Digressions&Impressions

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

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

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 Racial immigration laws were repealed.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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Friedman and Mill on the Art of Economics (with some J.N. Keynes)

IN HIS admirable book on The Scope and Method of Political Economy John Neville Keynes distinguishes among "a positive science ... [,] a body of systematized knowledge concerning what is; a normative or regulative science . .. [,] a body of systematized knowledge discussing criteria of what ought to be... ; an art . .. [,] a system of rules for the attainment of a given end"; comments that "confusion between them is common and has been the source of many mischievous errors"; and urges the importance of "recognizing a distinct positive science of political economy."--Milton Friedman (1953) “The Methodology of Positive Economics” in Essays on Positive Economics, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, p. 5. [The ellipses are in Friedman. Hereafter: Friedman 1953][1]

According to Milton Friedman the art of economics is a system of rules for the attainment of a given end. Implied in Keynes’ definitions is a division within the art of economics into two: first, if the given ends follow from normative economics then the art of economics is the system that generates normative policy. This way of putting it stipulates that the art is – like a deductive logic – moral truth preserving from input to its output. The implied nature of the second part of this division within the art is left unclear. For, unless normative science is completed, it is possible, of course, that a given end is moral but not part of a body of systematized normative knowledge. In fact, when one starts musing on it, more combinations between given ends and the output of an art are possible (from a-moral ends to moral output; from a-moral ends to a-moral output, etc.) One can even entertain the possibility that an immoral given end (say, state enforced birth-control) may lead to welcome policy results. So, it is by no means obvious what the status of the output of the art is when the given ends do not follow directly from normative economics.

Much of Friedman essay is devoted to the nature and defense of the possibility of positive economics and, while less important, how it contrasts with normative economics. In fact, the art of economics seems so little pertinent to Friedman’s essay, that in a (1992) paper in the Journal of Economic Perspectives, David Colander comments, “Friedman placed Keynes' tripartite distinction in the open and then he lost it.” (p. 192)

But, as Colander notes, Friedman does address the art of economics at least once more in his 1953 essay. It is worth quoting the passage in full:

Normative economics and the art of economics, on the other hand, cannot be independent of positive economics. Any policy conclusion necessarily rests on a prediction about the consequences of doing one thing rather than another, a prediction that must be based-implicitly or explicitly-on positive economics. There is not, of course, a one-to-one relation between policy conclusions and the conclusions of positive economics; if there were, there would be no separate normative science. Two individuals may agree on the consequences of a particular piece of legislation. One may regard them as desirable on balance and so favor the legislation; the other, as undesirable and so oppose the legislation.

I venture the judgment, however, that currently in the Western world, and especially in the United States, differences about economic policy among disinterested citizens derive predominantly from different predictions about the economic consequences of taking action-differences that in principle can be eliminated by the progress of positive economics-rather than from fundamental differences in basic values, differences about which men can ultimately only fight. (Friedman 1953: 5)

Friedman treats the art of economics as dependent on empirical science. For it’s this science that provides the knowledge that constitute at least part of the rules of how one gets from given ends to proper outcomes. That is, the dependence of the art on positive science is epistemic in character.

This dependence claim can also be found in the relevant chapter of J.N. Keynes’ (1891) book, but he argues for it slightly differently (than Friedman does): “it is both possible and desirable to discuss [positive] economic uniformities independently of [normative] economic ideals, and without formulating economic precepts [of the art], although the converse cannot be affirmed.”[2] From this quote it is not quite clear in virtue of what the art is dependent on positive science, but Keynes claims elsewhere that the dependence is “logical…for we cannot satisfactorily lay down rules for practical guidance expect on the basis of knowledge of facts.”[3]

Of course the passage just quoted from J.N. Keynes is rather important: for Keynes consensus over facts is eminently possible, but elsewhere it may be “prevented by conflicting ideals, as well as by divergent views as to the actual and possible.” (Keynes 1891: 51.) And so, on Keynes’ view, conflict over given ends and disagreement over feasibility will prevent consensus over the art of economics according to Keynes.[4] A view like this – there is natural value conflict but relatively easy agreement over facts and theory -- we also find in Keynes’ colleague Sidgwick and a generation later in Robbins, and is used to argue for a disciplinary distinction between economics and ethics.[5]

By contrast, and strikingly, on Friedman’s picture, rather than disagreeing about the given ends that are the inputs of the art of economics, it is likely people will disagree about the outputs of the art. And that is because Friedman presupposes that in the context he is writing (“the Western world, and especially in the United States,”) there is kind of basic value unanimity over the given (major) ends while there is disagreement over what science predicts.

Because the main aim of Friedman’s essay is to explore “whether a suggested hypothesis or theory should be tentatively accepted as part of the "body of systematized knowledge concerning what is,"” (Friedman 1953: 3) while Friedman assumes consensus over the input of the art of economics and treats its output as dependent on empirical/positive science, he does not really pause to reflect on the contents of the art. Colander seems to think this is due to a lack of interest. But there may be a rather obvious reason for Friedman’s silence (which also points to an important difference with Colander).

If we reflect a bit on the form of the art of government, which (when we plug in Keynes’ definition as quoted by Friedman) just is a rule “for the attainment of a given end;” this is highly reminiscent of Robbins’ famous characterization of the nature of positive economics, which just is “a relationship between [given] ends and scarce means which have alternative uses.”[6] So, if in the context of consensus over given ends, one takes this relationship between ends and means to be known, as supplied by positive economics, then a fortiori there is no further fact of the matter that enters into the rule of the art of government.

That is to say, on Friedman’s account there is no substantive difference between positive and the art of economics. For the art of economics is then just a proper subset of its science restricted in scope by a more limited set of given ends and dependent on the development of the relevant positive science! So, for example, Friedman explicitly affirms “there is an underlying consensus on the objective of achieving a "living wage" for all, to use the ambiguous phrase so common in such discussions.” (Friedman 1953: 5.) And it is pretty clear he thinks there is a similar consensus over the importance of economic growth as one of the main “long run objectives.”(“Monetary and Fiscal Framework for Economic Stability” in Friedman 1953: 133. He tends to ignore disagreement over distribution!)

Colander does not offer the reconstruction of this second passage I have just given, but I suspect he does recognize something like the position I have ascribed to Friedman. Because he writes,

The problem with this statement is the inserted phrase, "differences that in principle can be eliminated by the progress of positive economics." This phrase assumes that policy conclusions flow directly from positive economics. However, as Keynes argued, the art of economics is contextual and as much dependent on non-economic political, social, institutional, and historical judgments as it is on economics. (Colander 1992: 197.)

I hedge my interpretation of Colander because he also claims that Friedman’s lost the art of economics. Whereas it is more accurate to say, as an interpretation of Friedman, that he differs in his understanding of what the content of the art of economics is from Keynes (and Colander), and that for Friedman [Thesis A] the art of economics just is a subset or extension of positive economics. Or to be more precise, in societies with a fundamental consensus over ends, the art of economics is a subset or modest extension of positive economics. Friedman tacitly denies there is a significant difference between applied economics and economic science.

I mention this for two reasons. First, Colander’s analysis has been influential on those that notice Friedman mentions an ‘art of economics. For example, while citing Colander, Thomas Mayer writes that “in stressing the positive–normative distinction Friedman furthered the unfortunate tendency to ignore a third category of economics, J. N. Keynes’s (1891) art of economics, that is the knowledge required to apply positive and normative economics in a way that results in successful policies.”[7] (Emphasis added.)

Second, Friedman's account of the art of economics matters because while it would be wrong or misleading to treat Friedman as a kind of rational choice theorist in the way familiar from Becker & Stigler 1977,[8] I want to suggest that by implying that [Thesis A] the art of economics just is a subset or extension of positive economics, Friedman does give voice here to – and now I am stipulating -- a distinctly and broadly agreed upon Chicago understanding of the art of economics as continuous with its (positive/empirical) science.[9]

An anticipation of Friedman's position can, indeed, be found in Keynes’ Scope an Method. When the “end at which the art of political economy aims” at is agreed upon (as Friedman stipulates, recall, is the case among disinterested citizens in the ‘Western world’) – say, “simply the increased production of wealth” – “its scope is certainly definite.” (Keynes 1891: 76.) And in such cases statements of positive science in the “indicative mood” can be transformed into statements “in the imperative.”[10] Colander is right to suggest that Keynes does not accept this position in his own voice because Keynes denies such unanimity over ends in the wider context of the passages I have just quoted. But the position does have an important earlier advocate: J.S. Mill.

