Digressions&Impressions

On Historical Experience, Legitimacy, Conventions and the Spirit of Experimentation in Locke

Sect. 50. But since gold and silver, being little useful to the life of man in proportion to food, raiment, and carriage, has its value only from the consent of men, whereof labour yet makes, in great part, the measure, it is plain, that men have agreed to a disproportionate and unequal possession of the earth, they having, by a tacit and voluntary consent, found out, a way how a man may fairly possess more land than he himself can use the product of, by receiving in exchange for the overplus gold and silver, which may be hoarded up without injury to any one; these metals not spoiling or decaying in the hands of the possessor. This partage of things in an inequality of private possessions, men have made practicable out of the bounds of society, and without compact, only by putting a value on gold and silver, and tacitly agreeing in the use of money: for in governments, the laws regulate the right of property, and the possession of land is determined by positive constitutions.--John Locke Second Treatise of Government

The quoted passage is at the end of chapter 5 "Of Property" of Locke's Second Treatise. Much of the philosophical interest is in the earlier articulation of the principle known as the 'Lockean proviso' (in, recall, section  33) and the labor mixing argument grounded in self-ownership (sect 27). On re-reading the chapter recently (with expert guidance of Bas van der Vossen and Katharine Gillespie), I noticed, perhaps for the first time, that the very chapter that justifies property is also a polemic against (feudal) land-owning society (in favor of an economy focused on growing  numbers and economy). 

Earlier in the chapter, Locke had noted that "the invention of money, and the tacit agreement of men to put a value on it, introduced (by consent) larger possessions." (Sect 36). There are five important claims lurking here. I) (the right to) property precedes the invention of money. II) The invention of money facilitates accumulation of property (and of itself; see also sects 48 & 50 quoted above). (III) This generates inequality (this is made explicit in sect 50 quoted above). IV) The value of money is a convention. V) This convention is tacitly consented to. 

As an aside, according to Locke the conventional use of money can in a growing economy itself make other things scarce and so valuable, "(where the increase of people and stock, with the use of money, had made land scarce, and so of some value)" (sect 45). There is a complex issue lurking here: in Locke, unlike Hume and later economists, scarcity is itself not a condition of the possibility of property. But that's for another time. 

Now, interestingly enough, that the use of money is consented to is a refrain repeated through the chapter: e.g., "amongst that part of mankind that have consented to the use of money," (sect 45); "thus came in the use of money, some lasting thing that men might keep without spoiling, and that by mutual consent men would take in exchange for the truly useful, but perishable supports of life," (sect 47). And again in the passage quoted above.

So, one may be tempted to think that Locke's account of the legitimacy of money as an institution is grounded in a consent theory not dissimilar to his account of the social contract. But I am also reminded of his account of toleration, where (recall) the institution of (true) a church is grounded in voluntary association, that is, mutual consent ("A church...I take to be a voluntary society of men, joining themselves together of their own accord"). But it is crucial to Locke argument in his analysis of the nature of a church that it produces a positive social consequence: piety, that is, obedience to the law. This positive consequence is conducive to social order and, to connect it to the present argument, respect for property.

Let's now, finally,  turn sect 50 quoted above. First, it clarifies that (IV) "the value of money is a convention" is imprecisely formulated. It would be better to say, (IV*) that money is valuable is a convention. For, the exact value of money can vary. And (VI) of  this particular value labor is the measure. How Locke's version of the labor theory of value is supposed to work is not my present concern.

Second, and more important, Locke's account of the legitimacy of the convention of money as a social institution is not just  grounded in  (tacit) consent. It is also grounded in what we may call historical experience over time. They have learned to appreciate ("found out") the social utility ("made practicable") of the convention despite some of its equally evident drawbacks -- that is, others become richer than you do. That is to say, social utility is a matter of judgment about social costs and benefits. This two-staged for of legitimation (first) tacit consent then, after a period, (second) continued consent based on historical experience of positive social consequences. 

This two-stage approach to legitimacy is, I think, capable of being extended to, appropriate for other social institutions (and conventions) in a Lockean approach. As noted above, he comes close to offering it in his account of toleration of certain churches. Obviously, it means that initial legitimacy of a social institution is always conditional on the continued proper effectiveness of the institution over historical time. This analysis of costs and benefits may well involve comparing incommensurables and so will involve good judgment, and it is not impossible that different communities and ages will come to different conclusions.  For some the lack of a clear and objective decision procedure will be thought a problem for Locke; for others, this (almost Aristotelian) contextual variability will be thought a proper feature.

