Digressions&Impressions

On Caesarian Democracy

For these are inherent in plebiscitarian Caesarism, or so-called 'Caesarian democracy', with its direct appeal to the masses: demagogical slogans; disregard of legality in spite of a professed guardianship of law and order; contempt of political parties and the parliamentary system, of the educated classes and their values; blandishments and vague, contradictory promises for all and sundry; militarism; gigantic, blatant displays and shady corruption. Panem et circenses once more and at the end of the road, disaster.--Lewis Namier (1958) "The First Mountebank Dictator" in Vanished supremacies, 55.

A few weeks ago, I read Marx's The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon. (One of the few works by Marx I warmly recommend!) A book I publically bemoaned I had wished I had read it before. In discussion on social media, Michael Rosen, I think, encouraged me to seek out Namier's short essay partially quoted above. This essay is like Marx's focused on Louis Napoleon/Napoleon III. Namier (a historian) himself is, as the first sentence suggests, indebted, in more ways than one, to Max Weber, who had also used Napoleon III as an example of plebisciarian Caesarism. 

While thanks to modern media, caesarian democracy is a risk in all democratic systems, as Weber argued, it is especially a danger in political systems where there is an elected president who has broad executive powers, and with norms that allow for even broader extra-constitutional powers in emergency circumstances. I tend to think of these presidential systems (e.g., France, Brazil, Russia, the United States, etc.) as approaching elective monarchies with serious downside risks lurking in the background of devolving into dictatorships/tyrannies. For, once power has been legally obtained, usurping more power, and destroying or corrupting the would be countervailing powers, is not unachievable if the circumstances permit and there is a ruthless will.

Namier offers three important observations: first, the plebiscitarian Caesar is generally most underestimated by those that know him best: political rivals and intellectual/business elites. We might say that a certain kind of functional distance enables the plebiscitarian Caesar. By this I hope to capture the thought that for those whose business it is to judge functional and what we may call situational competence, the would be plebiscitarian Caesar tends to underwhelm. (Often, these elites share an anti-democratic tendency.)

But that is compatible with the further thought that such a would be leader may have the image of good leadership qualities from, as it were, a distance--even if, due to effects of mass modern media, this is not felt as distant at all. And in fact, the rejection by the cadres, intelligentsia or clerks or functionaries and other elites of the would be plebiscitarian Caesar may well be treated as a proxy for good leadership by the larger electorate.

Of course, and this gets me to Namier's second and connected observation, "modern dictatorship arises amid the ruins of an inherited social and political structure, in the desolation of shattered loyalties it is the desperate shift of communities broken from their moorings." (54) The connection between these two observations is that rejection by the cadres/elites (etc.) starts to be a signal in the would-be-plebiscitarian-Caesar's favor once the trust and even legitimacy of existing elites is endangered or broken (by revolution, financial crisis, public health disaster, defeat in war, religious crisis, hyper-inflation, famine, etc.).

To be sure, Namier allows that dictatorship can arise in other ways (he is discussing a particular "modern" kind). And what he says is also compatible with the thought that would-be-plebiscitarian Caesars can be defeated before they rise to power and, perhaps (although Namier does not explore this), even after they have so risen. Namier leaves it unclear how desperate and how broken the community needs to be.

There is a third, more subtle and helpful observation lurking in Namier's analysis. On his view the would-be-plebiscitarian-Caesar re-activates the past in highly "peculiar" ways. There is a particular kind of "imitation" of the past "engendered by historical memory." In contemporary scholarly discussion this is often treated in terms of nostalgia, but I don't think that's quite right. For there is a real desire to repeat the past,  but a past that has been now sanitized or, as Namier notes, influenced by legend or myth and without complexity.

Now, rather than closing with commentary on contemporary politics/politicians, I want to close with a concern. I often notice in my best students the following reflex: many of today's real problems (unfolding environmental disaster, redistributive monetary policy, etc.) are theorized and understood in terms of a lack of democracy or imperfectly functioning democracies which are taken to thwart the will of the people. But when I note, say, that most of the problems they diagnosed have been generated by liberal democracies -- including some they admire greatly --, we reach a stale-mate. There is very little room for suggesting that the people can get it wrong or that our ordinary democratic functioning may be the problem without simultaneously becoming or sounding genuinely anti-democratic (or elitist in various ways).

But Caesarian democracy is always a latent possibility. And it is a possibility in virtue of features of ordinary democratic life. For, ordinary democratic politics cannot prevent major economic and natural disruptions to the social order. It can at best mitigate the effects of these, but as we have learned in the last decade, it will do so in ways that are generously described as 'messy.'  And while the conditions under which caesarian democracy will achieve victory may not be regular, they are frequent enough that they should be a constitutive feature of democratic theorizing. But that requires we theorize democracy without self-serving myths; denying such myths may not be welcome.

 

 

 

Marx on Ideology Critique and Social Explanation in the Jewish Question

Nevertheless, North America is pre-eminently the country of religiosity, as Beaumont, Tocqueville, and the Englishman Hamilton unanimously assure us. The North American states, however, serve us only as an example. The question is: What is the relation of complete political emancipation to religion? If we find that even in the country of complete political emancipation, religion not only exists, but displays a fresh and vigorous vitality, that is proof that the existence of religion is not in contradiction to the perfection of the state. Since, however, the existence of religion is the existence of defect, the source of this defect can only be sought in the nature of the state itself. We no longer regard religion as the cause, but only as the manifestation of secular narrowness. Therefore, we explain the religious limitations of the free citizen by their secular limitations. We do not assert that they must overcome their religious narrowness in order to get rid of their secular restrictions, we assert that they will overcome their religious narrowness once they get rid of their secular restrictions. We do not turn secular questions into theological ones. History has long enough been merged in superstition, we now merge superstition in history. The question of the relation of political emancipation to religion becomes for us the question of the relation of political emancipation to human emancipation. We criticize the religious weakness of the political state by criticizing the political state in its secular form, apart from its weaknesses as regards religion. The contradiction between the state and a particular religion, for instance Judaism, is given by us a human form as the contradiction between the state and particular secular elements; the contradiction between the state and religion in general as the contradiction between the state and its presuppositions in general. Karl Marx (1843/1844) On The Jewish Question, Proofed and Corrected: by Andy Blunden, Matthew Grant and Matthew Carmody, republished at marxists.org.

I returned to the early Marx of Zur Judenfrage after nearly thirty years because of a discussion in my department about the nature of ideology critique. And I did so because in the intervening years I had picked up somewhere that it is the original Marxist ideology critique. And indeed it anticipates, as Jo Wolff notes in his SEP entry, a standard criticism of liberalism: that the political project that is supposed to emancipate us both presupposes and promotes our separation and, thereby, promotes a false view of life (that is, greed) and a false (Hobbesian) view of freedom (that is, security from threats). It also anticipates the line of argument that liberal democracy just is a species of applied or debased christianity. I leave to others to trace the link of influence from this piece to Max Weber, Nietzsche, Freud, and Carl Schmitt and all the luminaries of modernity.

In re-reading the argument I was struck by the claim that the "existence of religion is the existence of defect, the source of this defect can only be sought in the nature of the state itself." In particular, the causal claim this presupposes -- viz., social defects are the effects of the nature of the state [hereafter: the causal claim] -- can be made best visible "where the political state exists in its completely developed form." It is no surprise that Marx quotes The Social Contract further down, because this kind of causal claim that deviations from human flourishing in social life can be explained by social even political causes is articulated in The Social Contract.+

The United States is then the main instance of such complete development because it, or at least some of its states, allows pure freedom of religion even granting that all political rights (including holding office) can be gained without a formal religious requirement.* Marx does not deny that the causal claim operates in other (post-Feudal) political contexts, but in those contexts there are interfering social mechanisms (so Marx is intuitively thinking of the causal claim in terms of its instantiation of a law with ceteris paribus conditions). 

The way Marx traces out the argument suggests something like the following: that there continue to be religious individuals is the effect of the liberal state's promotion of capitalism and individualism (since it does not promote a religion). Their religiosity is essentially a byproduct of this. And because religious association is constituted by individual choice it generates not community, but growing difference and differentiation (and so, as Weber notes, value pluralism). Now, in context this fact is used to criticize Bauer's argument that Jewish emancipation is only possible on the condition that Jews give up their Judaism. While the main criticism of Bauer is that he has an incomplete understanding of emancipation, the conceptual argument is that Bauer aims for the impossible (because the liberal state effectively promotes religious diversity). 

While Bauer's argument is developed in a Prussian context (where relations of subordination are christianized), Marx's criticism of Bruno Bauer remains of interest in light of the militant secularism of French laïcité (which is effectively anticipated by Bauer), which is the true Atheist state described by Marx. (More than the United States, France evacuates traditional religiosity from the public sphere.) From a Marxist perspective, even more than the US, French secularism (which presupposes our separateness in civil society) is doomed to fail in virtue of its effective tendency to promote religiosity among (sovereign) individuals, and simultaneously to insist that the French state itself is the only legitimate political tie in common.