In the final Chapter XII of (the final) Book VI of Mill’s Logic, after distinguishing between a science and art, Mill writes:

the reasons of a maxim of policy, or of any other rule of art, can be no other than the theorems of the corresponding science.

The relation in which rules of art stand to doctrines of science may be thus characterized. The art proposes to itself an end to be attained, defines the end, and hands it over to the science. The science receives it, considers it as a phenomenon or effect to be studied, and having investigated its causes and conditions, sends it back to art with a theorem of the combination of circumstances by which it could be produced. Art then examines these combinations of circumstances, and according as any of them are or are not in human power, pronounces the end attainable or not. The only one of the premises, therefore, which Art supplies, is the original major premise, which asserts that the attainment of the given end is desirable. Science then lends to Art the proposition (obtained by a series of inductions or of deductions) that the performance of certain actions will attain the end. From these premises Art concludes that the performance of these actions is desirable, and finding it also practicable, converts the theorem into a rule or precept.[11]

So, unlike Keynes (and Friedman), Mill includes the setting of ends within the art. But as it happens, the end (growing a nation wealthy) the art of political economy pursues is treated as given in the fifth essay of some Unsettled Questions. But anticipating Friedman, Mill treats the art and science as sharing content.[12] And while Friedman and Mill have slightly different conceptualizations of what an economic theory is and Mill surely should not, I think, be treated as a proto rational choice theorist, Mill, too, endorses [Thesis A]. (As an aside, while my argument for this conclusion is wholly distinct from Foucault’s, at a high level of generality the position echoes Foucault’s understanding of Chicago economics as a kind of radicalization of the radical-Benthamite tradition. ) 

Mindful of inductive risk, Mill is cautious to remind the reader that what I have called '[Thesis A]' presupposes a mature science. Imperfect or incomplete science will generate bad rules:  “If, in this imperfect state of the scientific theory, we attempt to frame a rule of art, we perform that operation prematurely.” (Mill 1882: 654) Of course, one may not know that one’s science is incomplete or one must act on imperfect knowledge. So, for “a wise practitioner, therefore, rules of conduct will only be considered as provisional.” (Idem) As an aside, for Mill, then, there is also no difference in kind in the art of political economy and the of government. In the Logic, in the very next paragraph, Mill goes on to offer a sketch of the art of political science.

That Friedman appeals to the existence of (an idealized) ‘disinterested citizen’ as a theoretical posit may be surprising given that the rest of his paper argues for the legitimacy for positing firms that behave as if they are maximizing returns. (Friedman 1953: 21.) And since later Chicago economics became associated with a theory of rent-seeking, it might seem odd to see him posit a disinterested citizen. In addition, that the disinterested citizen agrees over values is by no means obvious if one thinks that modern society is intrinsically pluralist.

But it’s clear that in the 1940s and 50s, the idea circulated among Chicago economists with reference to J.N. Keynes. For example, in the context of a polemical exchange with Samuelson over the new welfare economics, Friedman’s friend, George J. Stigler wrote a decade earlier:

Talcott Parsons probably had economists in mind when he wrote: “For it is a fact that social existence depends to a large extent on a moral consensus of its members and that the penalty of its too radical breakdown is social extinction. This fact is one which the type of liberal whose theoretical background is essentially utilitarian is all too apt to ignore—with unfortunate practical as well as theoretical consequences.” At the level of economic policy, then, it is totally misleading to talk of ends as individual and random; they are fundamentally collective and organized. If this conclusion be accepted, and accept it we must, the economist may properly exceed the narrow confines of economic analysis. He may cultivate a second discipline, the determination of the ends of his society, particularly relevant to economic policy. This discipline might be called, following J.N. Keynes, applied ethics.[13]

Parsons attributes the claim to Durkheim, who, on Parsons’ view, advocated “moral conformity.”[14] (To be sure with a minimal use of compulsion.) Even in the passage quoted by Stigler it’s clear that Parsons is contrasting Durkheim with a position one might associate with the liberal interpretation of Mill for whom increasing moral “diversity” is an “increase in happiness” not social instability.[15] So what follows may be a bit counter-intuitive because I  claim that in addition to both embracing [Thesis A] Friedman’s position is itself in in the ambit of Mill’s philosophy in more ways than one here.

To the best knowledge, J.N. Keynes would never posit the existence of a kind of value unanimity among citizens. But the ‘disinterested citizen’ that Friedman appeals to is an entity that is posited, as a normative ideal, in Mill’s Utilitarianism, where “as between his own happiness and that of others, utilitarianism requires him to be as strictly impartial as a disinterested and benevolent spectator.” In general, Mill praises disinterestedness.

In addition, Friedman clearly is presupposing a conception of progress such that in the ‘Western world’ there is a moral consensus and possibility for disinterestedness conception of citizenship. The implied contrast are communist states and less developed countries, of the sort that Mill infamously thought (temporarily) lacking in capacity for self-rule. I don’t mean to suggest Friedman agrees with Mill’s imperial policies. But Friedman does embrace a model of development. (Friedman 1953: 202.)

Now, ordinarily, among liberal interpreters, Mill is usually not associated with moral consensus. He is considered the great advocate of individuality, spontaneity, and authentic experiments in living that see moral conformism as oppressive. Nothing I say undermines that reading.[16]

But some conservative critics of Mill take him to be an advocate of a revisionary moral consensus to be propagated initially by the clerisy, and eventually adopted by the disinterested citizen.[17] The two interpretations of Mill are, incidentally, not necessarily in conflict with each other if the experiments in living are treated as a means toward the discovery of moral truth and so a new consensus. And I do not mean to suggest this interpretation is exclusive to conservatives. For example, late in life, Rawls seems to have understood Mill as advocating a “comprehensive philosophical and moral doctrine” that involved “a society united on a form of utilitarianism.”[18] I do not want to suggest that Friedman must be echoing Mill here. [19]

In the fifth essay of some Unsettled Questions, Mill contrasts sharply between the science and art of economics. And according to Mill,

These two ideas [of science and art] differ from one another as the understanding differs from the will, or as the indicative mood in grammar differs from the imperative. Science is a collection of truths; art, a body of rules, or directions for conduct. The language of science is, This is, or, This is not; This does, or does not, happen. The language of art is, Do this; Avoid that…An art would not be an art, unless it were founded upon a scientific knowledge of the properties of the subject-matter…Rules, therefore, for making a nation increase in wealth, are not a science, but they are the results of science. Political Economy does not of itself instruct how to make a nation rich; but whoever would be qualified to judge of the means of making a nation rich, must first be a political economist. The one deals in facts, the other in precepts. [20]

In context, with an appeal  to Adam Smith, the ends of political economy are taken as given (that is, growing a nation rich). This pretty much anticipates the material Friedman quoted from Keynes.

 

On Bureaucrat Philosophers

During my Summer blogging break philosophy's modern association and intertwining with bureaucracy was highlighted in two stimulating essays, which both received considerable social media attention (by philosophy standards): first, in his moving, autobiographical essay, "Two Tendencies," on what we might call the praxis and orientation of philosophy, Liam Kofi Bright articulates a kind of "dualism" in which one of the major tendencies is titled, 'Basically Pleasant Bureaucrat.' Second, while writing at DailyNous about the tensions, even incommensurable value conflicts, that may arise when one innovates in teaching in light of the values of the underlying philosophical source material, C. Thi Nguyen, distinguishes among the roles (and values associated with these roles) of "Teacher, Bureaucrat, Cop."

Now, in C. Thi Nguyen's essay the bureaucrat is explicitly associated with "fairness" in grading and (in more "authoritarian" role) the enforcement of the rules. For those of us who work in systems where the academic is a civil servant (as the Dutch system was in living memory), or where the process of how one assigns grades can be evaluated and challenged at and by exam committees (who in turn have to show evidence of due process and proper application of rules to possible appeals committees), C. Thi Nguyen's challenges of combining pedagogic or mentoring principles with bureaucratic ones are undoubtedly familiar. His lively descriptions of the conflicting considerations involved resonated with me. (Go read the essay!)

However, fairness is not really a bureaucratic principle.* Impartiality and rule-following (and, as he suggests, rule-enforcement) are. I noticed C. Thi Nguyen's emphasis on fairness because in my own Dutch context (teaching at a huge state school) students and administrators alike will use 'equality' -- in the sense of treating like alike not in the sense of giving everyone the same actual grade -- when they focus on the proper process of grading. Despite the different vocabularies, C. Thi Nguyen and my Dutch students both capture the same commitment or principle that indeed is meant to block species of judgment and discrimination, let alone prevent any measure, if that were possible, of how the soul has been turned to the good, to infiltrate one's grading practices.