To put the last point provocatively: the Lockean can now respond to (say) the Marxist or Environmentalist critique of (one element of) capital accumulation as follows in the spirit of adaptation/experimentation: sure, the institutions of the status quo have serious drawbacks (as all institutions are wont to do). Why not propose, or better yet, with your comrades, try out an alternative institution or set of institution that can generate consent from its participants and that generates good social outcomes over time worth living by? 

What's striking about all this is that in one sense Locke comes closer to Spinoza for whom all social contracts are never final but always dependant on continued utility of the contract to the parties; and in another sense he now clearly anticipates the more consequentialist style of justification of social institutions found in Hume and Adam Smith, while still remaining distinctly (ahh) Lockean. 

On Karl and/or Michael Polanyi on the Rise of Fascism.

Totalitarianism, hostile to all dynamic systems, attacks their standards and ideals. In the totalitarian view those who pursue ideals are neglecting their duty to society, for the sake of unsubstantial values of purely formal significance. The...[denial of] the justification of pure science, is a case in point. We will come back to it later in detail.

Another aspect of the same conflict arises from the democratic nature of the dynamic systems. Their growth takes place through the life and action of the community of specialists in charge. It is a democratic life conducted publicly, under the voluntarily accepted laws of this circle. We have seen how every new addition to the social heritage is suggested in public, discussed and codified, or rejected in public under the guidance of the "influentials" acting as elected officers. At the same time the specialist circles keep up popular contacts all around them. They appeal to a wider range of lay connoisseurs or specially interested members of the general public, and through these they recommend themselves to the common man throughout the entire community. Thus they establish the standing of their particular pursuits in the life of society as a whole. The inner circle of creative men becomes entrusted by the whole of society with the cultivation of certain ideals, in which the rest of the people take part at various stages of interest. We have here a system of indirect representation, at each stage of which people less experienced and interested in a particular field confide in others, more intimately concerned with it.

The expansion of modern public life during the 19th century, which has continued rapidly during the past two decades through the advent of the wireless and film, had made this informal mode of self- government, by direct response of the public to the activities of various specialised strata, a most important element of democracy. It has recently become a factor in politics, where it seems to be side-tracking to some extent the electoral machine. In the United States in particular, the division between the Legislative and the Executive has invited the development of this type of direct public influence-- exercised through the press and the results of private polls which sway in major issues the views. of the professional politicians-the electoral machinery retaining of course its function as the ultimate sanction of public opinion.

The existence of this modern form of democracy, upheld by the circles of dynamic systems and the general public connected with them, makes it necessary for modern dictators to become totalitarian. No absolute ruler can be satisfied to-day with dominion life alone. That realm in itself is shadowy and for example by the regime of South American can become real to-day only by eradicating the cultural life with all its widespread popular roots. prestige of the guardians of intellectual and moral their autonomous circles are dispersed, and the wider thereby to a helpless mass, can the dictator address without fear of control or criticism.'--Michal Polanyi (1941) "The Growth of Thought in Society, Economica, 442-3

Last week, I noted that in the Great Transformation (1944), Karl Polanyi argues that markets are inherently fragile and proper functioning markets are very disruptive of traditional forms of life and destroy previously existing organic culture. This generates reactions that have the (possibly conflicting) aims to shore up and protect the market and protect society to slow down the rate of social change. In some some cases these reactions work in the same direction and thereby strengthening forces that threaten to overwhelm liberal society. Thus, "Fascism, like socialism, was rooted in a market society that refused to function."  Because nineteenth century liberal society was global, for Polanyi the fascist reaction to the implosion of market society is a world-wide phenomenon. Given the clear rise of fascist tendencies around the world, Polanyi's thought has returned to salience.*

One arresting feature of  Karl Polanyi's account is his treatment of the capitulation of democratic forces against rather weak fascist action. And while he sometimes -- in a minor key -- suggests this was due to a kind of cynical miscalculation (from craven self-interest) by conservative business-friendly interests, his account implies -- in the major key -- the shocking result is due to a lack of faith among democratic elites. Why this is so, he does not quite explain.+ So, while Polanyi is strong on describing the triggering conditions when liberal societies are vulnerable to implosion, he does not explain the mechanism. Somewhat surprisingly, the thought of another Polanyi can be helpful here.  

