Digressions&Impressions

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.

 

 

A thread from Spinoza to James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock, via Knut Wicksell (and Christian Wolff)

It should not be surprising, therefore, that the most “sympathetic” or “congenial” works are to be found among the “realists” in the history of political doctrine. Initially we look to Glaucon in Plato’s Republic, to Thomas Hobbes, and to Benedict Spinoza. Of these, and others within this tradition, only Spinoza’s work seems to have much in common with our own, and only his seems deserving of special comment.
In his Tractatus Politicus, published posthumously in 1677, Spinoza approaches the whole study of political organization in a way that seems surprisingly modern by our standards. First of all, men are assumed to be motivated solely by considerations of interest. This is an underlying assumption of the models through which Spinoza examines alternative organizational arrangements. He states, quite specifically, that human behavior is taken as an empirical fact and that he makes no attempt to attach either praise or condemnation to the behavior that he observes. Spinoza examines the various political institutions in terms of their efficacy in producing results which he holds to be desirable. To him, political institutions are variables subject to change and perfection, and he conceives the primary task of the political scientist to be that of analyzing the workings of alternative organizational structures and of making such recommendations for change as seem indicated. His work on the political order anticipates, in many respects, that of David Hume and that of Adam Smith on the economic order. Spinoza deliberately sets out to construct political institutions in such a fashion that individuals acting in pursuit of their own interests will be led, by the institutional structure within which such action takes place, to further the interests of their fellow members in the political group.
The constitutional and the operational levels of collective decision-making are clearly separated in Spinoza’s work. For the latter, at least in his aristocracy model (his discussion of democracy was not completed), simple majority rule is acknowledged as appropriate for reaching decisions in legislative assemblies. For changes in the constitution, in the basic laws, “common consent” or relative unanimity is suggested. Spinoza’s work, in many respects therefore, may be taken as the most appropriately chosen classical precursor to that of this book. It should be stated, however, that Spinoza’s influence on our own ideas has been limited to his general and indirect effects on the Western intellectual tradition. In a specific sense, we have carefully reviewed Spinoza only after the completion of an initial draft of the main body of this book.
Although Spinoza is often described as a follower of Hobbes, we do not find Hobbes’ work at all similar to Spinoza’s in relation to our own construction. As we have suggested above, it seems essential that some separation of the constitutional and the operational level of decision be made before politics, as a social science, can be satisfactorily divorced from moral philosophy. If sovereignty is conceived as being necessarily undivided and indivisible, this essential separation cannot be made readily. The contractual apparatus, to Hobbes, becomes an excuse or a justification for political obedience of the individual and little more. Hobbes’ construction is aimed at establishing a basis for political obligation, whereas Spinoza’s construction becomes a genuine theory of political order that, more than most others, is largely divorced from all issues of obligation.

At this point, as elsewhere in this Appendix, it is necessary to refer to the work of David Hume.

....

We find a similar emphasis in the writings of Christian Wolff in 1750. Wolff’s work is also noteworthy because of his clear conception of the collective organization as a set of rules or institutions that are subject to analysis, to modification, and to reform. His method, like that of Spinoza, was that of examining alternative political institutions on which members of the community of rational individuals might agree jointly.--James M. Buchanan, "Marginal Notes on Reading Political Philosophy" (1962) The Calculus of Consent: Logical Foundations of Constitutional Democracy, By James Buchanan & Gordon Tullock  [HT Hartmut Kliemt]

The Calculus of Consent launched Public Choice theory and Constitutional Political Economy, and was a major milestone (recall) toward Buchanan's (1986) Nobel. I was sent back to it by Hartmut Kliemt, who had generously commented on a draft paper that I had sent him. In my paper I argue that (recall) Spinoza is concerned with the problem of luxury in the TTP (a key issue in 18th century political economy). And that in the Political Treatise Spinoza shows what mechanisms (recall) might be used to prevent luxury from corrupting the state. I noted in my paper that Spinoza anticipates (recall also here) Hume and James Buchanan in uncanny ways. I noted that I was not the first to muse about this connection. (In particular I cite Doug Den Uyl and Kliemt.)