Once higher education is shaped by government funding in a Weberian state, in which degrees play certain certification roles in public life (or where students can sue over their  grades), it seems inevitable that some bureaucratic principles seep into and constrain professors' evaluative or grading practices in virtue of the fact that we are functionaries of potentially huge organizations. To what degree that undermines the very possibility of a philosophical education I set aside here.

Because he is vocal admirer of Carnap, even one of our foremost exemplifications of what (the Spirit of) a Left Vienna philosophy would look like today, I was not surprised that Liam Kofi Bright embraces the cognitive division of labor and even bureaucracy. Even so his characterization of the Basically Pleasant Bureaucrat surprised me, and in order to explain that I quote the paragraph that introduces it: 

The first tendency is that which is most visible in my published work. Here the thought is that philosophy is a sort of public service work, a small part of the greater enterprise of generating knowledge that can be put to use in bettering our estate. The work is essentially service orientated (Dotson 2015) or Mohist in nature (Johnston 2010) — to work in this tendency one must be trying to find what combination of beliefs, technologies, and social practices will best foster flourishing (including, of course, refining the idea of “flourishing”). At a high level this will involve identifying and resolving social problems. These are cases wherein one finds “the failure of an organised social group to realise its group ideals, through the inability to adapt certain desired lines of action to conditions of life” (Du Bois 1898, 3). Upon finding these one must work out what needs to change — the ideals, the actions, the conditions of life, etc — and work out how these changes may be effected. However it turns out that doing this effectively requires a huge division of labour and so most of the time one will not work at that high level of abstraction, but rather on more specific technical puzzles. None the less, the essence of this tendency is to commit to this project of perpetual collaborative amelioration.

Now, one reason I admire Liam Kofi Bright is how he can find points of contact, even overlap, between purportedly different philosophical traditions. In our discipline, which values disagreement and the focused objection and sharply polices standards boundaries, this capacity to see, say, how Master Mo's ameliorative, egalitarian consequentialism anticipates (say) Carnap's without having to diminish our admiration for Carnap is lovely (and politically important). [It's also lovely how he can turn his wide reading into stimulating reflection for the rest of us!]

Now, public service is a bureaucratic value. But Liam Kofi Bright also demands the kind of initiative (e.g., "one must work out what needs to change — the ideals, the actions, the conditions of life, etc — and work out how these changes may be effected") that one does not naturally associate with bureaucratic life, so there is a latent tension here in the way the first tendency has been labelled. (I return to this below.)

But I was especially surprised by the attempted, seamless integration of the Basically Pleasant Bureaucratic perspective with Dotson's conception (recall) of service philosophy. Now, to begin to explain why, I first (with apologies) quote myself on service philosophy:

Dotson observes that the professional philosophy she encountered is incapable of being self-justifying. This is no surprise because the dominant traditions (e.g., analytical philosophy, scientific philosophy, etc.) rest on broadly consequentialist foundations that presuppose shared values. The tacit elitism that could be counted on to do the real work -- that a life of philosophy is best -- does not sit well rhetorically in a democratic culture. Genuine and secure axiological foundations are not easy to come by in an intellectual culture that is scientistic. Dotson's attractive vision turns the weakness of the recent tradition around and turns it into a virtue: philosophy is not self-justifying or autonomous, but a good tool in the service of other ends. So despite many differences in sensibility, she is, thus, not far removed from the spirit of, say, Left Vienna. (D&I, 03/24/2015)

So, one may well wonder why I act all surprised at Liam Kofi Bright's stance if I myself had already noticed what one may call the 'formal resonance' between Dotson's and his approach to philosophy in which a certain kind of consequentialism and externally given (and optative) ends combine. But, of course, sensibility matters.

For, while in practice the service philosopher may well find herself advising government and shape the bureaucracy, she explicitly receives her ends from social movements and activists and joins in their (ahh) praxis ("I have learned and continue to learn living and working as a Black feminist, epistemology-based activist.") And without wishing to romanticize either bureaucrat or activist, the activist is willing, if necessity demands it, to break rules and violate norms in a way completely orthogonal to the bureaucrat.** 

At this point one  may well object on Liam Kofi Bright's behalf that he may not be adverse to taking guidance from activists, nor abhor a revolutionary impulse. After all in the paragraph I have quoted, he quotes Du Bois, who eventually, late in life, joined the communist party because “Capitalism cannot reform itself; it is doomed to self-destruction. No universal selfishness can bring social good to all. Communism—the effort to give all men what they need and to ask of each the best they can contribute—this is the only way of human life.” (Quoted from Angela Davis.)

But when Liam Kofi Bright quotes Du Bois, he is quoting from his reformist period. And Liam Kofi Bright himself explicitly advocates "amelioration" even over many generations ("Philosophy conceived of as [the building of] la Sagrada Família.") And while amelioration and even conceptual engineering is formally compatible with some species of activism, there is a different attitude in each toward both the disciplinary and social status quo. So, even if we ignore the virtues of bureaucracy, and treat his first tendency in terms of a highly skilled, even experimental Basically Pleasant Bricklayer there is an important contrast between it and the spirit of service philosophy (relative to the status quo).

I also suspect that there is a more important difference between service philosophy and the BPB tendency. I am circumspect here because I do not self-identify with each approach and I don't have recent phenomenological access toward my speculation: but I suspect the activist philosopher can experience the spiritual satisfaction that the "alienated labour" (that, as Liam Kofi Bright reports), the sublimating BPB experiences.** 

For, while activism can be a soul destroying grind and isolating (even very dangerous), in a well functioning activist milieu, it has as a predictable side-effect the creation of communal feelings in the pursuit of a self-transcending goal that simultaneously is self-justifying. Of course, how to get to that point is no easy matter and actually require some attention to nurturing the life of the mind as part of the activist ethos. (This is a neat subtext in Zena Hitz's Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life.) But the service philosopher's attitude toward her own work would not have to be alienated. 

Let me close with a final observation. Since Max Weber there is a peculiar blind-spot that the bureaucratic life has attracted relatively little attention from philosophers this despite the outsized significance of it in the modern state and, as C. Thi Nguyen and Liam Kofi Bright remind us, to many of own own lives as professional academics. (I suspect this is partial effect of the fact that many high prestige academic institutions try to maintain (at least the fiction of) self-governance in ways that those who work as functionaries cannot maintain.) And while I have only scratched the surface of both essays, a key feature of our involvement in bureaucratic life is that our educational and research practices are shaped by rules, norms, and goals that are extrinsic to philosophy (and education). This strikes me as rather important to our self-understanding if only because it allows us to organize our thinking about the many unhealthy symptoms we often encounter and discuss (reliance on metrics, rankings, stability of hierarchies, the lengthening syllabi, etc.). And so I am grateful to both for starting this conversations.

 

On Hobhouse (with some mention of Adam Smith, Ingrid Robeyns, Pareto and Rawls)

These principles may appear very abstract, remote from practical life, and valueless for concrete teaching. But this remoteness is of the nature of first principles when taken without the connecting links that bind them to the details of experience. To find some of these links let us take up again our old Liberal principles, and see how they look in the light of the organic, or, as we may now call it, the harmonic conception. We shall readily see, to begin with, that the old idea of equality has its place. For the common good includes every individual. It is founded on personality, and postulates free scope for the development of personality in each member of the community. This is the foundation not only of equal rights before the law, but also of what is called equality of opportunity. It does not] necessarily imply actual equality of treatment for all persons any more than it implies original equality of powers. It does, I think, imply that whatever inequality of actual treatment, of income, rank, office, consideration, there be in a good social system, it would rest, not on the interest of the favoured individual as such, but on the common good. If the existence of millionaires on the one hand and of paupers on the other is just, it must be because such contrasts are the result of an economic system which upon the whole works out for the common good, the good of the pauper being included therein as well as the good of the millionaire; that is to say, that when we have well weighed the good and the evil of all parties concerned we can find no alternative open to us which could do better for the good of all. I am not for the moment either attacking or defending any economic system. I point out only that this is the position which according to the organic or harmonic view of society must be made good by any rational defence of grave inequality in the distribution of wealth. In relation to equality, indeed, it appears, oddly enough, that the harmonic principle can adopt wholesale, and even expand, one of the "Rights of Man" as formulated in 1789—"Social distinctions can only be founded upon common utility." If it is really just that A should be superior to B in wealth or power or position, it is only because when the good of all concerned is considered, among whom B is one, it turns out that there is a net gain in the arrangement as compared with any alternative that we can devise.--L.T. Hobhouse (1911) Liberalism, Chapter VI ("The Heart of Liberalism")

The other day, I remarked that while he goes unmentioned by them, Hobhouse anticipates (mediated by Herkner) Ordoliberal ideas in some key respects known as 'social market economy.' So, it is very tempting to understand Hobhouse as a synthesizing transitional figure between English radicalism and twentieth century social and ordoliberalism. This is especially so because (inspired by T.H. Green) he draws on an organic metaphysics (see the quote above) that many tried to discard through the twentieth century. And because my own interest is, in fact, motivated by his historical role, I thought it would be neat to pause and look at some of his distinctive philosophical moves (since he tends to be neglected in contemporary political philosophy except by Gauss and his students and those interested in the history of social liberalism).

