Digressions&Impressions

On Graeber and Wengrow and Institutional Flexibility

As Claude Lévi-Strauss often pointed out, early Homo sapiens were not just physically the same as modern humans, they were our intellectual peers as well. In fact, most were probably more conscious of society’s potential than people generally are today, switching back and forth between different forms of organization every year.  Rather than idling in some primordial innocence, until the genie of inequality was somehow uncorked, our prehistoric ancestors seem to have successfully opened and shut the bottle on a regular basis, confining inequality to ritual costume dramas, constructing gods and kingdoms as they did their monuments, then cheerfully disassembling them once again.--David Graeber and David Wengrow (2018) "How to change the course of human history: (at least, the part that’s already happened)" in Eurozine.

I start with a cute observation: the position attributed to Lévi-Strauss is itself an echo of one of Adam Smith's central claims in the Wealth of Nations:

It is otherwise in the barbarous societies, as they are commonly called, of hunters, of shepherds, and even of husbandmen in that rude state of husbandry which precedes the improvement of manufactures, and the extension of foreign commerce. In such societies the varied occupations of every man oblige every man to exert his capacity, and to invent expedients for removing difficulties which are continually occurring. Invention is kept alive, and the mind is not suffered to fall into that drowsy stupidity, which, in a civilized society, seems to benumb the understanding of almost all the inferior ranks of people. In those barbarous societies, as they are called...Every man too is in some measure a statesman, and can form a tolerable judgment concerning the interest of the society, and the conduct of those who govern it. 

For according to Lévi-Strauss (and as it happens Graeber & Wengrow) and Smith, and unless social conditions conspire against it, we are  capable of what we may call natural political theorizing--the imaginative effort of reflecting on institutional arrangements, perhaps even counterfactual institutional arrangements. 

Smith famously thought that the extensive division of labor corrupted our natural capacity in certain kinds of wage laborers (see also this passage). For Smith we are primarily shaped by our environment. It is no surprise (recall) that his initial example of technological innovation and liberty (!) is due "one of those boys, who loved to play with his companions," because in children our natural inventiveness and play-fullness is not yet destroyed.

If I understand the larger argument of David Graeber (recall these posts) & David Wengrow, one I heard extended last week at a public lecture, they think there is quite a bit of archaeological and anthropological evidence that humans deploy their natural capacity for "play" and what above I called natural political theorizing to experimenting with institutional arrangements even alternating among them on a regular basis. They think this was once well known, but (shades of Kuhn loss) lost: Scholarship does not always advance. Sometimes it slides backwards.  I quote an extensive passage before I comment:

Why are these seasonal variations important? Because they reveal that from the very beginning, human beings were self-consciously experimenting with different social possibilities. Anthropologists describe societies of this sort as possessing a ‘double morphology’. Marcel Mauss, writing in the early twentieth century, observed that the circumpolar Inuit, ‘and likewise many other societies . . . have two social structures, one in summer and one in winter, and that in parallel they have two systems of law and religion’. In the summer months, Inuit dispersed into small patriarchal bands in pursuit of freshwater fish, caribou, and reindeer, each under the authority of a single male elder. Property was possessively marked and patriarchs exercised coercive, sometimes even tyrannical power over their kin. But in the long winter months, when seals and walrus flocked to the Arctic shore, another social structure entirely took over as Inuit gathered together to build great meeting houses of wood, whale-rib, and stone. Within them, the virtues of equality, altruism, and collective life prevailed; wealth was shared; husbands and wives exchanged partners under the aegis of Sedna, the Goddess of the Seals.

Another example were the indigenous hunter-gatherers of Canada’s Northwest Coast, for whom winter – not summer – was the time when society crystallised into its most unequal form, and spectacularly so. Plank-built palaces sprang to life along the coastlines of British Columbia, with hereditary nobles holding court over commoners and slaves, and hosting the great banquets known as potlatch. Yet these aristocratic courts broke apart for the summer work of the fishing season, reverting to smaller clan formations, still ranked, but with an entirely different and less formal structure. In this case, people actually adopted different names in summer and winter, literally becoming someone else, depending on the time of year..

Quite independently, archaeological evidence suggests that in the highly seasonal environments of the last Ice Age, our remote ancestors were behaving in broadly similar ways: shifting back and forth between alternative social arrangements, permitting the rise of authoritarian structures during certain times of year, on the proviso that they could not last; on the understanding that no particular social order was ever fixed or immutable. Within the same population, one could live sometimes in what looks, from a distance, like a band, sometimes a tribe, and sometimes a society with many of the features we now identify with states. With such institutional flexibility comes the capacity to step outside the boundaries of any given social structure and reflect; to both make and unmake the political worlds we live in. If nothing else, this explains the ‘princes’ and ‘princesses’ of the last Ice Age, who appear to show up, in such magnificent isolation, like characters in some kind of fairy-tale or costume drama. Maybe they were almost literally so. If they reigned at all, then perhaps it was, like the kings and queens of Stonehenge, just for a season.

There are really three main points to Graeber & Wengrow's argument: first, there is a polemic against the idea that in the state of nature, or in pre-history, societies are naturally "tiny egalitarian bands of hunter-gatherers" (without any or much private property) and that the rise of inequality is the consequence of the invention of property and new forms of social instutions. The most famous version of the account is to be found in Rousseau, who treats it (as they note) as a fiction.**

Second, Graeber & Wengrow attack the impoverished taxonomy used to classify different kinds of political societies. They claim the historical record shows (for example) cities are possible without bureaucracies or without large inequalities (including standing armies; they claim that "in those parts of the world where animals and plants were first domesticated, there actually was no discernible ‘switch’ from Palaeolithic Forager to Neolithic Farmer" instead there were hybrids of various forms. 

Third, the first two points are part of a larger argument that is meant to undermine a species of fatalism about theorizing about social organizations. The record shows that humans are capable of reflecting on and experimenting with many different kinds of social organization; as they put it in the sentence just before the passage I quote at the top of this post, "those same pioneering humans who colonised much of the planet also experimented with an enormous variety of social arrangements."

Now, in their criticism of social fatalism, I much prefer Graeber & Wengrow's argument over Foucault's (which, to simplify in reductive fashion, emphasizes contingency of our present arrangement, but somehow can't imagine an alternative to the status quo). So, I prefer not to close with a critical worry. Even so, in reading their sentence of the pioneering humans I had to think of the Cambian explosion so wonderfully described by Gould. Perhaps, we humans are a bit like the Burgess Shale fossils: after a period of immense social diversification, our social Baupläne have been narrowed down quite a bit.+

I am not sufficiently expert to suggest an explanation for this reduced experimentation (beyond Smith's point that societies with extensive division of labor reduce inventiveness and play). Perhaps, after the bout of experimentation, our ancestors increasingly started bumping into each other again and resource competition among societies of homo sapiens caused the winnowing; perhaps the invention of written language was a decisive technological shift in favor of certain extractive political economies. I am not suggesting that we are doomed to the status quo.++ Given the challenges facing humanity, we should, perhaps, allow our imagination more play and experimentation, 

 

 

Mencius in the late Enlightenment (Sophie de Grouchy & Adam Smith)

First, we are clearly moved to concern ourselves with others’ troubles so we can relieve them. This desire acts in us without any thought as to whether it is possible to contribute to this relief and before we have had time to see whether it will ever be possible to do so. It is this desire which, when we see a man struggling in the water and about to be swallowed up by it, causes spectators on the shore to reach out with their arms to him with urgency, a sublime movement of nature, which shows in an instant all the power of humanity over our hearts and also all the consequences a legislator could derive from that sentiment, more often weakened than strengthened by our institutions.--Sophie de Grouchy (1798) Letters on Sympathy, Letter 2. Translated by Sandrine Bergès.'

