Digressions&Impressions

Some Pre-History on the History and Sociology of Multiple Discovery: Merton, Dicey, Stigler- (etc.)

It may very well, owing to the condition of the world, and especially to the progress of knowledge, present itself at the same time to two or more persons who have had no intercommunication. Bentham and Paley formed nearly at the same date a utilitarian system of morals. Darwin and Wallace, while each ignorant of the other’s labours, thought out substantially the same theory as to the origin of species.--A.V. Dicey [2008] (1905) Lectures on the Relation between Law & Public Opinion in England during the Nineteenth Century, Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, p. 18 n. 6 (based on the 1917 reprint of the second edition).

As regular readers know (recall), I was sent to Dicey because he clearly shaped Milton Friedman's thought at key junctures in the 1940s and 50s. So, I was a bit surprised to encounter the passage quoted above. For, I tend to associate interest in the question of simultaneous invention or multiple discovery with Friedman's friend, George J Stigler (an influential economist) and his son Steven Stigler (a noted historian of statistics). In fairness, the Stiglers are more interested in the law of eponymy. In his (1980) article on that topic, Steven Stigler cites Robert K. Merton's classic and comic (1957) "Priorities in Scientific Discovery: A Chapter in the Sociology of Science." (Merton project was revived in Liam Kofi Bright's well known "On fraud.")

When Merton presented (and first published it) he was a colleague of George Stigler at Columbia University (and also Ernest Nagel). In his (1980) exploration of the law of eponymy, Steven Stigler even attributes to Merton the claim that “all scientific discoveries are in principle multiple." (147) Stigler cites here p. 356 of Merton's 1973 book, The Sociology of Science: Theoretical and Empirical Investigations, which is supposed to be the chapter that reprints the 1957 article. I put it like that because I was unable to find the quoted phrase in the 1957 original (although the idea can certainly be discerned in it, but I don't have the book available to check that page).

Merton himself makes clear that reflection on multiple discovery is co-extensive with modern science because priority disputes are endemic in it. In fact, his paper is, of course, a reflection on why the institution of science generates such disputes. Merton illustrates his points with choice quotes from scientific luminaries on the mores and incentives of science that generate such controversies, many of which are studies in psychological and social acuity and would not be out of place in Rochefoucauld's Maximes. Merton himself places his own analysis in the ambit of the social theory of Talcott Parsons (another important influence on George Stigler) and Durkheim. 

The passage quoted from Dicey's comment is a mere footnote, which occurs in a broader passage on the role of public opinion in shaping development of the law. And, in particular, that many developments are the effect of changes in prevaling public opinion, which are the effect of in the inventiveness of "some single thinker or school of thinkers." (p. 17) The quoted footnote is attached to the first sentence of remarkably long paragraph (which I reproduce at the bottom of this post).* The first sentence is this: "The course of events in England may often at least be thus described: A new and, let us assume, a true idea presents itself to some one man of originality or genius; the discoverer of the new conception, or some follower who has embraced it with enthusiasm, preaches it to his friends or disciples, they in their turn become impressed with its importance and its truth, and gradually a whole school accept the new creed." And the note is attached to 'genius.'

Now, often when one reads about multiple discovery (or simultaneous invention) it is often immediately contrasted to a 'traditional' heroic or genius model (see Wikipedia for an example, but I have found more in a literature survey often influenced by Wikipedia). But Dicey's footnote recognizes that in the progress of knowledge, and presumably division of labor with (a perhaps imperfect) flow of ideas, multiple discovery should become the norm (and the traditional lone genius model out of date).

In fact, Dicey's implicit model of the invention and dissemination of new views is explicitly indebted to Mill's and Taylor's account of originality in chapter 3 of On Liberty. (Dicey only mentions Mill.) Dicey quotes Mill's and Taylor's text: "The initiation of all wise or noble things, comes and must come from individuals; generally at first from some one individual." (Dicey adds that this is also true of  folly or a new form of baseness.)   

The implicit model is still very popular. MacAskill's account (recall) of Benjamin Lay's role in Quaker abolitionism (and itself a model for social movement building among contemporary effective altruists) is quite clearly modelled on Mill and Taylor's model. I don't mean to suggest Mill and Taylor invent the model; it can be discerned in Jesus and his Apostles and his been quite nicely theorized by Ibn Khaldun in his account of prophetic leadership. Dicey's language suggests he recognizes the religious origin of the model because he goes on (in the very next sentence of the long paragraph) as follows: "These apostles of a new faith are either persons endowed with special ability or, what is quite as likely, they are persons who, owing to their peculiar position, are freed from a bias, whether moral or intellectual, in favour of prevalent errors. At last the preachers of truth make an impression, either directly upon the general public or upon some person of eminence, say a leading statesman, who stands in a position to impress ordinary people and thus to win the support of the nation."

So far so good. But Dicey goes on to deny that acceptance of a new idea depends "on the strength of the reasoning" by which it is advocated or "even on the enthusiasm of its adherents." He ascribes uptake of new doctrines to skillful opportunism in particular by a class of political entrepreneurs or statesmanship (or Machiavellian Virtu) in the context of "accidental conditions." (This anticipates Schumpeter, of course, and echoes the elite theorists of the age like Mosca and Michels.) Dicey's main example is the way Bright and Cobden made free trade popular in England. There is space for new directions only after older ideas have been generally discredited and the political circumstances allow for a new orientation. 

It's easy to see that Dicey's informal model (or should I say Mill and Taylor's model?) lends itself to a lot of Post hoc ergo propter hoc reasoning. So I am by no means endorsing it. But the wide circulation of some version of the model helps explain the kind of relentless repetition of much of public criticism (of woke-ism, neoliberalism, capitalism, etc.) that has no other goal than to discredit some way of doing things. If the model is right these are functional part of a strategy of preparing the public for a dramatic change of course. As I have noted Milton Friedman was very interested in this feature of Dicey's argument [Recall:  (1951) “Neo-Liberalism and its Prospects” Farmand, 17 February 1951, pp. 89-93 [recall this post] and his (1962) "Is a Free Society Stable?" New Individualist Review [recall here]].

I admit we have drifted off from multiple discovery. But obviously, after the fact, multiple discovery in social theory or morals can play a functional role in the model as a signpost that the world is getting ready to hear a new gospel. By the end of the eighteenth century, utilitarianism was being re-discovered or invented along multiple dimensions (one may also mention Godwin, and some continental thinkers) as a reformist even radical enterprise. It was responding to visible problems of the age, although its uptake was not a foregone conclusion. (And the model does not imply such uptake.)

It is tempting to claim that this suggests a dis-analogy with multiple discovery in science. But all this suggestion shows is that our culture mistakenly expects or (as I have argued)  tacitly posits an efficient market in ideas in science with near instantaneous uptake of the good ideas; in modern scientific metrics the expectation is that these are assimilated within two to five years on research frontier. But I resist the temptation to go into an extended diatribe why this efficient market in ideas assumption is so dangerous.