Karl Polanyi's younger brother, Michael, had more liberal political tendencies than Karl. Unlike Karl -- who has a narrow identification of liberalism with free markets in people and land, and a fixed exchange rates (i.e., the gold standard) --, Michael Polanyi emphasizes the rise of specialized, partially self-governing intermediary societies (within science, art, law, the crafts, engineering, medicine, etc.) as constitutive of liberal society. In these intermediary societies, professionals get to exercise independent judgment that, regardless the diversity of underlying private motives, indirectly serve the common good (over time). These self-governing intermediary societies have a complex inward-looking dynamic and a complex outward-looking dynamic partially mediated by what Polanyi calls "influentials." (In my own work (recall) I call these "aggregators".)

The evolving views that are characteristic of development of these intermediary societies are fundamentally influenced by discussion about evidence and ideals.) And, while Michael Polanyi, does not use the phrase, it's clear he thinks these intermediary societies are democratic in virtue of the fact that they instantiate the ideal of 'government by discussion' not force, among (relative) equals. As it happens, one of the more important intermediary societies is political in character at the interface of professional politicians and opinion makers and the expert-influentials that advise them. (Here Polanyi seems to echo (recall) Lippmann, who he does not quote.)

Michael Polanyi thinks that the attack, characteristic of fascist thought, on elites is really an attack on the significance of these 'influentials' and the independent power(s), including prestige, these represents. (He thinks this, partially, reflects the legacy of aristocratic disdain of science.) I find this helpful in understanding why anti-liberal political movements ranging from populists to fascists and marxists, never let up in attacking many of the intermediary societies, but especially law and the academy, as long as they are independent. The whole point is to make these intermediaries feel isolated so that when the inevitable power grab comes, the ruling strata of these intermediaries lack the faith and confidence to stand for their independence. It's an insight that today's fascists have grasped.

On Perry Anderson; writing on the Politics of Austerity, discursive power, Greece and the EURO

It was no accident that the first tremors of the earthquake to come originated not in the us but in the eu, with the crisis of bnp Paribas and collapse of Northern Rock in August–September 2007. Entanglement with America to the west; predation in Europe itself to the east, where Tooze shows the extent of the financial appropriation of local assets in the former Communist countries by Dutch, Austrian and Scandinavian capital. Nor, of course, has he anything but scorn for the role of the ecb and the turn to austerity once the crisis broke.
There, in one of the many gripping set-pieces of the book, Tooze delivers a damning verdict on the treatment of Greece by the Commission, the ecb and the imf, and subsequently the European Council, which presided over its fate from 2010 onwards. The crushing of Syriza’s attempt to negotiate less draconian terms for its society and economy is not only vividly portrayed, but set in the wider context of the thwarting of governments of the left in these years by the external imposition of ‘political and financial discipline’ on them. No one could doubt on which side Tooze’s sympathies lie in this exercise of brute power. But just where did this discipline come from, and how far did it extend? At this crux, his account takes leave of absence. At its centre lies the nature of the European Union, and the position of Germany within it. Evasive on the first and inconsistent on the second, Crashed offers no coherent account of the relationship between them, for it is too protective of each.
Decisive in this regard is the book’s abstraction of the decisions taken by policy-makers from the structures in which they were working. What was the matrix of the monetary union created at Maastricht?--Perry Anderson (2019) "Situationism a la Envers," in New Left Review (119), p. 80.

Prompted, apparently, by a review (by Cedric Durand) of Tooze's Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World, Perry Anderson's widely circulated essay, which ranges widely over Tooze's oeuvre and twentieth century politics, is a stinging rebuke of the "complacency" and brutality of "left liberalism" (a term also used by Tooze to describe himself) or "centrist liberalism" (a term used by Anderson (85)). My interest here is not in defending left liberalism; much of Anderson's (and Tooze's) criticism of it is spot on.

Rather, my interest is in the claim that "governments of the left" within the EU have been thwarted by "external imposition of 'political and financial discipline' on them" by the EU. This claim fits two larger trends of broadly left-wing intellectual British writing about the EU, which has two functions: (i) to combat the politics of austerity in the UK; (ii) to undermine the legitimacy (and its anti-democratic technocracy) of the EU. (Since the Brexit vote not all left-sympathetic intellectuals embrace (ii), of course.) For all their merits, such writings tend to present intra EU debates in ways that fail to do justice to the political agency of the participants in them. 