There is a strain of argument in Grouchy, indebted to Mandeville and Rousseau, where she emphasizes the pleasure we feel when we benefit others(e.g, in Letter 6, she writes, "individual ideas of justice are linked to the feeling of pleasure or pain when we benefit or harm others”) And there is also a consequentialist streak in here account of sympathy (e.g, in Letter 4, she writes “we feel sympathy for physical pains and pleasures in proportion to our understanding of their strengths and consequences.") But in the quoted passage, the point is to claim that sometimes we are naturally moved to unthinking compassion. The 'moved' here is also literal ("reach out with their arms.") Such unmediated and immediate compassion is evidence of our natural humanity,

Grouchy's point is not just moral psychological, but also political: we can organize the institutions of society to strengthen our natural compassion or undermine it. Quite clearly Grouchy thinks that institutions and their incentives should be so designed that they cultivate our natural compassion, and that they draw upon them to generate good consequences. The point is not just left abstract; her reformist account of the legal system (recall here, here, here) draws on this would-be-mechanism.

Now, the original reader of Grouchy's Letters, would have encountered this passage after reading, perhaps, her translation of The Theory of Moral Sentiments (to which the Letters were added as an appendix). That book starts by calling attention to the very same mechanism:

When we see a stroke aimed and just ready to fall upon the leg or arm of another person, we naturally shrink and draw back our own leg or our own arm; and when it does fall, we feel it in some measure, and are hurt by it as well as the sufferer. The mob, when they are gazing at a dancer on the slack rope, naturally writhe and twist and balance their own bodies, as they see him do, and as they feel that they themselves must do if in his situation. 

But what is notable is that in discussing this passage, Smith does not make the claim that this is evidence of our natural compassion or common humanity; nor does he use it to claim that the legislator should design institutions in light of our natural (unmediated) compassion or use these institutions to the strengthen them. This is not to deny that these are Smithian themes, but one has to work at deriving them from Smith.

However, Grouchy's thought experiment evokes a passage in another famous moral psychologist, Mencius:

The reason why I say that humans all have hearts that are not unfeeling coward others is this. Suppose someone suddenly saw a child about to fall into a well: everyone in such a situation would have a feeling of alarm and compassion-not because one sought to get in good with the child's parents, not because one wanted fame among their neighbors and friends, and not because one would dislike the sound of the child's cries. "From this we can see that if one is without the heart of compassion, one is not a human." Mencius, 2A6, Translated by Bryan W. Van Norden

For Mencius it is constitutive of humanity that we feel immediate and unmediated compassion to others in direct need. For him such compassion is constitutive of our humanity. Were such compassion absent, we can point to social causes, that is, bad governance that have corrupted our (naturally good xing shan 性善) human nature. (Regular readers know, recall, I admire Mencius' philosophy because it prevents status quo bias and victim blaming.)

Clearly Grouchy's thought experiment is not identical to Mencius'; she uses a drowning adult and not a child. And she adds the physical reaching out which is absent in Mencius. Even so, we may say that the underlying points are sympathetically attuned to each other. 

I have no evidence that Grouchy read Mencius. But the passage was familiar in a translation and discussion of the Jesuit Jean-Baptiste Du Halde, who mentions it in his (1735) Description géographique, historique, chronologique, politique, et physique de l'empire de la Chine et de la Tartarie chinoise, enrichie de cartes générales et particuli`eres de ces pays, de la carte générale & des cartes particulieres du Thibet & de la Corée. The book was very popular in Europe during the Eighteenth century, Du Halde had not visite China himself, but he created a standard summary of a century and a half of Jesuit discovery in China (recall this post for some of the significance of this).

There is lurking here a crucial connection to Adam Smith. As my friend, Ryan Hanley, first taught me the status of China was of crucial importance to Smith's political economy. And, in fact, Smith sometimes alludes to knowledge of  Du Halde in the Wealth of Nations (see here; and here). 

 

 

 

Ibn Khaldun On Self-Domestication and Autonomy

Not everyone is master of his own affairs. Chiefs and leaders who are masters of the affairs of men are few in comparison with the rest. As a rule, man must by necessity be dominated by someone else. If the domination is kind and just and the people under it are not oppressed by its laws and restrictions, they are guided by the courage or cowardice that they possess in themselves. They are satisfied with the absence of any restraining power. Self-reliance eventually becomes a quality natural to them. They would not know anything else. If, however,the domination with its laws is one of brute force and intimidation, it breaks their fortitude and deprives them of their power of resistance as a result of the inertness that develops in the souls of the oppressed, as we shall explain.
...
When laws are (enforced) by means of punishment, they completely destroy fortitude, because. the use of punishment against someone who cannot defend himself generates in that person a feeling of humiliation that, no doubt, must break his fortitude. When laws are (intended to serve the purposes of) education and instruction and are applied from childhood on, they have to some degree the same effect,because people then grow up in fear and docility and consequently do not rely on their own fortitude.
For this (reason), greater fortitude is found among the savage Arab Bedouins than among people who are subject to laws. Furthermore, those who rely on laws and are dominated by them from the very beginning of their education and instruction in the crafts, sciences, and religious matters, are thereby deprived of much of their own fortitude. They can scarcely defend themselves at all against hostile acts. This is the case with students, whose occupation it is to study and to learn from teachers and religious leaders, and who constantly apply themselves to instruction and education in very dignified gatherings. This situation and the fact that it destroys the power of resistance and fortitude must be understood.
It is no argument against the (statement just made) that the men around Muhammad observed the religious laws, and yet did not experience any diminution of their fortitude, but possessed the greatest possible fortitude. When the Muslims got their religion from the Lawgiver (Muhammad), the restraining influence came from themselves, as a result of the encouragement and discouragement he gave them in the Qur'an. It was not a result of technical instruction or scientific education. (The laws) were the laws and precepts of the religion, which they received orally and which their firmly rooted (belief in) the truth of the articles of faith caused them to observe. Their fortitude remained unabated, and it was not corroded by education or authority. 'Umar said, "Those who are not educated(disciplined) by the religious law are not educated (disciplined) by God." (This statement expresses) 'Umar's desire that everyone should have his restraining influence in himself. It also expresses his certainty that the Lawgiver (Muhammad) knew best what is good for mankind.
(The influence of) religion, then, decreased among men, and they came to use restraining laws. The religious law became a branch of learning and a craft to be acquired through instruction and education. People turned to sedentary life and assumed the character trait of submissiveness to law. This led to a decrease in their fortitude.
It has thus become clear that governmental and educational laws destroy fortitude, because their restraining influence is something that comes from outside.The religious laws, on the other hand, do not destroy fortitude, because their restraining influence is something inherent. Therefore, governmental and educational laws influence sedentary people, in that they weaken their souls and diminish their stamina, because they have to suffer (their authority) both as children and as adults. The Bedouins, on the other hand, are not in the same position,because they live far away from the laws of government, instruction, and education.'--Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah, Chapter 2, Section 6. (Translated by Franz Rosenthal.)