Riker on The Calculus of Consent; some Rawls and Strauss and the confused and unproductive state of Political Theory

As numerous writers have pointed out, political theory as a field of academic concentration has been in a confused and unproductive state for at least the last generation. Most of the academicians who have written about it have been either historians of ideas who speculated about the influence of writer A on writer B or literary critics who simply explicated and criticized the texts of A and B. Very few academicians have had the intellectual courage to play the role of A and B themselves; so that, in consequence, most contemporary political theory has been produced by politicians and journalists. Refusing thus to theorize themselves, most academicians have been limited to a consideration of intellectual primitives or of, what amounts to the same thing, the rantings and ideological tergiversations of half-educated modern pamphleteers. In almost no other field of study do the professionals thus abase themselves before the ancients and the amateurs.

    Not unsurprisingly, there has been much dissatisfaction with this state of affairs and in the last decade or so a number of writers have tried to reorient the study of political theory. Some, like Leo Strauss, have urged a return to the great tradition; but unfortunately the process of return, as it appears in the work of both master and students, has turned out to be an even more sterile historicism than that against which they revolted. Others, like T. D. Weldon and Carl Friedrich, have urged a close and systematic study of words; but again unfortunately, word-study, while a useful preliminary to theorizing, has produced no more than literary criticism and is not properly theory at all. Still others, the political behaviorists, have turned to the theories of contemporary psychology and sociology for a new start in theorizing about politics; and, while these writers have undoubtedly succeeded in generating descriptive theories that can actually be tested empirically, still their theories seem to have more in common with social psychology than with the traditional subject matter of politics. Furthermore, their positivistic character, wholly appropriate for descriptive theories, is far from satisfying to those who believe political theory should be at least partially normative. These three attempts at re-orientation have been useful in the study of history, philosophy, and behavioral science; but they have not added much to political theory itself. Indeed, if these three schools were all we had, it would be fair to say that political theory was no better off than before.

    There is still a fourth school, to which the book here reviewed belongs, which offers some hope of a really successful reorientation of political theory. Since its inspiration is more from economics than any other source and since economics is the social science closest to politics both in the nature of the events abstracted for study and in the process of abstraction, it happens that the works of this school are clearly political in nature. Since economics like politics has a long tradition of normative theorizing, these writings contain normative elements alongside of positive ones. Most important of all, however, they seem to be capable not only of reformulating traditional problems in a more sophisticated way but also of dealing with problems beyond the ken of even the great theorists of the past. Some of the main works in this fourth school of re-orienters of political theory are: Duncan Black, The Theory of Committees and Elections; Anthony Downs, An Economic Theory of Democracy; Morton Kaplan, System and Process in International Politics (although this work has its roots as much in sociological as in economic theory); Thomas Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict; and, as an important addition, James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock, The Calculus of Consent.--William H. Riker (1962) Midwest Journal of Political Science, Vol. 6, No. 4 (Nov., 1962) [Reviewing The Calculus of Consent. by James M. Buchanan and Gordon Tullock], pp. 408-409.

Because I am working on a side project (recall here; here) on the (non-)reception of Leo Strauss within analytic philosophy, I stumbled on this passage in Riker's review of The Calculus of Consent. I also want to situate the passage in the black hole in our collective narrative of what exactly political philosophy could be within analytic philosophy and its sister-discipline political theory pre-Rawls (which was re-opened for me by Katrina Forrester's In the Shadow of Justice: Postwar Liberalism and the Remaking of Political Philosophy (recall (recall here; here; here; and here). Somewhat to my own surprise these issues intersect with my interest in neoliberalism and the split between ('positive') economics and ('normative') philosophy.

I suspect most of my readers know who William Riker is (not to be confused with the Star Trek character). He is now widely seen as one of the founders of rational choice theory, and among other achievements introduced game theory and social choice theory into political science. He is, what in an earlier generation disparagingly would have been called (by the sociologist Talcott Parsons [recall]), an exponent of 'economic imperialism.' We call it 'intellectual arbitrage' now. He founded the so-called Rochester School that's associated with the 'behavioral revolution' in political science. When he published the review of Buchanan and Tullock, Riker had just published The Theory of Political Coalitions, which was a major contribution to orientation he promoted.

About half of the review is quoted above. And only after this set-up does Riker discuss the contents of the book. So, the review itself is self-consciously a methodological intervention and cannon creation. 

So, Riker distinguishes four approaches to political theory. First, there is the return to the classics which he (correctly) associates with Leo Strauss. This is treated -- much as Bacon treated final causes -- as sterile. Riker correctly represents Strauss's school as critical of historicism, but then misrepresents, either from confusion or from sincere insult, Strauss as instantiating historicism. (I am unsure he ever engaged with Strauss in substantive fashion elsewhere.)

Second there is a school devoted to "a close and systematic study of words." Riker's criticism of it echoes Isaiah Berlin's (1958) criticism of ordinary language philosophy (recall). T.D Weldon I know primarily as a Kant scholar and as being the supervisor of Wilfrid Sellars. But he is also the author of The Vocabulary of Politics (1953), which in reviews is described as an attempt to apply ordinary language philosophy to politics. A book I, thus, have to read because it is clearly in the event horizon of the black hole of analytic political philosophy whose shadow Rawls has (ahh) blotted out.*

I have to admit that I am puzzled by Riker's inclusion of Friedrich in this category. Friedrich's approach is so eclectic, that I would think he would be hard to categorize. This is not to deny he sometimes focuses on words, too. But this comment (alongside the Strauss as historicist 'mistake') makes me wonder, if Riker actually had carefully studied the schools he is rejecting. Or whether his polemics derive from supreme confidence in his own (sophisticated!) methods. That confidence is not without robust intellectual foundation, but one does wonder if in his polemics with opposing schools there isn't an element of bluster and bluff. (This combination is not unfamiliar to us within analytic philosophy.) I actually suspect that Riker is confusing Friedrich with Felix Oppenheim (who can, perhaps somewhat unfairly, be slotted into this category.)

No exemplar of the third school is mentioned. I suspect Talcott Parsons (or those influenced by him) is one of the targets. This school is also engaged in intellectual arbitrage from other social sciences, but Riker finds them wanting. Riker's two criticisms of this approach (not very far removed from his own) are very interesting: first, they produce work that fits social psychology but is in some sense not properly political. One would have liked an extra sentence here because it would have illuminated his own stance toward the subject (or the discipline). Second, on Riker's view political theory ought to be descriptive/empirical (or at least fruitful in generating theoretically salient empirical generations and be an engine for theorizing) and normative/positive. So, the right kind of theory can help us study the political world and tell us how to improve it. (I return to this in the next paragraph.)