The Calculus of Consent has two appendices. The one that I quoted above is by James Buchanan. The Appendix is explicitly designed to forestall a certain kind of objection: "Our work could, quite properly, be charged with serious omission if we should fail to include what must be, at best, relatively uninformed commentary on the classical treatment of some of these problems....We hope that these notes will be helpful in relating our analysis to what has gone before and in pointing up the differences which, in our view, make the analysis contained in the main text of this book essentially unique." Buchanan then goes on to describe the "relation of political science to moral philosophy" and how to situate Buchanan & Tullock's achievement. I hope to return to that some day. He then turns to Spinoza, who is explicitly recognized as anticipating their own approach.

First, Spinoza is treated as a proto-rational choice theorist.* In particular, he treats Spinoza (correctly) as a theorist of  alternative organizational structures (hereafter: mechanism design or mechanism). This is exactly right (and also anticipates another Chicago trained Nobel, George Stigler). And, more important what Spinoza's mechanisms have in common is the attempt not to reform human nature, or to turn people into the wise, but rather to make human nature serve the common good; as Spinoza puts it in the Political Treatise, “I conclude that those common perils of peace of which we here speak , must never directly but indirectly be prohibited , namely by making the fundamental principles of the government such as to have for result not that the mass of the people strive to live wisely  ( for this is impossible ) but be led by such dispositions as will promote the state's weal. (TP 10.6; translated by William McCall, 1854--this is the translation Buchanan used.)+ This indeed anticipates Hume (Smith, and Buchanan).

Second, Buchanan is even more struck by the anticipation of his distinction between constitutional level and operational levels of collective decision-making in Spinoza's treatment of aristocracy. At the constitutional level Buchanan and Tullock require unanimity, and he sees Spinoza's use of “common consent”  as a kind of ("relative") unanimity. It is worth noting that in McCall's translation, Spinoza only uses the phrase in 2.17. But that precedes the treatment of aristocracy. And, indeed, what Spinoza says there is true not just of aristocracy, but for all kinds of  constitutions: "This right,which is determined by the power of the multitude, is usually called government. And he possesses this right absolutely and without limitation, who by common consent has the guidance of the commonwealth, which consists in establishing, interpreting, abolishing laws, fortifying cities, deciding on war and peace, etc." (TP 2.17) And so one can see why Buchanan was primed to read this as equivalent to his constitutional level. 

It is worth noting that Spinoza anticipates Hume's account of the genesis of the institution of justice (which really is for him the political founding:  "that justice is the sense that “all the members of the society express to one another, and which induces them to regulate their conduct by certain rules” (3.2.2.10). This is also a unanimity requirement. But here (in Spinoza and Hume), the distance with Hobbes is not far. For, in Leviathan, the commonwealth is, when not founded through conquest, instituted by a unanimous covenant “of every man with every man . . . as if every man should say to every man, I Authorise and give up my Right of Governing myselfe, to this Man, or to this Assembly of men.”  Of course, Buchanan would not deny that. 

Buchanan makes two related claims about the difference between Hobbes and Spinoza.One is an odd mistake, the other is perceptive. In reverse order, first, he implies that Spinoza allows for divided sovereignty. That's strictly speaking false. Spinoza is as unitary about sovereignty as Hobbes is (which is revealed in Spinoza's treatment of the need for the sovereign to control the church). But it's true that Spinoza thinks there are benefits to be derived from functional division of powers that make it look as if he is willing to allow for division of powers.  But, on a more fundamental level Buchanan is right, Hobbes offers an account of obligation whereas Spinoza does not.** By contrast in Spinoza, and now I quote a perceptive treatment by Justin Steinberg, "The commonwealth must be structured so as to promote compliance; when there is excessive vice or non-compliance, the blame must be “laid at the door of the commonwealth.” 

