Digressions&Impressions

Why Does Socialism have no autonomous governmentality; Foucault, Duncan Kelly (and Wendy Brown), and a hypothesis

Viewing the contemporary problems of European socialism through ordoliberal lenses allowed him to suggest there is no "autonomous socialist governmentality." Socialism remains too statist, beholden to ideological dogma, and therefore too utopian to be effective as a contemporary strategy. Socialism in effect has become a model of the total state for Foucault, [not] unlike Nazism, in fact, and this makes its analysis of power problematic, because of "power is not a substance." Alongside revisionists accounts of modern socialism that has had been repurposed since the 1959 Bad Godesburg decisions of the SDP, Foucault thought that such revisionism was no sort of betrayal, but a necessary update providing an entry point into the liberal game of modern politics. Willy Brandt, too, offered a new kind of German realism about modern politics and modern liberalism, and the French left needed to learn from it.--Duncan Kelly (2019( Foucault on Phobie d’État and Neoliberalism." in Foucault, Neoliberalism, and Beyond, (edited by Stephen W." Sawyer and Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins), p. 117. [I inserted a 'not' above, but nothing that follows turns on it.--ES]

Kelly's essay on Foucault is very interesting because it clarifies the significance of Kant and Weber to Foucault's 1979 lectures published as Birth of Biopolitics. And I also agree with the claim that according to Foucault the SDP's stance at Bad Godesburg -- which (in the tradition of Bernstein) basically rejected revolution and accepted the ordoliberal social market economy as legitimate (this involved planning for the market, but no more than necessary) -- was no "betrayal." So, Foucault here, as elsewhere in the Birth of Biopolitics, rejects a Marxist historiography and lens. So what follows is a relatively minor disagreement with Professor Kelly.*

I am not convinced, however, that the explanation for Foucault's claim that there is "no autonomous socialist governmentality" is that it is "too statist," as Kelly suggests. To be sure, one may well think this is plausible because one may assume that the term/concept 'governmentality' is introduced in order to distinguish it from a kind of direct exercise of power by way of command and control; and rather to describe government practice, as Wendy Brown argues, as the "power of conducting and compelling populations "at a distance."" (Undoing the Demos, p. 117; recall also this post). If Brown is right then 'governmentality' anticipates what has come to be known as 'governance.' (Since she is primarily interested in 'governance' my disagreement with her is irrelevant to her argument.)

I don't think Brown is correct here. For Foucault also applies 'governmentality' to police states (which have their own kind of governmentality); that is -- and this is central to my disagreement with Kelly -- on Foucault's account statist doctrines do have their own governmentality. Now, to be sure, Foucault means quite a few things when he uses 'governmentality' and sometimes these do involve a process of compulsion at a distance. But these are just one way governmentality is exercised. In 1978 he stipulated that one of his uses of 'governmentality' meant "The ensemble formed by the institutions, procedures, analyses and reflections, the calculations and tactics that allow the exercise of this very specific albeit complex form of power, which has as its target: population, as its principal form of knowledge: political economy, and as its essential technical means: apparatuses of security."** There is no mention of 'distance' here. And this, for good reason because the security state is rather invasive.

Let's look at the passage that Kelly quotes:

In any case, socialism offers an economic rationality just as it puts forward an historical rationality. We can also say that it possesses, and has shown that it possesses, rational techniques of intervention, of administrative intervention, in domains like those of health, social insurance, and so on. So, it is possible to recognize the existence of an historical rationality, an economic rationality, and an administrative rationality in socialism, or, at any rate, let’s say that we can argue about the existence of these rationalities in socialism and we cannot eliminate all these forms of rationality with a wave of the hand. But I do not think that there is an autonomous socialist governmentality. There is no governmental rationality of socialism. In actual fact, and history has shown this, socialism can only be implemented connected up to diverse types of governmentality. It has been connected up to liberal governmentality, and then socialism and its forms of rationality function as counterweights, as a corrective, and a palliative to internal dangers. One can, moreover, [reproach it, as do liberals],* with being itself a danger, but it has lived, it has actually functioned, and we have examples of it within and connected up to liberal governmentalities. We have seen it function, and still see it function, within governmentalities that would no doubt fall more under what last year we called the police state, that is to say, a hyper-administrative state in which there is, so to speak, a fusion, a continuity, the constitution of a sort of massive bloc between governmentality and administration. At that point, in the governmentality of a police state, socialism functions as the internal logic of an administrative apparatus. Maybe there are still other governmentalities that socialism is connected up to; it remains to be seen. But in any case, I do not think that for the moment there is an autonomous governmentality of socialism. Foucault-Birth of Biopolitics, Lecture four, 31 January 1979, p. 92 [See also the material from the same lecture I quoted here a few years ago]

I think this passage is really incompatible with the idea that socialism lacks a governmentality in virtue of its statist orientation. If anything, Foucault's claim isn't just that (i) socialism lacks a governmentality of its own, but also (ii) that when socialism is in power it relies on governmentalities it borrows from others (including rather statist orientations), and (iii) socialism does have a administrative rationality. To put the point sharply, for Foucault the Leninist-Stalinist art of government is de facto a police state while relying on bureaucracy (which can follow socialist principles [as Lenin himself suggested]).

Now, there is no doubt -- and the secondary literature is in broad agreement over this -- that Foucault is rather polemical against Marxism in these lectures. (And remember he had first hand experience not just with the French communist party, but with really existing communism in Poland and social democracy in Sweden.) The real scholarly disagreement involves to what degree Foucault was searching for a a non-socialist 'left' governmentality or to what degree he kind of endorsed a neoliberal governmentality in 1979. I will take no position on this disagreement.

If Kelly is incorrect, as I have argued, why then would Foucault claim that socialism lacks its own autonomous art or practice of government? I have a speculative suggestion. True socialism in the Engels-Leninist tradition involves the abolition of the state. And when it arrives, there is no need for a governmentality at all. Governmentality is only required in the transitionary phases (involving the dictatorship of the proletariat or, say, the party's leadership, etc.) when the state is supposed to be made to wither away. But in the transition phase ruling and governing cannot really be done on socialist principles. This is why during the transition it borrows from other intellectual traditions and practices (and so the lack of autonomous governmentality). I can't prove this is what Foucault has in mind, but I think it makes good sense of his position. For, as he goes on to say, "In short, whether or not there is a theory of the state in Marx is for Marxists to decide. As for myself, I would say that what socialism lacks is not so much a theory of the state as a governmental reason, the definition of what a governmental rationality would be in socialism, that is to say, a reasonable and calculable measure of the extent, modes, and objectives of governmental action."

 

Milton Friedman (Schumpeter, Foucault, Dicey, and Hayek) on the Possibility of a Free Society

THERE IS A STRONG TENDENCY for all of us to regard what is as if it were the “natural” or “normal” state of affairs, to lack perspective because of the tyranny of the status quo. It is, therefore, well, from time to time, to make a deliberate effort to look at things in a broader context. In such a context anything approaching a free society is an exceedingly rare event. Only during short intervals in man’s recorded history has there been anything approaching what we would call a free society in existence over any appreciable part of the globe. And even during such intervals, as at the moment, the greater part of mankind has lived under regimes that could by no stretch of the imagination be called free.