These two criticisms do not apply to the fourth school (which is Riker's own). From my perspective what is most interesting here is that Riker rejects the very firm distinction entrenched within economics (in word, less so in deed) since the time of Marshall, Sidgwick, and John Neville Keynes, and articulated by Lionel Robbins (and Milton Friedman) between the positive and normative projects.+ The final paragraph of the review actually explains Riker's own stance on this:

If it is assumed that most men are rational and that the appropriate rational behavior is transparently obvious, then the analysis is entirely positive. If it is assumed that rationality is a goal rather than a fact, then the calculus is normative. If it is assumed that the logic of the calculus is not obvious until it is deduced, then again the analysis is normative. (411)

Of course, the problem here is not the willingness to combine empirical and normative aims, but (to use scientistic terminology) that how to think about circumstances of what is 'transparently obvious' to the theorist/expert may not be so to (ahh) 'most men' and, more important, if, in a political context, the latter have to rely on the former for the deductions in the 'logic.' [As a slogan: Riker takes the relationship between theorist and theorized for granted.]

Be that as it may, lurking in the final paragraph that I quoted at the top of the post is the sense that the fourth school is generating a scientific revolution: "Most important of all...they seem to be capable not only of reformulating traditional problems in a more sophisticated way but also of dealing with problems beyond the ken of even the great theorists of the past." The fourth school has moved beyond the past and is progressive. (Such claims are common among economists of the age.) Interestingly enough the Nobel committee in economics has also recognized the contributions of this school of 'political theory' (including, in addition to Buchanan, Schelling).

After the polemical first half, the rest of the review of Calculus of Consent "list[s] what are for [Riker] some of the most interesting notions in the essay." (409) One important point is that Riker treats Calculus of Consent (not unfairly) as an advance beyond Downs on the question of what the effect is "of differing intensities of concern about particular issues under the rule of simple majority voting." (410)

From the vantage point of thinking about the nature and evolution of political theory at the middle of the twentieth century, the first, main question is actually rather important:

The main question the authors ask is: On what basis does a rational man, situated in a society created by unanimous agreement, consent to the transfer of a particular activity from private to collective decision-making? This question is, of course, a new and more sophisticated form of the question to which the theory of the social contract provided the answer. (409)

In the spirit of progress (we may say), Riker understands Buchanan and Tullock as having surpassed and made obsolete social contract theory. While the historian in me hesitates to disagree with such a well-informed contemporary of them,  Riker somehow misses (presumably for his own polemical purposes) that Buchanan and Tullock themselves present their own work, en passant (but not obliquely) as a contribution to social contract theory. For, throughout Calculus of Consent, they imply both that individuals cannot withdraw from the social contract, as well as (and  more important) that "Insofar as participation in the organization of a community, a State, is mutually advantageous to all parties, the formation of a “social contract” on the basis of unanimous agreement becomes possible." (ch. 17; the whole chapter is relevant, including for understanding why they frequently use scare-quotes around 'social contract,' but not always.)** So, the main question by Riker's lights is answered in terms of a social contract analysis according to Buchanan and Tullock. (The character of their social contract is worth exploring in a digression some time.)

Two final quick promissory thoughts connected to Rawls, since I click-baited you here with Rawls. First, there was a pre-Rawlsian political analytic philosophy. (Riker's second school.) Weldon is an example of this. (So is, perhaps, Felix Oppenheim.)++  And it was noticed by outsiders. But Rawls did not respond to it in The Theory of Justice.*** Oppenheim is cited once respectfully in TJ, and Weldon isn't mentioned. Rather, Rawls took the fourth school, the re-orienters, as his interlocuters and rivals. In fact, in TJ, Rawls also cites Black, Downs, Buchanan and Tullock, and Mancur Olson as authorities. And whatever else he is doing, he is also trying to offer an alternative to their project.+++ That's partially obscured to later readers because he doesn't name them much as targets. But it is worth noting they inherited their own normative project from utilitarianism, which is Rawls' official target. And partially obscured by the fact that after the mid to late 1970s Rawls himself emphasized the normative project in Kantian terms and so it's much harder to see TJ as building on and in competition with Rochester and Virginia.

 

 

On Táíwò and Elite Capture

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

On How Public and Experimental Philosophy Disappears (as Philosophy), and Reappears

Dewey, this most public intellectual and advocate of progressivism in American politics during its most activist age, repeatedly said that science and technology are the engines of not just material but moral progress. His theory of inquiry is robustly objectivist, and he advocates throughout his career not just the objective value of science but the fostering of the values of objectivity right through all human concerns. Here is Dewey in 1938, writing in the first volume of the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, as the storm clouds of fascism formed over Europe:

[T]he scientific attitude and method are at bottom but the method of free and effective intelligence. . . [I]t is intensely desirable and under certain conditions practicable that all human beings become scientific in their attitudes: genuinely intelligent in their ways of thinking and acting. It is practicable because all normal persons have the potential germs which make this result possible. It is desirable because this attitude forms the sole ultimate alternative to prejudice, dogma, authority, and coercive force exercised in behalf of some special interest. (LW 13:279–280)

Indeed, already in 1920, in the wake of the First World War, Dewey argued in Reconstruction in Philosophy (MW 12) that bringing the scientific attitude into ethical and social thought was the task of the twentieth century.
This was a widespread understanding of the task of pragmatism around 1930. There were groups who sought to discharge the tasks Dewey had set. If I were to argue that there was a robustly “objective” pragmatist tradition that was active in American philosophy right into the 1960s, I would not point to the analytic luminaries Misak points to but rather to Edgar A. Singer, Jr., and his students and colleagues and their students: C. West Churchman, Russell Ackoff, Richard Rudner, and Bob Butts. This group was a “hard pragmatist” (Singer’s term) community of scholars who were central members of the American philosophy of science community before and during the time of the alleged dominance of logical empiricism in the philosophy of science. It was a group with its own technical projects—largely in probability, statistics, and experimental inference—but whose technical interests remained robustly within the general purview of the “theory of inquiry” that formed Dewey’s conception of logic and trained on socially useful ends. In the end, Churchman, Ackoff, and Rudner all sought a science of ethics as well.
Singer was an undergraduate engineering student at the University of Pennsylvania in the 1890s who went on to work with James at Harvard and then went back to Penn where he was on faculty for about 50 years. He and his students and colleagues—especially the biochemist William Malisoff, who worked for Atlantic Oil in Philadelphia and lived in the University City neighborhood—were the founders in 1934 of the journal Philosophy of Science; Malisoff, Churchman, and Rudner were the journal’s first three editors, over a time period lasting roughly thirty years. They sought to promote the understanding of science, especially of the details of increasingly technical regimes of statistical techniques in experimental inference, and sought to understand how to mobilize science for social good. They thought of themselves as pragmatists who knew the details of what people like Dewey could only gesture at in phrases like “the scientific habit of mind.”
Unlike Misak’s narrative, the story of these scholars is not that of a continuing pragmatist tradition in American philosophy involving central philosophical figures. Just as pragmatist philosophers like George Herbert Mead ended up being much more influential in American anthropology than American philosophy, Churchman and Ackoff left academic philosophy entirely and took up the cause of establishing new social sciences at leading American business schools: Ackoff at Wharton, Churchman at Berkeley. They were founders of operations research, systems science, management science, the measurement of consumer preference, etc. This is how they sought to bring the methods of science into social and ethical philosophy.
If I were to write a book called Some More American Pragmatists, I would offer a different narrative, then. Not a narrative of a continuing, important strand of pragmatist thought in American academic philosophy, but a narrative of a far-reaching impact of American pragmatism in the new features of the American post-Second-World-War university and the growth of an American “scientific-technological elite”—in education schools, business schools, new social sciences, and new methods in old social sciences. This is neither a story of academic philosophy nor one of academic anti-philosophy but of philosophically-inflected social science, a fitting setting for pragmatism as a mature project.--Alan Richardson (2013) "What Good is a (Indeed, This) History of Pragmatism?"  Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 49:3: 411-412.