Interestingly enough, the contrast between Hobbes and Spinoza on obligation is not in J. W. Gough's The Social Contract, which is the authority Buchanan claims to follow when he describes Wolff's debts to Spinoza. (In the first (1936) edition,  Gough writes: "The most important of the followers of Hobbes was Spinoza, who constructed a theory of political obligation which in most essentials corresponds closely to Hobbes's." (107))++ So, Buchanan read his sources with independent mind.++

Okay, let me wrap up. Buchanan says explicitly that Spinoza did not influence the development of his thought. He does repeatedly credit (also in The Calculus of Consent), the great Swedish economist, Wicksell, with decisive influence on him (including the point about unanimity). So, this naturally made me wonder, whether Wicksell could have been influenced by Spinoza. Thanks to Google my search was brief and fruitful. Below I picture the closing lines of Wickell's (1917) fascinating review of the revised, second Swedish translation of Mill's On Liberty. To be continued:

 

On James Buchanan (yeah that one!), European Greatness and the fate of Good Ideas

How can the opportunity that is opened up for Europe, both intellectually and politically, be seized before the historical moment has passed? How can the competitive federalism that is surely Europe's potential avenue toward twenty-first century greatness be constitutionally emplaced? As the premature project for a single currency and a monolithic central bank fails, perhaps Europe's political leaders will shift their attention to the specific constitutional structure recommended by Frank Vibert.
As analysts-philosophers, we must stick to our lasts. We dare not enter the political lists directly, but we must hold onto the faith that, somehow, ideas do have consequences, and that good ideas must triumph over bad ones. James Buchanan (1996) "Europe as social reality" 255.

The quoted paragraphs are the final of a short article that is accompanied by the following note: "This essay is stimulated by Frank Vibert (1995) Europe: A Constitution for the Millennium. I take my title from John Searle (1995) The Construction of Social Reality." Buchanan (who won a Nobel 1986) is the kind of economist that did not disguise he read and engaged with philosophers (especially Rawls) throughout his life. 

Speaking as an economist, Buchanan predicts the failure of the single currency and the ECB. This is remarkable because he starts the essay with a firm nod to Shackle's arguments about an "unknowable future." (254)* While few would call the EURO a great success after the past decade of near permanent crisis, it is worth noting that the Eurozone has held together despite considerable cost (to, say, the population of Greece). And it is undeniable that the political influence and role of ECB has been strengthened in virtue of the crisis.

And while it is not impossible, of course, that the Euro and ECB will collapse under the weight of crises, one may say that from Buchanan's perspective (ca 1996) the crisis moment was wasted. No effective path toward a European constitution, let alone greatness, was pursued during the crisis. To put the point a bit as a serious joke, from Buchanan's perspective the Constitutional Treaty (and subsequent Treaty of Lisbon) were also pursued prematurely (because it was attempted ahead of schedule in good times). Buchanan, who disliked technocratic and permanent elites, was  at times open-minded about (at least the strategic use of) a popular referendum,  would not have been surprised by the referendums that rejected the Constitutional Treaty.

So, Buchanan clearly thought crises presented opportunities for significant constitutional change. It is important to emphasize here -- because Buchanan's name has been linked to the development of disaster capitalism -- that in context Buchanan is proposing the possibility of peaceful statecraft. And, in fact, the path that Buchanan advocates in his essay is not here some major policy change (austerity or what have you not), but the discussion of a framework that can guide, without stipulating an endpoint (254), the development of a constitution that can turn a European "confederation" (253) into something more federal. I don't mean to deny that Buchanan's favored "competitive federalism" rules out other kinds of European models. But it is compatible with Buchanan's thought that European leaders opt for a path that does not advance greatness.

Now, there is a lot more to be said about how Buchanan conceives of this reflexive process. Buchanan has his sights on the "potential feedbacks between predicted patterns of outcomes" and the rules that help shape those patterns. That's the bit of the essay that is clear critical dialogue with Searle's project.  