According to Ibn  Khaldun (recall) the institution of justice, which he thinks in its origin co-extensive with properly functioning royal authority, originates  only after the division of labor has generated some surplus worth fighting over; it follows from the need to prevent people from harming each other in virtue of our innate aggressiveness and tendency toward mutual harm. Aggressiveness is not all bad; the properly cultivated version (when royal authority is "kind and just") is a form of spirited-ness (akin to the greek thumos) or courage, which he calls fortitude.  

Before I continue, I must clarify that Ibn Khaldun, like his great successors (Hume, Smith, Marx) identifies (at least three) major stages of of economic and social development: (i) the necessary civilizations of nomadic tribes (who live near starvation levels); (ii) sedentary agricultural societies, which generate sufficient surplus to live comfortably; and (iii) commercial cities (which can double as seats of royal power) where, when taxes are kept low, the arts and sciences can flourish amidst luxury goods.  Originally this scheme characterizes a historical-logical, even teleological development from (i) to (iii), but in practice the three forms of society can live alongside each other at the same time and have complex modes of interaction (which can be captured in familiar patterns of development). 

Not unlike the Roman historians and their great admirer, Rousseau, Ibn Khaldun treats luxury as a source of corruption. (The story is more complicated than that sentence allows because he also recognizes that a society with arts and sciences has definite advantages, including military ones.) But what is especially notable is that Ibn  Khaldun treats the effects of civilization as a form of domestication. And that is because, according to Ibn Khaldun, it is constitutive of advanced civilization that it is characterized by a great number of influential social institutions which impose the rule of, what we may call, external law upon its subjects; these institutions shape the inhabitants of wealthy places into the compliant character types needed by the advanced division of labor. They do so with a great deal of force and generate docile population types. The force is not recognized as such because, unlike the tyrant's brutality and willful unpredictability, it is continuous and (to introduce a touch of anachronism) rule following. 

If one rejects civilization and tyranny, one may think one is left with anarchism. And indeed, ordinarily, Bedouin life is characterized by an anarchic "freedom from authority" without "subservience to authority." (Chapter 2, section 25) Again anticipating Rousseau and Adam Smith, Ibn Khaldun associates some of the noblest qualities with this kind of anarchic, savage character who is free and equal to his peers and who can endure seemingly limitless hardship.

The main problem with such anarchic freedom is that it is a barrier to joint action. To make joint action possible another species of law is needed; freely accepted religion helps solve coordination problems and supplies a shared end worth dying for. For, as Ibn Khaldun points out not all forms of law extinguish fortitude. A self-imposed law, which is the product of belief in the truth of its principles, can enhance naturally existing fortitude. When it coincides with what Ibn Khaldun elsewhere calls group feeling (mutual sympathy/co-affectation), groups animated by freely, self-imposed laws become invincible on the battlefield.* With this in place, Ibn Khaldun can explain how economically backward Bedouin Arab tribes, could defeat two ancient and numerically superior superpowers in an extraordinary short period.+ 

The point here is not just the non-trivial understanding -- recently popular thanks to Foucault's domestication and application of Nietzschean ideas -- of the embrace of civilization as a form of self-domestication and open-ended indoctrination into servitude (which gets mislabeled as 'education').  There is a more surprising and salient point lurking here; while civilized man is in chains, the (savage's) free embrace of a law that one takes to be true just is constitutive of autonomy. And so prophecy is a prerequisite for the very possibility of autonomy.  

On Realism, Theoretical Modesty, Systematicity, and Prefiguration

We have now seen how realists, especially through their focus on legitimacy, tend to be committed to strongly contextual approaches to political normativity. Contextualism also provides a way into the last and so far least developed focal point of realism, namely, the rejection of ambitious attempts to formulate grand theories from which to derive prescriptions for any possible political scenario and in reference to which we can judge political behaviour, in favour of a normativity that is appropriately sensitive to the specific conditions under which political decisions are taken and agents act. Enzo Rossi & Matt Sleat "Realism in Normative Political Theory" Philosophy Compass (2014), 694.+

l have noted before (recall here and here) the realist suspicion of theory as a set of systematic relations that can guide policy. By 'realist' I mean the tradition of thought that takes its immediate cue from Bernard Williams and Raymond Geuss, but that purports to find its world-historical inspiration in Machiavelli, Thucydides, Hobbes, and Schmitt. If Rawls and/or ideal theory is the only conception of grand theory that's available, and these, in turn, are constructed in terms of a (technocratic) ideal of consensus formation,* one can understand the realist distaste (given their other commitments), especially if such theories are (exclusively) -- to quote another, more recent paper by Rossi --  "inferred from overarching, pre-political values or principles." 

Now, one may wonder why this prevents one from embracing grand theories that are inferred from or constructed with attention to political values and principles (if one grants the realist that there is a distinction between ethical and political values). To the best of my knowledge, this is not addressed by contemporary theorists, but one can infer the suspicion of it from the following passage quoted approvingly and commented on by Rossi:

we cannot describe, that is, picture, in the concrete, any state of society of which the world has had no experience. For into the reality of a society, even in its broader details, there enters a large element of contingency, of alogicality, of unreason, with which no general principles will furnish us. (Belfort Bax 1891, Preface)**

radical realism is empirically informed, and so while it can let the political imagination run free of feasibility constraints, it is wary of letting it go down the dark alleys of precise prescriptions that balance an unwieldy amount of variables. The realist can be politically ambitious but must be theoretically modest enough to leave those details to politics: there are aspects of politics not amenable to philosophical domestication.--"Being Realistic and Demanding the Impossible"

We see here that Bax embraces a number of interrelated points: first, the embrace of radical (Knightian) uncertainty in political life; second, the idea that society itself contains internal contradictions, even (third) non-eliminable superstition. Fourth, that because of these facts any coherent and systematic theory of what an as-of-yet-non-existent society should look like, will be, as it were, falsified by the new world.

Rossi's endorsement of Bax infers from Bax's diagnosis that one should reject a baroque theory (with many variables [there are shades of Duhem here]) that purports to offer detailed policy prescriptions either to get from the bad status quo to the desirable end-state or to legislate the character of the end state. From the vantage point of realism, such Baroque theory is comic. Now, from the rejection of "blueprints" (technocratic and utopian), Rossi's recent work does not end up with mere (Schmittian) decisionism, nor with a focus on contextual judgment (which he had seemed to endorse while writing with Sleat); rather Rossi recognizes, that his rejection of grand theory still allows some place for (ahh) small theory (in the sense of 'small is beautiful'). He does so in describing so-called 'prefigurative politics' in sympathetic fashion:

one can create microcosms supported by alternative, not (or less) ideologically flawed legitimation stories, irrespectively of whether similar structures are feasible at the level of the whole society. To be sure, prefiguration is often understood as a way to enact what one hopes or expects to eventually extend society-wide. But it doesn’t need to be understood that way. Small-scale structures may simply be the best we can hope for, and that is all the more reason to pursue them.