But the proposed site of religiosity, civil society, is incapable of being truly heavenly according to Marx because it presupposes our separateness and promotes our greed. But because our religiosity has not been extinguished, it has in fact been stimulated, its only effective site is the state (which presents itself as striving for eternality). Thus, the state is effectively an idol not just from the perspective of the Marxist, who recognizes that the state continues the (essentially Christian project of) estrangement of abstract citizens from themselves (by secular means), but also from the perspective of those citizens who reject an individualist (i.e., protestant) conception of religion (and state).

In fact, if we think about the causal claim it is accompanied by a further claim (which Marx explicitly asserts): "the imperfection even of...politics [in the perfected state] becomes evident in religion." So, the presence of religious fundamentalism among citizens of a state that understands and presents itself as atheist, is indicative of the fact that the state itself has taken on the character of a supreme idol. So, rather than seeing fundamentalism as something archaic or atavistic it is a distinctly modern effect of a society that is capitalist and with a secular public sphere. 

Let me return to the building blocks of Marx's argument: his causal claim presupposes a proper functioning view of human nature. In his account of the effects of history this proper functioning is deformed/undermined by economic practices which are, in turn, secured by state power. (Again, note the echo of Rousseau here.) So, Marx here already anticipates features of his later view (recall) that is more articulated in (say) The Communist Manifesto and the Critique of the Gotha Program. Crucially, Marx's argument (in terms of social defects) in The Jewish Question does not get off the ground without such a proper functioning view of human nature. 

Now one may well wonder why from the perspective iof such a proper functioning view of human nature religion is a defect. Presumably because it is seen to undermine an authentic, communal life that belongs to our essence. It is possible Marx could allow that a non-individualistic religion -- one that glories our communal life in shared joyful activity (recall Plato's natural religion) -- wouldn't be thought defective. But perhaps he treats all religion as instances of superstition (there is language in the Jewish Question that suggests this). I am not sure.

Let me wrap up. Recall that for Mill ideology is the product of a system of hierarchy or domination in which the ruling classes promote falsehoods which justify their rule. Along the way this ideology undermines the proper functioning of the moral sentiments of the rulers and the ruled. In general the ruled see through these falsehoods, even if at times the ideology effectively promotes servility. What makes something ideological is not just that it is false and corrosive of our nature, but (and here Mill echoes Smith) that it serves a particular (factional/class) interest. (This sounds, in fact, like the kind of thing one would expect from a vulgar marxist.) So, we may say that the liberal idea of ideology requires the false to serve ruling faction and undermine our capacity to political and moral judgment. From a liberal perspective, one can always smell/rat out the existence of ideology if we ask 'cui bono?' and follow the trail. 

One attractive feature of the liberal conception of ideology is that the victims of it can see through it (and this eventually leads to standpoint epistemology). They generally do not need ideology critique to learn the truth of their situation. In this liberal conception if we could make our ruling ideas more impartial and reinforce our natural capacities, ideology can be overcome. And one natural route, although not the only one, to the undermining of ideology (and this (recall) anticipates Jason Stanley) (and here) is according to the liberal the flattening of hierarchy, which would undermine the 'demand' for such false justifications (and also undermine its supply by making it less profitable). Another route is to make sure that people flourish within a liberal polity.

If we go beyond Bauer's own aims, we can see that in Zur Judenfrage Marx, in effect, criticizes this liberal idea of ideology as itself a species of ideology. And Marx's main point is not that it serves the interest of capital (although clearly this is implied). But rather because the political emancipation implied by impartiality in the context of liberal state is, while worth having if you lack it, itself a defective ideal of emancipation. It is emancipation into a fragmentary and inauthentic life, and so no genuine emancipation at all.++ 

The explicit role of the Jews in Marx's analysis is, as is well known, not too flattering to Jews (or Christians). But the role they play in his analysis is also to show that on Marx's account it is by no means obvious that the subordinated victims of an ideology will see through the ideology. And so we see here already the rudiments of the need for a project of consciousness raising. That is to say, ideology critique takes on the shape of unmasking so that the victims of ideology can be oriented to a better ideal. This clearly has, although Marx does not alert his reader to it, the character of a kind of religious conversion.

I do not wish to try to settle the debate between Marx and liberalism. I just note that modern liberals may claim that such an ideology critique misses the mark. After all the proud modern liberal is, when legislating public reason, agnostic about the good life; this only works if the defectiveness of modern life is not widely felt. Such agnosticism does not tempt the older perfectionists like Smith and Mill, who have a conception of human flourishing that is a partial rival to Marx's. But I have gone on long enough today.

 

 

On Plagiarism in History of Philosophy

The current affair, which extends far beyond the pages of Vivarium, raises the traditional concerns of academic plagiarism, as well as some novel considerations. As with many cases in the past, the theft of material denies the rightful author of the credit deserved and unfairly gives the pretending author an advantage in an increasingly competitive market. As editors, we are bound first and foremost to maintain the integrity of the journal, and that requires us to document, clearly and extensively, cases where that integrity has been compromised. At the same time, the practice of academic stealing is constantly evolving alongside the countermeasures deployed to catch it, and making public the methods and techniques used in contemporary cases of unattributed copying should help future editors and scholars identify the cases that we collectively missed.
We do not enjoy performing our duty. For marginal fields such as those served by Vivarium, we have seen from experience that the damage wreaked by plagiarism extends to institutions, bringing vulnerable positions, departments, and institutes to the attention of administrators eager to let the rationale of collective punishment direct the evisceration of budgets in Social Sciences and the Humanities. Our colleagues in adjacent fields will seize upon public cases of misconduct as an opportunity to reallocate scarce resources in their favor, thereby ensuring that those who previously lost out to plagiarists in competition for fellowships and positions lose out once again. Yet we believe that it would be worse for the field were we to ignore the accusations, cast doubt on the charges, and claim that the damage done were minimal.
For these reasons, we present examples of what we know about the incidents of unattributed copying in Vivarium.-- The Editors of Vivarium "Notice The Retraction of Articles Due to Plagiarism" 256-257 [emphases added; see also: Dailynous]

Let me start with a note of appreciation. The editors of Vivarium, C. Schabel and William Duba, were contacted in July this year about the suspicion of plagiarism of papers in the journal. It is a good thing that, despite all the strains of the pandemic, they quickly decided to investigate, to take action, and to report. Their clearly written report leaves no doubt that retraction was merited. In fact, since they limited themselves "to verbatim copying of material available to us in digital form" (256) it stands to reason their report understates the problems they found or could have found.* I am grateful for their speedy and forthright Notice. As a regular reader of retractionwatch, my impression is that this is not always the norm, alas.

Their Notice reveals that two of the retracted papers were re-published (now retracted) in a collected volume of papers, The Instant of Change in Medieval Philosophy and Beyond, co-edited by the plagiarist and published at Brill (the same press that publishes Vivarium). This volume also includes a chapter by one of the co-editors of Vivarium. While these details do not justify the claim that the field is (and now I use the editors' language) "marginal," they do give a sense of some of the relatively narrow overlapping circles in the field. While I think of myself as being in an adjoining field, I did host the author of these plagiarized papers in a seminar series back in 2015. 

In the emphasized part of the Notice, the editors of Vivarium present the zero-sum, cut-throat nature of academic life in incredibly stark terms of political economy. In fact,they convey the thought -- I think (and hope) unintentionally -- that their decision to publish the retraction and the details of the case as itself the product of cost-benefit analysis of alternative possibilities ("it would be worse for the field were we to ignore the accusations, cast doubt on the charges, and claim that the damage done were minimal.") I assume they primarily acted from duty.

Even so, the editorial notice is also a missed opportunity. For, this is the second major plagiarism case (see also here) to hit the field in less than a decade. Back in the day,  I blogged quite a bit about the earlier case (e.g., here). At the time I noted that given its egregiousness, "the referee process is broken in rather serious fashion." As several high profile hoaxes, and the pages of retractionwatch, suggest refereeing is unlikely to catch all forms of fraud. But it is less likely to catch it, I fear, in a field that feels itself under threat in a low trust environment (as the editors describe) and with relatively small and potentially competitive networks that do not just compete for status and journal space, but also for scarce positions.

In particular, since scholars in the field must have familiarity with an enormous span of history of primary and secondary sources in multiple languages, it stands to reason that staying on top of the field is very difficult. Since referees are themselves stretched for time and, if my experience is anything to go by, swamped with referee requests (while writing this blog post I received two!), I wonder if I could catch the plagiarism or am myself stretched too thin to miss it. (I have often suggested in my reports that papers are ungenerous to others, but I do not recall catching outright plagiarism as a referee whereas as a teacher it is not uncommon, alas.) 

The issue is structural, and it is not just overworked referees or the side-effects of possible journal capture.

In particular, my university has incredibly fine-grained book-keeping for my 'output.' It also tracks my hours spent on teaching, admin, and research. (Yes, really. It's meant to be a fairness issue so that we all do our fair share.) But refereeing goes almost entirely uncredited in this system. (Stateside it may count a bit as service to the profession.) Even though in many ways universities, and not to forget grant agencies, which play a huge role even in the Humanities in Europe, free-ride on the evaluative judgments of anonymous journal referees (and less anonymous, editors) in a lot of their decisions. One often feels that judgments of quality are largely outsourced to referees of, especially, high status journals. That itself tells you quite a bit (go read Trust in Numbers) about how low-trust the environment is.