First, it is undeniable that the EU creates obstacles to certain forms of "governments of the left," especially those that are in the Eurozone. The most important of these are rules against government control of the economy and attempts to pursue industrial policy that end up favoring local producers. That is to say, left-wing governments that would pursue nationalist agendas are indeed severely handicapped by the EU. But redistributionist left-wing governments are, if they are willing and capable of taxing the local rich, not so-handicapped. Yes, the rich have ways of hiding some of their money, but it's not EU rules that prevent member states from finding and taxing it; rather there is a lack of political will. And the lack of political will is a function of the lack of local political power. The absence of political power makes the reliance on debt so tantalizing. But debt-financing is not itself characteristic of governments of the left. (As the next paragraph illustrates.)

Second, it is undeniable that the EU has thwarted the democratic will of some of the citizens of its member states during the crisis. But this is not directed at governments of the left. This becomes transparent if we reflect on the following passage (partially quoting Tooze): "when Papandreou and Berlusconi were ousted as premiers of Greece and Italy in 2011, senior officials in Berlin could be heard boasting: ‘We do regime change better than the Americans’; and to admit that the Fiscal Compact of 2013 was a straightforward imposition of the German ‘debt brake’ on the rest of the Eurozone." (81) Whatever else one may wish to say about Berlusconi, his is in no sense a government of the left.

As an aside, it is notable that Portugal goes unmentioned. In 2015 an anti-austerity would-be-left-wing government was thwarted (briefly). But it was not the EU who did so, but the country's president. Eventually constitutional processes prevailed, and Portugal has had a left-wing government since.

Third, and let me now turn to the heart of the matter: Greece. It is worth mentioning that Syriza was never crushed. After it became the main opposition party, in May 2012, it became the governing party in 2015. It called a snap-election after its defeat in EU elections, and was defeated (in Summer of 2019). But it is now the regular opposition. And if Greek politics has stabilized (that is by no means certain) it can expect to govern again.

It is, of course, true that Syriza failed to undo much of the austerity that was imposed on Greece by the Troika prior to its ascension to power. I have  been quite critical of the EU's policies toward Greece in the midst of the crisis (see for example here in Dutch). These policies were manifestly designed to protect well connected (German, Dutch, and French) bankers and not Greek citizens. But English language critics of Greek austerity tend to ignore four pertinent facts: (1) the annual budget deficit of Greece was, when the crisis started, around 15% of GDP. It remained above 10% for the next few years. While one can argue about the size and speed of budget cuts and the distributional effects of these, austerity in Greece has very different character from the voluntary austerity pursued by, say, Tory/Lib Dem and Tory governments in the UK. Austerity in Greece was real, but claims about it also tend to be exaggerated. Its "size relative to GDP of [was] 4.0% in 2010, 3.1% in 2011, 2.8% in 2012 and 0.8% in 2013."+ In particular, in contrast to the UK, the Greek state lacks the capacity to raise income; this was, in fact, exhibited in the boom period prior to the crisis. 

In addition (2), there was widespread distrust of the Greek ruling elites in the rest of Europe thanks to the decades long fraud by successive Greek governments, statisticians, etc. It is pretty clear that non-Greek banks and officials were (sometimes actively) complicit (and profited) from this. While I think more should have been done to hold those responsible (inside and outside Greece) accountable, and to show more public good-will toward Syriza, politically (1) and (2) made it impossible for any EU politician to advocate for massive transfers from Northern taxpayers to Greek citizens. If Anderson  (recall also this post) cared to advance a reform of the EU, he would argue that some such structural transfers are necessary inside the Eurozone. Of course, he is not interested in doing so.**

Also, (3) a majority of Greek citizens apparently prefer staying inside the Euro.* And when given the option to leave the Euro on favorable terms and staying in, they seem to wish to stay in even if it means austerity. This is by no means irrational because inside the Euro, the purchasing power of Greek citizens is better preserved (at the cost of high unemployment and low growth). Even accounts (correctly) highly critical of German and Dutch politicians, acknowledge that the German government was willing to spend serious money to facilitate a Greek exit from the Euro.

