realist demand to respect facticity-- should not go against robust findings of social sciences, is required because of its political virtues (recall also this piece on Adam Smith and Jacob Levy):   

1. A system can allow one to limit the risks of always acting in ad hoc fashion and, thereby, allow one to grasp which compromises are worth accepting and which undermine one's political, strategic, and (yes) moral  aims.
2. Some kind of system is required to guide (not control) long-term planning and to allow trade-offs to be modeled (say, between short-term gains and long-term goals) and, where possible, foreseen. 
3. Being guided by a system generates the possibility of consistency (maybe even accountability) over time. 

 

When Zionists assume that Neo-Nazis Belong to the Past

To put things in perspective. I'm a Jew, I'm an Israeli, the neo nazis scums in Virginia hate me and my country. But they belong to the past. Their breed is dying out. However the thugs of Antifa and BLM who hate my country (and America too in my view) just as much are getting stronger and stronger and becoming super dominant in American universities and public life.--Yair Netanyahu [HT Fox news]

I stumbled upon Yair Netanyahu's comment because I was curious how his father, Prime Minister Netanyahu, would respond to President Trump's (ahh) troubling responses(s) to Charlottesville. I have interpreted the Netanyahu government's embrace of the Trump administration,* which has shown a willingness to nurture White Supremacist nationalism, as a fatal and fundamental betrayal of a tacit pact that has sustained Zionism among Jews for a century: because real-world liberal institutions inevitably generate tensions for minorities and are sometimes incapable of protecting them when most needed, diaspora Jews, primarily those Stateside, would support the state of Israel financially and politically and, in turn, its right of return as well as its ability to project power abroad would be a kind of insurance policy for Jews in need. I have defended the moral grounds of this pact. (See also for the roots of this idea in Herzl's writings here and, more recently in the context of a controversy between Omri Boehm and Andrew Pessin, here.) For it has been clear (ever since Bibi Netanyahu called on French Jews to leave France in February 2015) that the government of Israel not only understands itself as promoting the mass migration of diaspora Jews to Israel (that's always been its declared goal), but is also willing to promote partisan ends [Netanyahu's tilt toward Republicans has been clear since his too open support of candidate Romney] in other countries to serve its own (tactical, short-term) ends even if these ends undermine the local, diaspora Jews.

As an aside, it is an open question if the Trump administration's pro-Israel rhetoric signals a decisive shift in policy.* It's hard to see how the bi-partian US policy toward Israel since the Clinton administration could be any more pro-Israel (unless what will follow is (a) a shift of US embassy to Jeruzalem and (b) carte blanche for settlement expansion.) Israel has been very critical of the Obama administration's policy on Iranian nuclear program, but if Israel really thought this could be  prevented it would have already delivered the necessary military blows. Israel is de facto a protectorate of the US, it cannot reasonably complain when the imperial hegemon pursues multiple ends some of which balance its interests alongside others. The Trump administration may wish to re-balance its policy over Iran toward the Israel government's position, but if it does so, it will find itself, in all likelihood, sacrificing other ends.

I am interested in Yari Netanyahu's comments not because they represent the official thinking of the State of Israel or his father's informal views. Rather, because they are offered in the form of a facebook post they offer a revealing, informal window into the mindset of elite Israelis in two ways. First, he embraces a teleological conception of neo-nazism as a primarily historical ("past") and generational (breed is dying out) phenomenon. This is a natural thought for an Israeli because Israel's self-conception understands itself (too frequently) as a response and successful overcoming of the catastrophic Nazi era. In this scheme, Israel -- like Noah's ark -- just is the future that has left Nazism behind. This, in turn, has a surprising implication: (i) the diaspora Jews are themselves historical relics that (if they don't make Aliyah) will also be left behind (note my comment above about undermining diaspora Jews)--they don't get mentioned at all in his comments. And (ii) Israel understands itself as having overcome the historical conditions that gave rise to its necessity (namely, the liberal state system's inability to protect [historically] persecuted minorities). This (ii) suggests that such Israelis feel safe from existential threat.

As should be clear I think Yair Netanyahu's betray complacency. By this I do not merely mean that no state endures forever (although this is surely also true) and  so that Israel's Jews remain vulnerable. But primarily, as the pictures of Charlottesville reveal, that young people, especially young men, continue to be attracted to Neonazi ideas even in the adverse environment of the US where Nazis have long been the declared enemy, including the stock villain in the entertainment industry. It is a peculiar complacency because the Zionist contribution to the history of (liberal) political theory is that versions of Nazism and ideas that support ethnic supremacy are enduring possibilities, inherent shadows we might say, of modern nation-states: capitalist economies are disruptive of existing hierarchies and they promote economic advancement for some groups at the expense of (the expectations generated by the) existing privileges.+ This interpretation is, in fact, illustrated by the neo-nazis of Charlottesville (alongside their Confederate sympathizers), who chanted (among other slogans) that "Jews will not replace us."  I can't say if by this they meant to express economic anxiety (to be displaced in jobs, economic status, etc.)** or  genetic/cultural anxiety (in the sense of (ahh) 'their breed is dying out').