A few weeks ago I noted (recall) that Feigl's and Sellars' (1949) Readings in Philosophical Analysis. was reviewed in Philosophy of Science by Russell L. Ackoff. I had no idea who Ackoff was, and so looked him up. He became one of the founders of operations research (hereafter OR) and systems thinking in management science. Since I have an interest in the complex interactions between philosophy and economics I made a mental note to investigate further. Also because it reminded me of something I had once picked up, presumably from Alan Richardson, that the institutional founding of philosophy of science, and the journal with that name, Stateside was connected to people who became important in OR.

I couldn't find much written on that from the perspective of the history of philosophy, but there is a neat (2006) volume, Rescuing the Enlightenment from Itself, that gives a sense of how the rather influential school inspired by Churchman and Ackoff understands itself retrospectively. In the most philosophical chapter, "Pragmatism meets systems thinking: the legacy of C. West Churchman" by D Matthews, one can find a lovely account of how Ackoff took a philosophy class with Churchman at Upenn, and how that was the germ of their decades of collaboration.* I was especially struck by the claim that after the war, and after several fruitless attempts at institutional building, that at Case Western, "Churchman and Ackoff established a multidisciplinary faculty group (complete with postgraduate programs for Masters and Doctoral students) for specifically studying the philosophy, methodology and practice of tackling complex organisational and societal problems. By borrowing the appellation Operations Research, from the wartime British and American analysis units set up to help plan operational tactics Churchman, in effect, established the first post-war academic OR group in the US." (Matthews 2006: 184) For several years Churchman and Ackoff kept publishing in professional philosophy, but eventually their professional self-identification and legacy become more and more identified with their academic appointments (outside of philosophy).

Now, Richardson's argument is part of a critical extended review essay of Misak's excellent (2013) The American Pragmatists. And part of the debate between Richardson and Misak is not just about the self-understanding of pragmatism but also analytic philosophy. Regular readers know I am interested in those issues, and so I have to disappoint that in what follows I will not take a stance on their many layered disagreements. But I do think it is interesting Churchman and Ackoff have been nearly forgotten within philosophy, even the history of philosophy. (Rudner is if not still read, at least cited, in the inductive risk literature rehabilitated by Heather Douglas. Butts became an important historically sensitive philosopher of science.)

And this forgetting holds lessons for us, especially those with an interest in the fortunes of experimental philosophy, public philosophy, and interdisciplinary/integrative projects now associated with (say) PPE. For initially, Churchman and Ackoff didn't just understand themselves as pragmatists, but also as adherents of Singer's pragmatist version of experimentalist philosophy (for a philosophical introduction see here). Now what Singer meant by experimental philosophy is not quite what contemporary XPHI has become. But that's for another occasion, perhaps.

Okay, let me turn to the heart of the matter: so one way to understand an important strain of pragmatism just is a species of what we may call (recall) public facing philosophy. And the public here is not just the wider democratic culture (for which Dewey is still famous), but also other forms of knowing. And rather than adopting the philosophy of X model (with X being a special science [POX]), which came to be dominant in philosophy of science generally, Churchman and Ackoff sought not just to shape the special sciences, but to constitute them philosophically alongside the 'technical' machinery mentioned by Richardson. This can be seen in their rather successful efforts at institution building which extended to textbook writing.  

It would be wrong to think of what Churchman and Ackoff did as applied philosophy. Because as Richardson hints (okay so this may be taking sides in his debate with Misak), there is a sense in which what they are doing -- public facing, progressive, socially consequential -- just is what pragmatism is, from a teleological perspective, supposed to be.** How to think of their achievement in the context of higher education in American empire is no easy matter and it would require some comparison with another systems thinker (Talcott Parsons), who was shaped by philosophy and in some sense carried it forward within social theory and sociology.+

From the perspective of philosophy's institutional self understanding today this reminds us of something salutary. It is quite possible that the very best (let's stipulate), public facing, even high profile ones, can become of little interest to other philosophers or invisible to other philosophers as philosophy. I am not suggesting great originality here. Writing from an entirely different angle, the insight is fully present in Kristie Dotson's "How is this paper Philosophy?" Dotson argues for valuing multiple forms of disciplinary validation within philosophy to make space not just for those that have been excluded from its ranks, but for different kinds of (what she calls) cultures of praxis. (We can see hints of this, too, in Srinivasan's call for "more capacious notion of both philosophy and brilliance.") And, perhaps if Dotson and Srinivasan have their way, the future of philosophy will be able to be public facing and socially consequential without a choir of disciplinary influential naysayers. History need not repeat.

But if we think about the issue outside of institutionalized [!] philosophy, but from the perspective of public facing and integrative philosophy or synthetic science-- say in the way PPE may develop --, then it's possible that a form of philosophy can just be a certain intellectual practice of the sort that Churchman & Ackoff's OR became. Now, to avoid misunderstanding I do not mean to remind us of the self-serving and widespread myth that philosophy is the mother of science, and that a special science just is an empirically successful discipline that has liberated itself from philosophical roots.

Rather, these new forms of public and experimental philosophy, or integrative PPE (etc.), aim to fuse recent philosophy with special sciences that themselves are the product or sedimentation, at least in part, of past philosophical constitution or shaping. And so today's public philosophy encounters in its integration with the sciences after many what we may call afterimages of forgotten philosophy and, perhaps, not even recognizable as philosophy. 

 

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.   