But I got distracted by the presence of "greatness" in the first quoted paragraph above.** For it suggests that Buchanan recognizes that not all politicians will always be motivated by narrow conceptions of self-interest or rent-seeking.+ Here Buchanan is appealing explicitly to what we may call the vanity of the elite (!) politician no less than Machiavelli does at the end of the Prince (or, more consciously in Buchanan's mind, Smith at the end of Wealth of Nations and his plan for an Atlantic parliament [recall] or Kant's project of Perpetual Peace [recall also the connection between Buchanan and Kant]). 

That is to say, the final paragraph of the article (which I have quoted, too) may make one believe that Buchanan is committed ("faith") to a kind of magical, efficient market in ideas (modeled on Say's law): where the supply of good ideas will somehow produce the demand for them, given sufficient time and, simultaneously, that the market for ideas will reward the better ones in competition with the normatively undesirable ("bad") ones. But that's not so. Buchanan understands better than anybody (google rent-seeking; public choice) that good normative ideas are not automatically implemented (recall this post on the challenges to a liberal theory of politics).

For, Buchanan explicitly recognizes that good ideas do not rely on faith alone. We may say, then, that Buchanan addresses here obliquely the problem of how ideas that may have powerful constituencies arraigned against them can still shape their own uptake when their vehicles for implementation are properly identified and addressed. To what degree this strategy is compatible with broadly liberal sensitivities about the nature of public discussion, I leave for another occasion. 

 

On (Lippmann and) Ignorant Voters

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

on Glory Liu on Milton Friedman (and George Stigler) and the Invisible Hand.

Though they were both students of Knight and Viner, Milton Friedman (1912-2006) and George Stigler (1911-1991) had very different views about the nature and purpose of economics — and hence, of Smith — from their predecessors. For Friedman and Stigler, economics’ scientific power came from its ability to predict outcomes based on two central insights, both of which could be found in “The Wealth of Nations.” The first was self-interest, or what Stigler called the “crown jewel” of “The Wealth of Nations.” According to Stigler, Smith’s idea of self-interest was so powerful that it was “Newtonian in its universality” and had unlimited explanatory power.

The second was, of course, the invisible hand. According to Friedman, Smith’s master metaphor represented “the way in which voluntary acts of millions of individuals each pursuing his own objectives could be coordinated, without central direction, through a price system.” Taken together, self-interest and the invisible hand represented the core axioms of scientific economics. The political implications were clear. Once individual behavior was reduced to utility-maximizing self-interest, promoting Smith’s invisible hand of the market — and restraining the heavy hand of government — was the ultimate goal. Few economists were as successful as Friedman in spreading this interpretation of Smith’s ideas to the public. In numerous op-eds in major news outlets, speeches and public television (where he sometimes sported an Adam Smith tie), Friedman popularized this interpretation of Smith’s invisible hand for an overtly conservative political agenda.--Glory Liu, "How the Chicago School changed the meaning of Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand," The Monkey Cage, Washington Post

The quoted passage is by the exciting young scholar, Glory Liu, who published an important scholarly paper on the reception of Adam Smith in the Chicago school (see here). Liu's WP editorial is a nice introduction to the more complicated larger argument. And I agree with her conclusion that "Smith’s relevance has always been political" (although I would add not only political). Her editorial nicely introduces a larger public to the complex intellectual evolution of the Chicago school, drawing an important (and scholarly well grounded) generational contrast between Viner and Knight (who didn't agree about everything important) and two of Chicago's Nobel laureates, Friedman and Stigler (who also didn't agree about everything important). It's a clever idea to use their treatment of Smith to reveal the contrast.* 

Here I want to focus on Liu's treatment of Friedman in her editorial and her piece. For, while Liu is primarily interested in the reception of Smith (and the political ways in which the Chicago schools used him), she does take a stance on Smith's position. I quote the relevant paragraph (from the editorial):

At the same time, political theorists and historians like me have argued that the Scottish moral philosopher didn’t just stand for free markets and that, in fact, [A] Smith’s invisible hand wasn’t a warning about state intervention but state capture. Rather unlike the caricature of Smith who espouses unchecked economic growth, they’ve also argued that [B] Smith was deeply worried about the moral consequences of growing inequality.