Second, the younger Netanyahu reveals that the major anxiety of Israelis is the effort to de-legitimatize Zionism in the PR war on American campuses Stateside. Recall, "Antifa and BLM who hate my country (and America too in my view) just as much are getting stronger and stronger and becoming super dominant in American universities and public life." This statement is peculiar for the fact that the major movement that aims to de-legitimize Israel, BDS, goes unmentioned (for my position see here) and for its utter, even abhorrent, lack of minimal sympathy for Black Lives Matter.++ For even the Economist (echoing  Jacob Levy (here)) understands that BLM's "supporters oppose police brutality, mass incarceration, America’s drug war, police militarisation and civil-forfeiture abuses. All of those are causes that liberals, libertarians and conservatives—anyone who fears unchecked state power—ought to cheer." That is, lovers of liberty, least of all Jews, have nothing to fear from the success of BLM in promoting its primary aims.

One may object that political success and, thereby, increased prestige of BLM  on college campuses will come at the expense of sympathy for Zionism. Now, it is undeniable that some, perhaps many, folk who are active in contemporary civil rights movements have  become convinced that Zionism as such is a great evil that needs to be stopped (recall). (I leave aside here to what degree some folk among these are also antisemitic.) But if one meets peaceful attempts at de-legitimization with unrelenting opposition -- and without scrutiny of one's own actions -- all one succeeds at is the hardening mutual opposition with the non-trivial risk of, thereby, further undermining  (would be) support for Jews and Zionism. While it is foolish to suggest to invite armed Neonazis to afternoon tea, denunciations that emanate from vulnerable civil rights activists should be met with invitations for conversations and occasions for mutual learning. While Israelis perceive they have no interest in starting or maintaining conversations with activist critics (and I am the last to deny these can be painful--my support for Zionism has weakened long-standing friendships), there exist clear common interests among American Jews and other historically persecuted minorities Stateside in securing the (bare minimum of the) rule of law. By promoting a zero-sum agenda, Israelis play into the hands of BDS and prevent fruitful, tactical and strategic coalitions for America's Jews.

Finally, despite what Yair Netanyahu implies (if the neo-nazis are the past, Antifa & BLM (etc.) are the future), antisemitism in activist circles outside and on college campuses is not a new thing. Quotas on Jews and a lack of welcome for Jewish refugee scholars, not to mention the endurance of a genteel-Snobbish-academic-antisemitism, are an enduring element of the history of Anglophone higher education. I have seen this up close. And, nobody familiar with the history of Marxist-Leftish thought since Marx's Zur Judenfrage, would deny that its relationship to antisemitism is a complicated one including very ugly episodes (including state, antisemitic propaganda in some Communist countries).* But this history also includes great, principled acts of courage on behalf of Jews and tactical alliances with Jewish interests. But the most striking feature about lefty-activist- antisemitism, when it exists, is that it has been far removed from the regions of political-economic power in most liberal democracies for a long time now. The same is not true, alas, for white-supremacy.

 

 

 

On the Nature of Scientific Authority; on Hannah Arendt and Heather Douglas

No one ideal for values in science will suffice. We need nested ideals, articulated for individual actors, for communal practices, and for science-society interfaces, in order to ground the authority of science.  

The authority of science rests on the interlocking character of these norms. At the communal level, scientists are expected to continually question and critique each other’s work. They are expected to respond to criticisms raised, and to hold no scientific claim above criticism. Such mutual critique is a minimum for granting science prima facie epistemic authority. The more diverse and reflective of the plurality of society the scientific community is, the more taken for granted assumptions and unreflected value commitments will (hopefully) be elucidated, the more authority science should have.

But community practices need good individual reasoning practices to operate with. Maintaining the proper roles for values in science keeps values from acting in place of evidence, which will support the critical interactions needed in science. New evidence should always be able to contest old positions, and this can only happen if values are not used to protect desired positions from unwanted criticism. A scientist can point to their values to argue for why they require more evidence to be convinced, but they can never point to their values to argue for why evidence is irrelevant to the claims they make or protect. Asking for more evidence drives the inquiry dialectic; holding claims above evidential critique does not.

Further, it is not just in individual reasoning integrity (right roles) and communal practices, but in some shared values (operating within proper roles) that science gains its authority in a democratic society. I will discuss this more in the next two lectures, but for now, note that getting the values right, particularly in the realm of policy relevant science, strongly supports scientific authority. That scientists are investigating questions we care about, using methodologies that we find morally acceptable and targeted at what we are concerned with, and using values we share for assessing evidential sufficiency, can and should make a big difference for what we think is epistemically authoritative. Thus, elucidating the proper roles and proper values for science is part of what makes science authoritative, rather than undermining the authority of science.

