Digressions&Impressions

Belloc's Road to Serfdom thesis, Pt2

Substitute for the term “employee” in one of our new laws the term “serf,” even do so mild a thing as to substitute the traditional term “master” for the word “employer,” and the blunt words might breed revolt. Impose of a sudden the full conditions of a Servile State upon modern England, and it would certainly breed revolt. But my point is that when the foundations of the thing have to be laid and the first great steps taken, there is no revolt; on the contrary, there is acquiescence and for the most part gratitude upon the part of the poor. After the long terrors imposed upon them through a freedom unaccompanied by property, they see, at the expense of losing a mere legal freedom, the very real prospect of having enough and not losing it.
   All forces, then, are making for the Servile State in this the final phase of our evil Capitalist society in England. The generous reformer is canalised towards it; the ungenerous one finds it a very mirror of his ideal; the herd of “practical” men meet at every stage in its inception the “practical” steps which they expected and demanded; while that proletarian mass upon whom the experiment is being tried because, by the nature of the case, only landowners can be affected by the law, and landowners would be compelled by it to safeguard the lives of all, whether they were or were not owners of land.
    But the category so established would be purely accidental. The object and method of the law do not concern themselves with a distinction between citizens.
A close observer might indeed discover certain points in the Factory laws, details and phrases, which did distinctly connote the existence of a Capitalist and of a Proletarian class. But we must take the statutes as a whole and the order in which they were produced, above all, the general motive and expressions governing each main statute, in order to judge whether such examples of interference give us an origin or not.
    The verdict will be that they do not. Such legislation may be oppressive in any degree or necessary in any degree, but it does not establish status in the place of contract, and it is not, therefore, servile.
    Neither are those laws servile which in practice attach to the poor and not to the rich. Compulsory education is in legal theory required of every citizen for his children. The state of mind which goes with plutocracy exempts of course all above a certain standard of wealth from this law. But the law does apply to the universality of the commonwealth, and all families resident in Great Britain (not in Ireland) are subject to its provisions.
   These are not origins. A true origin to the legislation I approach comes later. The first example of servile legislation to be discovered upon the Statute Book is that which establishes the present form of Employer’s Liability.--Hilaire Belloc (1912 [2nd edition] The Servile State, Section Nine ("The Servile State Has Begun")

As I noted in my first post on Belloc (recall), Hayek mentions The Servile State approvingly in The Road to Serfdom. The book is is quite clearly one of the founding texts of what shortly thereafter came to be known as 'property owning democracy' (as Ben Jackson notes here.) In addition, Belloc does anticipate a road to serfdom thesis (although surely does not originate it--it's in Tocqueville and probably earlier), but it's not Hayek's (or Mises') version (Edward McPhail has a lovely paper explaining that it here). It's worth taking a look at because in some ways, Belloc's road to serfdom thesis is an attractive alternative to both the Austrian (Hayekian/Misesian) road to serfdom thesis, and the Marxist one (articulated by Karl Polanyi [recall]) which suggests that capitalism naturally leads to fascism (or worse).

The quoted passage should give a hint of why Hayek would have liked Belloc. It's pretty clear that for Belloc the road to serfdom is fatally initiated once liability law distinguishes citizens between two kinds: employers and employees. This breaks, for him, the symmetry of all contracts. And on Belloc's view, a whole range of legislation, which puts the onus on employers regardless of merits or responsibilities of individual circumstances is not ground in, say, the ability to pay of deep pockets or in considerations of duties of care or basic fairness or Christian charity (or recognition that some employees may have severely limited options between certain kind of work or starvation),* but rather in a modern kind of paternalism. Here's how Belloc puts it a few pages after the passage quoted above: 

Still more striking, as an example of status taking the place of contract, is the fact that this law puts the duty of controlling the proletariat and of seeing that the law is obeyed not upon the proletariat itself, but upon the Capitalist class.

But he sees in such paternalist legislation the start of a tendency, a fatal tendency, in which employers control the workers on behalf of a quasi-permanent status quo. The capitalist class will also help collect taxes for the state. (This is rather prescient--for in our times corporations end up collecting a good chunk of employees' taxes in the form of various withholdings.) For while at first paternalist legislation may seem to benefit the workers, at bottom the advantages to the state of corporations as tax collectors and agents of control of working classes -- and the very high costs involved in removing capitalists altogether -- will induce the state to help secure a relatively docile workforce for the the capitalist class in which collective bargaining will serve the interests of those at the negotiating table, but not those unrepresented. 

Writing a century ago (but in the wake of Bismarck's welfare programs), Belloc argues that over time the welfare state will evolve two permanent classes: rulers and ruled. And while the ruled will have their lives preserved and a kind of permanent employment guarantee, which will be "necessarily transformed into a system of compulsory labor" (or what is now known as 'workfare'). The workers can expect to experience state violence if they wish to challenge this permanent arrangement.

The end-state of this state of affairs is one in which property rights of the capitalist class are secured, in which the working poor are guaranteed a basic income if and only if they work, and in which only the capitalist class has full citizenship. Of the road to serfdom theses this one has non-trivial plausibility to be our future judging by many dystopiab Hollywood movies.

To be sure, Belloc does not think this outcome inevitable in all capitalist structures, but if the initial conditions for the rise of capitalism are oligarchic (as he thinks occurred in England as a result of Henry VIII's confiscation of the monasteries and distribution of these lands to a limited number of cronies) this particular outcome is necessary. So, lurking in Belloc's argument -- he is not shy about this -- is a kind of argument for limiting excessive income inequality. In the lingo of Ingrid Robeyns, Belloc is a limitarian. To be continued. 

An Alternative to the Marxist-Liberal Debate, Belloc and The Servile State (pt 1)

A peasantry eager to purchase might have gradually extended their holdings at the expense of the demesne land, and to the distribution of property, which was already fairly complete, there might have been added another excellent element, namely, the more equal possession of that property. But any such process of gradual buying by the small man from the great, such as would seem natural to the temper of us European people, and such as has since taken place nearly everywhere in countries which were left free to act upon their popular instincts, was interrupted in this country by an artificial revolution of the most violent kind. This artificial revolution consisted in the seizing of the monastic lands by the Crown.
It is important to grasp clearly the nature of this operation, for the whole economic future of England was to flow from it.
Of the demesne lands, and the power of local administration which they carried with them (a very important feature, as we shall see later), rather more than a quarter were in the hands of the Church ; the Church was therefore the “Lord” of something over 25 per cent., say 28 per cent., or perhaps nearly 30 per cent., of English agricultural communities, and the overseers of a like proportion of all English agricultural produce. The Church was further the absolute owner in practice of something like 30 per cent, of the demesne land in the villages, and the receiver of something like 30 per cent, of the customary dues, etc., paid by the maller owners to the greater. All this economic power lay until 1535 in the hands of Cathedral Chapters, communities of monks and nuns, educational establishments conducted by the clergy, and so forth.
When the Monastic lands were confiscated by Henry VIII., not the whole of this vast economic influence was suddenly extinguished. The secular clergy remained endowed, and most of the educational establishments, though looted, retained some revenue; but though the whole 30 per cent, did not suffer confiscation, something well over 20 per cent, did, and the revolution effected by this vast operation was by far the most complete, the most sudden, and the most momentous of any that has taken place in the economic history of any European people.
It was at first intended to retain this great mass of the means of production in the hands of the Crown: that must be clearly remembered by any student of the fortunes of England, and by all who marvel at the contrast between the old England and the new.
Had that intention been firmly maintained, the English State and its government would have been the most powerful in Europe.
The Executive (which in those days meant the King) would have had a greater opportunity for crushing the resistance of the wealthy, for backing its political power with economic power, and for ordering the social life of its subjects than any other executive in Christendom.
Had Henry VIII. and his successors kept the land thus confiscated, the power of the French Monarchy, at which we are astonished, would have been nothing to the power of the English.
The King of England would have had in his own hands an instrument of control of the most absolute sort. He would presumably have used it, as a strong central government always does, for the weakening of the wealthier classes, and to the indirect advantage of the mass of the people. At any rate, it would have been a very different England indeed from the England we know, if the King had held fast to his own after the dissolution of the monasteries.
Now it is precisely here that the capital point in this great revolution appears. The King failed to keep the lands he had seized. That class of large landowners which already existed and controlled, as I have said, anything from a quarter to a third of the agricultural values of England, were too strong for the monarchy. They insisted upon land being granted to themselves, sometimes freely, sometimes for ridiculously small sums, and they were strong enough in Parliament, and through the local administrative power they had, to see that their demands were satisfied. Nothing that the Crown let go ever went back to the Crown, and year after year more and more of what had once been the monastic land became the absolute possession of the large land-owners...Hilaire Belloc (1912 [2nd edition] The Servile State, Chapter IV ("How the Distributive State Failed")

Hayek mentions The Servile State in The Road to Serfdom., and so I was curious about the connection. (I had never heard Beloc before.) The book is very brief and written in an engaging style, and it's full of stimulating observations. It's a bit peculiar I had never chanced upon it before because it is quite clearly one of the founding texts of what shortly thereafter came to be known as property owning democracy. (I was pleased to find Ben Jackson claim this a decade ago, too here.) In addition, Belloc does really anticipate a road to serfdom thesis (although surely does not originate it--it's in Tocqueville and probably earlier), but it's clearly not Hayek's (or Mises') version (Edward McPhail has a lovely paper explaining that it here). I intend to blog a bit about in the future -- not the least because of his description of biopolitics and his analysis of corporate welfare state.

But today, I want to do a more lighthearted piece. As is well known Marxists and Liberals have a fierce debate over the origin of capitalism (which on the liberal side is treated as the origin of mercantilism to which liberalism is a response.) On the Marxist side -- recall (here) my digression on Meiksins Wood and Adam Smith (and this follow up) --, capitalism emerges when term-limit leases are introduced in agriculture and the price of these leases are determined by an estimation by surveyors of the value of that land after improvement in light of prevailing, or at the least the abstract perception of prevailing, market conditions. And this, in turn, sets a landgrab in motion in which enclosures are forced on a politically weak rural population who live out a kind of natural communism. And this violence generates the 'productivity of property,' which gets capitalism going (which liberals will call Mercantilism).