I have mentioned grant agencies in the previous paragraph. These greatly amplify the zero-sum nature of academic life in European humanities. Since grant funding in the humanities (and social sciences) is incredibly tight (with very low chances of success and with a tendency to reward bullshitting), these agencies pick winners whose careers get an enormous boost (jobs, invites, more research time, etc.), while those that are passed over find themselves without resources to pursue ordinary research. For much of the past decade, there was also a clear bias toward quantity of publication. (Supposedly that's changing.)

So, the credit structure of the academy is a very steep prestige and economic hierarchy where the agencies most responsible for accelerating one's move up or down the hierarchy farm out the evaluation of the 'input' into their analysis (journal publication) to the nearly uncredited work by overworked and anonymous referees. And these referees often have an indirect incentive to promote the work of people they trust and admire and who enhance their own work/states or their network in the field. This predictably leads to possibly unfair rejections and, perhaps, too much benefit of the doubt in other cases. In the past I have offered suggestions to improve the process, but with little noticeable effect. So much for political economy.

In a famous piece, Agnes Callard claims, drawing on a paper by Brian L. Frye that I have not read, that "in academia the immorality of plagiarism is one of the few principles everyone converges on." Not unlike Seneca, Callard wants to reject the (what she calls an "extralegal") principle or "convention." With Callard I agree that it is a mistake to confuse this principle/convention with morality. And I am open to the idea that in some areas of intellectual life, things might go better without giving credit. As a scholar I am familiar with robust practices of anonymous and pseudonymous publication (and I have been very uneasy about recent practice of unmasking pseudonymous publication in instances where the only fraud is the fake name.) And, not to put too fine point on it, these Digressions are all written not just without advertisement, but also without attribution (although I have never made it difficult to guess my identity).

Callard has a tendency to treat the norm (that she rejects) against plagiarism as a violation of intellectual property, which is another feature of the political economy of higher ed. (Brill is a for-profit press.) And she points out that this sits uneasily with university life more generally which she, not unfairly, treats as a deformed honour culture. And in fact she offers a tempting genealogy of error: "We academics cannot make much money off the papers and books in which we express our ideas, and ideas cannot be copyrighted, so we have invented a moral law that offers us the “property rights” the legal system denies us." In her genealogy of error, the norm (mistakenly treated as moral) against plagiarism is correction to a kind of market failure ("cannot make much money").

Perhaps Callard is right about this for much of academic life. But some areas of intellectual life, especially those influenced, in part, by (of course evolving norms and standards of) philology, are constituted by scholarship and the art by which one conveys that scholarship. And plagiarism is, then, not, as it were, a second order effect of market failure, but a violation of the rules that do not merely constrain, but constitute the field. It's not just cheating (breaking the rules) or disrupting the market in ideas and the wider academic credit economy, but one has decided to play an altogether different game or to act in a different play. 

To put the point I am driving at by way of analogy. Lots of philosophers think that argument is constitutive of philosophy. I have protested this, but I know I am in the minority. If there is no argument there is no philosophy. This is why much wisdom, or insight, or intellectual history is not treated as philosophy by professional philosophers.

So, much the worse for professionals, Callard might say, and for good measure she might make fun of Max Weber, too. It's clear she thinks, and again this echoes Seneca (who undoubtedly is echoing true sages), that what matters in one's intellectual life is not the proper apportioning of credit. She suggests plausibly that to appropriate is to change one's identity, possibly, for the better. Philosophically and morally that's often true. 

But it is not true in scholarship. For all I know none of the functional arguments for proper citation can withstand scrutiny. Perhaps scholarship would be socially more productive and less dangerous for the psyche if competitive emulation (recall my response to Hitz) that characterizes it would disappear. I certainly recognize that intellectual fraternity is made difficult by oligarchic organization of academic life today.

But true scholarship owes nothing to anybody; its allegiance is to truth and to the standards of excellence, including beauty, that constitute it. And these standards allow one to escape, in thought, the political and cultural economies that condition it materially and, simultaneously, experience the recognition by and, more commonly, one's recognizing of the skill of fellow scholars.

And if time permitted me I would offer you a proof of all of this in the margins of this Digressions. Sure, given the challenges facing humanity, it is comical to demand, as an existential matter, proper footnoting.

At this point the reader, if still awake, may suspect something religious. And, as is well known, footnoting has, as scribbling in the margins, or hyperlinking, a complex relationship with revelation, that is, scripture. And this, in turn, has been well deployed and satirized by Bayle and Swift (among the magisteria). Herman Hesse wrote a long, irritating and oddly moving novel, Glass Bead Game, -- which (recall) I read because of a suggestive footnote in Hugo Drochon's Nietzsche's Great Politics (see here), -- to try to convey even hints of this to a culture that cannot bring itself to confront such religiosity. 

I mentioned Zina Hitz, who is better equipped than I am to talk about religiosity, because she criticizes, not unfairly, the academy (and now I simplify) for its surrender to a fundamentally base political economy. And when one reads the vocabulary of the editors of Vivarium -- "countermeasures" -- it is easy to think she is right--that something essential has gone missing. That we have lost sight of what truly matters. 

But this is a mistake. Philology, with its roots in love of logos, expresses this love, in fact, from the start by the unmasking of forgery. It is because we recognize that human nature is weak, and that even extremely modest details might matter, sometimes greatly, to the life of many communities that we rest our faith in civilization, in part, by securing the integrity of the small print.

 

7 March 1979: Foucault on the Radicalness of Liberal Governmentality (XXV)

First of all, we should not forget that the diffusion of the German neo-liberal model has taken place in France on the basis of a strongly state-centered, interventionist, and administrative governmentality, with precisely all the problems this entails. Second, the attempt to introduce and implement the German neo-liberal model in France takes place in a context of an initially relatively limited, and now acute economic crisis which is the motive, pretext, and reason for the introduction and implementation of the model and, at the same time, what checks it. Finally, for the reasons I have just mentioned, the third characteristic is that the agents of the spread and implementation of this model are precisely those who administer and direct the state in this context of crisis. Because of all this, the implementation of the German model in France involves a whole range of difficulties and a sort of awkwardness mixed with hypocrisy, examples of which we will see. Michel Foucault, 7 March, 1979,  translated by Graham Burchell, Lecture 8, The Birth of Biopolitics, 192

According to Foucault, the twentieth century is characterized by two kinds of "reduction of state governmentality." (191) One is through  the "growth of party governmentality," as occurred most dramatically in fascist and communist states.* Lecturing in 1979 the Marxist kind was not yet something of the past.

As an aside Foucault is also having a bit of fun here because for Max Weber the mediating function of parties (and party bosses) is characteristic of nineteenth century developing liberal democracies.  (Of course, that is compatible with the rule of law, which, by contrast, true party governmentality erodes.) This is a core commitment of twentieth political science (see, e.g., Schattschneider). As I have noted before, this feature of liberal democracy has been eroded by the development of the open primary (this started to happen in Foucault's life-time).

Liberal democracies, by contrast, "regimes like our own" experiment with the second "form of reduction" and "attempt to find a liberal governmentality." (191) And it is very important for Foucault's argument that liberal governmentality has two different templates: one that he calls the "German model," which is the ORDO liberal version he has articulated in the first seven lectures.  This ORDO model is ""being diffused, debated, and forms part of our actuality, structuring it and carving out its real shape, is the model of a possible neoliberal governmentality." (192) The other approach is the Chicago school.*

Now, what's crucial -- and what has taken me a long time to discern -- is that Foucault makes a rather sharp distinction between the way the German model functions in its origin and what happens to it when (ahh) its copy is diffused and 'implemented' elsewhere; the implementation is, simultaneously, a "radicalization," (207). But Foucault does not make the distinction (between original and copy) fully explicit because he does not repeat the analysis of the previous weeks to draw out all of the contrast.

For, in a seeming paradox, while the ORDOs confronted a much more distinctive circumstance, the collapse of Nazi Germany and occupation, Foucault treats original ORDO-neoliberalism as a kind of organic political solution to circumstances. (Here he implicitly kind of tracks Röpke conception of what ought to happen as factual.) Whereas the application of the copy of neoliberalism in France during the apparently more ordinary political crisis of the 70s is treated as disruptive. And so lurking in Foucault there is a surprisingly nineteenth century assumption in which ideas and society form a kind of organic whole.**

One way to track the most fundamental difference is that in Germany, post Stunde Null, the ORDOs had to invent (recall lecture 4) a new kind of sovereign power, which simultaneously made the NAZIs illegitimate, and that would constitute the legitimacy of the Bonn Republic by the maintenance of certain basic rights by way of the rule of law and economic growth with social characteristics. Whereas in France, liberal governmentality is imported by leading technocrats of a legitimate state in economic crisis. And for Foucault this starts to happen around 1970 or "from 1970 to 1975 or anyway in the decade now coming to a close." (195) 

As another aside, Foucault here very quietly, and prudently, skips the collapse of the third republic, and all the turbulence of the fourth republic, and the founding of the fifth, not to mention '68. Or to be more precise, he mentions some of it in the lecture, but from a vantage point, as if, of relatively little import. Given some of the flamboyant political persona associated with Foucault, it is  no surprise that his prudence when discussing his own society goes so unremarked so often. And, he turns the rise of Giscard into a turning moment in French history (197). But it means one misunderstands him easily.