I agree with Rossi (who himself aspires to a more Maxist position than I would) that realists should not reject prefigurative politics out of hand. But it is peculiar that Rossi does not stop to pause at the danger that small scale improvements may well entrench larger scale (bad) structures (say, by making these more robust). This is not a mere oversight. From the contemporary realist's perspective, there is no theoretical ground to make the evaluative claim (or prediction) about the effects on the larger structure. That's because he (and contemporary realists more generally [with the notable exception of our colleague, Paul Raekstad]) have rejected grand theory. I want to close today's post by gesturing at what I mean.

As regular readers know, I share much of the grounds that lead the realist to reject of Baroque theory (of both the technocratic and utopian kinds) with its detailed blueprints. But it does not follow that the realist must reject non-Baroque grand theory that sketches a politically desirable end point without offering a detailed recipe. So, for example, at the end of the Prince, Machiavelli proposes a plan for Italian unification:+

Italy, left as without life, waits for him who shall yet heal her wounds and put an end to the ravaging and plundering of Lombardy, to the swindling and taxing of the kingdom and of Tuscany, and cleanse those sores that for long have festered. It is seen how she entreats God to send someone who shall deliver her from these wrongs and barbarous insolencies. It is seen also that she is ready and willing to follow a banner if only someone will raise it.

The unification of Italy is an ideal that means to combine (i) the elimination of really existing  injustices ("ravaging and plundering;" "swindling and taxing;" "wrongs and barbarous insolencies") and so be an enteprise that really is "great justice" and (2) a call to a magnanimous soul to engage on a great heroic enterprise worthy of lasting fame. While much of the Prince is full of insight on how to go about such a great enterprise, it does not go into the details how to get from here to there. 

There are two features worthy of comment here. First, Machiavelli recognizes that ideals, including highly normative ideals, are politically motivating. Unlike more modern realists, which (to simplify) tend to embrace a kind of political facts vs ethical ideals distinctions, Machiavelli recognizes that values (and ideologies) motivate (great) collective action that, second, may themselves become constitutive of political union. Obviously, Machiavelli's ideal is rooted in already existing (geographic and historical) realities, but these do not predetermine the shape of the ideal. There is a more important point lurking here. Once such an ideal is motivating, then it creates a whole bunch of conceptual-social necessitations that constrain future paths while recognizing that in practice politics will be full of contingency.

Now, Machiavelli's sketch of a grand theory is extremely thin. And I mention it only because Machiavelli is a realist in excellent standing. But a realist grand ideal can be elaborated systematically and immodestly without falling into the trap of an overly detailed, Baroque blueprint. (I have analyzed in my book such a realist, but relatively un-Baroque grand theory by Adam Smith; I have in mind not his argument for the system of natural liberty, but rather his plan to 'complete' the constitution of the United Kingdom in order to ameliorate the wrongs done to the Irish wrongs and to prevent war with the American colonies.) Such a systematic theory, which -- let's stipulate in honor of the realist demand to respect facticity-- should not go against robust findings of social sciences, is required because of its political virtues (recall also this piece on Adam Smith and Jacob Levy):   

1. A system can allow one to limit the risks of always acting in ad hoc fashion and, thereby, allow one to grasp which compromises are worth accepting and which undermine one's political, strategic, and (yes) moral  aims.
2. Some kind of system is required to guide (not control) long-term planning and to allow trade-offs to be modeled (say, between short-term gains and long-term goals) and, where possible, foreseen. 
3. Being guided by a system generates the possibility of consistency (maybe even accountability) over time. 

 

Rousseau's Legislator, Religion, Magnanimity and the Problem of Evil

There is a further difficulty that deserves attention. Wise men, if they try to speak their language to the common herd instead of its own, cannot possibly make themselves understood. There are a thousand kinds of ideas which it is impossible to translate into popular language. Conceptions that are too general and objects that are too remote are equally out of its range: each individual, having no taste for any other plan of government than that which suits his particular interest, finds it difficult to realise the advantages he might hope to draw from the continual privations good laws impose. For a young people to be able to relish sound principles of political theory and follow the fundamental rules of statecraft, the effect would have to become the cause; the social spirit, which should be created by these institutions, would have to preside over their very foundation; and men would have to be before law what they should become by means of law. The legislator therefore, being unable to appeal to either force or reason, must have recourse to an authority of a different order, capable of constraining without violence and persuading without convincing.

This is what has, in all ages, compelled the fathers of nations to have recourse to divine intervention and credit the gods with their own wisdom, in order that the peoples, submitting to the laws of the State as to those of nature, and recognising the same power in the formation of the city as in that of man, might obey freely, and bear with docility the yoke of the public happiness.

This sublime reason, far above the range of the common herd, is that whose decisions the legislator puts into the mouth of the immortals, in order to constrain by divine authority those whom human prudence could not move.¹⁴ But it is not anybody who can make the gods speak, or get himself believed when he proclaims himself their interpreter. The great soul of the legislator is the only miracle that can prove his mission. Any man may grave tablets of stone, or buy an oracle, or feign secret intercourse with some divinity, or train a bird to whisper in his ear, or find other vulgar ways of imposing on the people. He whose knowledge goes no further may perhaps gather round him a band of fools; but he will never found an empire, and his extravagances will quickly perish with him. Idle tricks form a passing tie; only wisdom can make it lasting. The Judaic law, which still subsists, and that of the child of Ishmael, which, for ten centuries, has ruled half the world, still proclaim the great men who laid them down; and, while the pride of philosophy or the blind spirit of faction sees in them no more than lucky impostures, the true political theorist admires, in the institutions they set up, the great and powerful genius which presides over things made to endure.'--J.J. Rousseau The Social Contract, 2.8

In the quoted passage, Rousseau addresses an instance of the transition problem, that is (recall; recall here and here] how from any status quo to create a normatively desirable or ideal political future with a population raised under bad institutions (or worse, bad breeding). Rousseau's version of the problem is something like, under what conditions can we expect a people capable of exercising the general will to form? And, in fact, Rousseau's answer is rather dramatic, and shows that he recognizes the full nature of the transition problem, namely that people need to be transformed: the legislator must "feel himself capable, so to speak, of changing human nature, of transforming each individual...of altering man's constitution for the purpose of strengthening it (etc.)" In this instance the transition program is turned into (to echo my homage to L.A. Paul) a Political Transformative experience (PTE see Helen de Cruz; P. Allen; or me). Such a PTE can only succeed with a multitude that already has ‘some unity of origin, interest, or convention’ (SC 2.10).

Rousseau proposes that the agent of transformation (the Legislator) is somebody (not unlike the legislators of Plato's Laws and Moses) who remains outside the new social order (in order to prevent corruption of his preferences/aims) he is bringing into being. For this agent religion (and this echoes Al-Farabi's version of Platonic political theory) becomes a tool for political union. Religion here plays three distinct roles: first its symbols and language are more accessible than philosophy/science and so it is a good vehicle to convey the insights of political philosophy to the lesser educated (and educatable); second, it provides an incentive for people to move beyond their personal interests (that is otherwise absent); third, the political project can piggy back on the authority that is accorded to the divine.

The two intermediate aims (the full one is to create a people capable of exercising a general will), of this transformative process are 1.`’liberty and equality’ (SC 2.11;  and 2. the formation of 'social spirit,' that is a form of civic religion. About both of these more is to be said, but I want to wrap up and point out a feature of the origins of magnanimous legislators.