As an aside, some Liberals have a tendency to treat the 'productivity of property' in consequentialist fashion as unequivocally a good thing. The other day, for example, I noticed that in The Constitution of Liberty (1960), Hayek mentions, in passing (while discussing mid twentieth century agriculture), that "there can be little question that the consolidation of dispersed holdings inherited in Europe from the Middle Ages or the enclosures of the commons in England were necessary legislative measures to make improvements by individual efforts possible." (p. 488-489 [Hamowy edition]; emphasis added). It's the kind of passage that gives critics and even friends of Hayek pause--he clearly thinks that some transitionary violence can be justified for the end it serves (but will not dwell on it).

Okay, if we turn to Belloc, he posits a kind of golden age (he calls it an "excellent state of affairs"): the distributed state: in which property was very widely distributed and guilds and country customs conspired to keep income and property inequality to a relative minimum. And the first quoted paragraph above gives his very schematic model for the natural course of events of the evolution of the distributed state. It's not a pure counterfactual (as in Smith's natural course in Book 3 of Wealth of Nations) because Belloc also suggests this natural evolution happened in France. (That's an odd claim, but let's ignore it.) But in England this natural evolution was interrupted by an artificial revolution: Henry VIII's landgrab of the monasteries.

Now, because of the weakness of the sixteenth century English royal family, the landgrab ends up reinforcing and creating a more durable oligarchy with a weak monarchy and a more powerless rural population.* Belloc tells what happens next:

All over England men who already held in virtually absolute property from one-quarter to one-third of the soil and the ploughs and the barns of a village, became possessed in a very few years of a further great section of the means of production, which turned the scale wholly in their favour. They added to that third a new and extra-fifth. They became at a blow the owners of half the land! In many centres of capital importance they had come to own more than half the land. They were in many districts not only the unquestioned superiors, but the economic masters of the rest of the community. They could buy to the greatest advantage.

The world-historical significance of this is as follows meant that before the industrial revolution, England was already an oligarchic state. 

Take, as a starting-point for what followed, the date 1700. By that time more than half of the English were dispossessed of capital and of land. Not one man in two, even if you reckon the very small owners, inhabited a house of which he was the secure possessor, or tilled land from which he could not be turned off.
Such a proportion may seem to us to-day a wonderfully free arrangement, and certainly if nearly one-half of our population were possessed of the means of production, we should be in a very different situation from that in which we find ourselves. But the point to seize is that, though the bad business was very far from completion in or about the year 1700, yet by that date England had already become Capitalist. She had already permitted a vast section of her population to become proletarian, and it is this and not the so-called “Industrial Revolution,” a later thing, which accounts for the terrible social condition in which we find ourselves to-day.

Now, I want to offer four observations about Belloc's story. First, it is an unintended consequence explanation: in which structural forces (pre-existing social arrangements and webs of local corruption) and historical contingency (Henry VIII's rupture with Rome) conspire to upend English economic development.

Second, in so far enclosures figure into his story, they are a late nineteenth century development in which oligarchic capitalism is performing a mopping up operation and they figure in tales of futile resistance by the old and their fathers. 

Third, in Belloc's account there never really was an early revolution in the productivity of property as an engine of history. Rather, it's the application of technology by entrenched wealthy landowners (who also become industrialists).

Fourth, and finally, Belloc is no liberal. But his origin story is a natural one to embrace by liberals who, while distancing themselves from capitalists as a class, want to explain why due to initial conditions capitalism turned mercantile (in which violence was part of its DNA), as (say) Röpke argues. And such liberals might wish to suggest that in so far as there were original sins of capitalism, they were performed by a capricious monarch. Of course, such liberals are scarce on the ground.

Lenin and The State's Essential Coerciveness

In what follows I use Lenin's The State and Revolution (1917; hereafter S&R quoted by chapter and section) as my guide to an orthodox Marxist interpretation of Marx and Engels on the nature of the late nineteenth century capitalist-imperial state. It's perfectly fine for my purposes if you think that Lenin flattened Marx and Engels or misrepresents them (or the evolution of their thought, etc.). It's also fine for my purposes if you think that this is not the best version of a Marxist theory (orthodox or not) of the capitalist state out there. 

Drawing on Engels' fascinating (1884) The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, for Lenin the modern state is the effect of class conflict; the state exists in order, it's fundamental function is, to reduce the transaction costs of class conflict. As Engels puts it: "in order that these antagonisms, classes with conflicting economic interests, shall not consume themselves and society in fruitless struggle, a power, apparently standing above society, has become necessary to moderate the conflict and keep it within the bounds of “order”; and this power, arisen out of society, but placing itself above it and increasingly alienating itself from it, is the state." This independent power understands itself "as apparent mediator." In some respects (I will qualify this below) this anticipates the idea familiar from twentieth century neoliberalism which conceives of the state as an "impartial umpire" above civil society (I am quoting the excellent SEP entry on Hayek by Schmidtz and Boettke).

Of course, Marxists emphasize that the mediating role is not truly impartial. It serves the interest of capital. In particular, the bourgeoisie have captured the state for their own interests. As Marx and Engels put it in the Communist Manifesto, "the executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie." Or as Lenin puts it, "According to Marx, the state is an organ of class rule, an organ for the oppression of one class by another; it is the creation of “order”, which legalizes and perpetuates this oppression by moderating the conflict between classes.  (S&R 1,1) It is worth noting that this emphasis on the order creating nature of states anticipates the Ordoliberal self-understanding in non-trivial ways, and also, as I learned from Erwin Dekker's biography of Tinbergen, more technocratic social democrats like Tinbergen, and the young Rawls as Katrina Forrester persuasively argues in the early chapters of In the Shadow of Justice. I return to this below.

While Lenin suggests that bourgeois politicians would deny it, as an empirical matter, it's not difficult for liberal thinkers to agree that late nineteenth century liberal states are characterized by rent-seeking elites biased toward relatively narrow interests. This was, in fact Hobson's view in his (1905) Imperialism -- a book Lenin (recall) studied carefully -- and Lippmann's in his (1937) The Good Society. And it is a familiar refrain from, say, the Chicago school onward in so-called classical liberal understandings of the contemporary state (recall here).

As an aside, Lenin anticipates the view of liberals of the 1930s that the 1870s were a watershed period in the development of the nineteenth century liberal state. As Lenin notes, in commenting on a remark by Marx that it "was understandable in 1871, when Britain was still the model of a purely capitalist country, but without a militarist clique and, to a considerable degree, without a bureaucracy." (3.1) For, in the 1920s and 30s, in reflecting on the collapse the global order during WWI, so-called neo-liberals came to believe that a corruption of liberalism was manifested after the 1870s. (They would tell different stories about the timing and original source of that corruption (compare here with here). 

The point of the last few paragraphs is that there is non-trivial overlap between Lenin's Marxist analysis of the period leading up to WWI and the liberal analysis of that same period in the first third of the twentieth century.  This is, as I have shown in a different context (recall), also visible in the accounts of the rise of militarism and imperialism as an effect of national monopoly. A crucial difference is that for Lenin capitalism naturally tends toward monopoly whereas Hobson treats it as an effect of rent-seeking behavior.

I use the language of 'rent-seeking' because the Marxist-Leninist position is that in addition to the exploitation of proletariat by capital, and the structural domination of all under capitalism, government offices and the leading functionaries in the bureaucracy are treated as special rents. This is manifest in the following passage (and others like it): "The bureaucracy and the standing army are a “parasite” on the body of bourgeois society--a parasite created by the internal antagonisms which rend that society, but a parasite which “chokes” all its vital pores." (Lenin S&R, 2,2) I don't mean to deny that in context Lenin's major point is the intrinsically coercive nature of the state. I return to that below. But on the orthodox Marxist view it is notable that the bureaucracy (and the army) is parasitic on the body of bourgeois society. These are rents extracted not just from the proletariat, but even from the bourgeoisie. This is pretty much Hobson's own position. (It is peculiar that Lenin implies this would be denied by "the petty-bourgeois and philistine professors and publicists.")

That is to say, on the Orthodox Marxist view the state is a coercive mechanism for upward redistribution. Further evidence for the claim that the bureaucracy is understood as a source of class based rents can be seen in the proposals what to do with the bureaucracy in the transitional period after a successful revolution (and before the state has withered away): 

At the present the postal service is a business organized on the lines of state-capitalist monopoly. Imperialism is gradually transforming all trusts into organizations of a similar type, in which, standing over the “common” people, who are overworked and starved, one has the same bourgeois bureaucracy. But the mechanism of social management is here already to hand. Once we have overthrown the capitalists, crushed the resistance of these exploiters with the iron hand of the armed workers, and smashed the bureaucratic machinery of the modern state, we shall have a splendidly-equipped mechanism, freed from the “parasite”, a mechanism which can very well be set going by the united workers themselves, who will hire technicians, foremen and accountants, and pay them all, as indeed all “state” officials in general, workmen's wages. Here is a concrete, practical task which can immediately be fulfilled in relation to all trusts, a task whose fulfilment will rid the working people of exploitation, a task which takes account of what the Commune had already begun to practice (particularly in building up the state).