The first reference [A] is to a 2018 Aeon piece by another rising scholar, Paul Sagar. The second is [B] to an essay by a leading (more senior) scholar, Dennis Rasmussen writing in the Atlantic in 2016. (That second piece was, in turn, anticipated by Deborah Boucoyannis in her LSE blog, which introduced the findings of her important 2013 paper, and several papers by Lisa Herzog (see, for example here and here).) It's notable how much public attention Smith is getting! As it happens I agree with [B] and so I leave that aside here.  But the story about [A] is more complicated. Let me first quote Sagar before I respond to him and Liu:

Indeed, Smith’s single most famous idea – that of ‘the invisible hand’ as a metaphor for uncoordinated market allocation – was invoked in precisely the context of his blistering attack on the merchant elites. It is certainly true that Smith was skeptical of politicians’ attempts to interfere with, or bypass, basic market processes, in the vain hope of trying to do a better job of allocating resources than was achievable through allowing the market to do its work. But in the passage of The Wealth of Nations where he invoked the idea of the invisible hand, the immediate context was not simply that of state intervention in general, but of state intervention undertaken at the behest of merchant elites who were furthering their own interests at the expense of the public.

So, first, I agree with Sagar and Liu that Smith cared deeply about state capture by mercantile interests. But it is worth noting Milton Friedman also agreed about this. In the very (1977) essay that Liu quotes, Friedman writes:

There is a great misunderstanding about Adam Smith, a serious misconception of his role. Because he is known as the father of laissez-faire, because of his emphasis on the “invisible hand,” and because he explained the virtues of the price system, Smith is ordinarily regarded as if he were a defender of the status quo, a representative of the existing institutions, part of the establishment. He was anything but that. Smith was a revolutionary, one of a small minority who attacked the existing order of things. At the time he wrote in the late eighteenth century, Britain was a mercantilist state, in which the government was exercising almost as great a control over economic affairs as the United States government does now. It was a state of affairs in which there were restrictions on imports and exports, there were remnants of the guild system of the middle ages, and so on down the line. Adam Smith attacked this system. His book was a tract for reform, calling for a revolution in the way in which economic affairs were conducted.--Milton Friedman (1977) "The Invisible Hand"

What Friedman writes here is all correct (except, perhaps, the claim that in 1776 "the government was exercising almost as great a control over economic affairs as the United States government does"in 1977). In fact, as I have noted before (recall here and here) it is a key theme of Chicago economists to worry about state capture. These days regulatory capture is entrenched within the critique of neo Liberalism. But the idea of regulatory capture was developed by the Chicago economist, George Stigler [recall this post, too], and is also strongly associated with the so-called public choice literature associated with the Virginia school of (other Chicago trained economists) Buchanan and Tullock and law economics (see this classic article by Coase). That is to say, the intellectual framework of regulatory capture was developed to help understand and criticize the effects of the New Deal and became influential in the aftermath of understanding the successes and limitations of the Great Society by market-friendly economists.

As it happens, in his 1962 presidential address to the AEA, Stigler credits the idea of state capture to Adam Smith! However, he does so, in part, to complain that Smith fails to "demonstrate" empirically "that the state is normally the captive of "partial interests." (3; Liu does not mention the piece in her more scholarly article.) So, Stigler and Friedman agree with (and anticipate) Liu and Sagar that Smith was interested in and worried about state capture and rent-seeking. 

Second, Sagar and Liu are correct that the invisible hand (in the version presented in the Wealth of Nations) is offered in the context of Smith's criticism of state capture by mercantile interests. I agree with them that Stigler and Friedman tend to ignore this when they write about the invisible hand.