This casual empirical observation raises the question whether a free society may not be a system in unstable equilibrium. If one were to take a purely historical point of view, one would have to say that the “normal,” in the sense of average, state of mankind is a state of tyranny and despotism. Perhaps this is the equilibrium state of society that tends to arise in the relation of man to his fellows. Perhaps highly special circumstances must exist to render a free society possible. And perhaps these special circumstances, the existence of which account for the rare episodes of freedom, are themselves by their nature transitory, so that the kind of society we all of us believe in is highly unlikely to be maintained, even if once attained.--Milton Friedman (1962) "Is a Free Society Stable?" New Individualist Review.

In yesterday's post, I said something about the intellectual significance of New Individualist Review to the political development of what came to be known as 'fusionism' Stateside and its Hayekian context (and so the mainstreaming of neoliberal ideas, 'neoliberal' in its historical sense, that is). I also suggested that Friedman's essay (I quoted the first two paragraphs above) should be understood in context of the surprisingly critical reception of the Road to Serfdom thesis in this context. (Friedman's friend and colleague, Stigler, savages it.)

I wish I had read Friedman's essay before I blogged on Graeber and Wengrow's recent Dawn of Everything because one way to understand the significance of their book is that it challenges the idea that a genuinely free society is rare. Now, obviously Friedman and Graeber/Wengrow don't mean the exact same thing with a 'free society.' While Friedman is a right or 'individualist' libertarian he is clearly not an anarchist, so it's not the case that Graeber/Wengrow refute Friedman's claim here. (And it's pretty clear that Graeber & Wengrow would not accept Friedman's claim that we're living in a free society.) But since Graeber/Wengrow and Friedman agree that legally sanctioned coercion is itself generally problematic (in ways that mainstream liberals often think not, alas), my suggestion is not altogether farfetched. Because it's pretty clear that the many urban polities that Graeber and Wengrow admire are open to commerce while rejecting state organized/sanctioned/rent-seeking (etc.) capitalism (which is what draws Friedman's ire, too).

So, one way to react to Friedman's set-up of his argument is that he is (tacitly) working with a biased sample or a historically limited data-set (something Friedman may well appreciate given his kind of research in monetary history) because, and this is the interesting part, he is drawing on a literature (shared by Marxists and certain classical liberals alike) that presupposes something like an idea of progress (that has already occurred) and that is distinctly Eurocentric/Western. This can be checked because Friedman's main source is Lectures on Law and Public Opinion in the Nineteenth Century (1905) by A. V. Dicey. Dicey clearly impressed Friedman because he also frames Friedman's argument in his important earlier (1952) essay "Neo-Liberalism and its Prospects” that I have discussed here.

What makes Friedman's "Is a Free Society Stable?" interesting are  two important observations. First, and this one (I am pretty sure) he has repeated elsewhere but here clearly credits Dicey with noticing, is that the consequentialist arguments that tend to support classical liberalism all violate what we might call 'naïve empiricism' or 'lived experience' because they require a kind of statistical or aggregate perspective:

The argument for a free society, he goes on to say, is a very subtle and sophisticated argument. At every point, it depends on the indirect rather than the direct effect of the policy followed. If one is concerned to remedy clear evils in a society, as everyone is, the natural reaction is to say, “let’s do something about it,” and the “us” in this statement will in a large number of cases be translated into the “government,” so the natural reaction is to pass a law. The argument that maybe the attempt to correct this particular evil by extending the hand of the government will have indirect effects whose aggregate consequences may be far worse than any direct benefits that flow from the action taken is, after all, a rather sophisticated argument. And yet, this is the kind of argument that underlies a belief in a free or laisser-faire society.

So, that also means (and this is Dicey's initial observation) that arguments for a free society have a kind of utopian quality ahead of their existence. And even while such societies exist, given the abstracted/philosophical nature of the argument it is "says Dicey...really amazing and surprising...that for so long a period as a few decades, sufficiently widespread public opinion developed in Britain in favor of the general principle of non-intervention and laisser-faire as to overcome the natural tendency to pass a law for the particular cases." (The natural tendency is, thus, rooted in what I called the naïve empiricist assumption which is attributed to ordinary life.) Obviously, as an aside, Marxists would take Dicey's argument, if they cared to take it seriously, and suggest that it is violence (and then ideology) that has to do the job to get people to accept a free society.

I don't mean to suggest such utopianism is required. For, as Friedman notes there is another route that is at least partially ground in experience:

one of the factors that led Bentham and the Utilitarians toward laisser-faire, and this is a view that is also expressed by Dicey, was the self-evident truth that if you wanted to get evils corrected, you could not expect to do so through the government of the time. The government was corrupt and inefficient. It was clearly oppressive. It was something that had to be gotten out of the way as a first step to reform. The fundamental philosophy of the Utilitarians, or any philosophy that puts its emphasis on some kind of a sum of utilities, however loose may be the expression, does not lead to laisser-faire in principle. It leads to whatever kind of organization of economic activity is thought to produce results which are regarded as good in the sense of adding to the sum total of utilities. I think the major reason why the Utilitarians tended to be in favor of laisser-faire was the obvious fact that government was incompetent to perform any of the tasks they wanted to see performed.

So, you might say that on Friedman's view Bentham and the radicals that followed backed themselves into laisser-faire as a kind of second best (or n-th) best option. What's undoubtedly correct here is that there is no intrinsic connection between free society and Utilitarianism. But Friedman ignores how important Adam Smith (and Hume) is to Bentham's intellectual development and the more important political radicals.

The second really interesting observation by Friedman is set up by him noting that "Dicey’s argument is enormously strengthened by an asymmetry between a shift toward individualism and a shift away from it." (For all his admiration, Friedman doesn't mince words about a kind of Victorian complacency in Dicey.) By contrast, in virtue of accepting the rarity of a free society (and a kind of explanatory parsimony), Friedman treats the mechanisms one might posit in a road to serfdom thesis as symmetrical (even potentially identical) with those that lead to a free society. Friedman is motivated to do so, also, by his reflection on Schumpeter's acceptance of the Marxist idea that capitalism is doomed to failure (but with this twist that "[W]hereas Marx’s view was that capitalism would destroy itself by its failure, Schumpeter’s view was that capitalism would destroy itself by its success."). 

As an aside, if you accept my claim that Hayek is Friedman's real target in his 1962 article (which I claim is plausible on contextual grounds), what's neat about this is that he inscribes the road to serfdom thesis in a larger debate, inspired by Marxism, about the historical necessity of capitalism, and its subsequent demise. And in Friedman (recall here and here) not unlike Foucault in Lecture 7, The Birth of Biopolitics, 21 February 1979. Birth of Biopolitics, Schumpeter is crucial for linking the debates about monopoly capitalism and the road to serfdom thesis. (And unlike Foucault, Friedman, in turn, treats Schumpeter as a variation on Veblen and Burnham as a variation on Schumpeter--it is really a virtuoso performance by Friedman.) Some other time I will address Friedman's criticism of Schumpeter's thesis.

The mechanism, which has some unacknowledged roots in Marx's analysis, is as follows:

the development of laisser-faire laid the groundwork for a widespread respect for the law, on the one hand, and a relatively incorrupt, honest, and efficient civil service on the other, both of which are essential preconditions for the operation of a collectivist society. In order for a collectivist society to operate, the people must obey the laws and there must be a civil service that can and will carry out the laws. The success of capitalism established these preconditions for a movement in the direction of much greater state intervention.