To organize the whole economy on the lines of the postal service so that the technicians, foremen and accountants, as well as all officials, shall receive salaries no higher than "a workman's wage", all under the control and leadership of the armed proletariat--that is our immediate aim. S&R 3,3

After the revolution, functionaries in the bureaucracy will be paid workman's wages, the implication being that their existing wages are a form of extraction, parasitic on proletariat's labor, that is, a rent. I don't mean to suggest that's the extent of the change. Lenin also re-activates ideas I associate with the French revolution (including Girondins intellectuals like Grouchy) in which bureaucrats are elected and subjects to recalls. (For example: "The workers, after winning political power, will smash the old bureaucratic apparatus, shatter it to its very foundations, and raze it to the ground; they will replacce it by a new one, consisting of the very same workers and other employees, against whose transformation into bureaucratic will at once be taken which were specified in detail by Marx and Engels: (1) not only election, but also recall at any time; (2) pay not to exceed that of a workman; (3) immediate introduction of control by all, so that all may become “bureaucrats” for a time and that, therefore, nobody may be able to become a “bureaucrat”. S&R 6, 2; see also 6,3))

Let me wrap up with the crucial issue. While compared to anarchists, liberals tend to expect obedience to legitimate law,  liberals understand the liberal state as providing order without authoritarianism. In fact, the introduction of professional police -- as opposed to citizen militias and armed forces -- is seen as a crucial means forward away from despotism in part because the use of force against civilians can be more calibrated and less lethal than it is when every riot or public disorder is treated as a trigger of military action. And even states in which the mercantile tendency toward state violence is not fully defeated, but only partially tamed by parliament, law, press, and public opinion are often understood as doing so without extensive authoritarianism. (Of course, there are standing objections to this claim during, say, the Jim Crow era, and many periodic states of emergency.)

By contrast, for Lenin [here he is quoting Engels (1891 preface to the third edition of The Civil War in France)], the state is nothing but a machine for the oppression of one class by another, and indeed in the democratic republic no less than in the monarchy." (S&R 4.5; see also 2.1) Fundamentally, according to the Marxists we're focusing on here, the modern state is a coercive entity to impose class interests. Lenin (S&R 1.1) quotes Engels to that effect, the state “consists not merely of armed men but also of material adjuncts, prisons, and institutions of coercion of all kinds.” (Engels 1884; ch. 9)

That according to Lenin the most democratic state is essentially coercive is also revealed, by his view of what happens after the revolution:

Democracy is a form of the state, it represents, on the one hand, the organized, systematic use of force against persons; but, on the other hand, it signifies the formal recognition of equality of citizens, the equal right of all to determine the structure of, and to administer, the state. This, in turn, results in the fact that, at a certain stage in the development of democracy, it first welds together the class that wages a revolutionary struggle against capitalism--the proletariat, and enables it to crush, smash to atoms, wipe off the face of the earth the bourgeois, even the republican-bourgeois, state machine, the standing army, the police and the bureaucracy and to substitute for them a more democratic state machine, but a state machine nevertheless, in the shape of armed workers who proceed to form a militia involving the entire population. S&R 5, 4 (Higher phase of communist society)

What's notable about this is that the intrinsic coerciveness of the state is treated as an essential core that must be preserved through the transitionary period (the dictatorship of the proletariat) as a means to destroy class enemies, and to force changes in class structure and the possibility of acquiring rents. As Luxemburg discerned (recall the post earlier in the week) this understanding of the state, and the post-revolutionary transition period, has an inherent fragility; in so far as one leaves the coercive nature of the state untouched, one then opens the door to state capitalism in which a new managerial class extracts rents (as described by Burnham (recall) in The Managerial Revolution).

My point in the previous paragraph is not a victorious one. For, after the work of Foucault, few would be satisfied with the relatively limited list of coercive institutions that the orthodox Marxist tradition focus on. In addition, the last few years of financial crisis and pandemic have shown that liberal states have many instruments of coercion that they can use without fundamentally altering the liberal structure of the state or even traditional political institutions (elections, parliaments, press, rule of law, etc.) Simultaneously, Black Lives Matter has reminded many that even policing can easily be experienced as occupation, or worse. So, what I take away from the Marxist orthodoxy is that for liberalism to have proper self-understanding it needs to have an account of the centrality of the liberal state's coerciveness.** To be continued.

 

Luxemberg vs Lenin and a comment on Hayek (and Wieser)

The history of the Russian labor movement suggests the doubtful value of such centralism. An all-powerful center, invested, as Lenin would have it, with the unlimited right to control and intervene, would be an absurdity if its authority applied only to technical questions, such as the administration of funds, the distribution of tasks among propagandists and agitators, the transportation and circulation of printed matter. The political purpose of an organ having such great powers only if those powers apply to the elaboration of a uniform plan of action, if the central organ assumes the initiative of a vast revolutionary act.

But what has been the experience of the Russian socialist movement up to now? The most important and fruitful changes in its tactical policy during the last ten years have not been the inventions of several leaders and even less so of any central organizational organs. They have always been the spontaneous product of the movement in ferment. This was true during the first stage of the proletarian movement in Russia, which began with the spontaneous general strike of St. Petersburg in 1896, an event that marks the inception of an epoch of economic struggle by the Russian working people. It was no less true during the following period, introduced by the spontaneous street demonstrations of St. Petersburg students in March, 1901. The general strike of Rostov-on-Don, in 1903, marking the next great tactical turn in the Russian proletarian movement, was also a spontaneous act. “All by itself,” the strike expanded into political demonstrations, street agitation, great outdoor meetings, which the most optimistic revolutionist would not have dreamed of several years before.

Our cause made great gains in these events. However, the initiative and conscious leadership of the Social Democratic organizations played an insignificant role in this development. It is true that these organizations were not specifically prepared for such happenings. However, the unimportant part played by the revolutionists cannot be explained by this fact. Neither can it be attributed to the absence of an all-powerful central party apparatus similar to what is asked for by Lenin. The existence of such a guiding center would have probably increased the disorder of the local committees by emphasizing the difference between the eager attack of the mass and the prudent position of the Social Democracy. The same phenomenon – the insignificant part played by the initiative of central party organs in the elaboration of actual tactical policy – can be observed today in Germany and other countries. In general, the tactical policy of the Social Democracy is not something that may be “invented.” It is the product of a series of great creative acts of the often spontaneous class struggle seeking its way forward.--Rosa Luxemburg (1904) "Revolutionary Socialist Organization," part 1.

It is well known that despite their mutual admiration, and their common rejection of reformist/gradualist social democracy ('Bersteinism,') Lenin and Luxemburg also had some important disagreements. The quoted passage is from Luxemburg's response to Lenin's (1904) One Step Forward, Two Steps Back, and shows familiarity with Lenin's (1902) What is to be Done? In these works Lenin had advocated for an all powerful central party apparatus, as Luxemburg suggests. This apparatus was supposed to be secret (to avoid capture by the police) and constituted by an elite group of professional revolutionaries. (Lenin is also very critical of an exclusive, trade unionist focus on economic issues.) Lenin's argument appeals to the benefits of the division of labor among professional revolutionaries to the development of a professional cadre with different kind of specializations (agitators, propagandists, theoreticians, etc.) It is worth noting that the demand for secrecy is an effect of the Russian context (it being an autocratic police-state with few liberties of association), but the focus on professionalism seems less context sensitive for Lenin (nothing that follows hinges this, I hope). 

Luxemburg's intervention on the side of the spontaneous activity is notable not just because she risks being seen to side here, in part, with those gradualists she ordinarily condemns, but also because it appears she rejects the advantages of the division of labor to the revolution. In particular, Lenin's vanguardism solves a kind of knowledge problem for the proletariat which, while being exploited, lacks access to the intellectual tools to plan and organize a revolution. (It's short on human capital one may say.) Because I am not a Marxist, I hope the next part of this sentence is not treated as thinly-disguised-polemic, but it strikes me that Lenin is right to think that his view is well grounded in Marxist-Leninist writings (despite their criticisms of the division of labor under capitalism).* 

As an aside -- this may be more fairly construed as more polemical, but it is meant to be factual observation --, vanguardism does introduce an important tension into Marxism from a purely theoretical point of view. For, one of the key claims on behalf of Marxism, very clearly annunciated in the Communist Manifesto, is that it promises rule by the majority against the minority. And one need not be an Elite theorist to recognize how rare that it is. (The aristocratic element in liberal democracy -- elections to representative bodies -- secures (to be sure, legitimate) minority rule over a majority.) Vanguardism is a clear break with the idea of majority rule, which is why it is promised to be provisional. Of course, the non-trivial risk is that once in power the vanguard becomes a (new) species of elite rule.

So, Luxemburg's attack on the Leninist counterfactual ("The existence of such a guiding center would have probably increased the disorder of the local committees") is not merely an invention over a tactical debate, but also addresses a principled issue for Marxism. And here I want to call attention to two epistemic features of her position that are meant to respond to Lenin's solution to the knowledge problem for a revolutionary proletariat. First, she argues that central coordination does not increase unity and effectiveness, but is likely to cause disorder. And she attributes this to difference of positional or situated perspective which results inevitably in different stances (prudence vs enthusiasm), which itself undermines common agency. Of course, this is not a very convincing response to Lenin because the very enthusiasm of the masses is not sufficient to make a revolution (and often is directed at only local improvement without wider political regard). This is why Luxemburg's second point, the rejection of top-down policy, is significant.

Second, I read her as suggesting that many local struggles are each occasions of learning, trials that may in their very spontaneity and so novelty lead to new discoveries: where conflict induced necessity  generates "great creative acts." Each local trial of strength between the proletariat and the authorities and/or capital provides a feedback mechanism from which to learn in which (the revolutionary consciousness of) the working class is trained. And, in particular, over time this will create a critical mass of "the existence of a large contingent of workers educated in the class struggle" (presumably capable of revolutionary politics). So, from her perspective the temptation of vanguardism is understandable, but with patience (and class struggle) avoidable. 

By contrast, Lenin is quite clear that he thinks this is bunk--that a central clearinghouse is needed to integrate lessons learned and to provide the necessary expertise, to coordinate, and to educate. So, I am not suggesting Luxemburg wins this argument. In fact, with the benefit of hindsight we can see that he was right that vanguardism could achieve real power. But at the same time, Luxemburg was prescient in discerning that such vanguardism would inevitably lead to rule of a minority over a majority (as she notes "the self-discipline of the Social Democracy is not merely the replacement of the authority of bourgeois rulers with the authority of a socialist central committee.")

Now, what I want to note, in conclusion, is that Luxemburg's position on the spontaneous, bottom up education by the proletariat through local struggle is structurally analogous to (recall)the view that Michael Polanyi and then, more famously, Hayek develop in the 1930s on the way learning occurs in markets and the generation of spontaneous order. To be sure, knowledge about the spontaneous order generating features of markets pre-date Luxemburg, so I am not suggesting she influenced their development of the concept, which was already familiar. (And Polanyi is surely influenced by the way 'spontaneous' is used in chemistry and physics of the nineteenth century.) But anyone familiar with debates among Marxists at the start of the twentieth century, will be quickly struck by how important and intense the debate over revolutionary spontaneity is. This debate died circa 1920.