Now, for Foucault the awareness among the technocrats that France is in economic crisis is triggered by the 1973 oil crisis. Foucault's interpretation of it is worthy of attention, but I skip to the effect of it (which gives a sense of his analysis of it):  

Liberalism, that is to say, the total, unrestricted integration of the French economy in an internal, European, and world market, was the choice which appeared, first of all, as the only way to be able to rectify the erroneous investment choices made in the previous period because of interventionist objectives, techniques, and so on; so, liberalism was the only means of correcting these investment errors by taking into account the new factor of the high cost of energy, which was in reality only the formation of a market price for energy. (196)

Crucially, then, the diffusion of the ORDO template means in France not just a correction on Keynesian countercyclical dirigisme, but more importantly an insertion of France into a new kind of political economy in which energy costs would be (potentially) high and a submission (to use a Hayekian phrase) to the discipline of impersonal market forces. For students of the EU Foucault's observation is key because it suggests that from a French political perspective, the EU's Delors era (starting in 1985) originates in a change of intellectual climate of the 70s. 

Foucault's discussion of French experience with social security and the negative income tax anticipates the far more elaborate treatment (and much to recommend) of American neoliberal (recall) family policy by Melinda Cooper (Family Values).  But while interesting today I skip  to Foucault's conclusion:

Full employment and voluntarist growth [of the Keynesian era] are renounced in favor of integration in a market economy. But this entails a fund of a floating population, of a liminal, infra- or supra-liminal population, in which the assurance mechanism will enable each to live, after a fashion, and to live in such a way that he can always be available for possible work, if market conditions require it. This is a completely different system from that through which eighteenth and nineteenth century capitalism was formed and developed, when it had to deal with a peasant population which was a possible constant reservoir of manpower. When the economy functions as it does now, when the peasant population can no longer ensure that kind of endless fund of manpower, this fund has to be formed in a completely different way. This other way is the assisted population, which is actually assisted in a very liberal and much less bureaucratic and disciplinary way than it is by a system focused on full employment which employs mechanisms like those of social security. Ultimately, it is up to people to work if they want or not work if they don’t. Above all there is the possibility of not forcing them to work if there is no interest in doing so. They are merely guaranteed the possibility of minimal existence at a given level, and in this way the neo-liberal policy can be got to work. (207)

Now, what's important, and remarkable, is that Foucault is not claiming to unmask. On his presentation, the new system is not hidden. It's a self-conscious construct of French technocracy explicit in "the speeches, writings, and texts." (194) It involves the creation of a floating population that is not starving, but available (note the modality) for possible work. And the intention is to keep this population above subsistence by a safety-net. The pay-off is both a more efficient and productive economy that is capable of giving consumers what they wish in a high cost energy environment as well as reduce the amount of compulsion in society. Because unlike the friends/partisans of taylorist social democracy, Foucault tacitly grants their critics that the previous era of full employment also involved a lot of forced homogeneity.+

Since plans for negative income tax and basic income are still thought radical (despite the earned income tax credit and equivalencies elsewhere), we must acknowledge that Foucault's diagnosis is in some sense premature. And as Cooper shows, when neoliberal ideas where implemented, when political winds followed, they involve non-trivial amount of force with an ideology of moral hazard--many more sticks than carrot we might say. From our vantage point, then, neoliberalism never arrived fully (because it was hijacked by intrinsically conservative ideology). 

 

 

 

Polanyi (Karl), Adam Smith, The Great Transformation, and Credit.

The presence or absence of markets or money does not necessarily affect the economic system of a primitive society-this refutes the nineteenth-century myth that money was an invention the appearance of which inevitably transformed a society by creating markets, forcing the pace of the division of labor, and releasing man's natural propensity to barter, truck, and exchange. Orthodox economic history, in effect, was based on an immensely exaggerated view of the significance of markets as such. A "certain isolation;' or, perhaps, a "tendency to seclusion" is the only economic trait that can be correctly inferred from their absence; in respect to the internal organization of an economy, their presence or absence need make no difference.
   The reasons are simple. Markets are not institutions functioning mainly within an economy, but without. They are meeting place of long-distance trade. Local markets proper are of little consequence. Moreover, neither long-distance nor local markets are essentially competitive, and consequently there is, in either case, but little pressure to create territorial trade, a so-called internal or national market. Every one of these assertions strikes at some axiomatically held assumption of the classical economists, yet they follow closely from the facts as they appear in the light of modern research.
   The logic of the case is, indeed, almost the opposite of that underlying the classical doctrine. The orthodox teaching started from the individual's propensity to barter; deduced from it the necessity of local markets, as well as of division of labor; and inferred, finally, the necessity of trade, eventually of foreign trade, including even long distance trade. In the light of our present knowledge we should almost reverse the sequence of the argument: the true starting point is long distance trade, a result of the geographical location of goods, and of the "division of labor" given by location. Long-distance trade often engenders markets, an institution which involves acts of barter, and, if money is used, of buying and selling, thus, eventually, but by no means necessarily, offering to some individuals an occasion to indulge in their propensity for bargaining and haggling.--Karl Polanyi (1944) The Great Transformation, p. 61-62

Polanyi's official target here is the "nineteenth century myth," treated as "orthodox economic history," of the "classical economists" in which money causes the creation of markets and so facilitates the division of labor. This nineteenth century myth, in turn, adopts a theory of human nature theory, which includes the "propensity to barter, truck, and exchange," a reference to Smith's account of the origin of the division of labor.  And this propensity can (finally) express itself in the developing markets (and division of labor). 

The chapter I am quoting has been enormously influential in economic sociology, generating, somewhat ironically as Jens Beckert argues, a huge scholarly literature on embeddedness, and a certain kind of soft-marxist and republican political economy now fashionable again. I cannot tell you how often I read purported refutations of Adam Smith, classical economics, or liberalism more generally that echo Polanyi. I find this amusing because the story Polanyi tells after the "true starting point" is pretty much David Hume's account of the rise of commercial society in "Of Commerce" (except that Hume is more focused on the causes of productivity and adopts a kind of labor theory of value) and (recall) Smith's own account of Europe in Book III of Wealth of Nations (which, admittedly, Smith calls "retrograde" and does not rely on a labor theory of value.) But my interest today is not in defending the Enlightened Scots.

Polanyi's theory of the great transformation treats the development of markets as an imposition of the mercantile national and nationalizing state on towns and country that resisted this.* And this imposition inverted a kind of natural or at least better order of things: "Instead of economy being embedded in social relations, social relations are embedded in the economic system." (60)

And where markets did originally (before the great transformation) arise, they are hemmed in by local  restrictions, such that "Local markets are, essentially, neighborhood markets, and, though important to the life of the community, they nowhere show any sign of reducing the prevailing economic system to their pattern." (66) In other words, prior to the great transformation, markets are tamed by political life and serve community needs. And this story has an enormous pull on communitarians, social democrats, christian democrats and others partially nostalgic for a lost world. (Marxists tend to play a double game here: promoting the disaffection of the nostalgics, but accepting capitalism's destruction as needed for a better future.)

Now, when liberals confront the Polanyi style story, in response they sometimes note that the taming of markets also involves repeated acts of violence, but generally they tend to trot out the sudden upward curve of growing prosperity (wealth and consumption) since the industrial revolution. And the more insidious liberals may even justify colonialism and imperialism because those born late (including the descendents of surviving natives) benefit greatest from the creative destruction that follows from the spread of markets embedded in this curve.+ So, rather than addressing the roots of nostalgia generated by the present status quote, these liberals offer a consequentialist account about the status quo in terms of the good-making features of submitting to forces beyond most community's control (a great financial power, perhaps, excepted). Despite my (skeptical) liberal sympathies, it is obvious that the liberal response won't persuade. (That point is compatible with the further fact that most nostalgic folk are unwilling, in practice, to give up the comforts of modern life.)  

Polanyi had kind of anticipated the response. For, Polanyi pre-market societies are characterized by a different fundamental motive than market societies: the "transformation implies a change in the motive of action on the part of the members of society; for the motive of subsistence that of gain must be substituted." (43-44) And while Polanyi does not say this explicitly, a society based on  gain is in no sense properly reciprocal. (Here Polanyi cheats a bit because he relies on the reader to view gain as zero-sum not mutual.)

In the few words remaining in the Digression, I can't settle the debate. But in returning to Polanyi, I noticed a curious absence in Polanyi's argument. He completely misses that the primitive economies of medieval europe were suffused with debt; as a leading authority puts it, "it was an important part of medieval life."** People had to make "many deals on credit to allow consumption." (Christine Desan Making Money, 214) Now, Graeber has much of interest to say, also to philosophers, about the role of virtual money in such credit/debt patterns (and perhaps being the original form of money). But here I just want to note an important effect, that a society characterized by mutual credit/debt relations was enmeshed in open ended mutual acrimony and litigation (Desan 218ff.).