But then Friedman adds:

The process I have described obviously runs both ways. A movement in the direction of a collectivist society involves increased governmental intervention into the daily lives of people and the conversion into crimes of actions that are regarded by the ordinary person as entirely proper. These tend in turn to undermine respect for the law and to give incentives to corrupt state officials....the erosion of the capital stock of willingness to obey the law reduces the capacity of a society to run a centralized state, to move away from freedom. This effect on law obedience is thus one that is reversible and runs in both directions. It is another major factor that needs to be taken into account in judging the likely stability of a free system in the long run.

And this argument is directed against both Marxist necessity and the road the serfdom. Because countervailing forces are naturally developed as one goes down the road to serfdom: "Once government embarks on intervention into and regulation of private activities, this establishes an incentive for large numbers of individuals to use their ingenuity to find ways to get around the government regulations." (And this, in turn, starts to swallow up time of the more earnest government officials, etc.) Friedman recognizes his claims are speculative (much more historical work is needed), but a reader of Friedman comes away thinking that free societies are rarely stable, if one means by that, in equilibrium; that is, they are always in some kind of crisis (again this anticipates Foucault's idea that liberalism is co-constituted with crisis); but these crises of a free society have, on the whole also a self-correcting quality over the medium term.

It's easy to mock Friedman's position as I have reconstructed it as a kind of providential optimism. But perhaps such providentialism is required within political life; the great danger of it is that encourages complacency about the possibility of a crisis that fatally undermines a free society.

 

 

The Culture Wars, the Contradictions of our Age, and the Liberalism of Reparations.

Once upon a time the United States of America was a de jure racist society. As was much of the world beyond its borders, controlled as it was by racist European empires. There was a broadly understood and explicitly codified and enforced racial organisation of who could live where, of how individuals could interact, of what sort of jobs were appropriate for whom, of how law and order would operate — or wouldn’t (Wells-Barnett 1895). The science (Morris 2015), sport (Rogosin 2007), and artistic culture of the day (Cooper 1892), were largely carried out in conformity with, if not support of, racist norms. Gross or subtle as it may have been in any given instance, the colour line ran through everything and one crossed it only at great personal peril (Du Bois 1904, 530).

But mountains crumble and rivers disappear, new roads replace the old, stones are buried and vanish in the earth. Time passes and the world changes. So it was that eventually this de jure racist system went the way of all things. The civil war overthrew the slave regime. Racial immigration laws were repealed. The civil rights act made various sorts of explicitly racist laws and practices impermissible. By the latter half of the 20th century it was clear an officially endorsed de jure racial caste system was no longer to hold sway in American life. Likewise abroad the great European empires fell, and in their place sprang up a plethora of nations governed by formerly colonised peoples. All things considered, the 20th century saw de jure racism suffer a world-historic defeat...

Whatever else changed, the people who have the stuff still tend to be white, and blacks must still sell our labour to them if we are to get by.

In this way American domestic politics mirrored the broader global trends of a post imperial world (Táíwò 2022a, ch.2). The European empires despoiled and depopulated nations (Davis 2002, Marschal 2017). What they left in their wake were often under-developed economies (Rodney 1972) and institutional structures ripe to be taken over by local elites who could simply continue the pattern of authoritarian wealth extraction (Fanon 1961, ch.3; Acemoglu & Robinson 2012). But the end of formal colonisation did not generally lead to reparations. For the most part agents based in the former colonial metropoles retained ownership of key resources and even infrastructure (Nkrumah 1965), and if anything inefficiencies in the credit market have led to a net capital flow from the former colonies to the former colonisers (Picketty 2015, 58). Neither domestically nor internationally did a change in cultural attitudes and legal permissions correlate with a change in racial patterns of ownership. As such, many of the material patterns of inequality from the bad old days of de jure racist regimes have survived the demise of their former ideological superstructure.

Returning to the US, these persistent material inequalities have consequences for occupational inequality....

And the political intelligentsia are still largely white, which has arguably affected the content and focus of their work (Mills 2017). This then is where history has placed us. The maddening ambiguity of our position is what leads to the titular white psychodrama. One cannot reconcile oneself to this society because it constantly pulls in two directions - it presents one with an ideological narrative that speaks of equality, and a material structure that witnesses rank inequality. At some level this society just does not make sense to itself, its own ideology out of whack with the plain facts of its own existence. There are those who are tempted to focus only on the positives, and see in this a story of triumphant progress towards racial justice or a post-racial future. And there are those who are inclined to see in it a story of eternal recurrence, racism ever reinventing itself. But both of these perspectives are too tidy to capture the phenomenon. For this story is of a world and a nation in contradiction with itself.

...How then do people respond to the facts relayed in this historical narrative, and what does it mean for their ability to reconcile themselves to their own social order?--Liam Kofi Bright (2022, forthcoming) "White Psychodrama" Journal of Political Philosophy. [Emphasis added]

Kofi Bright introduces his paper (with nods to Hegel and Rawls) with a methodological aspiration: "One might hope that [i] philosophy could reconcile ourselves to our social world and [ii] each other. To entertain this as plausible is to think [iii] there is some perspective one could reach via philosophical inquiry that [iv] shows our life and society to be as they are for good reason, [v] allowed us to see it all as in some sense rational." (Numbers added to facilitate discussion.) And while I have a growing self-awareness that many of these digressions are modest impressions on or an occasional, recalcitrant modest 'yes but' to Liam Kofi Bright's evolving oeuvre, I have never thought of philosophy as a means to [i-v]. Maybe I am too angry or vain to become identical with such a thought, but neither 'reconciliation' nor 'rationality' ever become applied to my conceptualization(s) of our lives and society. And this, alongside my close vicinity to (if not outright membership in) the "political intelligentsia," makes me suspect with growing dread that I may well be (one of the minor cogs that is) the subject matter of "White Psychodrama."

The methodological aspiration that introduces the paper is partially echoed in the question that closes the block quote at the top of this post (which is the culmination of a section titled, "A Narrative Of How We Got Here.") But there philosophy and 'us' are absent. So, lurking in Liam Kofi Bright's paper is a soft opposition, perhaps it's just a matter of degree, between the orientation characteristic of philosophy and that of the political intelligentsia. Both are thought to reconcile themselves to the world, but only in philosophy can we come to understand the world as rational. That is to say, lurking in Liam Kofi Bright's analysis is a traditional (familiar from Plato, Al-Farabi, Smith, Madison, Arendt, etc.) distinction between the opinions (or ideology) of the political intelligentsia and the episteme (or theodicy rationalizations) of the philosophers.

I don't mean to suggest that Liam Kofi Bright engages in the fallacy of the overlooked alternatives. He recognizes "there may not be such a perspective. Perhaps to see the world aright is to recognise it as a jumbled mess, with no progressive tendency towards greater coherence, and no satisfaction to be had in achieving superior insight. Perhaps there is no good end we are collaboratively working towards, no possible reconciliation with each other; maybe we are perpetually on the brink of descending once more into a Hobbesian nightmare." But what's important about this explicit recognition is that it suggests we're in a high stakes context: the inability to even conceptualise reconciliation is to be some way down a slippery slope toward murderous anarchy. Despite the British spelling, there is no option of mere muddling through (or exiting to a desert island) in his set up. Given that the explicit background is slavery, empire, and genocide, this may be fair enough.