One never hears the intelligentsia critics of austerity talk about (1-3). This is remarkable because such intellectuals use their discursive power to deny Greek political agency (within the constraints that they face). This is also evident in Cedric Durand's review of Tooze: 

Tooze rightly stresses, from the very start it was never a question of economic necessity. The ecb could have bought Greek bonds in 2010 and stabilized the crisis very rapidly, but chose not to because it ‘meant to send a message: austerity or else!’ By using Greece as their exemplum, he argues, ‘right-wing fearmongers, conservative political entrepreneurs and centrist fiscal hawks shifted the political balance’ in the Eurozone. This was the moment when a crisis with its origins in the private financial sector was rebranded as a problem of fiscal and welfare profligacy.

Even if one were to grant that the financial crisis as a whole has its origins (not at least partially in misguided government regulations and policies but) wholly in the private financial sector (and ignore the enormous investment of subprime loans by European, regional state owned banks, etc.), this is manifestly not the case of the Greek crisis (which has a relatively small financial sector).++ In addition, and again this is often ignored by the English speaking intelligentsia writing for each other, the Euro crisis is really caused by the mercantile policies of Germany and the Netherlands.

That is to say, Anderson is right to claim (in his criticism of Tooze) that "The single currency is the ark of a covenant that is not to be questioned." (83) I think there is no doubt that at the height of (the ongoing!) crisis, no government leader wanted to be responsible for the break-up of the Euro on their watch. But the reason for this is pretty clear: (4) there is no evidence to think that ordinary citizens in even the countries that suffer most during the financial crisis wanted to leave the Euro.*** (This, of course, does not play well to British audiences, and is discomfiting to Lexiters, and so one never hears about it.) But if one wants to understand "decisions taken by policy-makers from the structures in which they were working." this is non-trivial omission.  

 

 

Utopia, Marx, Colonialism, and the Lockean Proviso

“As their cities are composed of families, so their families are made up of those that are nearly related to one another.  Their women, when they grow up, are married out, but all the males, both children and grand-children, live still in the same house, in great obedience to their common parent, unless age has weakened his understanding, and in that case he that is next to him in age comes in his room; but lest any city should become either too great, or by any accident be dispeopled, provision is made that none of their cities may contain above six thousand families, besides those of the country around it.  No family may have less than ten and more than sixteen persons in it, but there can be no determined number for the children under age; this rule is easily observed by removing some of the children of a more fruitful couple to any other family that does not abound so much in them. By the same rule they supply cities that do not increase so fast from others that breed faster; and if there is any increase over the whole island, then they draw out a number of their citizens out of the several towns and send them over to the neighbouring continent, where, if they find that the inhabitants have more soil than they can well cultivate, they fix a colony, taking the inhabitants into their society if they are willing to live with them; and where they do that of their own accord, they quickly enter into their method of life and conform to their rules, and this proves a happiness to both nations; for, according to their constitution, such care is taken of the soil that it becomes fruitful enough for both, though it might be otherwise too narrow and barren for any one of them. But if the natives refuse to conform themselves to their laws they drive them out of those bounds which they mark out for themselves, and use force if they resist, for they account it a very just cause of war for a nation to hinder others from possessing a part of that soil of which they make no use, but which is suffered to lie idle and uncultivated, since every man has, by the law of nature, a right to such a waste portion of the earth as is necessary for his subsistence.  If an accident has so lessened the number of the inhabitants of any of their towns that it cannot be made up from the other towns of the island without diminishing them too much (which is said to have fallen out but twice since they were first a people, when great numbers were carried off by the plague), the loss is then supplied by recalling as many as are wanted from their colonies, for they will abandon these rather than suffer the towns in the island to sink too low.--Thomas More Utopia. Book II

In a famous footnote, which inspired many generations of Marxist historians, in chapter 28 of Capital, Book 1, Marx calls attention to, and quotes, the description of the deleterious effects of the violent enclosures on farming communities in Book 1 of Utopia. Marx attributes the quote to Thomas More and not to the character Raphael Hythloday. This is notable because Thomas More is also a character in Utopia, with a perspective distinct from Hythloday's. This makes Utopia notorious (recall this post) difficult to interpret because one cannot take for granted that any character, including More, speaks for the author. 

To the best of my knowledge Marx never commented on the passage quoted above. In context, it is Hythloday's description of Utopian policy (that he endorses). The first part of the paragraph describes some of the mechanisms the Utopians use to keep population in a fixed equilibrium. (Given that the Utopians have managed to root out famine, and run food surpluses, we can infer there are more mechanisms.) One of the mechanisms mentioned in the passage is the practice -- which resonates with known Greek and Roman history -- to send out colonists in order to control population in the homeland (Utopia).