So, the social relations that embed pre-market society, if there is such a thing, is one of open ended mutual score-keeping (of mutual loans) and mutual promises of repayment that themselves are potentially precarious, and potential open-ended conflict about trying to call in outstanding debts. And while, if Desan is to believed, it is true that matters were worse in medieval England - because of the English policy of making low denomination coinage scarce --, medieval England is the source of the beginning of the great transformation (recall this post on Adam Smith's account on the origin of capitalism) and so highly relevant to evaluating Polanyi's argument (Desan also names him as one of her targets early in her book). 

That is to say, one way to understand the great transformation is that it liberated ordinary people from being routinely in each other's debt, that is, a suffocating embrace of unsteady and stifling mutual obligations that could be called in at the worst possible moments. And in particular, because these credit obligations predictably generated lots of mutual conflicts, they created an opportunity for authorities to settle conflict. This may have helped develop the rule of law in the very long run, but it is pretty obvious in the interest of the powerful to have the not so powerful be in regular conflict with each other and need their mediating/legal services to settle conflict among ordinary people. This form of social embeddedness undoubtedly helped ensure the long-term stability of this mode of governance.   

 

 

 

14 February 1979: Foucault on Debt and the Neo-Kantianisn of Neo-liberalism (XIX)

The second important point in this neo-liberal program is the question of conformable actions (actions conformes). This theory of conformable actions, this programming of conformable actions, is essentially found in a text which was actually one of the great charters of contemporary German policy. It is a posthumous text by Eucken which appeared in 1951 or 1952, called Grundsätze der Wirtschaftspolitik (the foundations of economic policy) and which is, as it were, the other, practical side of the text called Grundlagen der Nationalökonomie published a dozen years earlier, which was the theoretical side. In this Foundations these Fundamental principles of economic policy, Eucken tells us that liberal government, which must be perpetually vigilant and active, must intervene in two ways: first, through regulatory actions (actions régulatrices) and second, through organizing actions (actions ordonnatrices).
Regulatory actions first of all. We should not forget that Eucken is the son of Eucken, the neo-Kantian Nobel prize-winner of the beginning of the twentieth century. As a good Kantian, Eucken says: How should government intervene? It should intervene in the form of regulatory actions, that is to say, it must intervene in fact on economic processes when intervention is imperative for conjunctural reasons. “The economic process always leads to temporary frictions, to modifications which risk giving rise to exceptional situations with difficulties of adaptation and more or less serious repercussions on some groups.” It is necessary then, he says, not to intervene on the mechanisms of the market economy, but on the conditions of the market. Rigorously following the Kantian idea of regulation, intervening on the conditions of the market would mean identifying, accepting, and giving free play to the three typical and fundamental tendencies in the market, but in order to encourage these tendencies and somehow push them to their limit and full reality. These three tendencies are: the tendency to the reduction of costs, the tendency to the reduction of the profit of the enterprise, and finally, the provisional, localized tendency to increased profit, either through a decisive and massive reduction of prices, or by an improvement in production. These are the three tendencies that regulation of the market, that regulatory action must take into account, inasmuch as
they are themselves tendencies of the regulation of the market.
In clear terms this means first of all that the main objective of regulatory action will necessarily be price stability, understood not as fixed prices but as control of inflation. Consequently all other objectives apart from price stability can only be secondary and, so to speak, adjuncts. At any rate, they can never be the primary objective. In particular, the primary objectives must not be the maintenance purchasing power, the maintenance of full employment, or even balancing the balance of payments.
Second, what does this mean for the instruments to be used? It means first of all using the policy of credit, that is to say, establishing the discount rate. It means using foreign trade by reducing the credit balance when you want to contain the rise in foreign prices. Shifts in taxation will also be employed, but always moderate ones, when seeking to act on saving or investment. But none of the kind of instruments used by planning will be resorted to, namely: price control, support for a particular sector of the market, systematic job creation, or public investment. All these forms of intervention must be rigorously banished and replaced by the pure market instruments I have just mentioned. The neo-liberal policy with regard to unemployment in particular is perfectly clear. Whatever the rate of unemployment, in a situation of unemployment you absolutely must not intervene directly or in the first place on the unemployment, as if full employment should be a political idea and an economic principle to be saved at any cost. What is to be saved, first of all and above all, is the stability of prices. Price stability will in fact allow, subsequently no doubt, both the maintenance of purchasing power and the existence of a higher level of employment than in an unemployment crisis, but full employment is not an objective and it may be that a reserve of unemployment is absolutely necessary for the economy. As, I think it was Röpke said, what is an unemployed person? He is not someone suffering from an economic disability; he is not a social victim. He is a worker in transit. He is a worker in transit between an unprofitable activity and a more profitable activity. These then, are the regulatory actions.
Organizing actions are more interesting, however, because they bring us closer to the specific object. What are organizing actions? Well, [they are] actions with the function of intervening on conditions of the market, but on more fundamental, structural, and general conditions of the market than those I have just been talking about.  Michel Foucault, 14 February 1979,  translated by Graham Burchell, Lecture 6, The Birth of Biopolitics.137-139

After inscriping German neo-liberalism into the history of philosophy by way of Eucken's connection to Husserl (recall this post on the fifth lecture of 7 february 1979), and the dueling (recall) receptions of Max Weber, Foucault now has a bit of more fun and treats Eucken as a neo-Kantian.* Perhaps this means Foucault thinks of Husserl, not implausibly, as a species of Kantianism. The underlying conceptual point, that for the ORDOs markets need to constructed, is, thereby, reinforced. They are to be contrasted with earlier liberalism(s) and, perhaps, what he tends to call American-anarcho liberalism (p. 117--sometimes he speaks of American anarcho-capitalism), for whom the market is taken to be natural or spontaneous. 

While Foucault treats organizing actions as more interesting in virtue, I  think, of their closer connection to biopolitics, today I focus on the regulatory actions.  I do so, in part, because in many way the ORDOs have been so influential on this score that their significance may be worth pausing over, despite the seeming banality (to Foucault and us) of them. 

First, the (constructed) proper functioning market has three tendencies: "(i) the tendency to the reduction of costs, (ii) the tendency to the reduction of the profit of the enterprise, and finally, (iii) the provisional, localized tendency to increased profit, either through a decisive and massive reduction of prices, or by an improvement in production." The first tendency is good for consumers who over time can buy more for less. So, while Foucault is right to note that the primary aim is not purchasing power, it falls out, as it were, for free in proper functioning markets. In fact, the first natural tendency also means that deflation is a natural and expected byproduct of competitive market. And that inflation is, temporary  shocks excepted, itself the product of monopoly enhancing, juridical-political interventions in the market. 

The previous comment is a reminder that on the constructive perspective, monopoly is not just an economic but also, and primarily, a political problem that functions to undermine the Ordo's political purpose for the market: a domain where, for all its inequity, bad luck, and perhaps exploitation, no group can be too powerful (recall this post on Mestmäcker.) 

Strikingly, Foucault does not mention the Weimar experience. But if price stability is the primary aim, and markets naturally tend toward lower prices, then in ideal circumstances, when markets are competitive, policy must offer some countervailing inflationary measures.  I would have to go back to Eucken to see if this is so. What this tells us is that in the constructive framework, there are regulatory policies apt for when markets are competitive and different kinds of regulatory policies that are apt when markets are less competitive. If you look that the policies mentioned -- "the policy of credit, that is to say, establishing the discount rate;... using foreign trade... to contain the rise in foreign prices; [modest] shifts in taxation..., when seeking to act on saving or investment" -- these can all be adjusted to stimulate or reduce inflation. 

Second, this approach also provides one with epistemic access to knowing when a market is less than fully competitive; that is, when a corporation is capable of more than occasional, but structurally high profits. This also signals concentrated power, which is dangerous politically and economically. This is why anti-cartel policy is so important to ORDOs from the start. (Foucault has insightful things to say about this in the same lecture.)

As an aside, Foucault is silent on another, distinctive (Kantian) feature of the Ordo regulatory policies: that these, in turn, must be rule-following. This has the good-making consequence of being predictable to agents in the market-place, and so reduce uncertainty. It also has the good-making consequence to an ORDO of creating conditions that minimize the possibility of political rent-seeking (which violate the rules).  (I must check whether Foucault notes this in future lectures.)

Third, this regulatory framework incentivizes open-ended technological productivity enhancing innovation because that's the main way corporations can capture extra profits. Interestingly enough, Foucault notes this: social policy can develop "organizing actions" that create the social pre-conditions for such technological improvements in generating a productive workforce capable of adapting to open-ended changing circumstances. This spirit of adaptation is a key feature neoliberals inherit of Lippmann. In the future I return to this.

Finally, Foucault has no time for the tendency among lazy critics of ORDO-liberalism to read them as applied Schmittians. (This is by now a trope of scholarship.)+ That ordinary markets give "risk giving rise to exceptional situations" is not an invitation to a state of emergency.  Rather it is an invitation to develop a rule based response or to constitute circumstances that prevent it from recurring. This means that for the ORDOs the business of regulatory policy (at both the level of regulatory actions and organizing actions) is always unfinished, it's perpetually vigilant and active.