Of course, the way the methodological aspiration is formulated might suggest a quietist attitude. But that would be misleading, Liam Kofi Bright also emphatically claims, "We ought then make the social world worthy of reconciliation." Let's call this the 'revolutionary impulse' in his argument. And, perhaps, my alertness to this impulse is my occasion to highlight the claim that the world and nation is in contradiction with itself. In material dialectics such a diagnosis of self-contradiction is, of course, the funnel toward certain kind of revolutionary action. As he puts it (echoing MLKjr's comments to Harry Belafonte, but unusually in a paper dense with references without citation,) "We cannot and ought not reconcile ourselves to a society wrapped up in its own contradictions, no more than we should seek to integrate into a burning house."

Now at this point one may well suspect that one is listening in on a conversation that may not include everyone as agents in the earlier 'we'. I don't think that's right, but it is worth quoting the full passage to see how easy one can misread the essay:

Here I am interested in how our peculiar socio-economic conditions shape the contours and possible points of resolution in the cultural debate around issues of race. It shall be seen that characteristic responses to our social order, which I shall describe through stylised character archetypes, make it impossible for any lasting reconciliation to be had for participants in the culture war. Instead our responses both generate and constitute a kind of racialised psychopathology, that I describe as white psychodrama. Given this analysis of the social order and its sources of psychic incoherence, I will suggest a way forward. My hope is that this will at least help people of colour caught in the midst of this work towards a world we can live in, and by seeing ourselves as so working reconcile ourselves to our actual present social activities. We cannot and ought not reconcile ourselves to a society wrapped up in its own contradictions, no more than we should seek to integrate into a burning house. But we can come to see ourselves as knowingly and self-consciously working to resolve those contradictions, quenching that fire, and laying the foundations for a better structure that we may all live comfortably therein.

One may well think that the intended audience of 'we' here, is "people of colour" or "the PoC intelligentsia." And, if one reads hastily, one may well wonder if all of this isn't just a call to burn it all down.

But I don't think it's the only audience or that the content of revolution here is destructive. After all, Kofi Bright is not advocating letting the fire consume the house, rather he is explicit in calling for the fire to be quenched. And that quenching and rebuilding is only possible, if I understand him correctly, after reparations.* 

Now, at this point -- knowing my bourgeois, liberal proclivities -- you may suspect I will denounce the revolutionary ardor of Kofi Bright. But I don't view reparations or compensation for injustices suffered as a illiberal, a category error, or a radical step too far. After all, (recall) the Federal Republic of Germany, then governed by (relatively conservative) Ordo-liberals explicitly recognized the ideal of reoperations as the start of a proper response to the genocidal atrocities of Nazism and to make living in a common home, however imperfectly, possible. From the liberal perspective, reparations are the ground zero for massive historical injustices in order to make non-zero-sum interactions available to all of us.+ 

As an aside, Rawlsianism and (even more) utilitarianism have a tendency to privilege forward-looking theorizing and to encourage a kind of forgetting of the past. (This is a feature not a bug in much liberal philosophy.) And this leads them to the familiar sophisms that block reparations in their analyses;  that the status quo provides the solid foundations for the future.

So, clearly there is a possible task for the white political intelligentsia lurking in Kofi Bright's analysis and rhetoric: that is, it is to reject the Repenter stance (who leaves structures alone and only focuses on individual racial improvements) as much as the Represser stance (who would like racial bygones to be bygones). Now, from a Marxist perspective this is an invitation to be a race traitor. (There is no doubt that successful revolutions require them.) And one may well suspect that there are many incentives that despite the effectiveness of Liam Kofi Bright's rhetoric prevent the move from Repenter/Represser to pro-reparations (and "to realise racially egalitarian group ideals.")

But to make integration in the same house possible is, as Lea Klarenbeek (building on Haslanger's ideas) has shown, a two-way process. This process is, thus, much easier when the pie that is to be divided is being enlarged (and so liberalism and markets get a toe-hold back in). How to do so without worsening the climate crisis is a real challenge technologically, economically, and politically. But the task of the bourgeois intelligentsia is not to be a source of diversion, but to articulate the real social problems and to amplify the solutions that experts and social movements devise which will strengthen the survival of democratic self-government and rule of law.

So, while I agree that my kind is primarily engaged in "a conflict over how to psychologically manage the results of living in a materially deeply unequal society," I view reparations as the right thing to do and a sine qua non reformist move to make such stress much better manageable. Material and political inequalities are, I suspect, part of the human condition, but partially repairing the past as a means to more solid foundations is in our power, even now. And if advocating reparations is treated as Repenter-on-steroids-syndrome, I accept the moniker. 

 

Hayek on Mannheim: Or how One Road to Serfdom Thesis is Used to Block Another Road to Serfdom Thesis

Last week (recall) I noted the significance to Foucault's Weberian reading of Hayek that in The Road to Serfdom (1944) Mannheim's historicist interpretation of the law is one of the official targets of Hayek (especially in chapter “Planning and the Rule of Law”). In the passage from Mannheim's Man and Society (1940) that Hayek cites (without page-number), Mannheim himself calls attention to Weber (and his differences with Weber).* In his (1960) The Constitution of Liberty, Hayek drops the Mannheim reference and near the end of chapter 10 criticizes Weber's (indeed slightly different) historicist interpretation of the law (recall here). In both cases, he offers detailed responses to the historicist. That's not the end of the matter because in Volume II of Law, Legislation and Liberty (1976: p. 86), Hayek then uses the very same Mannheim quote, albeit shortened, as he had used in The Road to Serfdom (but now with page-number reference--see note 33!)

As it happens, Mannheim goes unmentioned in the The Constitution of Liberty. This is quite a difference from The Road to Serfdom, where Mannheim -- and his Man and Society in the Age of Reconstruction in particular, which Hayek calls "a widely acclaimed book" (p. 21) --is really one of Hayek's main negative exemplars.+ Mannheim is presented as holding the "extreme position" which defends "planning for freedom." This position entails, on Hayek's reconstruction, the "collective and "conscious" direction of all social forces to deliberately chosen goals." And Hayek alerts the reader that "we shall have to comment [on it] yet more than once." (p. 21) And on the same page, Hayek lists Mannheim among the German thinkers who have helped perfect "socialism" in the more radical and less radical forms (p. 21-22).

Unsurprisingly, then, later in The Road to Serfdom, Hayek treats Mannheim not just as a defender of legal historicism, but also as somebody who holds that collective planning is compatible with parliamentary control (and so democracy) over the planning process (p. 72). And, in fact, while Hayek doesn't mention this, on the very page he quotes from Man and Society, Mannheim also asserts that by reshaping the separation of powers along "functional lines" these can be "more easily applied to a planned society than to a liberal democratic one." (Man and Society, p. 340) And while Mannheim seems to grant that in a planned society sovereignty may take the form of a dictatorship, he denies that it is "necessary." Interestingly enough, Hayek, in response, does not assert the necessity, but only claims explicitly that such a system "tends toward the plebiscitarian democracy." (p. 72) So, here Hayek and Mannheim actually agree formally about the facts, but we might say have a different risk tolerance.

Finally, in the chapter ("the end of truth"), Hayek returns a final time to Mannheim (in The Road to Serfdom). In order to note that the old meaning of 'liberty' has been destroyed and discarded for a new idea of 'freedom.' (The Road to Serfdom, p. 162) Hayek treats Mannheim's ideas about "collective freedom" as entirely "misleading." (And even compares Mannheim here explicitly to "totalitarian politicians.") For Hayek, such collective freedom merely involves "the unlimited freedom of the planner to do with society what he pleases." (162) I return to this below.