That "whatever inequality of actual treatment, of income, rank, office, consideration, there be in a good social system, it would rest, not on the interest of the favoured individual as such, but on the common good" is a culminating claim of the social theory of the Enlightenment. It is, as he notes, explicitl articulated in the first Article of The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (Déclaration des droits de l'homme et du citoyen) of 1789. But Hobhouse's operationalization or precification of the principle breaths the air of then modern social science.

For, on Hobhouse's views considerable economic inequalities are only justified if they meet two social conditions: first, they are conducive to the public or common good. And by this he means not just a summation of individual welfare (a view he associates with the Benthamites), but qualities of collective life. As he puts it, in a passage just before the one quoted at the top of this post, while appealing to a Smithian "impartial spectator" and Green's philosophy, "the common good to which each man's rights are subordinate is a good in which each man has a share." I should note by the way, that while this all seems to be gendered quite male, Hobhouse is a feminist (although the details of his feminism are worth exploring some other time). The common good is, thus, not just the provision of collective services, but also features that are constitutive of common life (such as law, language, the arts and sciences, etc.) 

What this notion of a 'share' is supposed to reveal is that there is no fundamental trade-off between individual rights and the common good. This is not a bug, but a feature of the organic or harmonic view of Hobhouse. Again, for many, this is a central feature of a kind of Stoic harmony view that is often attributed to eighteenth century social theory (not me, by the way) in which the invisible hand represents a providential harmony of ends. Hobhouse admits that, in practice, this may seem unrealistic, but the harmonic view is a kind of normative goal not descriptive reality. Even so, this is not a liberalism that expects fundamental value conflict or irreconcilable pluralism.

As an aside, when Hobhouse is confronted by competing claims ground in contradictory value commitments or needs, he does not offer a technocratic conflict resolution mechanism at all or formula's by which these competing interests can be harmonized. He recognizes that many conflicts have different ways of being pacified or resolved. But what this requires is a kind of good will and localized practical judgment familiar from Smith's The Theory of Moral Sentiments: "an impartial observer will not consider me alone. He will equally weigh the opposed claims of others. He will take us in relation to one another, that is to say, as individuals involved in a social relationship."

Second, the state of affairs instantiated by the inequality under discussion must have two characteristics: first, it must be overall better than possible alternatives under some metric of the common good. Admittedly, it is not obvious what this measure might be for Hobhouse. Nor is it obvious how we should think about the nature of the possibilities that can be devised by us. But the overall thrust of Hobhouse's philosophy makes clear that these characteristic are not meant to justify the status quo; we are on his view often quite capable of conceiving alternatives that allow us to criticize the status quo.  

In fact, an important strain of his general argument for all kinds of social programs and state intervention is that great inequalities of wealth undermine the bargaining power of economic actors such that many economic contracts do not reflect the marginal contributions but rather the arrangements of social power. He actually thinks this undermines economic efficiency. In fact, he is a key figure in the part of the liberal tradition that worries about the distorting effects of society to the marketplace.+ And so not unlike Adam Smith he favors a high wages strategy:

the price which naked labour without property can command in bargaining with employers who possess property is no measure at all of the addition which such labour can actually make to wealth. The bargain is unequal, and low remuneration is itself a cause of low efficiency which in turn tends to react unfavourably on remuneration. Conversely, a general improvement in the conditions of life reacts favourably on the productivity of labour. (Chapter VIII "Economic Liberalism")

In fact, Hobhouse is explicitly a limitarian (recall this post about Kramm & Robeyns; and this one about Spinoza) about income: we may take it that the principle of the super-tax is based on the conception that when we come to an income of some £5,000 a year we approach the limit of the industrial value of the individual.[12] We are not likely to discourage any service of genuine social value by a rapidly increasing surtax on incomes above that amount. It is more likely that we shall quench the anti-social ardour for unmeasured wealth, for social power, and the vanity of display." And the accompanying footnote reads:

"It is true that so long as it remains possible for a certain order of ability to earn £50,000 a year, the community will not obtain its services for £5,000. But if things should be so altered by taxation and economic reorganization that £5,000 became in practice the highest limit attainable, and remained attainable even for the ablest only by effort, there is no reason to doubt that that effort would be forthcoming. It is not the absolute amount of remuneration, but the increment of remuneration in proportion to the output of industrial or commercial capacity, which serves as the needed stimulus to energy.

Obviously, it is worth asking if empirically his assumptions are sound. But my interest here is not to defend his limitarianism, but to note that this limitarianism suggests something about the second condition that considerable economic inequalities must meet before they are  justified. And this is a kind of proto-difference principle: the net overall gain to the common good that is to be pursued from our unequal baseline may not hurt those (like B) who are in the weakest groups today (nor may they violate anyone's rights).

I don't mean to be suggesting that the two conditions instantiate a Rawlsian decision procedure or some kind of alternative to Paretian principles. Hobhouse is not trying to compete with economists' normative social choice theories. And I recognize that this this will be seen as a failure by many. 

Rather, what Hobhouse two conditions generate is the idea that almost no status quo we may find ourselves in is justified, and so it animates a reformist social spirit in which to "maintain the essence of [liberalism's] old ideas it must be through a process of adaptation and growth." And making this spirit of adaptation -- more  than any particular policy -- central to his understanding of liberalism is, I think, Hobhouse's seminal contribution to liberalism's self-understanding.

 

 

Mediating between Strauss and Dewey: the forgotten radical liberal Arnold Kaufman

In this paper political theory is regarded as properly serving an instrumental function. This view is elaborated, then defended against the criticisms of Professor Leo Strauss...
Political theory should be a guide to action. The political philosopher should provide those who make policy with principles which will aid them in the attempt to cope with specific sociopolitical problems. Instrumental theories of this type should have two roughly distinguishable components: (1) an ultimate ideal; (2) intermediate ideals in their relation to specific policy recommendations.--Arnold S. Kaufman (1954) "The nature and function of political theory." The journal of philosophy 51.1: 5-22.

This post originates in my interest in finding critical engagements with Leo Strauss within analytic philosophy in the post-WWII era (triggered by (recall here; here; here; especially this one; here; and here) an invite by Sander Verhaegh). The topic intersects with my continuing reflection (recall here; here; here; here; here; here) on Katrina Forrester's In the Shadow of Justice, which convincingly shows that Rawls' Theory of Justice creates a kind of light-cone which does not allow us to discern events behind it. In fact, Forrester mentions Kaufman's work (in the 1960s) on civil disobedience, and treats Kaufman as "the New Left philosopher and intellectual founder of the “ teach-in.” (p. 52; see also p. 56; 61--in her footnotes she also alerts the reader to his views on Black reparations and participatory democracy.)

Kaufman died, June 6, 1971, aged 44 when his airplane collided with a military jet while traveling. Oddly, his supervisor at Columbia, Charles Frankel, who in the 1960s served the LBJ administration that Kaufman was battling from the left, died a few years later in an armed robbery in his home in Bedford Hills. In fact, while at University of Michigan, Kaufman was at the center of things at the founding of SDS and the Port Huron Statement (as Tom Hayden acknowledges), and was, as Forrester hints, alongside Marshall Sahlins and Rapaport one of the Michigan faculty key to organizing the first teach-in on the Vietnam War. (Sahlins was the supervisor of Graeber, who in some respects, is the heir to Kaufman.) Later, while at UCLA, he was (despite their non-trivial political differences) one of the most outspoken defenders of Angela Davis' appointment at UCLA and freedom to teach.

The (1954) piece I quoted at the top of this post was published before Kaufman completed his dissertation (on Hobhouse). It situates itself between Dewey, who is the advocate of instrumental political theory (but of whom Kaufman is also critical), and Strauss, and also wishes to draw from both. (How Kaufman draws from Strauss I leave aside here.)