On Quentin Skinner On the Practice Use of Historical Studies (I)

We ought, I think, to be prepared to ask ourselves quite aggressively what is supposed to be the practical use, here and now, of our historical studies. It has never seemed to me adequate to reply that they satisfy a natural curiosity, and it seems to me dangerously self-indulgent to suggest, as Lord Acton once did, that 'our studies ought to be all but purposeless', especially in a culture as committed as ours has become to a banausic view of 'relevance'. The accusation of antiquarianism is, in short, one that troubles me deeply, and it is one that all professional  historians ought, I think, to stand ready to answer, at least to the satisfaction of their own consciences. We must expect to be asked, and must not fail to ask ourselves, what is supposed to be the point of it all....

[O]ne of the ways - perhaps the only way - of improving our understanding will be to go back to the historical juncture at which this way of thinking about politics was first articulated and developed. We shall then be able to see how the concepts we still invoke were initially defined, what purposes they were intended to serve, what view of public power they were used to underpin. This in turn may enable us to acquire a self-conscious understanding of a set of concepts that we now employ unselfconsciously and, to some degree, even uncomprehendingly. It is arguable, in short, that we need to become intellectual historians if we are to make sense not merely of this but of many comparable aspects of our present moral and political world.
    This is hardly a new thought. It is the thought animating F. W. Maitland's last and most dazzling group of essays---Quentin Skinner, (1998) Liberty Before Liberalism, pp. 107-110

βαναυσικός can be translated as 'pertaining to mechanics.' In English 'banausic' seems to have been coined as a pejorative in the middle of the nineteenth century (see here); this reflecting aristocratic prejudice. But is pretty clear that Skinner means to say that in our culture 'relevance' has a kind of practical or mundane sense. And, while he may well feel some regret over this fact, he seems to use 'banausic' in neutral fashion. It is noticeable that dictionaries often use 'utilitarian' when explaining banausic; because part of the overall argument of the book is that the purportedly liberal utilitarians (from Paley to Sidgwick) have displaced the neo-roman sense of liberty with a different sense by using less than fully convincing arguments.+ 

After rejecting pure antiquarianism -- a charge that arises from Skinner's early work -- and an "essentially aesthetic" (p. 107) justification for engaging in historical studies, Skinner takes up a practical justification for historical studies in his extended version of his justly famous (1997) inaugural lecture. He is unusually forthright, perhaps historicist, in suggesting that in our culture* antiquarianism (and aesthetics, perhaps) are not properly self-justifying. Strikingly, Skinner does not claim to be offering a justification to the wider or interested public (of the sort rejected recently (recall here) by Zena Hitz (and her book)), but rather he hopes to craft a response that can convince the "consciences" of his fellow "professional historians." Skinner leaves it to the reader to figure out what standards of judgment enter into such disciplined conscience.

Part of the answer can be found in the second half of the passage I quoted above. The point of historical practice of intellectual historians is to generate a species of  "self-conscious understanding of a set of concepts that we now employ unselfconsciously." This is rather Socratic. Skinner wishes to provide a form of self-understanding of (to switch to Wittgenstein) fundamental concepts habituated in our form of life and, then, indirectly, to make questioning of these forms of life possible.* (I return to my 'indirectly' below.)

Skinner is cautious in the way he conveys the questioning part. He explicitly distances himself from moralising historians, who are likely to be enthusiasts or indignant when "surveying the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind." (p 118) He prefers the "aloof" kind of historian. Yet, he also suggests that in our status quo, we do not understand our most fundamental concepts; we deploy them 'unselfconsciously" and "most of us do not know" what some of these may mean. (p. 109). It is worth remarking that it is left unclear if this is a typically liberal disease or, as seems more likely, a perennial, or durable, feature of political life. 

So, the task of the professional historian, who wishes to improve thinking about politics for most of us not in the know, is to remove the pervasive ignorance about core even hegemonic  (p. 117) moral and political concepts. So, while the justification is offered to fellow historians, it is the many, or the public, which is supposed to benefit from the exercise. One cannot help admire such philanthropic impulse!

Above I used 'indirectly' because while Skinner leaves no doubt that he thinks that within "the traditions of thought about the character of the liberal state" (p. 119), the arguments that displaced the neo-roman conception of liberty are based on fallacious reasoning; at one point he claims that "the conclusion has already been inserted into the premise." (p. 115)).+ Despite exposing the argumentative flaws in a certain kind of liberal self-understanding (recall), he leaves it to the reader's autonomous, ruminating (120) judgment to decide whether the past choices "between different possible worlds" (p. 117) were right. So, the professional historian exercises vocational self-command. 

Since Skinner is a celebrated and much admired historian of our age, we can say that he has found a way to question moral and political pieties without attracting Socratic notoriety. Perhaps, this indifference to such foundational challenge is characteristic of liberal society.

I close with two thoughts. First, Skinner very adroitly prevents a certain kind of philosopher, who thinks the origin of concepts is irrelevant to present self-understanding, of raising the genetic fallacy. Skinner claims that by retracing concepts to their first definitions and use may help uncover what is now in some sense suppressed from us (recall: "how the concepts we still invoke were initially defined, what purposes they were intended to serve, what view of public power they were used to underpin. This in turn may enable us to acquire a self-conscious understanding of a set of concepts that we now employ unselfconsciously and, to some degree, even uncomprehendingly.")

Skinner doesn't offer us an argument why this is the best or the only way toward self-understanding (which he need not insist on); nor does he explain how this is supposed to work at an abstract level. He does not need to explain it because he has just exhibited/shown it in the book. I agree firmly with Skinner (who explicitly associates this with Foucaultian "archaeological analysis" (112)) that returning to the historical moment when concepts enter into practice/fashion is often very illuminating on the possibility spaces they help open up, and foreclose; and so heartily endorse his practice. This is because when concepts are first introduced, and the principles they animate, they are often explicated and contested by those who understand the foreseeable effects of uptake. This helps shed light on how concepts become part of an "ideology" (23; 59; 77) or life-affirming practice.

Second, one may wonder whether removing the lack of ignorance about core moral political concepts and principles improves thinking about politics. I am not here questioning the Enlightenment faith that removal of ignorance is conducive to better thought in some sense. Rather, what I have in mind is something more roundabout. Skinner explicitly endorses Pocock's idea that what is revealed by the "intellectual" historian (101) is "the changing political languages in which societies talk to themselves." (p. 105) One can agree that Namier's position -- that is, that how we talk politically acts "as the merest ex post facto rationalisations of political behaviour" -- is undoubtedly too narrow an understanding of such talk. Skinner is right to object to this because what one might wish "to legitimise [politically]...depends on what courses of action you can plausibly range under existing normative principles." (p. 105) 

But he then goes on to claim that "professed principles...will nevertheless help to shape and limit what lines of action you can successfully pursue." (p. 105) Let's grant that this is so in some great political cultures which have a juridical sensibility. Even so, this is a peculiar claim.** I do not just mean that wholly new principles may be invented or old ones reinterpreted to legitimate and even explicate the manner of success of actions after the fact (as Namier suggested), but rather, and more importantly for one's craft as political philosopher, that in order to grasp the nature of politics we must leave open the possibility of actions devoid of legitimacy and ungrounded in principles, and yet successful, even necessary, after a fashion. 

 

14 February 1979: Foucault's Polemics with 'the Left' (XVII)

When you talk about contemporary neoliberalism, whether German or any other kind, you generally get three types of response.

The first is that from the economic point of view neo-liberalism is no more than the reactivation of old, secondhand economic theories.
The second is that from the sociological point of view it is just a way of establishing strictly market relations in society.
And finally, the third response is that from a political point of view neo-liberalism is no more than a cover for a generalized administrative intervention by the state which is all the more profound for being insidious and hidden beneath the appearances of a neo-liberalism.
You can see that these three types of response ultimately make neoliberalism out to be nothing at all, or anyway, nothing but always the same thing, and always the same thing but worse. That is to say: it is just Adam Smith revived; second, it is the market society that was decoded and denounced in Book I of Capital; and third, it is the generalization of state power, that is to say, it is Solzhenitsyn on a world scale.

Adam Smith, Marx, Solzhenitsyn, laissez-faire; society of the market and spectacle, the world of the concentration camp and the Gulag: broadly speaking these are the three analytical and critical frameworks with which this problem of neo-liberalism is usually approached, and which therefore enable it to be turned into practically nothing at all, repeating the same type of critique for two hundred, one hundred, or ten years. Now what I would like to show you is precisely that neo-liberalism is really something else.--Michel Foucault, 14 February 1979,  translated by Graham Burchell, Lecture 6, The Birth of Biopolitics. 129-130.

In lecture five, Foucault had identified Marcuse's criticism of capitalism with Sombart's. Foucault is disparaging about the line of argument ("confused"), and, more striking yet, had claimed that the Nazis had appropriated it; and "indeed in opposition to this destruction of society by the [capitalist]* economy and state that the Nazis proposed to do what they wished to do." (114) The claim is rather damning toward Marcuse because in his own voice, Foucault describes Sombart's voyage (not unfairly) from "quasi-Marxism to quasi-Nazism." (113) So, one way to understand Foucault's criticism of Marcuse, is not just that his criticism is old-fashioned, but the criticism is of a dangerous sort: in its diagnosis it contributes to the very problem it wishes to analyze.