Hayek (1899 – 1992) and Michael Polanyi  (1891 – 1976) came to maturity in the aftermath of this debate. While Polanyi never seems to have flirted with social democracy (and was not especially educated in economics), Hayek was clearly (and un-controversially) influenced by Wieser and charmed by Wieser's 'Fabian socialist' tendencies as a student. The Fabians were the standard-bearers of social democratic gradualism (which is at times compatible, of course, with left liberalism). So, it's worth exploring to what degree Wieser and the young Hayek were themselves enmeshed in, or at least aware of, the debates over the epistemic merits of spontaneous proletarian action. 

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Michael Polanyi on the collapse of liberalism and the Rise of Fascism: Religion and Liberty

Anglo-American liberalism was first formulated by Milton and Locke. Their argument for freedom of thought was twofold. In its first part (for which we may quote the Areopagitica) freedom from authority is demanded, so that truth may be discovered. The main inspiration of this movement was the struggle of the rising natural sciences against the authority of Aristotle. Its programme was to let everyone state his beliefs, and to allow people to listen and form their own opinion; the ideas which would prevail in a free and open battle of wits would be as close an approximation to the truth as can be humanly achieved. We may call this the anti-authoritarian formula of liberty. Closely related to it is the second half of the argument for liberty, which is based on philosophic doubt. While its origins go back a long way (right to the philosophers of antiquity) this argument was first formulated as a political doctrine by Locke. It says simply that we can never be so sure of the truth in matters of religion as to warrant the imposition of our views on others. These two pleas for freedom of thought were put forward and were accepted by England at a time when religious beliefs were unshaken and indeed dominant throughout the nation. The new tolerance aimed pre-eminently at the reconciliation of different denominations in the service of God. Atheists were refused tolerance by Locke, as socially unreliable.

On the Continent, the twofold doctrine of free thought — anti-authoritarianism and philosophic doubt — gained ascendancy somewhat later than in England and moved on straightaway to a more extreme position.--Michael Polanyi (1951) "Perils of Inconsisency" in The Logic of Lberty, p. 117 (in the Libertyfund edition.)

In The Great Transformation, Karl Polanyi popularized (recall here; and here) for many Marxists and progressives a fairly straightforward narrative about the rise of fascism, totalitarianism, and national-socialism (sometimes I'll just use 'fascism' for this whole group): by undermining social cohesion the markets promoted by liberalism give rise to fascism. And (echoing a trope from Adam Smith himself) the workplace in the capitalist economy undermines cognitive proper functioning and the functioning of wider culture (this is especially so when it is accompanied by violence as it was under imperialism and even domestic development). In particular, because markets are also inherently fragile, they generate disruptive crises which fatally undermine the authority of ordinary politicians and open the doors to strongmen of various types (or 'fascism') who take advantage of a wider sense of despair and humiliation.

Sometimes people also add an idea (recall) derived from Lenin to this argument: that is, that capitalist economies naturally become monopolistic. And (partially drawing on the liberal Hobson) such monopoly promotes violent imperialism and/or militarism (and not to mention opens the door to the a concentration of power in the hands of few oligarchs). And from there it is small step to a strongman (if a worker's revolution doesn't stop the process). 

By contrast, market friendly liberals (e.g., Austrians, Ordoliberals, and neoliberals) when confronted with the collapse of liberal civilization after World War I and the aftermath of the Wall Street crisis, offered a different analysis one that also harkened back to Hobson's views: while on the surface the nineteenth century looks liberal, liberals were never so powerful as to defeat mercantilism (which historically preceded it). And depending on the liberal thinker the details will differ, but all agree that in its political guise liberalism suffered setback after setback from the 1870s onward (or even earlier). On this view the early partial success of liberalism actually enhanced the rent-seeking and militaristic forces of mercantile imperialism. On this view, monopoly is not a necessary byproduct of market economies, but the effect of political decisions (tariffs, especially). And one may add, even if monopolies were the consequence of market economies left to themselves, this only shows the need for robust antitrust (ordoliberals especially argued this). The problem for this 'solution' is that it has to prevent rent seeking even though the view itself predicts its likelihood.

It should be noted that both explanations suggest that democracy (broadly conceived) cannot save itself if the economic circumstances are dire enough. And it is no surprise that some theorists thought that democracy inevitably led to Bonepartism (or military dictatorship by plebiscite), also sometimes known as caesarian democracy (recall here). Marx's The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon offers a nice expression of the idea, and as I recently learned (recall) it became a staple of the so-called Italian Elite school. 

In particular, as James Burnham notes, while drawing on Michels' (1911) Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy in his (1943) The Machiavellians, because of mechanisms that drive elite capture (recall) and because of the doctrine of the general/popular will, it is actually fairly predictable that a leader of a democracy can turn himself into the true representative of the general will of the people. And so rather than Bonepartism being at odds with democracy it is actually its "logical culmination," (Burnham, p. 145). To be sure Bonepartism itself is not totalitarianism, but the step to it may not be so difficult.

But all these explanations suffer from an obvious problem: some states managed to remain broadly liberal warts and all (Switzerland, Holland, the United Kingdom and many of its Dominions, as well as the United States), despite suffering many of the same evils as the countries that did succumb to various strongmen. And this opens the door to alternative approaches.

As I noted before (recall), Karl Polanyi's brother, Michael Polanyi went in a different direction, one of the attendees of Lippmann Colloquium in 1938. (Today he is primarily known for ideas about tacit knowledge in the philosophy of science. In what follows, i will first be alluding to his (1941) "The Growth of Thought in Society, Economica). He noted that in places where fascism (now broadly conceived) succeeded, there had been a previous successful ideological and violent campaign attacking society's intermediaries: these partially self-governing intermediary societies (within science, art, law, the crafts, engineering, medicine, the press, etc.) are for him constitutive of liberal society. This form of liberalism partially harkens back to features we now more often associate with Burke's little platoons and with continental corporatism. But in his Rationalism, Pluralism, and Freedom, Jacob T. Levy has shown that what I here call Michael Polanyi's move is, in fact, a recurring theme within liberalism (that we can also find in Adam Smith).

And in fact Michael Polanyi thereby provides a mechanism for an observation that had figured prominently in Karl Polanyi's argument: that liberal authority seemed to collapse in the face of an organized but not especially threatening minority.  The collapse may look sudden, but it builds on a period of successful intimidation of the ordinary functioning of lots of intermediaries that stabilize liberal society. And if I can glance obliquely to our own time, one crucial lesson of this is that it is really important to bring the rule of law down on those that intimidate these intermediaries. It's to be feared that our own governments have not really learned Michael Polanyi's lesson.

Michael Polanyi himself must have felt that this account leaves out a crucial bit: motivation. Where do the would-be-elites and early cadres of fascists come from in a liberal society? In "Perils of Inconsistency," first published in his collection The Logic of Liberty (1951), Michael Polanyi tackles this question. Echoing and anticipating themes one finds in Hayek, Polanyi thinks that the difference maker is to be found in differential uptake of certain philosophical ideas. (And this also echoes Russell's views in The History of Western Philosophy then recent.) 

For Michael Polanyi, liberalism has its roots in a rejection of religious fanaticism and Church authority (p. 116). Both were replaced by a conception of liberty involving intellectual freedom. And for Polanyi this conception was internally contradictory (see above).* He claims one cannot simultaneously obtain a market place of ideas in public opinion -- notice that he does not attribute this idea to Mill -- and profess a mitigated skepticism at the same time. 

And simply put: on Polanyi's view, because of the demands of religious toleration (p. 122), Locke taught some places how to live with this inconsistency, while maintaining the authority of conscience and ideals pertaining to reason and justice formerly associated with church authority. (This is the bit, I think, is also in Russell--apologies that I lack an exact reference.) To put this amusingly, Locke taught the virtue of hypocrisy to Anglo-Saxon political culture--one continues to pay more than lip-service to certain ideals and so prevent their popular collapse. (On Polanyi's view this one also sees in Utilitarian practice.) As Polanyi puts it (again echoing Russell): "I believe that the preservation up to this day of Western civilization along the lines of the Anglo-American tradition of liberty was due to this speculative restraint, amounting to a veritable suspension of logic within the British empiricist philosophy." (121) One person's shallowness, is another's heroic self-command.

But, by contrast, under the influence of the French Enlightenment, other places tried to remove the inconsistency and replace Church authority with the authority of a public and objective reason. And to simplify greatly, nineteenth century continental philosophy -- special animus is directed by Polanyi at Hegel and Fichte, and then Marx and Nietzsche -- showed that this cannot be done, and that a species of nihilism is a result:

The process of replacing moral ideals by philosophically less  vulnerable objectives was carried out in all seriousness. This is  not a mere pseudo-substitution, but a real substitution of  human appetites and human passions for reason and the ideals  of man.

This brings us right up to the scene of the revolutions of the twentieth century. We can see now how the philosophies which guided these revolutions and destroyed liberty wherever they prevailed, were originally justified by the anti-authoritarian  and sceptical formula of liberty. They were indeed anti-authoritarian and sceptical to the extreme. They set man free  from obligations towards truth and justice, reducing reason to its own caricature : to a mere rationalization of conclusions, pre-determined by desire and eventually to be secured, or already held, by force. Such was the final measure of this liberation: man was to be recognized henceforth as maker and master, and no longer servant of what had before been his ideals.

This liberation, however, destroyed the very foundations of  liberty. (p. 126)

And this opened the door, on Polanyi's view to fanatics that could mobilize the serious moral passions of individuals who had been taught contempt for public morality. So, crucially, rather than seeing the varieties of fascism as inherently "savage," Polanyi sees fascism as building on a moral inversion  developed by Marxism. On this view, where public reason and public morality are seen as ideological, or merely a fig leave for the operation of power, fascism and authoritarianism can appeal to the moral sensibility of dissatisfied (and ambitious) individuals.