A magnanimous or great soul is not possible in the state of nature, according to Rousseau, because there we are (as Hobbes thought) roughly equal. Against Plato and Aristotle, Rousseau rejects (recall yesterday) natural hierarchy. (The one nice thing about embracing natural hierarchy is that the existence of great souled people is to be expected in any natural population; these show up on a regular basis.) For Rousseau hierarchies that seem natural are the product of society.  So, a great soul is only possible after (bad societies) have generated (with force) ‘natural seeming’ hierarchies in human nature. That is to say, the fact of historical inequality and injustice is a condition of possibility for the production of magnanimous legislators!

It is sometimes said (correctly) that Rousseau did not accept the gospel of progress. And in the Social Contract religion clearly has an instrumental role to play. This allows him (echoing Machiavelli) to see in Moses and Muhammad successful political legislators. But what seems to have been less noticed is that he does embrace a form of theodicy, a kind of cunning of history, which is (perhaps indirectly) also a (proto-Nietzschean) response to the problem of evil. Past suffering makes possible higher types who will transform us into beings that can be free and equal (and generate legitimate government).

 

 

 

Rousseau, Spinoza, Dennett and Adaptive Preference and the Strange Inversion of Reasoning

The reasoning of Caligula agrees with that of Hobbes and Grotius. Aristotle, before any of them, had said that men are by no means equal naturally, but that some are born for slavery, and others for dominion.

Aristotle was right; but he took the effect for the cause. Nothing can be more certain than that every man born in slavery is born for slavery. Slaves lose everything in their chains, even the desire of escaping from them: they love their servitude, as the comrades of Ulysses loved their brutish condition. If then there are slaves by nature, it is because there have been slaves against nature. Force made the first slaves, and their cowardice perpetuated the condition.-- JJ. Rousseau Social Contract, 1.2

In this paragraph, Rousseau presupposes natural equality. All exhibited inequality is a consequence of society and socialization. While Alan Ryan is probably wrong to claim that Rousseau was the "first to see human beings as clay in the hands of society and accussing society of making us self-destructive" (arguably Mencius predates him), it is true that Rousseau is thoroughgoing about the point.

In fact, all non-natural societies/political orders generate serious inequalities (due to use of force).  He uses that assumption to describes an instance of adaptive preferences. Yes, some slaves exhibit servility. (I use 'some' where Rousseau claims 'every'' because his argument does not require the stronger claim. But he may well have believed the stronger claim, alas.) But their servility is a consequence of their environment. You can't infer their servility as intrinsic to their character/nature; in different contexts these same people may not be servile at all.

I think the real, underlying target here is Hobbes--after all, Aristotle is explicitly said to anticipate Hobbes and others. I think so for because throughout the book, it's Hobbes' (proto-Homo Economicus) conception of freedom -- to simplify: want satisfaction in the absence of constraints -- which is Rousseau's target and which is treated as an instance of slavery. (And it is Hobbes which is, as is well known, extremely vulnerable to criticism in light of the argument about adaptive preferences and sour grapes.)

But is notable that Rousseau's criticism of Aristotle's embrace of natural hierarchy is treated as a confusion of effects and causes. For, that style of argument is really at heart of Spinoza's argument against final causes: "that which is really a cause it considers as an effect, and vice versa:" (Ethics, Appendix 1). It is distinctly Spinozistic. In his recent book, From Bacteria to Bach and Back, Dennetts calls the exploitation of this observation 'a strange inversion of reasoning.' (He attributes it to Darwin, Turing, and Hume.)

I am not denying that Plato and Machiavelli (and Hobbes/Mandeville/Locke, and various Republican and Stoic authors) may be more important to Rouseau's political writings, but I think the influence of Spinoza on the Social Contract is marked (since Jonathan Israel and Wim Klever few will be shocked by this suggestion). (To say this is not to genuine differences pertaining to state of nature, property, and social contract!) Consider this eminently quotable line: “[A] mere impulse of appetite is slavery, [B] while obedience to the law which we prescribe to ourselves is liberty” (SC 1.8) It's pretty clear that something like [A] is the Hobbesian view (even if uncharitable).

[B] really consists of two claims: (i) liberty is obedience to the right sort of law; (ii) when we are (properly) autonomous we can be free. (I am using freedom and liberty interchangeable; I am also switching between individual and political freedom because I believe Rousseau and Spinoza does so, too.) Now, to be sure Spinoza's does not have the proto-Kantian characterization of autonomy we find in Rousseau. (I think the puppet image in Plato's Laws is really the ultimate source here.) But I also think (i-ii) are Spinozistic and mutually entailed (?) in Spinoza's system.

For, Spinoza to be free (a real agent) just is to act from knowledge/reason/virtue/adequate causes. I tend to treat this as a slogan: to be free is to act from reason. But as we all know, Spinoza denies that our agency can be separate from natural/physical law (the chain of efficient causes). So, even when are free we obey necessity or natural law in Spinoza. (Students dislike this.) I could say this more precisely (in terms of an essence who's nature is expressed in lawlike fashion; see also E3Def.2: "we are active...when from our nature there follows in us or externally to us something which can be clearly and distinctly understood through our nature alone" (or when are its adequate cause). That is And "true virtue is nothing other than to live only by the guidance of reason."). 

But it's also quite natural [sic] to treat Spinoza's form of freedom as a species of substantive autonomy. See, for example, a lovely (2003) paper by  Doug den Uyl who once argued that Spinoza clearly embraces a form of autonomy; the point was made more carefully and thoroughly by Matt Kisner in his fine (2011) book (which shows that Spinoza can be interpreted in terms of self-legislating because 'being autonomous...requires us to act in accord with universal laws.'

My contribution here is to call attention to significance of Spinoza's criticism of something like a Hobbesian view on agency:

“Men think themselves free, because they are conscious of their volitions and their appetite, and do not think, even in their dreams, of the causes by which they are disposed to wanting and willing, because they are ignorant of [those causes]” (Spinoza, Ethics, Appendix 1).

(I love the point about 'even in their dreams'!) For Spinoza -- anticipating as much Freud as Dennett -- our sense or experience of freedom rests on a kind of user-illusion in which many if not most of the real causes of our behavior are hidden from us. And so we think we act (freely) when we really are not in control over ourselves. I think that Spinoza here links self-knowledge and self-command. When we know ourselves we can act for real in accord with reason, that is, law.

Leading Philosophers Clueless about 'Public' Philosophy, Yet Wish to Control It

Does anybody remember the now unknown names of the Dijon academy that awarded the prize to Rousseau's first Discourse (and, later, his now less famous Letter on French Music)? History is unfair to the discerning judges, who launched the greatest career in public philosophy of the eighteenth century (which has quite a few contenders). Perhaps, if one believes in inductive risk, it is better this way because the train of Rousseau's ideas did not only have noble consequences and so one could judge the prize committee harshly. The point is that whatever the petty or elevated motives of the Academy were to institute their prize, or merely following European fashion, it translated its prestige into recognition of the essential task for philosophy: to give us systematic ideas and programs to live by or, at least, to challenge those we are currently accepting too easily. That means a willingness to take a chance on dangerous ideas.