Finally, the authority of science also rests on its raw instrumental success. Relying upon scientific understandings of disease (e.g. in the cases of communicable diseases) has greatly increased lifespans, relying upon scientific understandings of materials has greatly increased the range of what we can manufacture, relying upon scientific understandings of what we can transmit in the air has transformed communication, and so forth. It is this raw instrumental success that is probably at the root of most of the trust society places in science. But, as we will see in the next lecture, we are running into areas of science where success is not easily measured, especially in the short term, and the problems we are addressing seem more interrelated than ever. The challenge of science in democracy is still with us.--Heather Douglas (September 2016) "Descartes Lecture 1: Opening Statement: Why Science, Values, and Democracy?" [quoted with permission.]

Hannah Arendt notes that authority is neither the compelling of another by persuasion nor the compelling of another by physical/legal force (see her (1954) "What is authority?) Rather, it's the kind of rule that generates obedience, which is naturally associated with child-rearing and the Church.  In both force and persuasion are available, of course, but neither relies exclusively nor primarily on force and persuasion. (This is not to deny the many legal, normative, and social differences between the authority of parents and churches.) When one thinks of the authority of science(s) and scientific experts in terms of (Kuhnian) hegemonic paradigms, then speaking of the "authority of science" or "scientific authority" is a natural way to talk if we think of Church authority.  As is well known, there are many natural resonances between conceiving of the functioning of scientific paradigms and Church history. The connection is not merely historical-cultural; as I noted Koyré was himself both a great historian of religion and a key influence on Kuhn.

Somewhat surprisingly, Arendt does not discuss the authority of science in her essay. It is surprising because science is mentioned in her essay and it is treated as a cause in the undermining of traditional forms of authority (associated with the Church, educators, and parents). [It is notable  that Arendt is writing this already in the 50s and not in the late 60s as I assumed before I looked up the date.] In Arendt's hands social science paradigmatically offers functional explanations of social phenomena and institutions and, in so doing, deflates their pretensions. Now, science can do so -- analyze and deflate -- because its deliverances have some authority over our minds. To resist some such functional explanations (and the unmasking that follows it), is to resist being reasonable in a certain sense, that is, one comes across as being unreasonable. (I say 'in a certain sense' because, to be sure, Arendt is a critic of such functional-focused social science.) But, of course, both 'Frankfurt' and Foucault offered functional explanations of science's authority and this did undermine it (alongside moral and political disasters consequent -- e.g., eugenics, Hiroshima, etc. social planning, financial bubbles, etc. -- of the authority of science).

As an aside, the rise of methodological individualism pushed back at the authority of functional explanations even among Marxists (recall this post on Elster), and while controversy has not been eliminated, science's authority has survived in many ways such that we often trust some or the consensus of experts and act accordingly. (Of course, different sciences have different authority.)*  think functional explanation in social science are ripe for a come-back thanks to Dennett's distinction between doing things for reasons and having reasons for doing things. But that's for a different day.

Heather Douglas is committed to the (normative) idea(l) that within science no authority is to be used to prevent new evidence from having a hearing (it "should always be able to contest old positions, and this can only happen if values are not used to protect desired positions from unwanted criticism"). But in science's relationship with society, she thinks that science can have authority (based in part on its track record "instrumental success").

As the quoted passage reveals, by "authority," Douglas means to convey a certain kind of "trust" not obedience. This distinction matters because Douglas's wishes to promote a conception of science in which science engages in conversation with the public not as infallible experts talking to a needy, child-like public, but with receptivity such that constructive dialogue among folk with competing commitments can shape and improve research the outcome of which may surprise (epistemic uncertainty plays a big role in Douglas's account). It's her commitment to some such dialogue, hat helps explain why she thinks that "elucidating the proper roles and proper values for science" can be helpful to generating authority for science (both within and outside science). How this is supposed to work, exactly, I leave aside here. But the thought seems to be that by being more honest about the nature of science the more support it can have among an Enlightening public, because it becomes less vulnerable to debunking arguments.

For, one of Douglas's key moves is to argue that "Rather than stalemates of ideological clashes, we can see how understanding the intertwining of values and evidence in science provides ways to disagree rationally and to discuss our disagreements without disparaging our opponents." Douglas gets there by introducing (it's already in her 2009 book, see p. 153) what I call a neo-Popperian assumption that (ideologically diverse) participants in the public discussion need to reveal what (kind of) evidence would make them change their mind about some policy or claim. (Obviously, it is an open question if they will treat the evidence as evidence, etc.) Revealing this will spur on conversation and research.

The problem is, is that authority is meant to produce obedience of a certain sort not conversation nor persuasion.  Such obedience need not be unquestioning and can allow conversation, but authority is designed to end conversation (and make space for action or inaction). So, it's an awkward concept for Douglas to be relying on. Even if we treat authority as a kind of trust, it's clear that trust is necessary, but not sufficient to generate such (non-violent, non-forceful) obedience.  Something extra is needed. Now, Douglas can allow this because she treats authority not as a mass noun, but as something that can come in degrees. If this extra is not going to be force/violence (and we should not ignore the role of state-power), then this something extra is going to be either some kind of faith or value/aesthetic commitment, or rhetoric. I don't mean to suggest this is a criticism of Douglas; for all I know, she welcomes this result.