 

 

 

Financial Crises, Lisa Herzog on Iris Marion Young on Systemic Harm/Structural Injustice

Can one ascribe individuals a responsibility to address systemic harms? I draw on arguments developed by Young (2011) in order to show that this is indeed possible. Young develops her notion of forward-looking responsibility in the context of a broader account of ‘‘structural injustice.’’ One can understand the imposition of systemic harms as a form of structural injustice: it puts some people into positions of privilege, e.g. because they benefit from risky investment strategies, while others are put into situations of disadvantage, as they are exposed to increased risks and volatility. It is, however, unlikely that individuals can overcome the problems of systemic harms by themselves. Nor can they be held individually responsible in the sense of backward-looking responsibility. In order to understand the responsibility to prevent such injustices or harms, Young argues that we should understand responsibility not only according to the ‘‘liability model’’ of accountability for harm done by specific individuals, but also as a ‘‘forward-looking’’ notion (2011, p. 92). We have a responsibility to care about the institutions within which we live and act, ‘‘watching [them and] monitoring their effects to make sure that they are not grossly harmful’’ (2011, 88). This notion of responsibility is ‘‘essentially shared’’ and ‘‘can be discharged only through collective action’’ (2011, p. 105). In Young’s words: one has an ‘‘obligation to join with others who share that responsibility in order to transform the structural processes to make their outcomes less unjust’’ (ibid.).
Thus, it suggests itself to turn to existing collectives that could carry these responsibilities. These should be the groups of those who can jointly take steps to prevent systemic harms. Young argues that factors that help determine who should be ascribed responsibility include the power to address the problem, the fact that agent benefits from existing injustices (or harms)—and are hence under a special obligation to do something about them—, and the fact that there are already organized entities that can take action (2011, 144ff.). These factors all point to bankers as addressees of such responsibility. Even if they are not personally guilty of misbehavior, they have a responsibility, as members of the profession, to take steps to prevent systemic harms, or at least to minimize the risks of their occurrence.--Lisa Herzog ([2017] 2019) "Professional Ethics in Banking and the Logic of ‘‘Integrated Situations’’: Aligning Responsibilities, Recognition, and Incentives" J Bus Ethics, 536

Lisa Herzog is one of the leaders of a developing field in the ethics and political theory of finance.* And I often find it very useful to think my way to my own views by grappling with hers. The paper partially quoted above argues, by using what Talcott Parsons' called ‘‘integrated situations,’’ for a significant role for professional associations of folk working in finance to help confront the ethical failures of bankers and to help create the right mix of regulation, incentives, recognition, and norms to tackle a whole bunch of systemic harms that follow from financial crises in particular. While I like the spirit of Herzog's proposal -- which echoes ideas about the significance of intermediary societies I tend to ascribe to Michael Polanyi --, I am a bit skeptical about the possibility of turning finance workers/traders/bankers (etc.) into professionals of the relevant sort (which is why I proposed, once, recall (here; here and here;  for background here) regular drilling and simulation-games by regulators and traders/managers, etc.). But about that some other time more. Here I want to focus, more narrowly, on the backbone of Herzog's normative argument which relies on increasingly important work by Iris Marion Young Young on structural injustice.**

Let's stipulate, for the sake of argument, that Young's argument for forward-looking responsibility is sound and convincing.+ The question, challenge, I wish to pose today whether it is right to think of the systemic harms of the sort generated by financial crises as species of structural injustice? (And my answer is, no.) To be sure, and not unimportantly, I fully grant that the policy responses to financial crises, often, in recent times, exhibit patterns of outcome that are well interpreted as structural injustice in many instances shockingly so. That is, the moral hazard involved in privatizing gains and socializing losses from the financial industry is indeed an instance of structural injustice due to rent-seeking and a kind of political blackmail. (I return to that below.) And so what follows is, perhaps, more of academic than of political interest. 

It is natural to assume that members of the financial community are relative wealthy. But even the UK, which has a permissive bonus culture and a large financial sector (and, by European standards, higher political tolerance for inequality), average pay for a banker is £39,412. Since averages can hide huge distributional variance, it is likely this means means that the vast majority of bankers really should not be thought of as wealthy (by advanced economy standards). Folk working in brokerage securities as a trader make, on average, £60,000, but they do average 30K in bonuses. Obviously that's compatible with some making a lot more than this.++ And this puts traders above average, but net yet among the structurally privileged (for an economy like the UK).

In addition, bankers and traders can lose their jobs when their firms go bankrupt as happened with Lehman--in the UK alone this led to 4000 people losing their jobs. Less high profile, in the collapse of Northern Rock, an once important British mortgage bank, about 2,500 jobs were lost. So, absent political decisions, bankers and traders do have real skin in the game when their firms go bankrupt. There are also more complex issues pertaining to pension coverage. 

The previous two paragraphs suggest that it is by no means obvious that we should think of the average member of the financial industry as especially privileged or immunized from the fall out in a financial crisis. That does not rule out that Herzog's argument would apply to some of the better paid members of the industry.

As an aside, I do not mean to deny that various forms of, say, deposit insurance, also involve de facto a hidden subsidy to bankers in times of crisis. But since these forms of insurance prevent systemic harms I leave them aside.

In addition, and more important, the systemic harms that accompany a major financial crisis -- characterized by liquidity crisis, bank-runs, bank-collapses, inability to complete trades at any price, the regular, automatic (etc.) imposition of circuit breakers, etc. -- are not intrinsically re-distributive from poor to privileged. As Piketty shows, en passant, in Capital, left to its devices, a financial crash, and its aftermath, tends to be a great leveller (because financial assets deflate across asset classes).1 It's only recent central bank policy -- which we can describe as the so-called Greenspan put -- and the way bailouts are now acted and priced in that has changed this historical correlation. 

Now a skeptical reader may think that here I am playing the government failure card a bit easily in suggesting that the imposition of systemic harms as a form of structural injustice are a consequence of government policy and not financial crises as such. I do recognize an exception to my claim, and that is, in fact, cases where a government cannot repay its debts in the context of a financial crisis. It's quite clear that restructuring, budget cuts, and devaluations that accompany such government debt crises can frequently involve cases of structural injustice even when, in executing austerity or a devaluation the government avoids (as it often does not) targeting the poor, vulnerable, and pensioned. (In practice, we have seen shockingly large forms of structural injustice in the Greek debt restructuring where Northern European banks were bailed out at the expense of the Greek poor.)*** For, in general citizens have very ineffective control over Government debts, while the investment banks, debt market makers/specialists, and treasury officials do. 

To sum up, in practice it is good to have an eye toward structural injustice given how policy de facto, alas, works. In my view this can only be solved if we end the effective blackmail of the financial industry of  policymakers since Lehman and the practice of using quantitative easing as our major, almost only, policy response to financial collapses--these do have enormous redistributive effects from the underprivileged to privileged in practice. (So, we need to develop alternative policy responses.) But I also suspect that the initial harms that follow from financial collapses, while systemic in character, are not forms of structural injustice. And so these require a different kind of normative argument than the one offered by Herzog.