It is worth noting that Mannheim's historicism, leads him to distinguish among three uses of 'freedom' and so three kinds of liberty depending on the three social/historical stage. More important from the perspective of Hayek's criticism, Mannheim explicitly recognizes the worry that under planning there is no restriction on the "powers of the planner." (Man in Society, 378) And so his response to the worry that Hayek presses later is that the "existence of essential forms of freedom" have to be secured by the plan itself. (378) He sometimes also calls for the "creation of free zones within the planned structure." (379) For Mannheim, "the advent of planned freedom [in the third stage] does not mean that all earlier forms of freedom must be abolished." (379) And, in fact, for Mannheim this means that independence of intermediary institutions such as "hospitals, schools, and universities" is preserved. (380) As we have seen, Hayek finds this idea to preserve Burkean platoons under planning impossible to take seriously as a genuine possibility under planning.

Anyway, the disappearance of Mannheim in The Constitution of Liberty after being so important to the rhetoric and argument of the Road to Serfdom was striking to me. I also thought it odd that Hayek only focuses on Man and Society, and the not more famous Ideology and Utopia. This got me curious about Hayek's wider engagement with Mannheim.

And, in fact, in earlier work published as the (1952) Counter-Revolution of Science, but mostly dating to the early 1940s, Hayek had engaged with the idea that consistently pursued historicism leads to a sophisticated sociology of knowledge (p. 76). But Hayek doesn't name anyone in particular. In his edition, Studies on the Abuse and Decline of Reason, Bruce Caldwell plausibly suggests Hayek has Mannheim's Ideology and Utopia in mind here (p. 139 n). 

In another essay, ""Conscious" Direction and the Growth of Reason," in The Counter-Revolution of Science, Hayek explicitly quotes again from Man and Society (p. 213) in order to illustrate the tendency in modern  thought (he also cites Hobhouse and Needham) for "the growth of the human mind itself" under conscious control (p. 88). And he quotes Mannheim as follows: "man's thought has become more spontaneous and absolute than it ever was, since it now perceives the possibility of determining itself." ** So, this echoes (or historically anticipates) the treatment of Mannheim on p. 21 in The Road to Serfdom quoted/discussed above.

Finally, in his chapter, "Engineers as planners" The Counter-Revolution of Science, Hayek writes that "in recent years this desire to apply engineering technique to the solution of social problems has become very explicit." (p. 94) And in the accompanying footnote he cites Mannheim's Man and Society, pp. 240-4 at length:

"functionalism made its first appearance in the field of the natural sciences, and could be described as the technical point of view. It has only recently been transferred to the social sphere... Once this technical approach was transferred from natural sciences to human affairs, it was bound to bring about a profound change in man himself. . . The functional approach no longer regards ideas and moral standards as absolute values, but as products of the social process which can, if necessary, be changed by scientific guidance combined with political practice. . . The extension of the doctrine of technical supremacy which I have advocated in this book is in my opinion inevitable . . . Progress in the technique of organization is nothing but the application of technical conceptions to the forms of co-operation. A human being, regarded as part of the social machine, is to a certain extent stabilized in his reactions by training and education, and all his recently acquired activities are co-ordinated according to a definite principle of efficiency within an organized framework."

This passage is not quoted in The Road to Serfdom. But it is definitely alluded to in Hayek's claim that in a system of collective planning, "The only tastes which are satisfied are the taste for power as such, the pleasure of being obeyed and of being part of a well-functioning and immensely powerful machine to which everything else must give way." (Hayek (1944 [2001]), p. 155) And Hayek's position here relies on the idea (already quoted above) that under collective planning there only freedom that exists is "the unlimited freedom of the planner to do with society what he pleases." (162) And Hayek clearly means to imply that Mannheim's identification with the social planner makes him unreliable on the possible experiences of those whose lives are planned.

So, what Hayek's explicit response to Mannheim in "Engineers as planners" The Counter-Revolution of Science helps explain is that even when Mannheim is not mentioned in The Road to Serfdom, he is still polemically engaged with Mannheim as the exemplary intellectual who advocates planning. I would not be surprised if a close reading of Man and Society in light of The Road to Serfdom would find more polemical points of contact between Hayek and Mannheim.

The reason I think that is because if we look at what Hayek cites from Man and Society (pp. 240-244) in "Engineers as planners," we can discern that at a key moment, Mannheim embraces a species of historical determinism: "The extension of the doctrine of technical supremacy which I have advocated in this book is in my opinion inevitable." (this is from p. 243 in Man and Society.) And in context, Mannheim makes clear that while his "dynamics of history" is indebted to Marx, it's also distinct. And the reason it's distinct, according to Mannheim, is that for Mannheim modern weapons technology alters the nature of warfare and the class system by producing a kind of mind that is neither bourgeois nor proletariat. (This kind of anticipates Burnham by the way.) And this new kind new kind of mind with access to weapons that can shape the economy, will make an entirely different dictatorship (than the dictatorship of the proletariat) possible.  (p. 243) 

And, in fact, if I understand him correctly, it is in order to prevent this new kind of dictatorship that, according to Mannheim, collective planning for freedom is required!++ So, in order to avoid a road to serfdom in which as a consequence of modern technology and social techniques of control (see especially p. 260 of Man and Society), military dictatorships that are immune to revolution -- a view more common in the era -- become entrenched that collective planning is required (pp. 260-261). That is to say, while the idea of a road to serfdom anticipates Hayek's account (we have seen it in Hobhouse, Mises, Belloc, and it has been attributed by Knight to Lippmann), Hayek's road to serfdom is -- inter alia -- a rather explicit response to Mannheim's own road to serfdom thesis.

Schumpeter, Marxism, True Liberalism, and Imperialism (with a hint of Foucault)

At first sight, the [neo-Marxist] theory [of imperialism] seems to fit some cases tolerably well. The most important instances are afforded by the English and Dutch conquests in the tropics. But other cases, such as the colonization of New England, it does not fit at all. And even the former type of case is not satisfactorily described by the Marxian theory of imperialism. It would obviously not suffice to recognize that the lure of gain played a role in motivating colonial expansion. The Neo-Marxists did not mean to aver such a horrible platitude. If these cases are to count for them, it is also necessary that colonial expansion came about, in the way indicated, under pressure of accumulation on the rate of profit, hence as a feature of decaying, or at all events of fully matured, capitalism. But the heroic time of colonial adventure was precisely the time of early and immature capitalism when accumulation was in its beginnings and any such pressure—also, in particular, any barrier to exploitation of domestic labor—was conspicuous by its absence. The element of monopoly was not absent. On the contrary it was far more evident than it is today. But that only adds to the absurdity of the construction which makes both monopoly and conquest specific properties of latter-day capitalism.--Joseph A. Schumpeter (1950 [1943]) Capitalism, Socialism, Democracy, third edition, p.53 [emphasis added]

Schumpeter spent a good part of his life thinking about Marxism, and even wrote quite a bit about Marxist accounts of imperialism. So, it might seem unfair to him and to Marxists to focus our attention on the quoted passage which does no justice to his (and the Marxists') theoretical virtuosity. Even so, the apparent superficiality of the claim may well obscure the significance of it. And since we here at Digressionsnnimpressions, live by the Dutch proverb, wie kleine niet eert is het grote niet weerd, [google it] we embrace even the solidly superficial.