So, lurking here (recall this post drawing on ideas by Niko Kolodny) are ideas about responsible speech and a polemic -- calling somebody a fellow traveler of Nazism counts as polemic -- about how to criticize and engage with liberalism and neoliberalism. That is to say, in addition to the complex positive argument of Birth of Biopolitics, which I have argued is itself a contribution to the liberal art of government, there is lurking a polemic against a bad style of criticizing liberalism in virtue of this criticism contributing to a species of totalitarian thought. And so, the lectures ask us to consider it as an exemplary form of responsible speech.

At the start of lecture six, in the passage quoted above, he addresses what we might call the general culture of anti-liberalism in certain circles. I actually think Foucault reveals some of his irritation because while his sense is clear he literally contradicts himself (e.g, X is nothing and simultaneously X is bad). The three kinds of criticism he rejects all end up flattening liberalism,  and turn 'neoliberalism' merely into a word of disapproval. 

As an aside, it is a bit sad that these lectures were only published in 2004 (in French) and in translation in 2008. For, the problem he identifies is extremely visible, as I documented, in David Harvey's very influential (2005) A brief History of Neoliberalism. I am not suggesting Harvey would have felt obliged to take on board Foucault's reservations, but given the celebrity of Foucault he or his reviewers might have responded to them.  Having said that, and this returns me to the fifth and sixth lectures, the enduringness of the anti-liberal tropes in a certain part of the 'Left' suggests it would have made little difference. Because we don't get Foucault's thoughts on why the tropes endure I leave it at that here.

With the critique of Marcuse in the background, we can discern that Foucault is making four critical claims about the three kinds purported critical analyses of liberalism. First, they are false. Liberalism "is really something else."* They fail to grasp liberalism in its historical specificity and its evolution. The whole Birth of Biopolitics is meant to support this claim. Second, the criticisms are intellectually lazy because merely repetition. And again, the lectures show what would be required to begin to engage with the details of liberalism. (As regular readers know, I am trying to keep track critically of this feature of the lectures in these digressions.) Third, the standard criticisms of liberalisms contribute to a culture that makes Nazism if not possible, at least appear more legitimate. Here, Foucault comes extremely close to accepting (recall this post on the road to serfdom thesis as an ideal type) the ORDO interpretation of history. And it is, I think, among the best evidence for recent interpretations of Foucault as a kind of fellow-traveler of neoliberalism. Fourth, the standard criticisms are analytically useless (because they flatten what needs to be explored in detail).

It is pretty clear that in addition to Marcuse, Foucault has his sights on the style of criticism of liberalism made popular (recall) by Karl Polanyi (recall also this post, in particular, on the Mises-Polanyi debate). Strikingly, Karl Polanyi is never mentioned in the lectures, while his brother is. This Foucault-ian criticism of Polanyi has recently been articulated in impressive fashion by Melinda Cooper in (2017) Family Values, itself an impressive contribution to the critical study of neoliberalism. She is a lot more critical than Foucault is (recall here; and with modest criticism here). The not naming, other than Marcuse, of targets -- undoubtedly lots of bien-pensant French intellectuals are included -- makes this feature of the lectures a bit frustrating to the later historian.+

One final point on the third criticism. In the fourth lecture, Foucault had (recall) already offered a searing criticism of Marxism as lacking an art of government. What he adds here, is that in its modern guise, it inspires an insipid and dangerous criticism of liberalism in which neoliberalism is just a cover, a masquerade, for a kind of totalitarian form of oppression (cf. Harvey). Rather than being informative this makes it impossible to make important distinctions.** And, if I understand Foucault correctly, the failure to make such distinctions contributes to making a Nazi culture possible. We might say that Ernst Thälmann's tendency to treat the Social Democrats as the real enemy is illustrative of the dangers of such a failure in thought. I am pretty sure -- and this is speculative -- that this is why Foucault doesn't even mention Pinochet (then fresh in memory). And treats the dangers of liberalism's flirtation with benevolent despots (recall for example lecture 3) in terms of the (more distant) physiocrats. 

The question is whether Foucault's point generalizes. As noted above, and as he rightly notes ORDO-liberal thought embraces, as an ideal type, a road to serfdom thesis in which lots of social phenomena are symptoms of, and simultaneously with "internal necessity" (111) contribute to, the rise of Nazism. If Foucault thinks the criticism generalizes, then this, too, is one of his targets. (I think this only gets addressed in the final lecture(s)--stay tuned!) And what is at stake here, is the general utility of the manner in which Weberian ideal types are deployed in (German) social science of the twentieth century.++

On (Wireless) Networks, Secret Police, and the Information State (via Hannah Arendt and Walter Lippmann)

The only important addition to our knowledge, the contents of the Smolensk Archive (published in 1958 by Merle Fainsod) have demonstrated to what an extent dearth of the most elementary documentary and statistical material will remain the decisive handicap for all inquiries into this period of Russian history. For although the archives (discovered at party headquarters in Smolensk by German intelligence and then captured by the American occupation force in Germany) contain some 200,000 pages of documents and are virtually intact for the period from 1917 to 1938, the amount of information they fail to give us is truly amazing. Even with "an almost unmanageable abundance of material on the purges" from 1929 to 1937, they contain no indication of the number of victims or any other vital statistical data. Wherever figures are given, they are hopelessly contradictory, the various organizations all giving different sets, and all we learn beyond doubt is that many of them, if they ever existed, were withheld at the source by order of the government.
Also, the Archive contains no information on the relations between the various branches of authority, "between Party, the military and NKVD," or between party and government, and it is silent about the channels of communication and command. In short, we learn nothing about the organizational structure of the regime...In other words, while it has always been known that official Soviet publications served propaganda purposes and were utterly unreliable, it now appears that reliable source and statistical material probably never existed anywhere.--Hannah Arendt The Origin of Totalitarianism, Preface to Part Three, xxxi (June 1966)

In her analysis of totalitarianism Arendt calls attention to the "multiplication of offices" in one-party dictatorships (522). This permits "constant shifting of power" (among party, state, office, etc.) by the leadership in order to generate permanent domination by the leader (53). One side-effect of this multiplication and constant motion is the undermining of competent state capacity (564).*

A key feature of this is impaired state capacity, which is worsened by the culture of secrecy, pervasive censorship and propaganda,  is that the state and its leadership lack reliable information even about itself. And part of the problem is that the culture of trust that supports a whole system of data gathering, collecting, and dissemination is constantly undermined in a totalitarian context.+ 

That the state is a machinery of record, a collector and disseminator of accurate public data was (recall) the central argument of Lippmann’s book Public Opinion (1922). A lot of our social practices, inside and outside the market, presuppose a social infrastructure in which the machinery of record is reliable; public authorities and private actors can plan their activities.

Lippmann’s underlying idea was not wholly original. As Nick Cowen reminded me recently, one can see the germ of it articulated nicely in John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty that “the greatest dissemination of power consistent with efficiency” should be allied with “the greatest possible centralisation of information, and diffusion of it from the centre.” Mill adds that "this central organ should have a right to know all that is done, and its special duty should be that of making the knowledge acquired in one place available for others."

To be a machinery of record requires state bureaucracies that operate by clear and impartial rules, statistical offices that collect data, and public record-keeping that is reliable and accessible to all with minimal thresholds. This immense and often nearly invisible machinery makes possible both political contestation and many private individual and collective decision making. As Lippmann, himself an accomplished journalist, emphasized even the very free press that reports the news and holds politicians accountable presupposes a proper functioning machinery of record (of births, deaths, marriages, licensing, etc.).

Totalitarian and authoritarian regimes have a tendency to undermine the machinery of record for a whole mixture of ends. But this is also true in states in which petty corruption takes a firm hold: once the opportunities and culture of bribery take over, say, customs house and farm or building inspectors, the data they report must be treated as fiction. In societies where corruption is normalized, the machinery of record cannot hope to stabilize expectations and facilitate planning. 

But, Arendt also notes that within structural undermining of the Weberian bureaucracy, there is "the utopian goal of the totalitarian secret police." (567) This goal is the development of a map -- we would say network--  of "the relations and cross-relationships of the entire population." (567) With the increase of computer power and the drop in its cost this goal is now not just feasible, but almost certainly within reach of public and private institutions. Arendt's concern is not the ways by which this network can be exploited to some policy end; but rather that a full map of the network allows for disappearance of (shall we say) nodes on even whole regions of the network. Survival in a totalitarian state requires, in addition to Luck, disappearing from the grid.

So, on Arendt's account then totalitarianism is characterized by two opposing movements: (i) the structural undermining of the state as machinery of record; and (ii) simultaneously the development of a secret map of the networked characteristics of the population. It is important to recognize that these are not in contradiction with each other. This is not just because the networked population map is relatively flat. Rather, given the effect of (i) on (ii) it is because in this map, once shadow-bookkeeping can't be trusted either, the state's activities become invisible to itself. This is why, despite the fearsome capacity to kill and terrorize, and (say) build at gargantuan scale, totalitarian and authoritarian regimes tend to be relatively hollow.