The important point here is that rather than seeing the success of strongmen as merely the success of cynicism, Polanyi glimpses that they can win in contexts where liberal society has lost its inner faith because they (the fascists) manage to channel moral grievance and moral disgust into a politics of violent renewal. 

Polanyi's own conclusion is that that liberalism and certain forms of religion are natural allies. (He is greatly cheered by the Christian Democratic defeat of Communism in Italy, and elsewhere.) Historically this was an important move because it prefigures the fusionism (of market friendly and religious conservative types) that made the Republican Party so successful in the latter half of the twentieth century (and so interestingly studied by Melinda Cooper in Family Values). And confronted by the success of Trumpism, I have been tempted by the idea (recall), in dialogue with Thomas Pink, that liberalism needs the help of religion, a revitalized Catholic Church, especially.+ 

Okay, let me wrap up. I don't mention all of this because I think Polanyi's history of philosophy is especially accurate or insightful. Nor do I mention it because I think we should go back to fusionism Stateside or Christian Democracy in Europe. But rather, I think Polanyi, is insightful that a successful public culture must do some justice to, or find a way to channel to proper public ends, the moral sensibility of the population. This means, I think, that liberal neutrality needs to be rethought without giving up on the virtues of liberalism.

 

On Táíwò and Elite Capture

In 1957 the pioneering African American sociologist E. Franklin Frazier published an English translation of his study of the U.S. black middle class, Black Bourgeoisie. We might also think of it as a pioneering work in the study of elite capture of politics. Frazier accuses the black middle class of being insecure and powerless, constantly constructing a world of “make-believe” to deal with an “inferiority complex” caused by the brutal history of racial domination in the United States. Immediately controversial upon its publication, the book notes in a preface to the 1962 edition that Frazier was both applauded for his courage and threatened with violence...

Value capture is managed by elites, on purpose or not. In other words, elites don’t simply participate in our community; their decisions help to structure it, much in the way that game designers structure the world of games. After all, elites face a simpler version of oppression than non-elites do: whereas working-class black folk are pressed by racial slights and degradation alongside economic problems that might require “socialized medicine” to solve, elites’s economic position makes them comfortable enough to focus on their own status and cultural power—often at the expense of non-elites....

Such elite capture threatens a whole group’s value structure, as everyone is confronted with this simplified version of the initial values and incentives to adopt it. This can tend, over time, to push understandings of the group values—both by those in the group and outside of it—toward the elites’ simpler direction.

There is another crucial insight that can be gained from applying the analogy of games to our discussion of elite capture. Design decisions structure a game’s built environment, baking the outlook of designers into the decisions players are faced with. In similar fashion, elite decision-making determines what options are available to non-elites. This is precisely the role that the press, social media influencers, military top brass, and titans of capital have in our lives. That is, they frame the conditions of work (and play) for the rest of us.--Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò (May 7, 2020) "Identity Politics and Elite Capture" Boston Review 

Last year Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò published a number of striking essays on elite capture (I mentioned these in passing here). In Addition to the piece from Boston Review I have partially quoted above (and will quote below), I also warmly recommend this post here. And judging by his personal website (and Amazon), he is about to publish a whole book on elite capture. But since there are a lot of fascinating moving parts in the Boston Review essay, I'll focus on it alone. Do read the essay because it very cleverly draws on ideas by C. Thi Nguyen to explicate what they call "value capture," which for Thi Nguyen and Táíwò involves the narrowing and simplification of values in virtue of participation in a (gamified) process.

As Táíwò (recall also this post) notes, "Elite capture is not unique to black politics; it is a general feature of politics, anywhere and everywhere," (emphasis added). Elite capture is, thus, a law of politics. It's a natural effect of the division of labor within politics, and the natural obstacles (time, expertise, lack of transparency, etc.) to monitoring by non-elites of elites, and so shows up within political parties, unions, and basically any social organization that allows some kind of distinction between the membership and its leadership. Elite capture is also reinforced by the absence of political consensus in the context of pluralism (which makes elite negotiation and representation so important).

Now Táíwò rightly singles out Frazier's (1962) Black Bourgeoisie as a landmark study of elite capture, but it should not come as a surprise that a law of politics has been studied before: the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Italian Elite school of political sociology-- with Pareto, Mosca, and Michels as most famous scholars -- had developed a whole theory of politics ground in this political law. Including an account of rent-seeking.** In his 1943 book The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom, James Burnham had introduced them as a group to a wider English speaking public, and ideas about elite capture are central to his reconstruction. (Of course, Pareto, Mosca, and Michels were very well known to specialist sociologists and economists of the age.)* Both Walter Lippmann's (1922) Public Opinion, and Schumpeter's Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (1942), are also very indebted to ideas of the Italian Elite school.** And while I'll leave this hanging here, in fact, Pareto (partially mediated by Parsons) and Schumpeter shaped the analysis of the ideas on crony-capitalism and rent-seeking in public choice and Chicago economics (recall here).

I don't mean to disparage the originality of the Black Bourgeoisie, a book very much worth re-reading. In fact, it was so controversial in its own day that Frazier encountered what we would call canceling in his own time. As he recounts in the 1962 preface to a reprint of the book, "I was invited by a Negro sorority to discuss the book but so much bitterness was aroused by the invitation that it had to be canceled. One leading member of the sorority accused me of having set the Negro race back fifty years." (p. 2) If one goes on to read the book one learns that fraternities and sororities play a key role in his analysis of elite formation (or "molding") and recruitment, and elite commitments. 

In his Boston Review essay, Táíwò argues convincingly that identity politics as pioneered by Combahee River Collective was originally part of a broader effort to avoid certain kinds of elite capture (that expressed itself in tokenism and marginalization), and so an enabling condition of coalition politics. And he notes that they suggest more strategies (including consciousness raising, and elite participation in activism) to avoid elite capture in the "right kind of political culture."

Now, above I used Táíwò's words to attribute a law of politics to him. So, if I were interested in gotchas it would be tempting to suggest here that by his own lights political culture cannot solve the problem of elite capture, it can only mitigate it. And perhaps this is all Táíwò means to argue. (Maybe the book will shed light on this.) But, of course, the problem is that according to the theory of elite capture, political culture is shaped by elite institutions and practices, as Táíwò himself notes. So, I don't think this solves his problem.

But he has another out: he could argue that by "the right kind of political culture" he means a species of sophisticated anarchism (say, of the sort recently revived in The Dawn of Everything by David Wengrow and David Graeber). For, at least conceptually some kinds of anarchism avoid the distinction between membership and leaders (masses and rulers, etc.) As it happens, the Italian Elite school and Burnham don't ignore anarchism, and claim it, too, is inevitably shaped by elites. (Something Ursula Le Guin also suggests in The Dispossessed.) But it's conceivable one can develop a form of anarchism that is not subject to the phenomenon of elite capture. And Táíwò's closing emphasis on the fact that 'we're in it together' might suggests he inclines toward such a view. (I return to this below.)

I want to close with three observations. First, Pareto was what we would now call a classical liberal when he developed ideas of elite capture. But when Burnham popularized Pareto's ideas, Burnham -- a professor of philosophy at NYU -- was an ex-Trotsky-ite (then famous for his book The Managerial Revolution) and on his way of co-founding the revival American conservatism (co-founding The National Review with William Buckley).+ And for Burnham the key to freedom, in the context of the inevitability of elite capture, is the possibility of opposition to the government which requires a rule of law, which in turn requires that within society that there are multiple social forces that counter each other and mechanisms to prevent the concentration of power. (And because Burnham is no liberal this does not require a focus on markets or property rights.)

And so my first observation is that 'elite capture' is not an idea exclusive to one political orientation. It's an important idea to all students of political life. And it is a standing problem for conceptualizations of politics that assume representatives speak for their (political, union, or shareholder, etc.) electorates or where politics is treated like an ideal speech act. So, Táíwò is right to emphasize it, and I look forward to engaging with his book.

However, second, it's possible that Táíwò does not think of 'elite capture' as a general law of politics, as I presented him. For he writes, "it is a fully general problem of politics in a world that distributes power and resources unjustly and unequally." (emphasis his!) And this suggests that he thinks elite capture can be avoided once the material conditions have been equalized (i.e., "resources unjustly and unequally") and there is no difference in power. But the only possible political system that delivers that is a form of anarchist-syndicalism. Fair enough. But this is more than a change in political culture.

Third, I fear that in using Thi Nguyen's ideas on "value capture," Táíwò also ends up suggesting that without mediation of elites there is a more authentic and discrete set of values and commitments that should guide policy. That is, value capture corrupts the will of the people. Now, I think one can recognize the phenomenon of value capture in the political sphere, but deny that this always involves a corruption of ordinary or popular will in the context of the division of political labor.++ (The idea that elites corrupt by way of elite capture is very popular among far right populists.)  For, in virtue of the division of cognitive and political labor, outsiders, masses (etc.) will often be in the position of having no access to a minimal opinion on a topic at all. I grant that such a view can easily slide in a cynical or meritocratic attempt to down-play the views (and interests) of non-elites, but that's not what I am suggesting here. Rather, it's the political process itself that makes clear what the people's values and their orderings are (and this is shaped by elites). So, such value capture is necessary to a well-functioning liberal democracy. And that requires elites that work in the interest of those they represent. So, rather than elite capture only being a problem to liberal democratic political life, it must given its inevitability also be part of its solution. To be continued.

 

 

 

The Dispossessed (Spoilers), Pt 4.: on the limits of Anarchism

The second year I was in Elbow, I was worklister, the mill syndicate cut rations. People doing six hours in the plant got full rations just barely enough for that kind of work. People on half time got three-quarter rations. If they were sick or too weak to work, they got half. On half rations you couldn't get well. You couldn't get back to work. You might stay alive. I was supposed to put people on half rations, people that were already sick. I was working full time, eight, ten hours sometimes, desk work, so I got full rations: I earned them. I earned them by making lists of who should starve. The man s light eyes looked ahead into the dry light. Like you said, I was to count people.--From Ursula Le Guin (1974) The Dispossessed, p. 407 (page-number are from a 2002 adobe e-reader edition)

This post is the fourth in an open-ended series on Le Guin's The Dispossessed (see here for pt 1; here for pt 2.; here for pt 3.).