Public philosophy (recall this post on my analysis)** is, ever since Socrates turned away from the heavens and to his contemporaries, the very justification of philosophy. Revelation agrees, Ye shall know them by their fruits. To forestall misunderstanding: this is not a rejection of professional philosophy and the intrinsic wonder-occasioned, often scholastic pursuit of puzzles and problems that characterizes so many of our professional activities. The by-products and sometimes even the intended results of attempted puzzle solving is to provide one of the main sources of fuel that drives innovation in public philosophy. (I do not share in the neurotic fear among my peers that we are not progressing; who cares as long as we're innovating and suppling the conceptual architecture of the public philosophy needed by humanity?)*

As an aside, such a consequentialist justification for the practice of philosophy is written into the DNA of analytic philosophy, especially those of us that embrace formal methods (recall here on Carnap vs Quine; here on Williamson; on Ernest Nagel). That's easy to see because analytic philosophy is substance-free: it's a sponge-like enterprise, characterized by if not topic neutral than generalist (that is empty-ish) methods and argumentative rigor.

Okay, so much for prelude.

The occasion for today's J'accuse is the simultaneous refusal by the Marc Sanders Foundation to award a cash prize ($4500) and publication in Philosopher's Imprint as its annual Public Philosophy Award because "no essay satisfied their standards," and the (personal) insistence of this year's committee member David Velleman, in remarks in a Dailynous thread that last year's prize, "Why Throwing 92 Heads in a Row is not Surprising," fully merited the award.+ Now, I really don't want to take a piss on a junior colleague, who writes well, has wide learning, and a keen interest in big issues. Let's encourage that (writing well, wide learning, etc)! I am happy that Philosopher's Imprint published his essay. But you ought to know something has gone wrong if you give a prize for this sentence, "Put less formally, the idea that seems to be at work in both of these formal treatments of surprise is that the surprisingness of a conjunction e1 & e2 must be a function of the surprisingness of e1, the surprisingness of e2 and the connection between them." The whole art if not beauty of public philosophy is that you can convey the most exacting and (sure) formal ideas without such clunky prose or ever having to introduce (this is a symptom/example) such notation!** The main problem of the winning piece (to repeat as public philosophy) is not that it tries to convey technical material somewhat less technically, the main problem is that it is hard to say what it ultimately wishes to convey. (It is something about 'surprise and belief;' about 'rational belief;' or about the difference  between the mathematics of surprise and the mathematics of probability?)  The piece has other, more stylistic problems: including the repeated use of italics to convey emphasis. (I am a sinner, too!) I could go on. You may think I hate the piece, I don't. Except for not sticking to one main issue, it conveys very nicely the kind of things we try to teach all the time: clean prose, relevance, underlying argumentative rigor, etc.++ But the virtues we teach are not the virtues of public philosophy. This is why I register my protest!

So, before I continue I should mention that this year's committee involved, Susan Wolf (UNC Chapel Hill), Ken Taylor (Stanford University and Philosophy Talk), Barry Maguire (Stanford University), David Velleman (NYU and Editor of Philosophers’ Imprint), and Brigid Hains (Editorial Director, Aeon Magazine). What they (the philosophers on the committee) have in common is that they have (a) high  institutional prestige; (b) are (at their best) excellent philosophical prose-stylists; and (c) have experience in (organizing) what I'll call philosophical outreach (philosophy cafe, philosophy talk, etc.) The more senior of these are influential in professional philosophy with distinguished positions and students all over the profession. However, none of them have  produced a single memorable instance of long form public philosophy which they define as "(minimum 3,000 words, maximum 10,000) with significant philosophical content or method written by someone with significant philosophical training primarily for an audience of non-academics." (Okay, that's a defeasible claim.) That's because writing stylish philosophical prose that we write for other philosophers is distinct from producing excellent public philosophy. (Dan Dennett and Martha Nussbaum may be the contemporay exceptions to the rule.)

Nor have the members of this committee shown themselves champions of long form philosophy before. (Of course, their conversion to the cause is to be welcomed. And they may think that this blog post attacking them is just evidence that all good deeds go punished.) Even so, their main qualifications seem to be prestige, the ability to recognize philosophical content produced by somebody with philosophical training, and editorial access to the Philosopher's Imprint. You may think I am being so unfair here. But remember the committee's talents were wasted because they launched no long form essay into the world this year and promote the wrong exemplar.

Who [the Fxxx] are you, Schliesser?

Well, I don't think I am disclosing anything confidential, but I had, in fact, been approached to submit to this year's contest by the committee. So at least somebody thinks I may have skill in the matter. (I declined cause I really need not produce more stuff.) More important, when I left NewAPPS in November 2013, I wrote in self-serving, but sincere, fashion: "I take great pride in the fact that we have revived the art of the philosophical essay; when I feel melancholic, I turn to the 'NewAPPS back-lists' of Bell, Des Chene, Matthen, Brogaard, and Cogburn." (Before you think I am only self-serving, notice I did not include Schliesser.) So, at least I have a track-record of saying  I care greatly about the fate of long-form philosophy (including opportunity costs, being the subject of anonymous mockery, etc.) I am not claiming my blogging buddies produced the best or only long form essays of the period. But it is indisputable that prior to NewAPPS, no group of philosophers was so devoted to producing long form philosophy since (haha) the Berlin Enlightenment. (Okay that was over the top.)

Yes, you could argue, more soberly, that Simon Critchley's The Stone and his more famous contributors reached a wider audience and were more influential leveraged by the authority of the New York Times. I won't argue you with you, except to note that because NewAPPS could ignore marketing (no advertising dollars) and the relevance of the news cycle, our essays were untainted by extrinsic factors. Either way, between Critchley's line up and the NewAPPS crowd I mentioned you could have an award committee that grasps the nature and substance of public philosophy by way of the long form essay. (Since those halcyon days, Helen de Cruz, Lisa Guenther, Eric Schwitzgebel, Omri Boehm, Amia Srinivasan, have been quite notable producers of public long form essays [apologies to the many i leave out].)

So here's my best case scenario suggestion, ask world class practitioners of the philosophical long form essay to be judges for the Sanders Public Philosophy Award.** Worst case scenario, this crowd may have slightly less prestige, on average, than the present committee (and undoubtedly quite a few will find it annoying that I have name-dropped them into this controversy). And just maybe this committee will allow itself the privilege to give the money and attention to somebody who has no professional philosophical training at all. Cause generous souls recognize that the way to protect philosophy's public future is not to run a disciplinary cartel.

Given that the present Sanders foundation is -- unlike the original and rather quirky (philosophy-wise) Marc Sanders -- risk averse and primarily giving money to inside-the-philosophical-beltway people/projects,** the suggestion to dramatically change the composition of the jury is silly. To be sure, the foundation can do whatever it wants with its money and has every right to ignore my unsolicited suggestions. But because it is shaping the future of philosophy along multiple dimensions (for my argument see here), we should judge it by its foreseeable effects. As is, this Prize should not be allowed to define how we think of the long form essay and/or public philosophy. 

You may grant my larger complaints and still think that the committee may well have  been right to award no prize this year. Shouldn't we trust our peers? As my regular readers now know, from the start of  my blogging career, I have been a critic of all behind-closed-doors-editorial decisions of our profession, so I am not a fan of such professional deference. But, as it happens, I have now read some of the contributions to this year's prize; I can't say they were the best of the crop. But they were prize-worthy.