Third, while it is true that Friedman and Stigler both thought that assuming self-interested agents could be predictive,+ I doubt, as Liu suggests (this is not in Sagar), they thought that positing the invisible hand helped them make "predictions." Since this claim is not (defended) in Liu's original essay in Modern Intellectual History, I am inclined to chalk this error up to the difficulties of condensing a major scholarly achievement into a popular presentation.

Fourth, I disagree with Sagar and Liu that in the Wealth of Nations, the invisible hand is itself a warning about state capture. Rather as I argue in my recent book, the phrase 'invisible hand' captures circumstances when (i) an agent produces unintended consequences that (ii) are unknown to him or her; but, (iii) the consequences are, in principle, knowable to the right kind of observer (theoretically informed)** at the time, and (iv) in fact, the agent should have known better. (As an aside, invisible hand processes tend to be short term in Smith and to be contrasted with the more typical unintended consequence explanation/process given by Smith.) In fact, one of the the key underling points is that (mercantile) ideology masquerades as science and, thereby, confuses even those who benefit from the ideology.++

Now, I agree with Liu that Friedman's interpretation of the invisible hand -- Adam Smith was all the rage in 1976-7 due to bicentenary of Wealth of Nations --  as a master metaphor representing the way in which voluntary acts of millions of individuals each pursuing his own objectives could be coordinated, without central direction, through a price system is incorrect. But as an interpretation of Smith, even the passage in which the invisible hand as a phrase occurs, it's not wholly false either: the subsequent passage (the very next paragraph in Wealth of Nations) does claim that government should not direct industry or mercantile agents (as Sagar also notes):

"What is the species of domestick industry which his capital can employ, and of which the produce is likely to be of the greatest value, every individual, it is evident, can, in his local situation, judge much better than any statesman or lawgiver can do for him. The statesman, who should attempt to direct private people in what manner they ought to employ their capitals, would not only load himself with a most unnecessary attention, but assume an authority which could safely be trusted, not only to no single person, but to no council or senate whatever, and which would nowhere be so dangerous as in the hands of a man who had folly and presumption enough to fancy himself fit to exercise it."

This gets me to the final point. Liu notes in her conclusion that, 

What makes the Smith of Milton Friedman and George Stigler so interesting — some people might say problematic — is not that they aligned Smith with a particular political agenda. It’s that they “economized” Smith in a way that obscured if not precluded the relevance of his moral philosophy and political theory. Stigler once famously quipped that “the correct way to read Adam Smith is the correct way to read the forthcoming issues of a professional journal.” In other words, Stigler believed that you had to read Smith as if he were a modern, 20th-century economist, not (as Smith originally was) an 18th-century moral and political thinker. What’s more, the power of Friedman’s version of the invisible hand derived from the seemingly objective scientific authority of its author, the “father of economics,” Adam Smith. It’s clear, however, that impulse to portray economics — even Smith’s version of economics — as an objective science is deeply embedded in the history and politics of the discipline.

Much of this is right. But there are two potentially misleading and connected features to this quote. First, Stigler's famous quip is offered in the context of an extended argument about the purpose of history of economics (it is a passage that long ago caught my eye): "The purpose in seeking to understand the man’s theoretical system is not to be generous or malicious toward him, but to maximize the probability that his work will contribute to scientific progress. Only if the analytical system is well defined and cleansed of irrelevant digression and inessential error may we determine whether it is a worthy addition to the corpus of the science, or at least a line of investigation that ought to be expslored further." (Stigler "Does Economics Have a Useful Past?" 1969: 221) Now, one may think there are other ways to make the past usable to scientific progress or, perhaps, other purposes for the past. (I think that's compatible with Stigler's position here, but this post is too long already.) Stigler's position does not entail that one need to efface the relevance of Smith's moral and political theory. For Stigler thinks that in addition to the corpus of (progressing) economic science, there are two different projects -- which both he and Friedman call 'normative' economics and the 'art' of economics. From the start of his professional career, Stigler takes these other two projects very seriously so much so that he famously, perhaps infamously, contested welfare economics's claim to being an objective science from his earliest publications onward (recall here; here, here, and here).  