The Utopian colonists settle in places where the land can support more inhabitants than the existing local population. At that point the colonized either voluntary allow themselves to be subsumed under the Utopians way of life or resist; and then get attacked by the Utopians.

At this point, Hythloday mentions the Utopian justification for colonial war: when "a nation [hinders] others from possessing a part of that soil of which they make no use, but which is suffered to lie idle and uncultivated, since every man has, by the law of nature, a right to such a waste portion of the earth as is necessary for his subsistence."  This argument has been called "the agricultural argument" (by Thomas Flanagan) and it has been treated, as Barbara Arneil implies, as an anticipation of features of the Lockean proviso.

To be sure, the actual law of nature reported Hythloday is better understood as a kind of right of necessity. The idea that under great duress you can take from others some of their property in order to survive. This right of necessity was common ground in the sixteenth century, and we find echoes of it as late as Adam Smith and Sophie de Grouchy, although to the best of my knowledge it was not used to justify colonial war.

It is peculiar that Hythloday does not note that the justification for colonial war is patently being abused. The Utopian colonists are not starving at home. At any given time, the Utopians have two years' food stored. To repeat, they leave Utopia in order to keep the population stable (which is the point of the whole paragraph in context) not to flee famine. 

As an aside, when a few pages later, Hythloday, moves to the subject of war, he presents them as near pacifists: "They detest war as a very brutal thing, and which, to the reproach of human nature, is more practised by men than by any sort of beasts.  They, in opposition to the sentiments of almost all other nations, think that there is nothing more inglorious than that glory that is gained by war." It turns out that there are only three official justifications for war: (i) "either to defend themselves or their friends from any unjust aggressors;" (ii) or to "assist an oppressed nation in shaking off the yoke of tyranny." In addition, and somewhat surprisingly also (iii) "offensive wars" but they never do that "unless they had been consulted before the breach was made, and, being satisfied with the grounds on which they went, they had found that all demands of reparation were rejected, so that a war was unavoidable." Hythloday seems to have forgotten the justification for colonial wars.

To return to the main argument. The Utopian justification for colonial wars is, of course, not just rooted in version of the right of necessity. As we have seen it also relies on the idea that one has no right to keep others from appropriating uncultivated land. When Utopia was published (1517), the Spanish were just starting their colonial projects. (Hythloday is presented as Portuguese who had traveled, in part, with Amerigo Vespucci.) So, the book has an uncanny prophetic quality. It is, then, no surprise that this feature of the Utopian justification for colonial wars are thought to anticipate Locke (recall):

Nor was this appropriation of any parcel of land, by improving it, any prejudice to any other man, since there was still enough and as good left, and more than the yet unprovided could use. So that, in effect, there was never the less left for others because of his enclosure for himself. For he that leaves as much as another can make use of, does as good as take nothing at all. Nobody could think himself injured by the drinking of another man, though he took a good draught, who had a whole river of the same water left him to quench his thirst. And the case of land and water, where there is enough of both, is perfectly the same.

It is uncanny how much this resembles the Utopian frame of mind. After all, the whole point of Utopian ideology and practice is to improve the land. Of course, the Utopians have no interest in defending individual property rights (Locke); their colonies also embrace communal ownership.+  And while I don't mean to suggest that the Utopians have an explicit formulation of the spoilage condition, they would clearly endorse it.* 

I close with three observations: first, the pre-history of the Lockean proviso explicitly involves a colonial project. Second, the Lockean proviso has roots in very egalitarian tendencies (for the in-group); this suggests that -- pace my colleague Bas Van der Vossen -- the left libertarian interpretation of Locke may well be defensible on broader contextual grounds. 

Third, and finally, there is no contradiction between Hythloday's endorsement of colonial land-grabbing of idle land, and his criticism of enclosure of the commons (which need not be idle, after all). It is uncanny how, when discussing colonialism and Wakefield's political economy, in chapter 33 of Capital, Marx sees the connection: "We have seen that the expropriation of the mass of the people from the soil forms the basis of the capitalist mode of production. The essence of a free colony, on the contrary, consists in this — that the bulk of the soil is still public property."

Of course, Marx goes on to say that the: "secret" of prosperity is that "every settler on it therefore can turn part of it into his private property and individual means of production, without hindering the later settlers in the same operation." But, analytically, as More discerned, this is also true of communist settler colonies. 

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

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.