Let me do a quick set up. Liberalism and Marxism both have theories of imperialism and the way it connects to political economy, rent-seeking and militarism. The paradigmatic forms of these are offered by Hobson (the liberal) and Lenin (who stands in for Marxism here). And because Lenin explicitly drew on Hobson, this allows for some comparison and shared commitments. 

Both (recall; and here) Hobson and Lenin noticed that (militaristic) imperialism and monopoly were mutually reinforcing. For Hobson (in 1902), monopoly capitalism was the effect of rent-seeking political behavior (by corrupt, imperial, financial interests). Lenin (ca 1916) didn't deny this, but he also thought that capitalism had an inevitable tendency toward monopoly and cartels, and imperialism (the search for monopoly markets overseas) is an effect of this tendency. Lenin's position doesn't just build (explicitly) on Hobson's position, but it can also grant (admittedly not in Lenin's character) that counterfactually even if Lenin were wrong about the causal arrow, Hobson lacks a political or economic solution to the problem Hobson diagnoses.

As regular readers know, (recall) my interest in Schumpeter here is motivated by Foucault's use of Schumpter in Lecture 7, The Birth of Biopolitics, 21 February 1979. There, Schumpeter represents a sophisticated version of the Leninist insight in response to Hobson. In Foucault's re-telling Schumpter agrees with Hobson that markets do not have an "inherent to the economic process of competition" tendency toward monopoly (BoB, p. 177). But the tendency is a social effect of, and caused by, the "concentration of decision-making centers of the administration and the state" (p. 177). This concentration is, itself, the effect of the kind of modernization that modern capitalism promotes (and facilitates). This makes rent-seeking easier, and also the centralized decisionmakers of administration and the state have a natural desire for counterparts in industry (to reduce coordination costs), which, in turn, facilitates an extrinsic tendency toward monopoly (and so Socialism is inevitable, alas). Schumpeter then adds for good measure that socialism while not ideal may be a price worth paying.

There is a lot more to be said about Foucault's use of Schumpeter. But it is worth noting that Foucault ignores Schumpeter's criticisms of the neo-Marxist theory of imperialism. I now see this has a huge impact on the Birth of Biopolitics because in his third lecture (of 24 January, 1979), Foucault quietly embraces (recall) a version of the neo-Marxist theory of imperialism. About that more some other time.

So, why does it matter that according to Schumpeter monopoly capitalism is responsible for imperialism. First, because as Schumpeter explicitly notes, within Marxist analysis of capitalism, monopoly is supposed to be the effect of a dynamic internal to capitalism and simultaneous with the age of imperialism (see Chapter IV of Lenin's The State and Revolution). That is it comes at the end of capitalist development. According to some (a bit less orthodox) it is supposed to be a very late stage before fascism as (recall) Karl Mannheim and/or Karl Polanyi thought (recall here; here).

By contrast, ever since Adam Smith's account of mercantilism, liberalism predominantly understands itself as an ameliorative and mitigating response to the mercantile-state and its imperial ambitions (this also comprises Bentham, Cobden, and Bright). The liberal treats mercantilism as a species of monopoly capitalism. In addition she denies that monopoly capitalism expresses the true nature of capitalism. So, here Schumpeter echoes the traditional liberal self-understanding. That Schumpeter is self-consciously echoing Smith on this point can be proved because he praises Smith's account of imperialism explicitly on the next page!

As an aside, since most students' introductions to the history of liberalism comes through J.S. Mill. And because Mill was an attenuated defender of civilizational mission of empire (and an employee of the India Company), the traditional liberal self-understanding is invisible to students (and critics) of liberalism.*

I don't mean to suggest only a traditional liberal can explain the phenomenon of early monopoly capitalism and its imperialism. Belloc, who is no liberal, can explain it just as adequately with his account of the rise of a narrow, and early oligarchy through the actions of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I.  

I don't mean to suggest that this exhausts Schumpeter's criticism of the neo-Marxist account of imperialism. He goes on to argue that class struggle does worse as an explanatory feature of imperialism which he treats as exemplary in providing class cooperation among Europeans. (Although he recognizes that one might reinterpret the Marxist account by treating all the Europeans as exploiters and the natives as exploited classes.) 

And I certainly don't mean to suggest a Marxist needs to capitulate at the sight of Schumpeter's argument. (Which I did suggest has a hint of superficiality to it.) A Marxist may well resists the liberal idea that there are different kinds of capitalism. And may well respond by rejecting the Leninist narrative of imperialism.

 

On Hobhouse, Hayek, Belloc (pt 3) and the Road to Serfdom.

Up to this point a thoroughly consistent individualism can work in harmony with socialism, and it is this partial alliance which has, in fact, laid down the lines of later Liberal finance. The great Budget of 1909 had behind it the united forces of Socialist and individualist opinion. It may be added that there is a fourth form of monopoly which would be open to the same double attack, but it is one of which less has been heard in Great Britain than in the United States. It is possible under a competitive system for rivals to come to an agreement. The more powerful may coerce the weaker, or a number of equals may agree to work together. Thus competition may defeat itself, and industry may be marshalled into trusts or other combinations for the private advantage against the public interest. Such combinations, predicted by Karl Marx as the appointed means of dissolving the competitive system, have been kept at bay in this country by Free Trade. Under Protection they constitute the most urgent problem of the day. Even here the railways, to take one example, are rapidly moving to a system of combination, the economies of which are obvious, while its immediate result is monopoly, and its assured end is nationalization.

Thus individualism, when it grapples with the facts, is driven no small distance along Socialist lines. Once again we have found that to maintain individual freedom and equality we have to extend the sphere of social control. But to carry through the real principles of Liberalism, to achieve social liberty and living equality of rights, we shall have to probe still deeper. We must not assume any of the rights of property as axiomatic. We must look at their actual working and consider how they affect the life of society. We shall have to ask whether, if we could abolish all monopoly on articles of limited supply, we should yet have dealt with all the causes that contribute to social injustice and industrial disorder, whether we should have rescued the sweated worker, afforded to every man adequate security for a fair return for an honest day's toil, and prevented the use of economic advantage to procure gain for one man at the expense of another. .--Hobhouse (1911) Liberalism Chapter IV ("Laissez Faire")

A few weeks ago, I noted in two related posts (here and here) that Hayek credits Belloc's (1912) The Servile State with articulating a road to serfdom thesis. To be sure, it's well known that road to serfdom theses predate Bellow in texts familiar to Hayek and Mises. In Book 4, chapter 1, of Democracy in America, Tocqueville claims that the principle of equality generates a 'road to servitude.' But while the phrase seems to have inspired Hayek, it would be a mistake to treat Tocqueville's version of the road to serfdom as providing the template for Belloc and Hayek (and Mises). Tocqueville is not diagnosing the effects of a welfare state or state capitalism. In my earlier posts I also noted that Belloc's own favored alternative is more akin to a property-owning democracy than anything one might wish to associate with Hayek's version of neoliberalism. So, while the Austrian economists' road to serfdom is modelled on Belloc's template, their substantive commitments differ (recall Ed McPhail here).

 

Be that as it may, I am pretty sure that Belloc was familiar with Hobhouse's writings and I would be a bit surprised if he had not read Liberalism before he wrote The Servile State. In fact, I can readily imagine that The Servile State, which is really a (1912) pamphlet unencumbered by any citations, was triggered by the very passage I have quoted above. Regardless whether that speculative hypothesis is correct, Belloc is clearly reacting to the kind of developments articulated and celebrated by Hobhouse in passages like the ones above in his Liberalism (on it recall also here; here).