On (Lippmann and) Ignorant Voters

The hypothesis, which seems to me the most fertile, is that news and truth are not the same thing, and must be clearly distinguished. The function of news is to signalize an event, the function of truth is to bring to light the hidden facts, to set them into relation with each other, and make a picture of reality on which men can act....For the troubles of the press, like the troubles of representative government, be it territorial or functional, like the troubles of industry, be it capitalist, cooperative, or communist, go back to a common source: to the failure of self-governing people to transcend their casual experience and their prejudice, by inventing, creating, and organizing a machinery of knowledge. It is because they are compelled to act without a reliable picture of the world, that governments, schools, newspapers and churches make such small headway against the more obvious failings of democracy, against violent prejudice, apathy, preference for the curious trivial as against the dull important, and the hunger for sideshows and three legged calves. This is the primary defect of popular government, a defect inherent in its traditions, and all its other defects can, I believe, be traced to this one.--Walter Lippmann (1922) Public Opinion (Chapter 24, 228-230) 

As regular readers know, I think reflection on Walter Lippmann is important in present circumstances. He is one of the intellectual architects (recall) of what I call the second-wave of liberalism (1945-2008), which has been imploding during the last decade, and even was the proximate cause of the development of what came to be known as neo-liberalism. More subtly, his conception of the good society, which hearkens back to the (attractive) kind of liberalism of Adam Smith and Sophie de Grouchy, rejects both state neutrality and state-craft as soul-craft; the good society is one that has many morally salient characteristics (the people are flourishing and can lead lives of their own choosing without fear or coercion). To attain the good society, not unlike a medieval cathedral, is a multi-generational, collective project. There is a sense in which this is a religious project. But, probably unlike the cathedral, the path and the outcome of the good society is, due to the uncertainty generating conditions of modern life, full of surprises. 

One reason to return to Lippmann (not in order to agree -- he also has (recall) serious weaknesses --) is that, as  JohnDewey emphasizes, he understands the problem of voter ignorance not, as anti-democrats do, as a problem of other (not-so-smart or gripped by ideology) voters, but as a structural feature of the human condition. One need not agree with all of Lippmann's ways of articulating the situation, to see that the (Platonic) cave is the human condition in mass society. And to overcome such ignorance, here he anticipates Hanna Arendt, is a rare achievement to be found in, or (perhaps its better to say) produced by, a few institutions:  the law and science.

As an aside, Lippmann, who knew the press from within, is adamant that the press is even during the best of times and ownership structures not that kind of institution capable of reliable generating truth.* And, in fact, he claims that, when the press is conducive, it is often relying on the rule-following features of the administrative state. Importantly, his skepticism about the press' truth-conducive-ness does not entail that the press has no positive contributions to make to democratic life. (If he thought that, his life would be self-undermining in a very obvious ways.)

I do not think Lippmann's answer to the problem of voter ignorance is successful, but it was (judging by what happened next) very influential; and if not influential, at least prophetic. It is possible that by Lippmann's own standards his solution would be deemed successful because Lippmann's aspirations were (again noted by Dewey) were more ameliorative than utopian.  Lippmann's proposal has three central features: first, is to advocate for an expansion of the (meritocratic) bureaucratic state and infuse it with what he calls 'technical knowledge' that he associates with "statisticians, accountants, auditors, industrial counsellors, engineers of many species, scientific managers, personnel administrators, research men, "scientists," and sometimes just as plain private secretaries." (234) He thinks such technical knowledge can also be turned into an "experimental social science." (237)  The point, for Lippmann, is not that such technicians will run the show, but rather that they become embedded (as "permanent intelligence section") in all government apparatuses (nationally and locally). For, by definition, a technician is not the decision maker.+

A key second feature of his proposal is that there will be a permanent circulation of college graduates from universities, perhaps even a privileged 'national university' (247) recruited from government staff, into government; and technical, government bureaucrats returning regularly to train and teach at universities. This intellectual flow of human capital would itself (in part) constitute "political science" and, in turn, would "associated with politics in America."+ (In 1922 economics was not yet seen as the future queen of the social sciences.) Lippmann optimistically assumes that all of this can be done transparently and openly (246).  The third, key feature is to insist that any political decision must be channeled through a procedure that will involve the bringing to bear of technical expertise on a problem (e.g., 255). 

As an aside, Lippmann's account is clearly distinct from the (later) Hayekian narrative, which sees the rise of the bureaucratic, technocratic state as a consequence of the experience of (mobilization and) war-planning during WWI. Lippmann, by contrast, thinks that the rise of the technician in the great society is itself the consequence "of blind natural selection" (234); complex organizations faced with complex decision environments started to require technical expertise merely to help integrate the flow of data and to structure decision-making for the executive. One discerns in Lippmann that the problem of big data is a nineteenth century problem, and that to overcome it even in competitive markets, requires the rise of expertise within organizations.

Now, Lippmann is not unaware that there is a real risk the technocrats will quickly run the show and displace elected officials and electorate. His response to this is to insist on a stark distinction between executive and technical functions and to aim to align incentives between them properly. [242]+ Only this can keep the technician's disinterestedness in place. If such a distinction were to be maintained in practice, and an esprit de corps among the technical class could be cultivated, then his hope that there will be circumstances in which the presence of a class of technicians can even abolish partisanship would not be comical. I don't mean to suggest that Lippmann's proposal is impractical: it very much reflects reality inside important elements of the governance of the EU and the US Federal government. As Dewey discerned, Lippmann proposes what became a tool, even an effective technique of governance one that has undoubtedly helped reduce the catastrophic mistakes all political agents can make.**

I used the word 'comical.' Perhaps that's unfortunate.  For Lippmann's weakness is the weakness of much of twentieth century liberalism. We can discern in Lippmann a tendency toward consensus and de-politicization in thinking about politics. In his (1937) Good Society, he demands that politicians combine, in spirit, the temperament of a legislator and a judge (who is impartial, fair, temperate, etc.) As the earlier Public Opinion teaches, that aspiration would only be possible in reality if political life is not governed by opinion. But if that were possible, we wouldn't (recall) need democracy at all. 

 

 

On the Politics of Academic freedom. Or Honour among Chicago Economists (Stigler's Appendix to the Kalven report)

Jacob Levy's recent post got me (recall) to take a fresh look at the (November 1967) Kalven report (named after the jurist). I was startled to learn that both John Hope Franklin and George Stigler (the Chicago economist, who figures in a lot of my blog posts and scholarship) were also on this committee. The report treats the university as a special kind of community. It is special not just because it is a "community of scholars" for the "limited [albeit noble] purpose" of "teaching and research." Rather, it is special for two reasons: (i) it exists for the "long term." That is to say it exists, in part, in order to reproduce students and scholars (recall my post). The significance of (i) is, in part, revealed by (ii) because it "cannot take collective action on the issues of the day without endangering the conditions of its existence and effectiveness."