One might well wonder why I treat Kaufman as an 'analytic' philosopher. I have two reasons for this: first, the later work from the 1960s is very naturally read as analytic philosophy.* Second, the early work I discuss here bears the imprint of Ernest Nagel (who was then at Columbia) because it anticipates some of the methodological claims of Nagel's 1954 presidential address (while still advocating a more activist stance).

While, in this post I can only leave this second reason as a promissory note, it's worth noting what Kaufman's two main criticisms of Dewey are: first, on Kaufman's  view there ought be also "a concern with theory, with logical interrelatedness, with the generality of political principles which would be anathema for Dewey." (21) In particular (and this very much echoes Nagel), Kaufman claims (while drawing on the analogy between natural and social science), "there is considerable evidence that attention to conceptual adequacy, to logical interrelatedness, and to the connections between a verbal structure and the events it was designed to help human beings control, will yield a rich reward." (22) And second, Dewey's political theory is too "programmatic in character. His formulations were extremely abstract and he always shied from the difficult task of linking those views to the "concrete" situations of which he was so fond of talking." (22; Kaufman acknowledges, of course, that Dewey also acted quite nobly in concrete situations of which he talked.)

While an older generation of political theorists and intellectual historians is definitely familiar with Kaufman, and there is some scholarship on him, to the best of my knowledge analytic philosophy has completely forgotten him in the post Rawlsian era. For example, in Jo Wolff's authoritative and fascinating survey, "Analytic Political Philosophy" (in the OUP volume on the History of Analytic Philosophy), Kaufman goes unmentioned (presumably because he made no impact on those collected in the series in Philosophy, Politics and Society. This is a shame because Kaufman quite clearly anticipates and pioneers the revival of advocacy (which is an important theme in Wolff's article). 

Kaufman recognizes that Leo Strauss is a fierce critic of the instrumentalist stance.** (He quotes Strauss' Review of Dewey 's German Philosophy and Politics, in Social Research.) And pieces together from scattered remarks in Strauss' writing an argument against the instrumentalist approach. Kaufman writes this before the publication of Natural Right and History (but he is aware that it is about the appear and hopes that in it Strauss will spell out some of the details of the argument that Kaufman attributes to him (see note 17 on p. 19)). Here's Kaufman's reconstruction of Strauss' criticism of instrumentalism:

[Strauss] argues (1) that it is possible and necessary for the philosopher to search for an objective political philosophy; (2) but one cannot be objective unless he escapes the influence of opinion; and, finally, (3) the instrumentalist, because he regards himself as a guide to action instead of as a discoverer of an objective external order, is influenced by opinion. Therefore, the instrumentalist cannot be objective and is unable to embark on that investigation which alone constitutes political philosophy.
This is the skeleton of the argument. (16)

Let's call this reconstruction of Strauss's position the 'contamination argument.' In my view it's quite plausible to attribute something like this position to Strauss. A weakness in the contamination argument is that it's quite possible for somebody to hold an instrumentalist view of theory without oneself engaging in action, and so creates an instrumentalist theory for others to use from the ivory tower arm-chair. And it is not obvious that such a theorist is necessarily influenced by opinion even if, let's grant this for the sake of argument, she must take it into account in how to move from principles to successful policy. (I don't quite return to this below, but see my final paragraph.)

Kaufman recognizes that (1) is connected to Strauss' criticism of relativism (historicism, positivism, etc.) and the Weberian fact-value distinction. He treats (1) as common ground between him and Strauss, and even Dewey by claiming that "Dewey does believe we can discover moral truths, these truths are relative to specific conditions." (17) It's left unclear if Kaufman actually agrees with Dewey's style of relativism. (Strauss would reject Dewey's position as stable.)

Most of Kaufman's criticism focuses on (2) & (3), which he treats jointly. A key issue is what is meant by 'objective' and why it's impossible to attain for the instrumentalist theorist. And Kaufman settles on the view that according to Strauss "no one engaged in political activity is in a position, no matter how carefully he attempts to make his investigations impartial, to acquire an understanding or a knowledge of political fundamentals, to determine the nature of the best regime." (18) In Strauss' platonic terminology in the 'cave' no real knowledge is possible.+

At this point, Kaufman goes on the offensive because rather than trying to figure out what would make the contamination argument stick (if that's possible), he starts criticizing (not unfairly) the lack of specificity in Strauss' position who leaves underexplained how 'understanding or knowledge of political fundamentals [is] acquired.' And Kaufman concludes his argument that it is very unlikely that Strauss' method "is continuous with that of the empirical sciences. This constitutes a decisive objection to his underlying theory." (19: emphasis added. Along the way, Kaufman implies that Strauss has no adequate response to Mill's criticism of relying on nature as a standard of adequacy.) 

Kaufman here instantiates what I call "Newton's Challenge to Philosophy," that is to argue from the authority of science to some criticism of an opponent. But this begs the question against Strauss who does not recognize that authority in political philosophy.

In fact, Kaufman has many astute and telling criticism of the details of Strauss' philosophy (including on Strauss' better known criticism of the distinction between facts and values). Kaufman is at his best, in fact, when he channels Hume to point that nature sometimes is itself a source of ungrounded action (this is the argument that eludes Oppenheim when he discerns that Strauss is relying on the PSR (recall here; here)). It is a shame (if you were to care about such matters that) for the reception of Strauss, that to the best of my knowledge no sober debate about these criticism ensued subsequently because unlike many criticism of Strauss they go to the heart of Strauss' project. And unlike a later generation of analytic critics, there is no lazy dismissal.

As should be clear from my comments, I do not view Kaufman's response to the contamination argument as fully adequate. He basically claims not to understand some of its key terms (and does show that Strauss has not clarified them properly), and so ultimately sets it aside. This is unfortunate because Strauss' criticism of the instrumentalist position has been echoed in recent times by analytic philosophers who claim that, say, feminist philosophy (and other 'activist' philosophies) is not really philosophy. (In fact, many of Strauss' apparently substantive positions have been quietly adopted by analytic philosophers in later generations.) Such claims against the instrumentalist conception have been met by vigorous rebuttal from (say amongst others) Dotson and in a number of papers, Srinivasan. But the recent analytic critics rarely dare to put their criticism explicitly in the elitist terms of Strauss (and generally fail to reflect on the nature of political philosophy). This matters not because one must agree with Strauss' return to natural right (and the ancients), or  his elitism, but rather because the most realistic interpretations (and justification) of our imperfect liberal democracies (as one can find in the writings of, say, Hume, Smith, Madison, Kant, and, say, more recently, Arendt) crucially suppose that political life is indeed ruled by opinion and so, if the argument isn't met, that such contamination appears to be inevitable for democratic theorists (broadly conceived). 

Kaufman himself falls in the wide gap between Marxism and Rawlsianism (even its leftist incarnation). With the demise of the New Left and the lack of students to take up his program it is no surprise that he left little mark on post Rawlsian philosophy. Yet, many of his papers from the 1960s have, given that they are the product of immersion in political activism, a sense of freshness and immediacy that I hope to share with you in later digressions. While I do not share in his politics or even his philosophic sensibility, one cannot help but be saddened that his life and career were interrupted just as he was developing his own systematic conception of what a liberal philosophy might be. To be continued.

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.

 

 

Lenin and The State's Essential Coerciveness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Perry Anderson, and the Political Failure of the Rawlsian Project: Forrester's In the Shadow of Justice, pt 3

If we compare the general fortune of these thinkers of the radical Right to that of more conventional eminences of the Centre, there is a pregnant contrast. The work of just one theorist, John Rawls, may have accumulated more scholarly commentary than that of all four put together. Yet this veritable academic industry has had virtually no impact on the world of Western politics. The reticence of its subject, who has never risked his reputation with express commitments, is no doubt part of the reason. But it is also to do with the distance between a discourse of justice, however Olympian, and the realities of a society driven by power and profit. The quartet considered here had the political courage of their convictions. But these also went, more largely, with the grain of the social order. So although they could often appear marginal, even eccentric figures to their colleagues, their voice was heard in· the chancelleries. Schmitt counselled Papen and received Kiesinger; Straussians thronged the National Security Council under Reagan, and surround Quayle; Hayek earned formal homage from Thatcher on the floor of the Commons; and Oakeshott, under the anaesthetic Major, has entered the official breviary. Even arcane teaching can reach gentlemen. They are the heirs.--Perry Anderson (1992) "The Intransigent Right" in Spectrum: From Right to Left in the World of Ideas, p. 28 [HT Jonathan Kramnick]

Once upon a time political radicals were Utilitarians. I also am going to ignore the acrobatics required to lump Schmitt, Hayek, Strauss, and Oakeshot together. Rather, my interest in Anderson's comments is in his treatment of the failure of a scholarly community devoted to political philosophy to have political uptake.