Naturally, this analysis raises non-trivial questions about political contexts in which the machinery of record and the networked map are properly functioning and not kept a secret. This question can be explored by way of the present political and public health fascination to use networked maps of wireless phone usage to control the spread of a virus, and people.

 

 

On the Origin of Capitalism; On Ellen Meiksins Wood, and Adam Smith

it was unfixed, variable rents responsive to market imperatives that in England stimulated the development of commodity production, the improvement of productivity, and self-sustaining economic development. In France, precisely because peasants typically enjoyed possession of land at fixed and nominal rents, no such stimulus existed. It was, in other words, not the opportunities afforded by the market but rather its imperatives that drove petty commodity producers to accumulate....The same process created a highly productive agriculture capable of sustaining a large population not engaged in agricultural production, but also an increasing propertyless mass that would constitute both a large wage-labour force and a domestic market for cheap consumer goods - a type of market with no historical precedent. This is the background to the formation of English industrial capitalism.--Ellen Meiksins Wood (1999 [2017] The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer view, 102-103

Meiksins Wood  (whose book I warmly recommend) relies on a distinction between commerce and capitalism. Commerce is historically ubiquitous; whereas capitalism originated once,  relatively recently in human history (in the English countryside). The former is characterized by voluntary exchanges in which people buy low and sell dear and occurs primarily in (what we may call) arbitrage opportunities. While societies in which commerce exists are durable, their growth potential is limited. The latter occurs from necessity, that is survival, in which in order to survive people engage in ever cheaper and more efficient production of their factor. Growth in capitalism is, in principle, open-ended bounded at some limit by Earth's resources (and internal instability). Crucially, in a capitalist system everybody, or all factors, experiences structural domination by the market: "compulsion lies at the heart of the new economic dynamic." (138)

Meiksins Wood explores the question of the origin of capitalism in order to (use her terminology) denaturalize it (cf. p. 74). In particular, she attacks the idea, which she repeatedly associates with Adam Smith and the phrase associated with him, 'truck, barter, and exchange' (11, 21, 28 75, 193), that there is an "economic man" whose shackles (e.g., feudalism, slavery, trade-protection, etc.) simply need to be undone in order for capitalism to emerge naturally. The idea behind this thought can be found in a famous passage in the Wealth of Nations (hereafter WN): "all systems either of preference or of restraint, therefore, being thus completely taken away, the obvious and simple system of natural liberty establishes itself of its own accord."

For Meiksins Wood, capitalism emerges, as it happens (but this is less important) under a certain version of feudalism, in which, and this is important, 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 (a key word) in light of prevailing, or at the least the abstract perception of prevailing, market conditions. I quote two representative passages: "As for the tenants, they were increasingly subject not only to direct pressures from landlords but also to market imperatives that compelled them to enhance their productivity." (100) And "We can watch the development of a new mentality by observing the landlord's surveyor as he computes the rental value of land on the basis of some more or less abstract principle of market value, and measures it explicitly against the actual rents being paid by customary tenants."  (101) These new kind of leases create the "rupture" (8) that generates the "laws of motion" associated with capitalism "that uniquely compel people to enter the market, to reinvest surpluses and to produce 'efficiently' by improving labour productivity - the laws of competition, profit maximization, and capital accumulation." (16) 

Some other time, perhaps, I'd like to discuss her fascinating treatment of Thomas More and, especially, Locke. And the role of the state in facilitating the growth of capitalism. For now I want to note that one need not be Marxist to appreciate her effort. Determining the historical origin and naire of capitalism is fascinating  and undoubtedly sheds some light on the possibilities, if any, of articulating alternatives or changes to it. This is so, even if one were to reject the commerce vs capitalism distinction. So, for example, if one has a liberal mindset, the relevant distinction is within capitalism: one between mercantilism and commerce (or liberalism). And the liberal is willing to grant that mercantilism is historically prior (albeit not, perhaps, conceptually). 

Above, I suggested that it is not unfair (to Meiksins Wood and Smith) to see Adam Smith as the proper target of Meiksins Wood's analysis. Even so, while reading her book I had the recurring thought that Smith had anticipated her in a key respect. This is not strange because as many authors have noted that despite the pin factory example, Smith seems almost ignorant of the industrial revolution (if he notices it at all), and focuses quite a bit of attention on land rents. For, in fact, Smith calls attention to the very leases singled out by Meiksins Wood, and he concludes his discussion of them: "Those laws and customs so favourable to the yeomanry, have perhaps contributed more to the present grandeur of England than all their boasted regulations of commerce taken together." (Wealth of Nations, 3.2.14, p. 392)

The three features Smith singles out are [i] "When such farmers have a lease for a term of years, they may sometimes find it for their interest to  lay out part of their capital in the further improvement of the farm; because they may sometimes expect to recover it, with a large profit, before the expiration of the lease." & [ii] since the time of Henry VII, the protection of the tenants'  value in improved land by "the action of ejectment" which allowed legal remedy of recovery against premature. (WN 392; in the next paragraph, Smith  notes that some such law was introduced in Scotland already in 1449) 

Before I get to the third feature, I want to stress this is not a side comment, in Smith's analysis. I offer two kinds of evidence. First, when Smith formally analyzes 'rents of land' in (WN 1.11) he describes variable, fixed-term leases of agricultural capitalism described by Meiksins Woods as the exemplary kind: landlords "In adjusting the terms of the lease, the landlord endeavours to leave him [the tennant] no greater share of the produce than what is sufficient to keep up the stock from which he furnishes the seed, pays the labour, and purchases and maintains the cattle and other instruments of husbandry, together with the ordinary profits of farming stock in the neighbourhood. This is evidently the smallest share with which the tenant can content himself without being a loser, and the landlord seldom means to leave him any more." (WN 1.11.1, 160). Throughout the chapter, Smith makes clear that these leases drive productivity and that they represent a conflictual model (and, but I explore this some other time, in some ways even violate our sense of fairness and justice).

Second, Smith praises the Physiocrats (or "Oecenemists"), when in their plans to eliminate French famine and to have French agriculture catch up with English standards, they emulate British practices:  "it has been in consequence of their representations, accordingly, that the agriculture of France has been delivered from several of the oppressions which it  before laboured under. The term during which such a lease can be granted, as will be valid against every future purchaser or proprietor of the land, has been prolonged from nine to twenty-seven years. The antient provincial restraints upon the transportation of corn from one province of the kingdom to another, have been entirely taken away, and the liberty of exporting it to all foreign countries, has been established as the common law of the kingdom in all ordinary cases. (WN 4.9.38, 678);

So, Smith both knows that the paradigmatic cases of rent, which are crucial to the analytic core of his system, are themselves historically conditioned by institutional factors and not eternal pre-existing forms of exchange.* And it is this paradigmatic case that drives commercial development as he sees it. So, why has this not been emphasized (even missed by friends and critics of Smith). This gets me to the third point.

In explaining the downfall of feudalism and monastic estates, Smith emphasizes [iii] that foreign commerce developed vain, new tastes in landlords, who, in order, to increase revenue from their holdings set in motion the kinds of leases which form the backbone of what Meiksins Wood calls agricultural capitalism.  In fact, scholars love to quote the passage, which emphasizes the political effects, of the rise of agricultural capitalism:

The expensive vanity of the landlord made him willing to accept of this condition; and hence the origin of long leases...The tenants having in this manner become independent, and the retainers being dismissed, the great proprietors were no longer capable of interrupting the regular execution of justice, or of disturbing the peace of the country. Having sold their birth-right, not like Esau for a mess of pottage in time of hunger and necessity, but in the wantonness of plenty, for trinkets and baubles, fitter to be the play-things of children than the serious pursuits of men, they became as insignificant as any substantial burgher or tradesman in a city. A regular government was established in the country as well as in the city, nobody having sufficient power to disturb its operations in the one, any more than in the other. (WN 3.4.13-15, p. 421; elsewhere Smith makes the same claim about the demise of feudal, monastic landholding: "But this increase of rent could be got only by granting leases to their tenants, who thereby became in a great measure independent of them.")

Scholars and critics have loved to focus on the moral psychology and providential morality tale, even theodicy, immanent in [iii], which Smith himself attributes to Hume. But there is no doubt that Smith has the very same explanation [i-iii] of the origin of commerce as a social stage in the four stages of development as Meiksins Wood. (Well not entirely the same because she downplays the significance of the existence of foreign trade.) It is in what she calls the slow development of agricultural capitalism made possible by a certain kind of variable but secure lease that Smith sees the great source of England's wealth. These leases represent  the (improving) reproductive potential of the tenant and the discipline of the market-place. 

So, while I think it is correct to say that Smith also propagated the rhetorical seeds of the naturalized version of the origin of capitalism, he is crystal clear about the origin and significance of agricultural capitalism. None of the above is meant to deny that Meiksins Wood and Smith offer different interpretations of the wider moral significance of agricultural capitalism (Smith thinks it generates a new kind of interdependent independence; Meiksins Wood a new kind of structural domination), but about these matters some other time more.