The reason for (ii) is because each member of the community -- the report only recognizes faculty and students -- cannot be compelled at all (neither by a procedure, argument (!), nor force) to conform to other people's views. (It is no surprise that the report does not argue its case; it merely reaffirms "a few old truths and a cherished condition"--that is, it deliberately presents itself as conservative.)* That is to say, the Kalven report embraces the idea that there is no decision mechanism at all that will not inhibit "the full freedom of dissent on which it will thrive." (So no proceduralism.)

I ignore here the objections to this idea of freedom such that even a lone, irrational dissent has to be respected. The report's notion of freedom is one that respects minimal unity, but no more--the individuals that make up the unity remain, as it were, fully sovereign in the unity. The report does not defend this notion of freedom nor does it fully explain it. But it seems to presuppose the anthropological view that in optimal conditions of freedom human disagreement is inevitable (and a good thing). This go well beyond the standard Weberianism of the day, which thought that agreement over the facts was possible. In fact, the report is adamant that the university is to be constituted by the widest possible epistemic and moral diversity. This is the central "faith" of the Kalven Report about the nature of "intellectual inquiry." The university should promote this diversity as much as possible ("widest diversity of views").

As an aside, it is notable that Stigler signed up to this because when it came to the role of consensus and dissent within disciplines, he was an eager student of Merton and an early Kuhnian and thought that expert, paradigm-driven communities could safely ignore dissenters and could aim and establish consensus.

The epistemic and moral diversity has three intended consequences: first, it entails that the university produces "discontent with existing social arrangements and proposes new ones;" second, it fosters "the development of social and political values in society;" third, it generates "power" for the university--this power ("prestige and influence" ) follows from the university's "integrity and intellectual competence." The report does not explore to what degree a society will permit these three consequences, but as I note below it does address the circumstances when society challenges its independence and existence. It is quite notable that the Kalven report does not claim that there is an indirect utility in technological applications. (There is no engineering school at Chicago.) This goes back to Hutchins's oft-quoted (1929) statement:

My view of university training is to unsettle the minds of young men,+ to  widen their horizons, to inflame their intellects. It is not a  hardening, or settling process. Education is not to teach men facts,  theories, or laws; it is not to reform them, or amuse them, or to make  them expert technicians in any field; it is to teach them to think, to  think straight if possible; but to think always for themselves.

Despite the fact that the report celebrates cognitive diversity, it proudly notes a "deep consensus," [and here I'll resist making fun of that 'deep'] among itself. Even so, George Stigler appended a "special comment:"

I agree with the report as drafted, except for the statements in the fifth paragraph from the end as to the the role of the university when it is acting in its corporate capacity. As to this matter, I would prefer the statement in the following form:

The university when it acts in its corporate capacity as employer and property owner should, of course, conduct its affairs with honor. The university should not use these corporate activities to foster any moral or political values because use of its facilities will impair its integrity as the home of intellectual freedom.

For those unfamiliar with the complex evolution of thought of Chicago economics, it is somewhat surprising to see one of the two leaders of the school (the other being Stigler's close friend, Milton Friedman), of all people, to appeal to honour. It's less surprising when one realizes that in 1967 Stigler was not yet the economist, who penned (with Gary Becker) "De gustibus non est disputandum." Rather he is the (by then accomplished) student of Frank Knight, who taught that considerations of honor were ineliminable from modern society, even a socialist one.**

Stigler's main point is that the university as a corporate body should maintain a kind of strict neutrality about moral and political values. This Weberianism came naturally to him. (Knight was an early translator of Weber, and Stigler was a keen reader of (early) Talcott Parsons in his scholarly youth.) In fact, on this point Stigler does not depart from the majority of the Kalven report. The report treats the university's neutrality as a (partial?) condition of possibility of its members to engage in political action and social protests" as individuals."

So, what's Stigler opposing?

In that fifth paragraph from below, the Kalven report first explains how the university must act in cases of 'crisis' when its survival is threatened by outsiders. The consensus (including Stigler's) is that then the university must act (it is an 'obligation') to "defend its interests" as a corporate body. Obviously, this opens the door to abuse (not everybody will agree that the state of emergency or the state of necessity is upon us); and so we can safely assume that the Kalven report also quietly presupposes views about judicious leadership.

Rather, Stigler disagrees with the 'deep consensus' only when the majority of the Kalven report go on to argue that in cases when the university comes into conflict with existing social values when it acts as a corporate entity (involving property, income, its awarding of honors, and its membership in other bodies) over and beyond the intellectual activity of its members, that then the situation requires "careful assessment of the consequences." That is to say, the majority of the Kalven report is allowing that the university may adjust its corporate course when it comes into conflict with the rest of society over its corporate activities. It may even adjust its principles and avoid granting honors to socially controversial agents. (The implied contrast is that the university is not supposed to compromise on the intellectual freedom of the students and faculty to research, teach, invite speakers, etc.) 

Stigler, by contrast, is not allowing the possibility of a conflict between the university as a corporate body and social values because he thinks it is possible and desirable for the university as a corporate body to maintain a strict neutrality. Leaving aside if such strict neutrality is genuinely possible (and desirable), it is worth noting that it's this notion of corporate neutrality, (with extreme partiality of its members), that allows him to think that a university as a corporate body can avoidthe possibility of tragic choices. That's to say, Stigler thinks one can avoid politics (or judgment) by a certain institutional posture--here Stigler flirts with a technocratic conception of the corporate body. Even so he is aware -- he helped pioneer the arguments in modern economics -- that officers of the corporate body and its members may well have incentives to pursue otherwise (than neutrality). In his dissent, Stigler, thus, presuppose public spirited university administrators who know how to maintain the stance of neutrality, while the majority of the Kalven committee recognizes that if one wishes to ensure the survival of the academy, politics cannot be eliminated.

 

Mathematical Economics > Sociology

Those concerned with general problems of philosophy of science and its methodology may find modern economics of considerable interest....Economics is by its nature a softer and less exact science than, say, conventional physics. Now in a hard, exact science a practitioner does not really have to know much about methodology. Indeed, even if he is definitely a misguided methodologist, the subject itself has a self-cleaning property which renders harmless his aberrations. By contrast, a scholar in economics who is fundamentally confused concerning the relationship of definition, tautology, logical implication, empirical hypothesis, and factual refutation may spend a lifetime shadow-boxing with reality. In a sense, therefore, in order to earn his daily bread as a fruitful contributor to knowledge, the practitioner of an intermediately hard science like economics must come to terms with methodological problems. I stress the importance of intermediate hardness because when one descends lower still, say to certain areas of sociology that are almost completely without substantive content, it may not matter much one way or the other what truths or errors about scientific method are involved—for the reason that nothing matters.”--Paul Samuelson (1964) (new) Foreword to Foundations of Economic Analysis, ix

We philosophers are known to look down (mistakenly) on English literature professors (you can count on Alex Rosenberg to express what others think), so I am going to be restrained in what follows. Recent sociological work has explored the sense of superiority of economists.* Even so, I was unaware that Samuelson had expressed his contempt for (bits of) sociology in the paradigm-setting text of mathematical economics. (Serves me right for only looking at the first, 1947 edition.)