Let's stipulate, with the Marxists, that the aim of political philosophy is to shape political life. Here Anderson suggests that the manner of so doing is in terms of what Machiavelli and Hobbes would call 'council' to the politicians by the students of the magister or by the magister himself in person or through his books. Anderson explains the absence of Rawls and Rawlsians in the corridors of contemporary power in virtue of the fact that a discourse of justice does not sell in a social environment devoted to power and profit. The political failure of the Rawlsian project is, then, plainly due to the demand side: successful politicians have no use for it (and lurking behind them an indifferent electorate). But he also hints at something else -- "express commitments" -- is lacking in the Rawlsian "academic industry," which seems to be engaged in cheap talk which, if I sense the drift of his remarks correctly, involves mostly servile people echoing each other, or at least sharing considerable common ground. There is striking evidence of this claim in Katrina Forrester's In the Shadow of Justice. She observes that "when [in 1979] Amartya Sen gave the Tanner Lectures, he took for granted that there was no need to justify his focus on equality." (208)+

As I noted in my first two essays (recall here; here) on Forrester's booke, it's easy to exaggerate the political impotence of Rawls' political philosophy in the corridors of power. A year after Anderson wrote these lines, the then most visible public interpreter of Rawls, Norman Daniels -- who started his political career as co-chair of SDS and gave a once famous speech on the steps of University Hall April 9, 1969 -- , was asked to be a member of Hillary Clinton's healthcare taskforce in 1993.* In a nearby possible world America would have had health care provision along Rawlsian lines. (Of course, Anderson will not be impressed by such possibilities.)

One may well suspect that Anderson's Machiavellian focus on the halls of power misses an important step. Unlike, say, Locke or Bentham, it is not entirely obvious that Rawls proposed an art of government. Given the Rawlsian focus on the basic institutions of society, one may well argue that the day to day political tactics of the executive are far less important than the role of ideas in shaping fundamental institutions of society: law, education, healthcare, criminal justice, welfare, etc. So, if one is interested in establishing and diagnosing the failure of the Rawlsian project outside the academy it would be useful to study how and to what extent (or not!) Rawlsian ideas percolated through the law and welfare provisions, etc.

I do not mean to suggest that the lack of political uptake (by the political class) of Rawls during the last half century isn't striking. I have often mused about the fact that as political life seemed to be moving toward the right, political philosophy seemed to have moved leftward. And so I was thrilled that Katrina Forrester addressed the issue in a scholarly context. It's an important sub-theme throughout the book -- where it is often operationalized rather narrowly in terms of the influence of Oxford philosophers on the British Labour Party--, and is, in fact, the major theme of chapter seven, where it is introduced as follows:

Liberal philosophers underestimated how high the New Right would rise. Many did not see or did not object to the process of marketization taking place, whereby social relationships were subordinated to market logic and new aspects of life were commodified. In part this was because they were preoccupied not with the rising right, but the left. For political philosophers, the ascent of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan initially provided an opportunity to consider the nature of the social democratic left’s egalitarianism. The collapse of affluence during the previous decade, particularly in Britain, had looked at first like it might benefit the socialist left. “In the 1950s many of us thought that inequalities would diminish as society became more prosperous,” wrote the Labour Party grandee and later founder of the Social Democratic Party Roy Jenkins in 1972. “It is now clear that this view was at best oversimplified and at worst just wrong.” Over the course of the 1970s, the Labour Party had responded by returning to ideas of industrial democracy and public ownership. In the United States, even as the traditional working- class constituency of left politics fragmented and was recomposed, and the political efforts to sustain it were abandoned, the Cold War thaw and leftward tilt of academia enabled the radicalization of philosophy, seen in the appeal of anticolonial global redistributive politics and Rawlsian engagements with socialism. With the relationship of capitalism to democracy under scrutiny following the fiscal crises, a socialist resurgence gradually became visible within political philosophy. “The apparent pause in economic growth, the crisis in stabilization policy occasioned by the current inflationary threats and realities, and the loss of purpose in redistributional measures all combine,” Kenneth Arrow wrote in 1978, “to raise anew the question of alternatives to capitalism.” By the 1980s, liberal political philosophy was being pushed to the left. Marxism was poised to enter the philosophical mainstream. Katrina Forrester In The Shadow of Justice, p. 205

Forrester echoes Anderson's point that elite political philosophers simply underestimated the more right wing thinkers amongst them. Lurking in Forrester's description is a very different kind of explanation of the irrelevance of Rawls to political power. In her account, political philosophy is sensitive to and tracking major social changes to which it responds and, one may, say offers solutions to. It just so happens, one might say, that its preferred policies are not popular among the political class (either because it is corrupted or because it senses there is no electoral gain to be had from pursuing democratic socialism). I return to this below. Furthermore, Forrester suggests that the end of the cold war, alongside a perhaps contingent leftward orientation of the academy, facilitated this leftward turn of liberal egalitarianism. I hasten to add, as Forrester notes, that in this period even the theories of analytic Marxists were "populated by individual rather than collective agents and focused on distribution and ownership rather than labor." (206) 

Later in the chapter, Forrester suggests, however, that while political philosophers were tracking something, they did not really understand, or at least failed to register important changes to their own societies:

The irony of this change in focus was that it did not help philosophers identify the transformation in the state they were witnessing. Those [among liberal egalitarian philosophers] most focused on the New Right overlooked the decline of democratic control that followed from the depoliticization, privatization, and weakening of the welfare functions of the state that occurred in the 1980s. By contrast, many who maintained Rawls’s assumptions and sought to deepen liberal philosophy’s democratic procedures did not engage with the radicalization [within philosophy] of egalitarianism.(207) [Insertions added to facilitate discussion--ES]

It's a bit of shame that Forrester does not engage with Melinda Cooper's Family Values (which she cites in different context, see p. 332 n 127). I want to pick up two themes from that book (recall this post; and here). First, Cooper shows that Stateside in non-trivial respects welfare reform (which drew on libertarian and socially conservative ideas) entailed the intensification of the state's involvement with and micro-management of the lives of poor people (who are, say, exposed to invasive drug-testing requirements) not the least massively increased incarceration. These illiberal and inhumane policies were democratically enacted and hugely popular at the time (perhaps still are) not the least because of the racial undertones of such policies. (Forrester notes this, too, on p. 228.)

As an aside, I suspect Forrrester falls victim here, not uncommon among left-leaning-theorists of idealizing (true) democracy, and of being unwilling to countenance that democratic processes often produce manifestly unjust outcomes. (I call this 'democratic innocence'). It's also not obviously true that democratic control really lessened in the 80s. While the administrative state expanded with delegated powers, those powers could be and sometimes were clawed back. In the UK (in the 80s), most changes involved centralization of control, but that does not entail lessening of democratic control. A lot of British privatization created monopoly suppliers that were regulated, and while such regulation was often at arm's length of government and parliament, the absence of de facto democratic control was more due to lack of political will (and perhaps the corrupting influence of revolving doors between industry, politicians, and civil servants) than lack of political power. 

Second, Cooper notes (and I am simplifying here) that by focusing on the male-gendered family wage and by ignoring the emancipatory desires of women and ethnic minorities (pertaining to work, sexuality, life style, etc.), social democratic/left-liberal parties missed out on changes in the electorate that gave the New Right part of its dynamism, and demanded from the Left new kind of reactions. And this suggests that Forrester is right to claim that the philosophers of the age did not understand their own society, but provides the wrong diagnosis of it.*** 

Given the demographics of professional philosophy at the time -- overwhelmingly male and white --, it is no surprise (after the fact) that political philosophers focused either arguing for egalitarian outcomes from individualist premises or doubling down on democratic procedures completely missed the boat on issues pertaining to race, ethnicity, diversity, sexuality, environmental health, etc. Many such issues were discussed in other disciplines, and these were disparaged, or when philosophers did approach them it often entailed giving up on, or delaying greatly, a career at the "elite institutions" (p. 242) that are Forrester's focus. (The career trajectories of, say, Iris Marion Young and Charles Mills are instructive.) That is to say (and now i am using Forrester's vocabulary), the internal politics of (elite) political philosophy left it in a bad epistemic position to develop the conceptual structures needed to be salient for a refashioned Left policy because, in part, its own elite demographics was out of step with social developments.+ And this meant, again quoting Forrester, that while there was conceptual room for "bottom-up challenges to the basic structure, to widen its scope and to include gender, racist, and interpersonal injustices. But there were few top-down reassessments." (237) 

This second point is, thus, in the spirit of Forrester's own analysis. Her book starts, in fact, by telling us "this is the story of the triumph of a small group of influential, affluent, white, mostly male, analytical political philosophers who worked at a handful of elite institutions in the United States and Britain, especially Harvard, Princeton, and Oxford. It is a story that includes few women, except at the margins, and fewer people of color."   (xvii) So, she is highly aware of the facts I am appealing to. Recall from my earlier posts that the official main focus of Forrester's "[i] book is about the politics of political philosophy and [ii] the political implications of conceptual choices." (xxi; numbers added to facilitate discussion.) Now, Forrester is careful not to suggest a causal connection between [i] and [ii]. But nothing prevents it. 