 

One telling reason for thinking that Belloc is responding to this particular passage is Hobhouse's claim about the "fourth form of monopoly which would be open to the same double attack, but it is one of which less has been heard in Great Britain than in the United States." Much of Section Five of The Servile State, is devoted to alerting his readers to how familiar "the numerous Trusts which now control English industry," really are to the public. Belloc describes in colorful detail how this facilitates what we would call rent-seeking and the corruption of the rule of law, even impartiality of the courts. And "the reason" that they are little discussed "is that political freedom is not, as a fact, protected here by the Courts in commercial affairs."* The point, which involves a kind of conspiracy of silence among elites, is essential to Belloc's argument" "it must always be remembered that these conspiracies in restraint of trade which are the mark of modern England are in themselves a mark of the transition from the true Capitalist phase to another" more servile one.

 

Now, Hobhouse himself is clearly not a friend of monopoly as such. But he does seem to accept the Marxist idea that monopoly capitalism is inevitable, especially in non-tradeable industries and services. Hobhouse also seems to accept Hobson's diagnosis (recall) about the reciprocal relationship between empire, militarism, and monopoly (see, especially, chapter IX of Liberalism), although Hobhouse is less obsessed with the influence of finance.

 

Crucially, while Hobhouse is a critic of a variety of socialisms (recall), Hobhouse treats various kinds of state capitalism as inevitable in such areas (the "assured end is nationalization.")_Beloc, by contrast, claims that such piecemeal nationalization is financially and politically impossible (in a society where both capital and labour can organize). And so the state transforms into one where corporate monopolies are accepted and become a controlling arm of the welfare state (and its interests control it in turn). Belloc's despotism is one in which the state mandates large corporations to do its job, and in which many coercive welfare provisions ultimately undermine the freedom of employees. As Belloc discerns, this will also undermine political freedoms. Belloc's fears strike me as rather prescient.

 

But for present purposes, the key point here is that Hobhouse accepts that there is an underlying dynamic of capitalism that requires an ever expanding welfare state to manage and ameliorate it:

On all sides we find the State making active provision for the poorer classes and not by any means for the destitute alone. We find it educating the children, providing medical inspection, authorizing the feeding of the necessitous at the expense of the ratepayers, helping them to obtain employment through free Labour Exchanges, seeking to organize the labour market with a view to the mitigation of unemployment, and providing old age pensions for all whose incomes fall below thirteen shillings a week, without exacting any contribution.--Chapter VII ("The State and the Individual.")

The underlying purpose is not, to be sure, the management of capitalism. Rather, it is "to secure the conditions upon which mind and character [of individuals] may develop themselves." This is, in fact, the Mill-ian individualist strain (as developed by T.H. Green) with its commitment to individual authenticity and autonomy in Hobhouse. And while iI doubt Hayek was familiar with Hobhouse (see below), Hayek clearly intuited that Mill was the source behind the strain of modern permissiveness he decried (see this post by me; and this one by Erwin Dekker.) Belloc's response is to claim that the very conditions that are meant to secure such freedom ultimately, through a slippery slope, undermine it.+

In the appendix to his (1927) Liberalism: the Classical Tradition, Mises treats Hobhouse's Liberalism as an instance of 'moderate socialism' and as one of the exemplars of the modern change of meaning of 'liberalism.' (One need not agree with Mises to notice that this contestation of the revised meaning of 'liberalism' really pre-dates the New Deal.) To the best of my knowledge neither Mises nor Hayek acknowledge that Hobhouse has developed the framework of the road to serfdom. Hobhouse anticipates the crucial features of the slippery slope argument that Belloc and Hayek articulate. But rather than treating these features as a descent, he treats them as an ascent.

Belloc and Mises refuse to acknowledge the presence of any such individualism in the Hobhouse program. Belloc consistently describes it as 'collectivism.' This is not altogether unfair because earlier Hobhouse had been an articulate defender of 'collectivism' before (see this (1898) paper "The Ethical Basis of Collectivism," in International Journal of Ethics.) 

What's interesting to me here, in conclusion, is that in Road to Serfdom Hayek uses Belloc's template articulated in response to the the developments championed by Hobhouse to challenge the much more far-reaching welfare state envisioned in the Beveridge plan. For Hayek, England is going down the dangerous road initiated by Bismarck in Germany. Here follows the final twist in the story.

As Hayek notes ruefully near the conclusion of Road to Serfdom, "there is no lack of sympathetic treatment of Bismarck in contemporary English literature, the name of Gladstone is rarely mentioned by the younger generation without a sneer over his Victorian morality and naïve utopianism" (p. 188) Hobhouse died in 1929 and is surely not Hayek's intended target. But I doubt Hayek ever realized how much he is echoing Hobhouse here. Hobhouse's 1898 paper is itself a response to the authoritarianism of "Bismarck's State Socialism" (p. 143).** And his Liberalism has a whole chapter (VI) treating Gladstone as the exemplary liberal statesman who understands the liberal art of government. 

Hobhouse is largely absent as an interlocuter for the liberals who came together at the Lippmann colloquium and later the Mont Pelerin Society. They largely treat the period in which he writes as decades of retreat from the ideals of true liberalism, as decades in which empire, militarism, and monopoly encroach on true individualism. And so they end up obscuring, I think, that the liberal contribution to welfare state was itself intended to promote a species of individualism in the process often battling the influence of the same figures that Hayek fought against. 

Hobhouse & Foucault on the Socialist Art of Government (with a nod to Luxemburg), 31 January 1979, Episode XXXXIV

In short, whether or not there is a theory of the state in Marx is for Marxists to decide. As for myself, I would say that what socialism lacks is not so much a theory of the state as a governmental reason, the definition of what a governmental rationality would be in socialism, that is to say, a reasonable and calculable measure of the extent, modes, and objectives of governmental action. Michel Foucault, 31 January 1979,  translated by Graham Burchell, Lecture 4, The Birth of Biopolitics. 92

Foucault (recall also here) famously denies that socialism has an art of government. And notably he does not seem inclined to supply one. That's notable, especially, because the 1979 lectures do supply several variants of a liberal art of government.

But that socialism lacks an art of government is by no means obvious. In chapter VIII, of T.L. Hobhouse's (1911) Liberalism, Hobhouse distinguishes between 'official' and 'mechanical' socialism. These are, to be sure, kinds of socialism Hobhouse rejects. (He is by no means a fierce critic of other kinds of socialism.) It turns out that mechanical socialism lacks an art of government (about which more below), but that 'official socialism' does have one: 

Official Socialism is a creed of different brand. Beginning with a contempt for ideals of liberty based on a confusion between liberty and competition, it proceeds to a measure of contempt for average humanity in general. It conceives mankind as in the mass a helpless and feeble race, which it is its duty to treat kindly. True kindness, of course, must be combined with firmness, and the life of the average man must be organized for his own good. He need not know that he is being organized. The socialistic organization will work in the background, and there will be wheels within wheels, or rather wires pulling wires. Ostensibly there will be a class of the elect, an aristocracy of character and intellect which will fill the civil services and do the practical work of administration. Behind these will be committees of union and progress who will direct operations, and behind the committees again one or more master minds from whom will emanate the ideas that are to direct the world. The play of democratic government will go on for a time, but the idea of a common will that should actually undertake the organization of social life is held the most childish of illusions. The master minds can for the moment work more easily through democratic forms, because they are here, and to destroy them would cause an upheaval. But the essence of government lies in the method of capture. The ostensible leaders of democracy are ignorant creatures who can with a little management be set to walk in the way in which they should go, and whom the crowd will follow like sheep. The art of governing consists in making men do what you wish without knowing what they are doing, to lead them on without showing them whither until it is too late for them to retrace their steps. Socialism so conceived has in essentials nothing to do with democracy or with liberty. It is a scheme of the organization of life by the superior person, who will decide for each man how he should work, how he should live, and indeed, with the aid of the Eugenist, whether he should live at all or whether he has any business to be born. At any rate, if he ought not to have been born—if, that is, he comes of a stock whose qualities are not approved—the Samurai will take care that he does not perpetuate his race.