Because I do not want to criticize only, let me offer a modest, second-best suggestion: it would be far more fruitful if the Public Philosophy Prize became an annual, retrospective award for published long form essays. (Apologies to the person who first suggested this to me!) That way, given that the discipline's gate-keepers are not trying to anoint the next Rousseau, they need not play too many other roles here (setting standards, judging what should be  published in a leading philosophical outlet, handing out cash prizes). Rather the committee could thereby express it sincere thanks, perhaps even on behalf of the rest of us, to the noble editors and curators who made hearing public philosophy's voice(s) possible. It could even republish the best piece in Philosopher's Imprint and so give it a professional seal of approval that (let's be practical) will count to tenure.

 

Nationalism as self-Subordination. On Ibn Khaldun: On the Nature of Group Feeling

When mankind has achieved social organization, as we have stated, and when civilization in the world has thus become a fact, people need someone to exercise a restraining influence and keep them apart, for aggressiveness and injustice are in the animal nature of man. The weapons made for the defense of human beings against the aggressiveness of dumb animals do not suffice against the aggressiveness of man to man, because all of them possess those weapons. Thus, something else is needed for defense against the aggressiveness of human beings toward each other. It could not come from outside, because all the other animals fall short of human perceptions and inspiration. The person who exercises a restraining influence, therefore, must be one of themselves. He must dominate them and have power and authority over them, so that no one of them will be able to attack another. This is the meaning of royal authority.
It has thus become clear that royal authority is a natural quality of man which is absolutely necessary to mankind. The philosophers mention that it also exists among certain dumb animals, such as the bees and the locusts. One discerns among them the existence of authority and obedience to a leader. They follow the one of them who is distinguished as their leader by his natural characteristics and body. However, outside of human beings, these things exist as the result of natural disposition and divine guidance, and not as the result of an ability to think or to administrate. "He gave everything its natural characteristics, and then guided it." [Qur'an 20.50(52)]
The philosophers go further. They attempt to give logical proof of the existence of prophecy and to show that prophecy is a natural quality of man. In this connection, they carry the argument to its ultimate consequences and' say that human beings absolutely require some authority to exercise a restraining influence. They go on to say that such restraining influence exists through the religious law (that has been) ordained by God and revealed to mankind by a human being. (This human being) is distinguished from the rest of mankind by special qualities of divine guidance that God gave him, in order that he might find the others submissive to him and ready to accept what he says. Eventually, the existence of a (restraining) authority among them and over them becomes a  fact that is accepted without the slightest disapproval or dissent.
This proposition of the philosophers is not [necessary],* as one can see. Existence and human life can materialize without (the existence of prophecy) through injunctions a person in authority may devise on his own or with the help of a group feeling that enables him to force the others to follow him wherever he wants to go....This is in contrast with human life in the state of anarchy, with no one to exercise a restraining influence. That would be impossible.--Ibn Khaldun The Muqadimmah (translated by F. Rosenthal), Chapter 1, First Prefatory Discussion, p. 88.

When we first encounter this passage in The Muqadimmah (recall this post), our attention may well be drawn to the curious mixture of familiar Aristotelian tropes (man is by nature political) with proto-Hobbesian tropes inscribed in an equally almost familiar feeling stadial account of history (moving from pre-civilized to civilized stages). Human political life is distinguished from the bestial kinds of political life in that the latter do not involve rational and administrative capacities of the group leader. Curiously, and somewhat slyly, Ibn Khaldun suggests here, too, that God's providence covers animal political life, but is not intrinsic to human political life. 

Ibn Khaldun then returns (recall this post) to his running critique of the philosophers (Al-Farabi, Avicenna, and Ibn Rushd), who he (somewhat unfairly) presents as holding that prophecy is required for the founding of all cities.* But interestingly enough, even though Ibn Khaldun ignores here (but not elsewhere) much of what these philosophers say about the metaphysics and cognitive apparatus of prophecy, he is not wrong (albeit a bit cynical) to suggest that at bottom the philosophical conception of prophecy-legislation boils to being the kind of person that gets others to submit to one's teaching. It's unfair because the philosophers argue repeatedly that theirs is (what we would call) a normative ideal, and that there are many 'ignorant' and imperfect cities that lack a proper prophetic-legislative foundation. 

Ibn Khaldun then introduces one of his central ideas: the significance of group feeling. Earlier, when he had talked about group feeling, he had emphasized the role it plays in mutual cooperation. (Society presupposes the division of labor.) It is a means toward facilitating such cooperation. When you have the group feeling political order will flourish. But crucially, for Ibn Khaldun group feeling can be shaped and controlled by political leaders and it also facilitates their authority and rule.  (So a few pages before he had talked of the ruling "men who controlled the group feeling.") It is, thus, a central way in which dynastic power can be kept (or lost). (It does so, in part, by promoting pride in the group.) So, to simplify his discussion: group feeling is a means to regulate the dispositions that facilitate political unity. 

Group feeling is co-affectation or mutual sympathy of a particular unity. Elsewhere Ibn Khaldon is quite clear that there are some outer limits to how far it can extend, and how durable it may be. But there is no natural unit (the tribe, the nation, etc.) that group feeling attaches itself to--it is, thus, rather malleable and the group feeling that generates, say, tribal or national identity can be developed in many different ways. (Some other time I return to this.)

Now, one often thinks of the dangers of nationalism in terms of the threat it may pose to internal outsiders or non-national-others. Even those that defend nationalism (recall) in terms of something anchored in common traditional law and religion, tend to think of nationalism as a means toward embracing differences among nations in the service of defending a particular (say) national heritage (or identity, territory, etc.). But Ibn Khaldun notes here that group feeling is a means of control by a leader of his own followers; group feeling will allow the leader to have others do what he wants. That is to say, group-mutual sympathy can easily generate the self-subordination of the (vast majority of the) members of the in-group.** 

 

 

On Virginia Woolf on Thoreau being a Counterpart of Emerson

But for a time he was to live in the world of men, at least in that very remarkable section of the world of which Emerson was the centre and which professed the Transcendentalist doctrines. Thoreau took up his lodgings in Emerson’s house and very soon became, so his friends said, almost indistinguishable from the prophet himself. If you listened to them both talking with your eyes shut you could not be certain where Emerson left off and Thoreau began ‘…in his manners, in the tones of his voice, in his modes of expressions, even in the hesitations and pauses of his speech, he had become the counterpart of Mr. Emerson.’ This may well have been so. The strongest natures, when they are influenced, submit the most unreservedly; it is perhaps a sign of their strength. But that Thoreau lost any of his own force in the process, or took on permanently any colours not natural to himself the readers of his books will certainly deny.--Virginia Woolf (July 12, 1917:) commemorating the 100th anniversary of Henry David Thoreau’s birth for the Times Literary Supplement.

It's almost a century ago that Woolf published these remarks. I was reminded of her moving essay, and this passage, in particular, yesterday when, in the company of my former supervisor, I heard him (my Doktorvater), say, in passing (in a festive mood after a succesful defense of one of my students), that's just swell.+ (As it happens we had just discussed Allan Bloom's distaste for Zelig.) Now, I was not surprised by his use; I have long known that somehow, without initially noticing it, I have picked up the habit of using this (folksy) expression from him. Luckily, despite my fascination with prophets, we do not share many doctrines (but recall) and, as he will be the first to remind me, I am no Thoreau (and he is no Emerson).