Let me close with two final observation inspired by Cooper. First, Forrester correctly notes "the horizons of philosophers [of that generation] were shaped by defenses and critiques of the market, and so, like nearly everyone else, many misdiagnosed the changes they were living through." (238) It's hard not to agree here. When I started blogging about philosophy of economics, I vowed not to recycle the state vs market debates that had been suffocating twentieth century political philosophy. (It's pretty clear that states constitute markets, and that markets shape states.) But Forrester misses that it was, in part, the dynamic effects of markets (alongside education and immigration) that created the constituencies among the non-wealthy for whom the family wage was not the highest priority.

Second, it's natural to read this digression, and suspect that I think demography is destiny and always decisive. By contrast, Forrester's "like nearly everyone else" suggests that knowing one's age is generally out of reach to those in elite echo chambers. (Here she and Anderson end up close together again.) But whatever one thinks of Foucault's interventions in politics, in his theoretical work he clearly understood his own age in a way that those working at "Harvard, Princeton, and Oxford" did not. And while the sample size is incredibly small, one can't help but wonder if the very different educational trajectories and internal gate-keeping didn't (and doesn't continue) to play a role here. To be continued...

 

 

Philosophers on Rawls' project; Forrester's In the Shadow of Justice, pt 2

If one understands political philosophy as an enterprise whose goal is to guide political action, then I think Forrester is absolutely correct that the abstractions and idealizations need to go...

But not all political philosophy need be understood as intending to guide our action in this very direct sense. Importantly, I do not think Rawls understood his project like this, though his acolytes seemed to have, as Forrester demonstrates in detail. Instead, Rawls understood the goals of political philosophy very differently, and how he understood the nature of his project may render some of Forrester’s criticisms inert. To this end, it is worth exploring this in more detail. 

In the introduction to the paperback version of Political Liberalism, Rawls concludes by discussing what the overarching point or goal of his project is. He writes:

Philosophy may study political questions at many different levels of generality and abstractness, all valuable and significant. It may ask why it is wrong to attack civilians in war either from the air by ordinary bombs or atomic weapons. More generally, it may ask about just forms of constitutional arrangements and which kinds of questions properly belong to constitutional politics. More generally still, it may ask whether a just and well-ordered constitutional democracy is possible and what makes it so. I don’t say that the more general questions are the most philosophical, nor that they are more important. All these questions and their answers, so far as we can find them, bear on one another and work together to add to the knowledge of philosophy.[2] 

Though he clearly thinks that all sorts of philosophical questions and projects have value, it is the latter inquiry—political philosophy at its most general and abstract—that Rawls takes as his focus in Political Liberalism. In particular, the guiding question is whether a just and well-ordered constitutional democracy is possible, and what makes it so.

Notice how political philosophy in its most general and abstract form seems to be quite different from the underlying account of political philosophy that Forrester presumes, where the goal of the philosopher of public affairs is to offer concrete advice to remedy pressing problems such as global inequality or overpopulation. Instead, the task is to construct a sort of possibility proof of the kind mathematicians or theoretical economists might pursue. Just as a mathematician tries to show that a certain mathematical object with interesting properties exists, or a theoretical economist might try to show that there exists a certain kind of equilibrium solution for a particular class of games, Rawls is trying to show that a certain kind of society—a just and well-ordered constitutional democracy—can, in fact, exist. As Burton Dreben, one of Rawls’s friends and a great interpreter of his work describes the project: “What Rawls has primarily been doing for the last twenty years is engage in a certain kind of very complex conceptual analysis, namely, he has been investigating the question, Is the notion of a constitutional liberal democracy internally consistent or coherent? Is it conceptually and logically possible to have as an ideal—it’s not even a question of how to bring it about.”--Brian Kogelmann reviewing In the Shadow of Justice: Postwar Liberalism and the Remaking of Political Philosophy (2019), by Katrina Forrester in The New Rambler [HT Matt Lister]

Yesterday (see here) Matt Lister nudged me toward Kogelmann's fascinating review of Forrester. Unlike Freeman's review, Kogelmann's provide a sufficiently accurate and helpful summary so that the reader can decide whether they ought to read the book. In addition, without actually stating the book's official aim, recall [I] "the book is about the politics of political philosophy and the political implications of conceptual choices," (xxi), Kogelmann's review actually says quite a bit about the book such that the second half of that aim comes into clear view such that the reader of Kogelmann's essay has a sence of what Forrester is up to. Below I return to discuss the substance of that.

Despite appearances to contrary, it's not my life's mission to 'score' philosophy book reviews. But I do find it interesting that a book that states prominently and early that it is about the "politics of political philosophy" fails to elicit discussion among philosophers about her analysis of the politics of political philosophy. I have now read five reviews by philosophers of the book, and of these only Lea Ypi mentions it (here) in her very interesting review without really exploring Forrester's views on the politics of political philosophy. Whereas non-philosophers (political theorists and intellectual historians, etc) have no trouble engaging with this theme. Feel free to call my attention to reviews by philosophers that I have missed that do engage with what she has to say about the politics of political philosophy.

As an aside, I find this state of affairs baffling. Philosophers of science (Liam Kofi Bright, Cailin O'Connor, etc) and feminists (e.g., Dotson) have brought different kinds of versions and models of (what we may call) the sociology of knowledge to bear on philosophy itself in journals and even in widely read blogs. And even those who don't write or read these works, are familiar enough in thinking about philosophy in Kuhnian terms. And given that many political philosophers teach in PPE programs, it is odd that they would be so unwilling to engage with scholarship that suggests that a philosophical status quo is itself the effect of the complex interaction between arguments and social environment (recall my treatment of p. 257 in yesterday's post), and what we might call the attractor effects of an established paradigm, as Forrester suggests.

In fact -- and now back to Forrester -- Forrester explicitly and repeatedly treats Rawlsianism as a philosophical paradigm (xx, 150, 174--I am sure I have missed a few (she also uses 'framework' sometimes); she also very often talks of a "distributive paradigm."). And she suggests that the uptake of Rawls' book was facilitated by the network he was in and their efforts. In fact she suggests her book will show two distinct further theses:

Just as often, rival political visions or arguments were not rejected outright, but domesticated and accommodated within the liberal egalitarian paradigm—often in a way that diffused their force. As subsequent generations built on the arguments of their forebears, a philosophical paradigm took on a political shape that none of its discrete theorists might have intended. (xx)

That is, first, once Rawlsianism become hegemonic it was capable of diffusing challenges by incorporating some of their insights (on domestication, see also p. 207 & 230). In a different context I have claimed (recall here; here) this sponge-like quality is not just a feature of the liberal egalitarian paradigm, but of analytic philosophy as such once it was safely ensconced in philosophy departments without serious rivals. The politics of analytic philosophy rarely figure in the book (except when she is discussing Wittgensteinian influence on early Rawls) under that guise, but Forrester alerts the reader in a few footnotes to work by Joel Isaac that she is aware of its significant to her story (but see also p. 131; 244). My own view is that Rawlsianism became hegemonic has a lot to do with the character of analytic philosophy in the 1960s. (About that soon.)

And second she claims in rather deflationary fashion that even if Rawls were a self-conscious philosophical legislator (something she is really rather mum about--she does not discuss the significance of his lectures and his PhD training to the formation of a Rawlsian 'school'), most of what became Rawslianism is the unintended effect of philosophical debates with critics and alternative approaches in light of shifting contexts. This (I almost called it a 'Hayekian') theory of the intellectual market place helps explain why after she has discussed  the period leading up to the 1971 of Theory of Justice,  in her treatment Rawls himself often disappears in his own shadow.  