It is commonly claimed that Ursula Le Guin's The Dispossessed offers a positive representation of a planet-wide anarchist society (on a planet Annares). This is no surprise because the narrative offers extensive details on the functioning of this society. In addition, Ursula Le Guin has herself invited this interpretation by adding a brief clarificatory note to one of her short stories, "The Day Before The Revolution." The story is about a day in the life of Odo, the intellectual visionary, the philosophical prophet, of Annares, where Odo's writing and her exemplary life function as the shared principles and touchstone of the anarchist program. This dedicatory note (recall) is "In memoriam Paul Goodman, 1911–1972" explicitly inserts the story into the history of anarchist theorizing mentioning ""early Taoist thought, and expounded by Shelley and Kropotkin, Goldman and Goodman."*

In addition, the action of The Dispossessed, which centers on Shevek, is all about the tension (I almost wrote 'dialectic') between an ossified version of anarchism and anarchism as a perpetual work in progress. And so any flaws noted in Annares can charitably be interpreted as evidence of the need for the more dynamic understanding of anarchism "properly conceived," that "was a revolution, a permanent one, an ongoing process." (230) This Shevek attributes to what we may call true Odo-nism. And the narrative of The Dispossessed is itself plausibly understood as a narration of his growth from (recall) political "fool" (123) to this more mature understanding.

So far so good. And in what follows I do not want to deny that the representation of Anarres, a kind of Socratic political theory, is a major contribution to Anarchist thought. It is especially important because this is not an anarchism that turns its back on technology and goes back to nature: "they would not regress to pre-urban, pre-technological tribalism. They knew that their anarchism was the product of a very high civilization, of a complex diversified culture, of a stable economy and a highly industrialized technology that could maintain high production and rapid transportation of goods." (124) But in what follows I suggest that Le Guin herself offers hints that there are limitations to Shevek's character (development) which might suggest more fatal flaws in Annares. After all the subtitle of the book is "An Ambiguous Utopia."

But first a relatively small point. So, there are two important features of the political economy of Anarres. First, their economy consists of cooperatives or syndics which are centrally coordinated from the top-down. Now unlike the economies familiar from the Soviet Union and its allied states, this is not a state capitalism. Anarres rejects property and money. Second, the economy has no mechanism to exchange surplus in one sector (say energy in which it is abundant) for needs in another section (say food). The second feature is a consequence of a kind of self-imposed autarky and political rejection of the mother planet, Urras, from which the revolutionaries were (self) exiled. Jointly, these two features make the economy of Anarres rather fragile, especially against famines in which all kinds of transportational and logistical bottle necks develop and in which starvation is a real possibility. In fact, at one point, during the famine Shevek becomes a locally important coordinator who literally decides the rations which might mean life and death for his community (see, especially, p. 407 quoted above).

Now, it's pretty clear that one of the side-effects or perhaps part of Shevek's mission to Urras is, in fact, the opening up of exchange of a commerce in ideas between Anarres and Urras. (And once on Urras he discovers a wider Hainish universe the possibilities of which are expanded by Shevek's intellectual breakthroughs and revealed to us in the last few chapters.) So, there is a sense in which the novel suggests that a truer Anarchism is open to the world/universe. And, so, perhaps this suggest that the limitations on the second feature might be overcome.

However, spatial distance might make planetary exchanges of commodities too slow and too costly to prevent famines. And Shevek's own approach (recall) is to promote nobly communism of knowledge, not trade. So it is by no means obvious that joining the league of worlds would be decisive on this score, and does not solve the coordination problems that are a consequence of central planning.

So, since there is no sign that Shevek is willing to promote the introduction of markets to solve the coordination problems that beset Anarres (and turn it into a more anarcho-capitalist society), it is by no means obvious that these can be solved. As an aside, it is worth noting that the (Hainish) League of Worlds seems loosely modeled on Kantian ideas as presented in Perpetual Peace. And Kant did think that such a League would need to be composed of commercial, trading republics. Some other time, I return to the Hainish League.

The other limitation of Anarres is that for all its egalitarian ethos, it has not, in fact, eliminated patriarchy. What I am about to discuss has long held me up writing about The Dispossessed. Shevek quietly presupposes and leans on women's labor of his scientist partner Tevek, who does menial tasks for him (see especially pp 488-489 and here paging of his manuscript). More important, Shevek sexually assaults the sister of one of his hosts on Urras, Vea. While the alcohol induced assault is very troubling by itself, it's his reaction once sober after that is, perhaps, especially jarring. While he feels humiliated, he never recognizes his own assault for what it is -- rather, he represents Vea as having betrayed him (355) -- and he rejects feeling any "guilt" (356) or shame, and this is crucial, nor does he seek any kind of atonement for it.

Now, that he rejects 'guilt' is no surprise because he has been taught to despise it. Guilt is associated with property, and in the consequentialist ethic of Anarres it's undoubtedly too backward-looking and too reminiscent of the kind of religions they have rejected. One can admire (recall) the cultivated, anticipatory "sensitivity" or sympathy (or empathy) with the pains and "suffering" of others that regulates behavior and mutual aid (393) among these anarchists, while still noticing that the absence of guilt and genuine atonement prevents forms of accountability worth having. They have norms that banish people from society (sending them to asylums), but nothing that allows people to -(ahh) own up to their wrongs to their victims, or themselves. 

And once one faces up to the significance of this sexual assault that Shevek simply sets aside, one notices that there is a structural undertone of always present violence on Anarres. Compared to the wars of the twentieth century, Anarres is quite pacific. But the book is literally book-ended by actual violence in chapter 1 and the threat of violence toward Shevek in the final chapter.  And while Shevek was still a comrade in good standing back home on Anarres, we see him in an unprovoked fist-fight with his near-name sake Shevet for no other reason that the near nominal identity causes a lot of mix-ups. (Shevet is the aggressor.) And once impartial bystanders decide that it would be a 'fair fight' (65) nobody intervenes to stop the punching despite the fact that this is an organicist society with an abundance of internal norm-enforcing social control. And after the fight a girl gives her body to him. 

Once one is willing to acknowledge that Anarres has more trouble than merely too much politics at the center, one sees that is very much a closed society of walls. This much Shevek himself diagnoses (with the help of his friends). But in so far as we are invited to reflect on the relentless forward looking ethic of Anarres, -- after he assaults Vea, Shevek wastes little time to engage in (a noble) political revolution -- we might well come to think that a society that is so incapable of registering harm done to each other may well be more rotten than just a certain amount of stasis in its cultural and social life. 

Again, this is manifested in troubled gender relations. Part of the political conflict that we are shown between Shevek and his friends with the more establishment critics, is also represented symbolically between his mother Rulag and his friend Bedap. And the reader can't help but wonder if the intensity of the conflict between mother and son isn't fueled by their mutual earlier personal rejection in accord with the anti-family norms of Anarres. The claims of family are treated as instance of property on Anarres, but this means that forms of what we might call natural sympathy are systematically suppressed or discouraged. 

And while one may well end up concluding that the anarchism of Anarres governed by true-Odonism in which a more robust openness to other perspectives may well be the best possible polity given the imperfections of human nature, Le Guin invites us to size up its true shortcomings carefully.+

Caliban and the Witch, Beauvoir, and The Great Transformations

My interest in this research was originally motivated by the debates that accompanied the development of the Feminist Movement in the United States concerning the roots of women's “oppression,” and the political strategies which the movement should adopt in the struggle for women's liberation. At the time, the leading theoretical and political perspectives from which the reality o f sexual discrimination was analyzed were those proposed by the two main branches of the women's movement: the Radical Feminists and the Socialist Feminists. In my view, however, neither provided a satisfactory explanation of the roots of the social and economic exploitation of women. I objected to the Radical Feminists because of their tendency to account for sexual discrimination and patriarchal rule on the basis of transhistorical cultural structures, presumably operating independently of relations of production and class. Socialist Feminists, by contrast, recognized that the history of women cannot be separated from the history of specific systems of exploitation and, in their analyses, gave priority to women as workers in capitalist society. But the limit of their position, in my understanding of it at the time, was that it hat it failed to acknowledge the sphere of reproduction as a source of value-creation and exploitation, and thus traced the roots of the power differential between women and men to women's exclusion from capitalist development — a stand which again compelled us to rely on cultural schemes to account for the survival of sexism within the universe of capitalist relations.--Silvia Federici (2004) Caliban and the Witch: Women, The Body and Primitive Accumulation, preface, pp. vii-viii (all my references are to the UK edition).

A few weeks ago, I noted (here; echoing diagnosis of MacKinnon) that De Beauvoir treatment of the origin of patriarchy suffers from circularity. She projects backwards the idea of man as inventive Homo Faber, especially of values, who is admired by the more rooted women who then become complicit in their own subordination because they enjoy and admire the activities of the more daring men. And while violence is not contingent here -- the military and hunting exploits of men are especially admired --, and violence toward women is not absent, women's subordination is, in part, sustained by their sharing in the fruits of Man's inventions and, as Marion Garcia has noted in her recent book, the non-trivial pleasures consequent subordination. But as an origin account, this whole approach presupposes, as MacKinnon notes, that patriarchy is already fully functioning (and so circular). 

One related problem with De Beauvoir's treatment is that the origin of patriarchy itself gets pushed back into mythic times and so ends up being omnipresent. A consequence of this is that real historical differences matter less than the omnipresence of patriarchy and that because there is no spatially and temporally bounded origin to their subordination, women also do not see themselves as distinct political group (a point noted by Garcia). It also means that the history of feminism itself is either a history of permanent failure, or something very new.

Last week (recall) I was rather critical of Federici's Caliban and the Witch. But it is important to recognize that Federici offers a much more compelling account of the origin of patriarchy than De Beauvoir does. While not denying that women's subordination to men is a historical reality in many times and places, Federici shows that modern feminism is reacting to a form of patriarchy that grew out of the late middle ages and that "peaked in the 19th century with the creation of the full-time housewife." (p. 78) By 'grew' I do not mean she thinks this was an organic or pacific development. She argues that it involved half a millennium of state (sanctioned) violence against women (and heretic), which was inaugurated by several centuries of persecution of purported witches (mostly female).