While few philosophers live with their intellectual mentors, the phenomenon that Woolf describes is familiar enough. There are many mannerism associated with certain intellectual environments (when the Oxford trained philosopher of a certain generation in a galaxy far away says (recall), 'I am confused' to you, you know they think you are a moron.) I am sure the next sentence will land me in  trouble (but here goes): for a while, I could unfailingly pick out a Pittsburgh trained philosopher based on the way s/he nodded during a lecture (in apparent disagreement) or used the phrase 'deep' to pick out a favored position. (There was selection bias.)

Of course, what makes Woolf's description (she is quoting a description by a former classmate of Thoreau, the Rev. John Weiss,) especially amusing is that both Emerson and Thoreau strongly attacked conformism and praised robust forms of individuality (recall this post, for example). In fact, Woolf enjoys her own joke so much that she adds for good measure, "The strongest natures, when they are influenced, submit the most unreservedly; it is perhaps a sign of their strength." Here she is also recalling Emerson's and Thoreau's interest in magnanimity (of course a strong soul need not always be a magnanimous soul, but, following, say, Thomas (inspired by Seneca), Emerson couples them (for example here) and so does Thoreau) [for a lovely paper on this topic, see Andrew Corsa, himself a former student].

Besides joking, Woolf makes the further point that certain forms of submission may well be the expression of a form of courage.* At first, she does not explain what she has in mind. But she returns to the topic later in her essay, "He was a wild man, and he would never submit to be a tame one." Again, she echoes Thoreau here (his work is suffused with the strong tropological contrasts between wildness/strength/true America vs civilization/weakness/cultured Europe (false America). Somewhat mischievously,** Woolf goes on (in the original quote at the top of this post) to conflate the persona as presented by Thoreau to his readers with the author/the man Thoreau.

Be that as it may, we may say that for Woolf, on her reading of Thoreau,*** that in one's education, or path to wisdom, a species of courage consists in submitting to the right sort of influence or exemplar. In so doing, one need not become inauthentic (colours...natural to himself) nor loose one's identity/strength++ (lost any of his own force), although even the strong soul may do so along the way (permanently).

Woolf here reminds the reader that much true education involves a potentially temporary submission to the will of  another. (My blog-persona reminds you, dear reader, that this is also true (recall) of reading other people's ephemera.) And sometimes education involves oneself in a comical, repetitive mimicking, with or without difference, of other people's ticks or turns of phrase.

    Isn't that swell?

 

Adam Smith's Greatest and Noblest of All Characters and Hume's History

The leader of the successful party … may re-establish and improve the constitution, and from the very doubtful and ambiguous character of the leader of a party, he may assume the greatest and noblest of all characters, that of the reformer and legislator of a great state; and, by the wisdom of his institutions, secure the internal tranquillity [sic] and happiness of his fellow citizens for many succeeding generations. (The Theory of Moral Sentiments 6.2.2.14)

Because of the contemporary focus on meta-ethics, much critical scholarship on Adam Smith's The Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS) focuses on the nature and significance of the impartial "and well informed" spectator, whose "sympathetic feelings" are the “precise and distinct measure,” of the propriety of our (properly moral) sentiments (TMS 7.2.1.49). It is easily overlooked that TMS is organized around a series of vignettes of instructive, exemplary characters (but see Heydt 2008 and Hanley 2008; or my chapter here).

Near the end of his life, Adam Smith added a whole part, the character of virtue, to the final, revised edition of TMS. In it, he is more explicit about issues pertaining to political theory and, inter alia, returns to the problem of faction. The passage quoted above occurs in this new material. Here Smith echoes the classical ideal, explicitly endorsed by Hume, that "wise regulations in any commonwealth are the most valuable legacy that can be left to future ages." ("That Politics may be reduced to a Science.") In context of his essay, Hume is talking about institutional design by legislators in the foundational sense (familiar from Plato, Aristotle) often associated with the figure Lycurgus (see Plutarch). But Hume's text also applies to those that improve regulations of an existing state.

In fact, although Smith sounds like Rousseau there, Smith's agreement in the quoted passage with Hume is not superficial here. For, Smith is describing the significance of the restoration of a constitution after a period of intense factional, party strife or (worse) civil worse. At that point the leader of a success party can transform him/herself from party-leader to statesman by focusing on the peace and happiness of all citizens. (It is crucial that this act of statesmanship is pacific not warlike.) S/he does so by a kind of act of re-founding (recall my treatment of Spinoza and Lincoln). Rather than being a self-styled revolutionary such a re-founder re-establishes and improves the constitution. (This is, in part, a matter of self-presentation.) In context, Smith leaves unclear if there are historical exemplars that fit his description of the "greatest and noblest of all characters." In fact, I worried about this because the only historical example I could think of, the emperor Augustus, goes against the anti-imperial (and somewhat republican) commitments I tend to attribute to Smith.

As it happens, in his very fine book, Hume's Politics: Coordination and Crisis in the History of England, Andrew Sabl calls attention to the significance of Hume's treatment of General Monk (who "ended England's civil war and restored the constitutional monarchy" (164)). In it, Sabl quotes the following passage:

This year, on the 3d of January, died George Monk, duke of Albemarle, at Newhall in Essex, after a languishing illness, and in the sixty-third year of his age. He left a great estate of 5,000 l. a year in land, and 60,000 l. in money, acquired by the bounty of the king, and encreased by his own frugality in his later years. Bishop Burnet, who, agreeably to his own factious spirit, treats this illustrious personage with great malignity, reproaches him with avarice: But as he appears not to have been in the least tainted with rapacity, his frugal conduct may more candidly be imputed to the habits, acquired in early life, while he was possessed of a very narrow fortune. It is indeed a singular proof of the strange power of faction, that any malignity should pursue the memory of a nobleman, the tenor of whose life was so unexceptionable, and who, by restoring the antient and legal and free government to three kingdoms, plunged in the most destructive anarchy, may safely be said to be the subject, in these islands, who, since the beginning of time, rendered the most durable and most essential services to his native country. The means also, by which he achieved his great undertakings, were almost entirely unexceptionable. His temporary dissimulation, being absolutely necessary, could scarcely be blameable. He had received no trust from that mungrel, pretended, usurping parliament whom he dethroned; therefore could betray none.

I have to admit that I had somehow missed this passage (which Hume buries in a footnote). I am not entirely sure I agree with Sabl and Eugene Miller (whom Sabl cites), who claim that Monk is here held up as "the greatest Briton of all time." For, Hume emphasizes the unexceptionable tenor of his life and the means by which Monk restored "the antient and legal and free government to three kingdoms."  That is, it matters to Hume that General Monk was, in certain respects, quite ordinary. In fact, Monk's frugal habits picked up in early life, are more associated with professional and commercial life than great statesmanship. That is, General Monk is exemplary, in part, because in certain respects he represents the anti-heroic virtues of modernity: this is the new kind of glory that Hume (and Hobbes) promote. In his own autobiography, Hume had emphasized his frugality and commercial independence (see here for discussion.)

Either way, Hume's description of General Monk fits Smith's description of the transformation from leader of successful party (he was one of Cromwell's important generals) to reformer and legislator of a great state. It is notable further evidence that in context of Hume's description, Hume attacks the factionalism of Burnet's more critical treatment of Monk in his History of My Own Time (here).