Later in Foundations, Samuelson mentions (without comment) that "many economists, well within the academic fold, would separate economics from sociology upon the basis of rational [homo economicus] or irrational behavior, where terms are defined in the penumbra of utility theory," (91; introducing Chapter V 'the pure theory of consumer's behavior.') While the study of irrational behavior may be significant, it does not have high status (then and now).

One might think that the Samuelson's put-down of (bits of) sociology is evidence of a kind of professional rivalry on what discipline gets to be the pre-eminent policy science. Now, it's true that folk like Parsons were promoting sociology and systems theory as the most general social (and even management) science, but by the mid sixties the context had already been decided. Economics was the paradigmatic social science. (In fact, Samuelson's forward is very triumphant: "serious economics has become mathematical and technical" (xii), which produced a "renaissance in economic theory" (xii) while coming close to comparing himself to Newton (xi). Don't trust me; here is Thomas Kuhn's judgment in Structure (1960):

“To a very great extent the ‘term’ science is reserved for fields that do progress in obvious ways. Nowhere does this show more clearly than in the recurrent debates about where one or another of the contemporary social sciences is really science….they will cease to be source of concern not when a definition is found, when the groups that now doubt their own status achieve consensus about their past and present accomplishments. It may, for example, be significant that economists argue less about whether their field is a science than do practitioners of some other fields of social science. (160-1)

So why is Samuelson dissing sociology? And, moreover, why do so in context of stressing that even the practitioner of economics (and not just the philosopher of science) should be concerned with methodology of economics?

As it happens in 1952 Samuelson addressed himself explicitly to methodology and philosophy of science (those were the days!) in the pages of the American Economic Review, happily reporting that "mathematical economics is flying high" (56).** Along the way he remarks, "I find Max Weber or Talcott Parsons difficult to understand in any  tongue." (62) There is little evidence, I think, that Samuelson was much interested in either Weber or Parsons (although I would be surprised if he never bumped into Parsons while writing his dissertation at Harvard).  Neither Weber nor Parsons is mentioned in the Foundations.

Even so, Samuelson's (1952) remark is a helpful clue. In the period, the Chicago economist, Frank Knight, was the great advocate of Weber, while his student, George Stigler, was the great advocate of Parsons (himself an important Weber scholar). In fact, Stigler had a tendency to introduce Parsons in the context of his own methodological musings (in his textbook and in his high profile, 1948 LSE lectures) that, in turn, set the stage of Friedman's still famous methodological reflections (I have traced some of the details here; this is part of a larger story about debates over economic imperialism and general sociology of knowledgein the 1930s). One such instance was his blistering attack on Samuelson and the so-called new welfare economics in the American Economic Review; Samuelson responded in kind (recall here and here for details on the debate between the two future Nobel laureates).

And, in fact, Samuelson's only mention of Stigler in Foundations is near the very end of his long treatment (and history) of welfare economics (chapter viii), where he reminds his reader of the debate: "Whether Kaldor and Hicks are open to the criticism along the lines which Stigler has recently advanced, the reader must decide." (252) As is well known, Samuelson's readers, the next generation of the economics profession, decided to agree with him (but see here and here).

So, the moral of my story is that sociology got dissed in the front pages of the most influential work of professional economics of the twentieth century because important rival economists that had to be discredited*** were appealing to sociological insights in criticizing central achievements of the new mathematical economics. These Samuelson understands as "internal problems of economic research" (viii), that is, immune from external criticism. If I am right about this, then there is a further historical irony lurking here. As I have recounted Stigler appealed, while drawing on Parsons and Merton, to that very internal/external distinction to let Thomas Kuhn know in a series of letters that economists (like Samuelson and himself) had anticipated most of Kuhn's philosophy of science because they had been engaged with the sociology of knowledge and methodology for much of the previous generation(s).

The Technocratic Conception of Politics (The Economists and Rawls redux)

By a 'technocratic conception of politics,' (recall) I mean to capture the following three features of an enduring image of politics present in (social) science: first, it is characterized by the ideal that with social knowledge and its progress, substantial political disagreement can be eliminated. Here is a very striking instance of the claim from Milton Friedman's (1976) Nobel lecture: "Many countries around the world are today experiencing socially destructive inflation, abnormally high unemployment, misuse of economic resources, and, in some cases, the suppression of human freedom not because evil men deliberately sought to achieve these results, nor because of differences in values among their citizens, but because of erroneous judgments about the consequences of government measures: errors that at least in principle are capable of being corrected by the progress of positive economic science." The context of the passage is the furor surrounding his association with the so-called 'Chicago Boys' in Chile and the assassination of his Chilean critic Orlando Letelier (recall).

In particular, second, this ideal of conflict-free politics presupposes (as is clear from the quoted passage in Friedman's Nobel lecture) considerable value-unanimity in society. So, for example, in a famous article, the Chicago-school economists, Stigler and Becker write, "one may usefully treat tastes as stable over time and similar among people;" establishing this point "is the central task of this essay." When value-unanimity is granted then ordinary welfare economics is possible as a kind of (social) engineering science (recall).

Third, the conception requires an image of science in which one of the central aims of policy scientists is to achieve consensus (or lack of disagreement). In modern economics this idea goes back at least to Sidgwick's (1887) Principles of Political Economy (recall; for some prehistory on Hume). It was a central feature of Lionel Robbins's influential methodological restatement (1932) of what economics is: "Surely, for the sake of securing what agreement we can in a world in which avoidable differences of opinion are all too common, it is worth while carefully delimiting those fields of enquiry where this kind of settlement is possible from those where it is not to be hoped for —it is worth while delimiting the neutral area of science from the more disputable area of moral and political philosophy." This image of science was made widely popular by Thomas Kuhn in Structure (1960), but via Talcott Parsons's Weberianism and others it was already well known in mid-twentieth century social science.

It is worth emphasizing that the expectation of consensus was by no means universal. Friedman's sometime co-author, Savage, insists in The Foundations of Statistics, that "we must be prepared to find reasoning inadequate to bring about complete agreement." (1954 [1972]:7; see also 3, 67ff.) But this view became a minority position (cf. Aumann).