While, the account presents itself as Marxist (about which below more) and feminist in character, the underlying template for the overall argument is derived Nietzsche. In particular, Nietzsche's account of the use of torture and force for the development of a so-called slave morality (structured around good and evil) and especially of breeding an animal "with the right to make promises" familiar from The Genealogy of Morals. She actually cites and partially quotes the passage, but presents Nietzsche as claiming that "blood and torture were necessary to 'breed an animal' capable of regular, homogeneous, and uniform behavior, indelibly marked with the memory of the new rules."* On Federici's account torture then is a site where "knowledge about the body was gained" and obstacles to the transformation of the modern worker eliminated. (p. 155)* 

That is to say, Federici explicitly invites the reader to see several large scale social transformations as essentially linked: the violent imposition of patriarchal norms on women's bodies and lives that are still with 'us in so-called 'developed' nations; the violent rise of capitalism out of primitive accumulation; and the violent rise of a transatlantic, racialized slave economy. One crucial feature these three transformations have in common is the rise of a national state that manages an economy, class relations, and (due to its interest in population) laws and norms of reproduction  These three transformation all occur in the centuries after the Black Death in the fourteenth century through the (so-called) age of Enlightenment. I used 'developed' because Federici believes that the linked historical transformations are being repeated today in 'lesser-developed' countries subject to forced capitalist development under the tutelage of international (financial) institutions.  

In Federici's argument the persecution of purported witches, a veritable reign of terror over several centuries, is a key mechanism in subduing, primarily rural resistance to the rise of capitalism, and in shaping patriarchal norms on all women, including a major narrowing of women's participation in the waged economy. Some of the most interesting passages are about the ways in which men conspired to remove women as competitors from the workforce as physicians, brewers, and midwives, and the steady erosion of women's rights to enter into contracts or live alone, etc. Unlike De Beauvoir, who treats 'la querelle des femme' as a secondary phenomena primarily a debate among men about the relative merits of marriage to life in the clergy (The Second Sex, trans. Borde & Malovany-Chevallier, pp. 118-120), while Federici sees it in as a highly salient debate over and a source of knowledge about "a new sexual division of labor" (p. 114).

To be sure, Federici never mentions De Beauvoir in the whole of Caliban and The Witch. And as the extended quote from the preface suggests, Federici is engaging with the question about the origin of patriarchy in light of an American debate. I assume that by radical feminists she has in mind people like Firestone and Millet and by socialist feminists people like Eisenstein. While De Beauvoir has a tendency to efface past feminists, Federici has a tendency to efface her intellectual targets (not, of course, her political target which is clearly transnational Capital). However, that debate was prompted in no small part by De Beauvoir, so I hope that the compare and contrast element of this post is not seen as a non-sequitur.

Compared to De Beauvoir's account of the origin of patriarchy, Federici's approach has a lot of advantages. It can point to a where and how of the development of modern patriarchy, and explain many of its characteristic features. That is to say, it can explain what we may call the patriarchal template of modern gender relations. ("Gender" is not a word Federici uses a lot, except when explaining her large scale goals.) And it is not implausible that there are many interactions between tools of oppression in the inquisition into witches and the vicious exploitation developed in the context of transatlantic racialized slavery and plantations.

It is, I think, eminently plausible that a few centuries of state mediated terror against particular women left a mark on all women, especially because this terror went alongside great legal and political changes. Federici's account is not circular. It explains how the cause of (what we may call) women's equality was tied up in the historical and sometimes intersectional defeats of rural populations and pre-reformation heretical groups. And it is, incidentally, notable that in her account the broadly protestant heresies that succeed politically were also, simultaneously, defeats for the cause of women. 

Let me close with noting three limitations of Federici's approach. First, one problem with Federici's account -- and this is remarkably similar to a problematic feature in Karl Polanyi's account (he is curiously absent from her bibliography) -- is a kind of romanticism about the pre-capitalist village economy. To be sure, to note this is not to deny the violence that destroys the rural way of life. Liberals like myself (although I am more skeptical than most) agree with Marxists that the mercantile development of capitalism is a bloody and violent affair. Mercantilism is evil, and I agree with Federici (and against some Marxists and Liberals) that the rise of Capitalism and liberal society itself cannot justify these evils. There is no secular theodicy. 

However, Federici treats the rural or village economy as a "subsistence economy" in which "the unity of production and reproduction which has been typical of all societies based on production-for-use came to end, as these activities became the carriers of different social relations and were sexually differentiated. In the new monetary regime, only production-for-market was defined as a value-creating activity, whereas the reproduction of the worker began to be considered as valueless from an economic viewpoint and even ceased to be considered work." (78) Of course, Federici's focus on how this unity permits more equal gender relations and permits an enlarged space for women's agency goes well beyond Polanyi. 

So, while Federici explicitly recognizes that the rural economy is structured by feudal relations and conflict, she ignores (as I have noted before) that it is also -- not in the least due to the absence of circulating coin -- suffused with credit and debt relations. And so this very idea of an organic unity has to pretend away the many social mechanism, which promote their own hierarchies and are often infused with violence, of debt accounting and settlement.** To put this in more ironic terms: while Marxists tend to make fun of those liberals who mistakenly posit a peaceful or natural primitive accumulation (Federici follows the tradition in associating this view -- see p. 61, p. 136, and note 6 on pp. 278-9 -- with Adam Smith's account), Polanti and Federici have a tendency to treat European pre-capitalist relations as thinly disguised gardens of Eden (e.g, Federici's pre-capitalist communities have abundant community wide feasts (etc.).)

Second, throughout the post I have described Federici's position in terms of 'modern patriarchy.' Perhaps, it would be better to call it 'capitalist' or 'Mercantile patriarchy' I do this in the spirit of charity because she is not trying to explain all patriarchy. And she has useful things to say about societies that do not exhibit the modern control over women's bodies. But as MacKinnon noted about De Beauvoir, Federici's argument often presupposes the institution of patriarchy. For, the gendered pattern of defeats she describes presupposes patriarchy's ability to organize militarily, politically, and economically to common ends. 

Federici recognizes the point by admitting that in "pre-capitalist Europe women's subordination to men had been tempered by the fact that they had access to the commons and other communal assets, while in the new capitalist regime women themselves became the commons." Even on her account Capitalist patriarchy grew out of a (pre-Capitalist) tempered patriarchy. (It would have been strange for her to deny this since both Feudalism and the Church were patriarchal in character.) So, while Federici's account advances beyond De Beauvoir, it, too, presupposes the patriarchy in order to explain the victory of patriarchy. 

And, third, and finally, it is notable that the developments she describes coincide with the growing influence of representative and elective institutions first in important towns and guilds, and, eventually in the nation-states and within (protestant) Churches. These representative institutions are almost uniformly gendered (propertied) male. Federici misses this point because she is only interested in what she calls 'workers democracies' (pp. 46-49) that resisted these representative organs. And this point can explain a peculiarity that her account notes but cannot explain (although predicted by Olympes de Gouges in 1791): that modern patriarchy was further developed and ultimately perfected under conditions of mass male democracy.+

 

The Caliban and the Witch, Hobbes, Trevor-Roper, Bodin, and the age of Geniusses

But it the jurists the magistrates, and the demonologists, often embodied by the same person, who in, contributed to the persecution. They were the ones who systematized the argument answered the critics and perfected a legal machine that, by the end of the 16th century, a standardized, almost bureaucratic format to the trials, accounting for the similarities of the confessions across national boundaries. In their work, the men of the law could count on the cooperation of the most reputed intellectuals of the age, including philosophy and scientists who are still praised as the fathers of modern rationalism. Among them was the English political theorist Thomas Hobbes, who despite his skepticism concerning the reality of witchcraft, approved the persecution as a means of social control. A fierce enemy of witches — obsessive in his hatred for them and in his calls for bloodshed — Jean Bodin, the famous French lawyer and political theorist, whom historian Trevor Roper [sic] calls the Aristotle and Montesquieu of the 16th century. Bodin, who is credited with authoring the first treatise on inflation, participated in many trials, wrote a volume of 'proofs' (Demomania, 1580), in which he insisted that witches should be burned alive instead of being 'mercifully' strangled before being thrown to the flames, that they should be cauterized so that their flesh should rot before death, and that children too be burned.
Bodin was not an isolated case. In this "century of geniuses” — Bacon, Kepler, Galileo, Shakespeare, Pascal, Descartes — a century that saw the triumph of the Copernican Revolution, the birth of modern science, and the development of philosophical and scientific rationalism, witchcraft became one of the favorite subjects of debate for the European intellectual elites. Judges, lawyers, statesmen, philosophers, scientists, theologians all became preoccupied with the "problem," wrote pamphlets and demonologies, agreed that this was the most nefarious crime, and called for its punishment.10---Silvia Federici (2004 [2021]) Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation, pp. 180-181 [p. 168 in the 2004 US edition!]

I turned to Federici after my dissatisfaction (recall) with De Beauvoir's account of the origin of patriarchy, which I think of as a key (illustration of, and) to maintaining all kinds of social hierarchies. Caliban and the Witch is a riveting read and it connects (recall) with one of my other long-standing interests: the Marxist's tendency to impugn the evils of mercantilism to capitalism as such (see also this post on Meiksins Wood; and this one). And while I intend future posts to tease out my reservations about some of the particularly Marxist theses of Federici, I want to be very clear that one of her underlying theses, that is, that centuries of violent persecution of witchcraft created the conditions of modern patriarchy is eminently plausible even in light of what follows. 