And, in fact, Stigler (not Friedman) shared with Smith the idea -- now unfashionable -- that the knowledge that economics produced was knowledge of comparative institutional development and analysis. As Stigler puts it in his AEA address: the "competence" of economists "consists in understanding how an economic system works under alternative institutional frameworks." (2)*** This has many pertinent implications for normative projects associated with political theory, including the possibility and appropriateness to act as an adviser to government. Stigler's immediate example is, of course, Adam Smith, but he criticizes Smith for insufficient evidence for his claims.+++ 

The reason for Stigler's dismissive attitude is not hard to find. Stigler (1971) thinks that "Smith’s attitude toward political behavior was not dissimilar to that of a parent toward a child: the child was often mistaken and sometimes perverse, but normally it would improve in conduct if properly instructed." ("Smith's Travels on the Ship," 273) The problem is not Smith's tone, but rather, according to Stigler, the giving of policy advice "without taking account of the political forces which confine and direct policy. In the absence of knowledge of these political forces, the advice must often be bad and usually be unpersuasive." What this reveals is that according to Stigler, Smith was a normative, political theorist. ("Political science had been a normative literature for 2300 years before Smith wrote and has continued to remain normative to the present day.") It's just that according to Stigler a different kind of policy relevant political theory is required; Stigler thinks that the art associated with turning empirical economics into normative economics involves taking into account the political forces which confine and direct policy. He claims Smith failed to do so, so qua political theorist, Smith is not an exemplar worth taking seriously according to Stigler.*****

On Academic Bullies

Scientists are apologetic because the scientific establishment or its political leadership is apologetic and the scientific establishment is apologetic in its effort to justify its very existence by an erroneous hypothesis; the erroneous hypothesis identifies the intellectual or scientific establishment with the intellectual or scientific leadership. This way our culture in general and particularly our science is debased: the false equation of the scientific establishment with the scientific leadership automatically justifies the fact that such scientists as Barbara MacClintock are not recognized for decades. (Agassi, "The Politics of Science," [emphasis added--ES] 36).

[P]retending, especially to our students, that we are ideal, even pretending that we always try hard to become ideal, is very harmful. It forces on our students either the view that they are much inferior to their teachers, or, alternatively, the dreadful observation that their leaders, too, have clay feet. And training them to try to be ideal is not training them to live in an imperfect world and control their own imperfection and the imperfection of the general situation. When they grow up and face their own imperfections they get terrified, do not know what to do, and in a desperate effort to cope get swept into the intrigues that they find all around. (Agassi, "The Politics of Science," 39; [emphasis added]) [HT Joel Katzav]

Agassi's 1986 paper is barely cited by others. One explanation for this, is that it is anecdotal and not rigorous according to acccepted standards. A more subtle reason is that it doesn't cite others, although it mentions a few (high status) fellow travelers.  It would be nice to think that it was ignored because people realized that Agassi was basically rediscovering Gordon Tullock's (1966) point about how academic disciplines become a "racket." While Tullock's book has very decent citations, it's primarily cited in works at the intersection of public choice theory and philosophy of economics. My amusing (and partial) experience with referees suggests, it is not well known in philosophy. Perhaps, Agassi's piece was ignored because Agassi is rather combative in print. (I have never met the man; maybe he is sage-like in person.) But in philosophy that has never prevented attention.

Here I want to explore the possibility that Agassi's piece was ignored because its truths hit too close to home. By this I do not mean that people would really honestly deny that there is politics in academic disciplines. Rather, the point is that we are en-cultured into a set of practices and norms that exact terrible costs on our psyches, especially, perhaps, for the most successful among us. To be clear: I do not introduce this topic to diminish the suffering of the adjuncts, the exploited, and the disadvantaged. (In what follows, I'll stick to professional philosophy because that's what I know best.)