This account of official socialism, which at the time was not reality anywhere, anticipates key features of Burnham's experience based account of managerial socialism (and capitalism) in the (1941; recall) Managerial Revolution. We might also call it 'Leninist/managerial or ethnic biopolitics' (notice the role of eugenics). Presumably Hobhouse has not Lenin, but the Webbs (he mentions them in the next chapter) or George Bernard Shaw in mind. It's the kind of 'government house' socialism we find satirized, if it is that, later in Huxley's Brave New World. One can agree with Hobhouse that a 'noble lying' socialism in the services of an intellectual avant-garde in charge of planning and population control is not very attractive.

From the perspective of Foucault's treatment of socialism in 1979, I note three important features in Hobhouse's analysis. First, the bio-political element is clearly not limited to neoliberalism. Or to be precise, neoliberal biopolitics shares roots with the official socialist kind in English radicalism's response to Malthus and Darwin. Second, Hobhouse clearly does not think he needs to offer arguments against official socialism once he has unmasked it. In part, that's because he thinks his own brand of liberalism has moved beyond Manchester's focus on 'competition' and has a more solid conception of 'liberty' (based on ideas derived from J.S. Mill and T.H. Green.*) In part, because he seems to think once a program devoted to deception has been unmasked it becomes impotent (that strikes me as a mistake or naivete).

Third, Foucault's comment is offered in the context of the German SDP's (1959) commitment (at Bad Godesberg) not just to reformist Bernsteinism, but to the "economic-political consensus of German liberalism" as articulated in the Ordoliberal ideals of a social market economy. Either way, the art of government on offer from official socialism as presented by Hobhouse is indeed unattractive as an art of government for a mass party committed to democratic ideals, Enlightenment, and an ordered market economy. 

As an aside, part of my interest in Hobhouse (1864 –1929) is, in fact, motivated by seeing his (left) Liberalism (about which some other time more) as a possible route toward Ordoliberalism. There are important differences between the ORDOs and Hobhouse's liberalism, but there also commonalities. To be sure, there is little interest in Hobhouse among the main first generation ORDOs. And I suspect that Hobhouse's absence in the neoliberal literature prevents Foucault from drawing on him.

But I learned from a forthcoming paper by Stefan Kolev and Ekkehard A. Köhler, "Transatlantic Roads to Mont Pèlerin: “Old Chicago” and Freiburg in a World of Disintegrating Orders," that the ORDOs themselves were shaped by the Berlin economist and sociologist, Heinrich Herkner (1863–1932). Herkner was one of the key left-Liberal thinkers of the Weimar age, and in the very work that inspired the ORDOs revisionism from classical liberalism, he was, in fact, also an ardent admirer of Hobhouse's Liberalism (see especially his Sozialpolitischer Liberalismus (1925), p. 39.).

Be that as it may, in the same chapter (in fact, in the previous paragraph) of Liberalism, Hobhouse also rejects another kind of socialism:

Mechanical Socialism is founded on a false interpretation of history. It attributes the phenomena of social life and development to the sole operation of the economic factor, whereas the beginning of sound sociology is to conceive society as a whole in which all the parts interact. The economic factor, to take a single point, is at least as much the effect as it is the cause of scientific invention. There would be no world-wide system of telegraphy if there was no need of world-wide intercommunication. But there would be no electric telegraph at all but for the scientific interest which determined the experiments of Gauss and Weber. Mechanical Socialism, further, is founded on a false economic analysis which attributes all value to labour, denying, confounding or distorting the distinct functions of the direction of enterprise, the unavoidable payment for the use of capital, the productivity of nature, and the very complex social forces which, by determining the movements of demand and supply actually fix the rates at which goods exchange with one another. Politically, mechanical Socialism supposes a class war, resting on a clear-cut distinction of classes which does not exist. Far from tending to clear and simple lines of cleavage, modern society exhibits a more and more complex interweaving of interests, and it is impossible for a modern revolutionist to assail "property" in the interest of "labour" without finding that half the "labour" to which he appeals has a direct or indirect interest in "property." As to the future, mechanical Socialism conceives a logically developed system of the control of industry by government. [emphasis added]

We can recognize in the contours of 'mechanical socialism' a Marxist edifice with its commitment to the labor theory of value, class warfare, and a materialist conception of history. What's notable is that unlike the 'official Socialism,' which he simply unmasked, Hobson feels the need to argue against the 'mechanical socialist.' This suggests to me that Hobhouse takes it as a more dangerous and more plausible alternative to his own views.

Regardless what one thinks of the merits of Hobhouse's criticism of 'mechanical socialism,' my present interest is in the following passage (which anticipates Foucault's observations on the absence of an art of government in socialism):

Of this all that need be said is that the construction of Utopias is not a sound method of social science; that this particular Utopia makes insufficient provision for liberty, movement, and growth; and that in order to bring his ideals into the region of practical discussion, what the Socialist needs is to formulate not a system to be substituted as a whole for our present arrangements but a principle to guide statesmanship in the practical work of reforming what is amiss and developing what is good in the actual fabric of industry. A principle so applied grows if it has seeds of good in it, and so in particular the collective control of industry will be extended in proportion as it is found in practice to yield good results. The fancied clearness of Utopian vision is illusory, because its objects are artificial ideas and not living facts. The "system" of the world of books must be reconstructed as a principle that can be applied to the railway, the mine, the workshop, and the office that we know, before it can even be sensibly discussed. The evolution of Socialism as a practical force in politics has, in point of fact, proceeded by such a reconstruction, and this change carries with it the end of the materialistic Utopia. [emphasis added]

Part of Hobhouse's polemical point is that for mechanical socialism to have an art of government requires it to forego Utopianism and become more like his own, piecemeal ameliorative (reformist) liberalism.+ And this means that in many ways it has to be an applied practice informed by concrete policy challenges emanating in particular sectors of the economy (and social life). I am going to leaving aside the well known dangers of reformism (for a revolutionary Marxism). What's notable about Hobhouse's position is that while it is compatible with a kind of technocratic pragmatism problem-solving specific sectorial problems, it also echoes the kind of view (recall) that Rosa Luxemburg (ca 1904) articulates, of a bottom up, local "often spontaneous class struggle seeking its way."

That is to say, while Foucault and Hobhouse both explicitly deny that socialism has an art of government that is compatible with democratic life (and Foucault insists that what passes for an art of government within Marxism is no better than a police state), Hobhouse de facto articulates a social-democratic art of government on behalf of a reformist socialism that is not far from his own social liberalism. I won't surprise you, I suspect, that Hobhouse's point is very much in the service for a political parliamentary alliance between liberalism and social democracy that he advocates.**  

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.