But this post is connected to a more general unease about the book that grew out of my initial inability to figure out what the sources of some of her claims were (mostly for future reading on my part), and then noticing all kinds of minor mistakes in the bibliography and omissions in the index (see here for a blogpost that enumerates all kinds of mistakes  [HT Tim Christiaens]). But when she started to discuss material presumably more familiar to me (17th century natural philosophy and political theory), I was really amazed by some of her claims about figures I thought I had studied reasonably carefully in the past. And my first reaction was a kind of panic that my own blinders and prejudices, combined with intellectually inherited ideas of what is significant, had made me miss all kinds of salient, gendered issues (pertaining to witchcraft and persecution). But as I traced out some of Federici's footnotes, I have come to think that she could have benefitted from more careful refereeing and editing.* And while this post illustrates that claim, it is, however, also focused on a strain of argument that runs through the book, even though in some respects it is dispensable to some of her more important theses. 

Take the quoted passage above. Let me start with common ground. Bodin, who routinely gets credited, and now I quote the textbook I use in my own teaching, Alan Ryan's On Politics, for articulating "the modern concept of a sovereign state and theorize its unity in terms of the indivisible sovereignty" (235), was truly a jerk. I was unaware of Bodin's important role in the persecution of witchcraft. (It  goes unmentioned in Ryan's On Politics.) This is no trivial matter because it supports another of Federici's central claims (shortly after the quoted passage above) that the persecution of witchcraft was a key step in the development of modern state: "Thus, it is no exaggeration to claim that the witch-hunt was the first unifying terrain in the politics of the new European nation-states," (p. 182 [p. 169] emphasis in original). That Bodin was of central importance in creating the intellectual framework for (and personally advocating) reviving the persecution of witches is really an unavoidable conclusion from reading Trevor-Roper's fascinating long essay, "The European witch-craze of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries." (See, especially, p. 112)+ 

But the claim about Hobbes surprised me. And this is actually what first let me to read Trevor-Roper's essay, which I took to be the source for her claims in the passage quoted at the top of this post. For, the only note 10 is appended to material quoted from Trevor-Roper's essay. I will quote the note and Trevor-Roper's source material below. But first, Trevor-Roper never mentions Hobbes in the essay! (I double-checked with word-search.) So, he could not be the source of the claim that Hobbes approved the persecution of witches as a means of social control. This had me scratching my head. 

Now, as it happens, a few pages before Federici had claimed the following:

The incompatibility of magic with the capitalist work-discipline and the requirement of social control is one of the reasons why a campaign of terror was launched against it by the state — a terror applauded without reservations by many who are presently considered among the founders of scientific rationalism: Jean Bodin, Mersenne, the mechanical philosopher and member of the Royal Society Richard Boyle, and Newton’s teacher, Isaac Barrow.18 Even the materialist Hobbes, while keeping his distance, gave approval. “As for witches,” he wrote, “I think not that their witchcraft is any real power; but yet that they are justly punished, for the false belief they have that they can do such mischief, joined with their purpose to do it if they can” (Leviathan 1963: 67). He added that if these superstitions were eliminated, “men would be much more fitted than they are for civil obedience” (ibid.).--Caliban and the Witch, p. 154 (p. 143-144 in the American edition)

Now, as regular readers (with a long memory) know, I think the term 'witchcraft' is very important in Hobbes because he uses it to describe the dangers of ambition (Hobbes anticipates (recall) Spinoza Ethics 3, p29, Scholium) of successful demagogues or usurpers who succeed at rebellion. His key example is Julius Caesar. (See Leviathan, chapter 29 and also the final sentence of ch. 36.) By contrast, as is even clear from Federici's quotes (these are from chapter 2 of Leviathian), for Hobbes, the persecuted women taken to be witches are not really witches at all. It is important to recognize how significant this is. For, as Trevor-Roper shows, non of the skeptics and critics of witch-burning had denied the existence of witches or such powers they might possess. Even the greatest of them, Weyer (a student of Erasmus) had granted not just their possibility, but their existence (p. 135). And this meant that the battle was really over the adequacy of the means of establishing witchcraft, especially the use of torture. So, by denying their reality, or at least denying the reality of their power, Hobbes had finally helped create the conditions for the retreat from persecuting witches through juridical mechanisms (which have to involve at least possible facts). 

Now at this point one may claim that the preceding paragraph is irrelevant because Hobbes does claim that "they are justly punished, for the false belief they have that they can do such mischief, joined with their purpose to do it if they can.” (Leviathan, chapter 2.) And while this can be taken to deny the magic power of witches, it does seem to advocate the persecution of those who understand themselves as witches willing to do harm. It's important to recognize that this alone would dramatically reduce the number of witch-trials because even by Federici's lights few would self-ascribe as witch and whatever powers were claimed were usually deployed for healing and service purposes.   

In addition, and Federici never mentions this, Hobbes, who is not exactly known for his concern with civil liberties, is an opponent of the use of torture: "Also Accusations upon Torture, are not to be reputed as Testimonies. For Torture is to be used but as means of conjecture, and light, in the further examination, and search of truth; and what is in that case confessed, tendeth to the ease of him that is Tortured; not to the informing of the Torturers: and therefore ought not to have the credit of a sufficient Testimony: for whether he deliver himselfe by true, or false Accusation, he does it by the Right of preserving his own life." (Leviathan, chapter 14) The partial critique of torture undermines the very mechanism that's used in the vast majority of witch trials which rely on the torture-induced self-incriminating evidence of the accused. In context this is a clear repudiation of the way witches are tried. For, as Trevor-Roper notes most earlier public intellectual critics of the persecution of witches came to their criticism by their sense that torture was thoroughly unreliable (e.g., p. 138). 

And this puts the claim about "justly punished" in a new light. For Hobbes witches are unjustly punished, and this is what frequently happens, if their conviction relies primarily on their torture-induced confession and not on their (intended) actions. 

Okay, but what about the claim that Hobbes promotes the persecution of witchcraft to promote civil obedience? This sounds something like Hobbes might well believe. Here's the full sentence that Federici partially quotes: "If this superstitious fear of Spirits were taken away, and with it, Prognostiques from Dreams, false Prophecies, and many other things depending thereon, by which, crafty ambitious persons abuse the simple people, men would be much more fitted than they are for civill Obedience." (Leviathan, chapter 2.) So, Hobbes' target here is quite clearly the ambitious demagogue who plays on the fear of common people. These ambitious types are dangerous because they exploit (superstitious/fake news) folk opinion to their own ends. 

Now, as it happens this particular sentence is the closing sentence of the paragraph that Federici uses to suggest that Hobbes promotes the persecution of people who think they are witches. What we can now see is that Federici has completely misrepresented Hobbes' point. The real danger is not people who think they are witches and who wish to harm others, the real danger is ambitious political types who exploit such beliefs and the fears they arouse in others for their own ends. And while Hobbes certainly does not take the civil obedience of ordinary people for granted, he thinks the politically ambitious (soldiers, politicians, and clergy) are the real danger. So rather than promoting the prosecution of witchcraft, what he wants is the wide circulation of official views (in particular his own book) that undercut the very idea of the powers of witches. I would not call Hobbes an Enlightenment thinker, but one can see the seeds of it in him.

Okay, so much for Hobbes. Recall the quote above. In note 10 (which is the only source offered) Federici writes, "H. R . Trevor-Roper writes: “[The witch-hunt] was forwarded by the cultivated popes of the Renaissance, by the great Protestant Reformers, by the Saints of the Counter-Reformation, by the scholars, lawyers and churchmen.... If these two centuries were an age of light, we have to admit that in one respect at least the dark ages were more civilized....” (Trevor-Roper 1967: 91)." That's the whole note (p. 310 [p. 211 in the US edition]). This is a very odd note if it is supposed to support most the claims in the paragraph to which it was attached (quoted at the top of this post).

Here's the corresponding passage in Trevor-Roper:

[The craze] was forwarded by the cultivated popes of the Renaissance, by the great Protestant reformers, by the saints of the Counter-Reformation, by the scholars, lawyers and churchmen of the age of Scaliger and Lipsius, Bacon and Grotius, Bérulle and Pascal. If those two centuries were an age of light, we have to admit that, in one respect at least, the Dark Age was more civilized. (p. 84 in my edition)

What's immediately striking is that Trevor-Roper's list is mostly different from Federici's "century of geniuses.” More important, inclusion in his list is, in fact, not intended to be membership among the advocates of persecuting witchcraft! That's not clear from the passage itself, but it is clear from the larger essay in which Scaliger, Lipsius, Bérulle, and Pascal are never mentioned. He does mention Grotius and Bacon again in a footnote (n.49 primarily on Erasmus), in order to suggest that they avoid the topic and that they probably belonged among the witch skeptics (p. 119)!

In fact, and I'll close with this. Trevor-Roper thinks that the new seventeenth century philosophy (broadly conceived) was one of the main causes of the end of the intellectual obsession with witches:

When we do that, the explanation, I believe, becomes clear. Bacon, Grotius, Selden may have been reticent on witches. So, for that matter, was Descartes. Why should they court trouble on a secondary, peripheral issue? On the central issue they were not reticent, and it is in their central philosophy that we must see the battle that they were fighting: a battle which would cause the world of witches, ultimately, to wither away. (p. 167)

This can't be the whole story, because he recognizes (something Federici passes over entirely in silence) that "no witch was burnt in Holland after 1597 and witch trials ceased in 1610." (p. 158) Trevor-Roper thinks this is primarily due to lay control over the judiciary (and it fits with his larger theme that religious authorities are central to the hunt for witches). 1610 is also the first year of the twelve year armistice (1609-21) of the Dutch war of independence, and presumably peace helped calm things down somewhat. Both 1597/1610 precede the successful uptake of the new sciences by several decades. (1609 is the year of Galileo's The Starry Messenger and Kepler's Astronomia Nova.)

Even so, Trevor-Roper makes a plausible case that it is people influenced by the new science of Descartes, including Queen Christina, and also Thomasius, who shaped the seventeenth century attack on the persecution of witches. One would never get this from Federici, who implies otherwise throughout her argument.**

Finally, of the list "Bacon, Kepler, Galileo, Shakespeare, Pascal, Descartes," the one most intimately connected to witchcraft was probably Kepler. His mother was famously accused of witchcraft when he was at the peak of his fame. (The whole episode is ignored by Federici, but it problematizes a number of her claims.) Kepler defended her personally, and successfully!++