Okay let me now turn back to Kogelmann. He notes perceptively that whatever the aims of Forrester's approach to Rawls are, and like all readers he has picked up on important strains of criticism, she may not be doing justice to Rawls' own views. To put it in terms of the historian's craft, if she were writing about Rawls' aims then she has violated the injunction to use actor's categories. (I think that's neat aspect of his criticism quoted above.) But Forrester is not very interested in Rawls' intentions, but in the construction of a Rawlsian paradigm by a community of scholars. And Kogelmann charitably reads her as claiming to be following norms of that paradigm (namely that political philosophy shouldn't merely clarify political problems but also "bring them to a resolution."*) The first sentence of his review I quoted above comes after a paragraph in which he grants that "this general vision of what the philosopher should do is widely adopted among the discipline’s practitioners." 

Kogelmann is a bit too charitable here. I really wish Forrester had added a chapter in which she had come more clean on her own (normative) framework in evaluating the success or failure of Rawlsianism. Because it is not entirely clear what the rules of the game are here. After all, as she demonstrates in all kinds of ways, Rawlsianism was a resounding success within the politics of political philosophy: as she shows, even philosophers that rejected the content and methods of Rawls' project did end up using his vocabulary (and vice versa). As I joked yesterday, as she shows, Rawls' achievement is akin to the claim that in economics Koopmans, Marschak, Arrow, or Debreu got economists to use convex analysis; and it is no doubt that this acted as a formal constraint on what kind of economy could be imagined, or at least the vocabulary in which one must speak in order to advance in professional economics. (I return to this below.) So, it's not entirely transparent how her empirical work in (say) the sociology knowledge connects to her critical strain. 

The purported political failure of Rawls according to her is that -- to simplify -- after Theory of Justice appeared, political life increasingly shifted away from Rawls' moral (and political) vision (chapter 7 is really a masterful treatment of this theme). Now, this is a very interesting general fact. This is one reason, for example, why I am myself much more interested in liberal programs that did sometimes manage to shape in some ways political outcomes (ordoliberalism, chicago school, public choice, law and economics, third way, etc.) But for all my great admiration for her book, Forrester really has not earned this conclusion because she has not really studied how Rawlsians tried to shape health care (e.g., Norman Daniels), the law (Nussbaum barely registers), and other areas of public policy. (She acknowledges this in response to critics here.) If the two parts of [I], "the politics of political philosophy" and "the political implications of conceptual choices," are connected it is not obvious from her book how. To make a (Schumpeterian) joke: winning the philosophical argument may be the worst possible predictor of the capacity to shape politics. And if Plato, Madison, and Smith are right one should not expect that at all (okay, sorry that was advertisement for my book).

It's also not clear why she thinks political philosophy can shape political outcomes given that she generally seems to think and argue it's the social environment that shapes and even partially determines political philosophy (and so makes it un-dangerous to the status quo), especially at the "elite institutions" (xvii) she is primarily interested in (again this exchange is very good about this).** And, to be fair, we don't criticize Hobbes for not preventing the messy mixed constitution of the Glorious Revolution (be grateful for small mercies, I say) nor do we criticize Olympe de Gouges for not preventing that mass democracy was gendered male for centuries (we praise her for her prescience and courage!).

Okay, let me wrap up with a three comments on Kogelmann's Rawlsian counter proposal from the paperback version of Political Liberalism, and then one on the significance of this to Forrester's argument. (Only the third will be critical.) Now, at first sight it seems Kogelmann is begging the question against Forrester's approach; for Rawls' own views have no special standing here (see above). Yet, I have come to think it is actually a fair response to Forrester's argument, but not convincing. For, it's fair because it actually presupposes something important about how in [I] "the politics of political philosophy" and "the political implications of conceptual choices," could be connected. (And as we will see I don't think Forrester herself has a compelling story.) For, one can reformulate Kogelmann's position in light of Forrester's book as follows: winning the politics of political philosophy, and by building on A Theory of Justice and Political Liberalism, allows a community to establish with its tools that it is "possible in a world of reasonable yet nonetheless insurmountable and irreconcilable disagreement for a just and well-ordered constitutional democracy to exist[.]" And, for Kogelmann (and Rawls) this will have beneficial political implications.

For, second, and in fact, by 'possibility' Kogelmann interprets Rawls to mean something like what the economist means by an 'existence proof.'+ (I return to that below.) And then he glosses this as follows: "it is possible generally speaking for a just and well-ordered constitutional democracy to exist, regardless of the particularities of a county’s circumstances and history. But proving the general claim requires we abstract away from current political realities, contra Forrester...Rawls’s project is not to show that a just and well-ordered constitutional democracy is possible for a society populated by knaves. Rather, he wants to show that such a political order is consistent with human nature when at its best...[without] to idealize away all our blemishes." And this possibility, when established by the Rawlsian paradigm, can influence people: "citizens will be influenced by the arguments of political philosophers, and this will have a down-the-road and very distant impact on the kinds of policies and laws that are eventually implemented."++ It's not entirely clear if we are supposed to believe that citizens will be expected to be influenced by reading Rawls (like the citizens of a Hobbesian commonwealth must read Leviathan, etc.) or, perhaps more likely, if the influence is supposed to trickle down through mediators.

Third, what is odd about Kogelmann's position is that nobody alive thinks that the economists' existence proofs or their arguments will convince citizens of anything. And since the analogy to existence proofs in game theory is so important to Kogelmann, let me quote a pre-eminent game-theorist on why he avoids using Rawls' framework; when confronted by Theory of Justice, even economists noted that as a model of political life it left out something very important. Aumann (who I usually do not cite approvingly) writes:

Criteria of equity that do not take power considerations into account have a pleasing air of symmetry and abstract perfection; they appeal to our philosophical, ethical senses. But what would make society adopt such criteria? And even if adopted, what chance do they have of surviving the attacks of pressure groups, large and small? For better or for worse, economic realities are dictated not by ethical considerations, but by the exercise of economic power. (Robert J. Aumann (1976) "Values of Markets with a Continuum of Traders," 621; notice that this does not require that everyone is a knave, but that the rich and other rent-seekers may well be.)++

Notice that I am not treating Aumann  as an authority on philosophy. Rather, to put this in jargon: I take what Aumann is suggesting is that while it is true that "belief in what is possible or impossible affects [citizens'] thoughts and attitudes," the transmission mechanism that Kogelman assumes from Rawls' arguments to citizen influence goes in the face of everything we know about political life. So, rather than inspiring political hope, Rawls' can only be appreciated aesthetically, as it were, for the artistry of the proof. Again, to put it as a serious joke: Kogelman's Rawls assumes a kind of invisible hand mechanism such that right arguments magically or mysteriously will win out in political life. I actually mention this because I also suspect this criticism can be lodged against Forrester's own views.

In a way, the remark by Dreben quoted by Kogelmannactually suggests the same. Rawls' possibility proofs are disassociated from "how to bring it about."  Quite right. (I should note that a natural reading of Political Liberalism suggests that Rawls is highly aware that local political traditions  can matter greatly to the conceptual engineer. But this does not fit Kogelmann's proposal.)

Third, Kogelmann recognizes something like this objection. And he has an implied response by way of a quote from Rawls on the fall of Weimar: "A cause of the fall of Weimar’s constitutional regime was that none of the traditional elites of Germany supported its constitution or were willing to cooperate to make it work. They no longer believed a decent liberal parliamentary regime was possible." Friends have repeatedly quoted this to me, too. And I can see why people find it beautiful and tragic (as Kogelmann does). But while something like this may have been true of German Marxists -- they thought that the fall of Weimar was demonstrated by science --, this claim is not true of the 'traditional elites' in the sense required for Rawls and Kogelmann. In so far as German traditional elites then ever believed a decent liberal parliamentary regime was possible (and it's not obvious many did), these gave up on it for reasons having nothing to do with philosophy but everything to do with the state of the economy, the street violence, the intimidation (including assassination), reparations required by Versailles' treaty, and a host of other issues not least that it was unclear to them how democracy could defend itself against its enemies while staying democratic. (Popper, of all people, gets this right.) 

So, finally, while Kogelmann has a serious response to Forrester's position, and even thereby finds a way of showing how the elements of [I] might be connected, I don't think anyone ought to be persuaded by it, especially if one takes Forrester's approach seriously. But this leaves as an open question what, if one takes her historical arguments seriously, the lessons of her argument are for a political philosophy worth having in light of the necessity of the politics of political philosophy and an interest in having these conclusions shape political life. To be continued.