Digressions&Impressions

Liberalism after Ukraine, Part 2: Changing Perceptions on Russia and NATO

It's been more than 80 days since the renewed Russian invasion of Ukraine. And so it's time for some punditry outside my expertise. I do so because the war is clearly reshaping the fate of contemporary liberalism.

Because of a badly handled American retreat from Afghanistan, Putin clearly assumed America is weak. In addition, his regime seems to have believed its own propaganda about Ukraine and so did not anticipate the military and political resistance it has encountered. When one listens to American military analysts like Michael Kofman and Dara Massicot about Russian performance, they emphasize two things: (i) don't believe the narrative you see on social media--we're still in the fog of war; (ii) it's inconceivable to send a giant army into combat that it has not really been planning to fight while keeping it secret from most of the backbone of that giant army [the logistical planners, the local commanders, etc.], and yet that's what seems to have happened. And, in addition, (iii) America's spies seem to have known more about the plans than those within the giant army.

On (i) it is worth noting that Finland's rush to abandon neutrality and join NATO and become a protectorate as part of Pax Americana, which (recall) I understand as empire with liberal characteristics, is as clear a sign of Russian weakness perceived by those with the greatest existential downside as any. Finnish neutrality has always been a least bad option for them (which has worked out surprisingly well); one their ancestors earned on the battlefield with great, heroic sacrifice; neutrality is still a bad option for them.* But since the transition period between signaling and applying for membership is the greatest risk for them in the face of stated Russian 'military-technical' retaliation, the fact that they have been increasingly brazen in pursing this otherwise high stakes policy is the clearest possible evidence of perceived Russian weakness by those who have the greatest incentive to get the facts about Russia right. The actual Russian retaliation -- suspension of some energy delivery -- has caused minor inconvenience (and suggests Russia is weak).

To be blunt: the military failures in Ukraine have exposed that Russian is no great power (in the sense that Realists use it). My friend Joshua Miller suggested this already before the war. Yes, it's a dangerous country because it has enormous amount of nuclear weapons, is capable of many lethal special operations (including electronic ones), has access to enormous natural resources, and a political leadership that is not averse to gambling with other people's lives. But it has many of the worst weaknesses of dictatorships: secrecy, bad internal communications, corruption, an economy that is seeing huge brain-drain, and a demographic crisis with declining birthrates. Their military has been able to defeat even annihilate militias, but it has not really faced modern armies (and it has been conspicuously restrained around Israel and Turkey).

At the moment Russia clearly lacks the capability of executing large scale military campaigns in a somewhat organized fashion. In fact, what has been astonishing over the last 80 days is the fact that it seems to lack the capacity to learn from failure in the field--something that is pretty much a given for any functioning army given the existential nature of war. The only really well designed military tasks that have been reported are disciplined retreats.

To be sure, the professional military analysists are right to say that Russia is no paper tiger. It has enormous fire-power. And it has shown a willingness to use it. It may well hold on to parts of Ukraine indefinitely. It's important that the Biden Administration continues its caution and level-headedness in not crossing various red lines that might lead to nuclear warfare. It's been very wise to maintain its involvement as a sponsor of a proxy-war without escalating to direct contact.

Another clear sign of Russian's regional weakness: Turkey (a NATO member) has closed off the Bosphorus and Dardanelles straits to warships meaning that Russia cannot now reinforce its naval capabilities in the Black Sea Fleet. So far Russia has not even bothered to try to challenge Turkey, and I have found no sign of a formal protest. (Russia does not consider its invasion of Ukraine a war; Turkey's invocation of the Montreux Convention suggests it does.) 

Of course, Russia is blockading Ukrainian ports militarily and commercially. If and when this war, as seems likely, extends into the next harvest season, world food supplies will become much tighter. (Ukraine is a major exporter.) The FAO food index is a third higher than a year ago. (The real question is if a failed Fall harvest is already priced in or not.) And high food prices, alongside rising global temperatures, are politically explosive in lots of countries.

My guess is that China and India (who surely also expected a quick war) will come to regret their support for Putin once they are faced with the effects on food and energy prices of this conflict dragging on. Of course, a lot of the worst hit countries and individuals will be those with the least power to influence any outcomes. The failure of so many important states like China and Russia, but also others who prefer to focus on American and European hypocrisy, to ignore the need for collective security and the enlightened benefits of enforcing it will be one of the main lessons of this conflict. The longer they continue to support Russia, the longer they de facto support its blockade of Ukraine, the more local social unrest they should expect around the world.

Given the structural challenges facing the overstretched Russian federation, it is an open question if it can ever recover great power status. If anything, since its mineral wealth is concentrated in the relatively unpopulated East, one must wonder if it can maintain its de facto independence vis a vis China over the next few decades and avoid debilitating civil war once Putin leaves the scene.

The military experts all emphasize that a large part of Russia's military predicament is that the stated political objectives have not adjusted to the failure of its initial aims (capture of the main cities and regime change in Ukraine as a set-up to partial annexation). Crucially, it is not making the decisions to win a war of attrition. (And given Western sanctions its capacity to do so will weaken over time.) My own view is (going beyond the experts) that if the Russian regime continues to be unwilling to make a serious political offer to Ukraine, that is, to recognize it as a political equal, in order to settle the conflict on the negotiating table that might allow it to consolidate some of its earlier gains (especially Crimea), we may well see a total collapse of (what we may call) the Russian Ukrainian expedition force later in the Fall on par with the German collapse in the Fall of 1918. 

Meanwhile beyond the military tactics it's been a good few months for perceptions about American empire. American intelligence has been impressive (also aiding Ukraine on the battlefield). Its allies and dependencies have committed to increasing defense spending, a lot of which will end up filling American military contractors' coffers. The German establishment's generation long strategy to (a) play America and Russia off against each other, and (b) to normalize the Russian regime in return for cheap energy has resulted in failure. European elites are rushing to re-integrate into US led military alliance, and the political leadership of Hungary has made it clear there is no interest in defecting toward a more neutral stance.+

It's also been a good few months for liberal democracy as a species of war-time governance. The purported decisiveness and singlemindedness of dictatorship turns out to be hollow if good information (and a willingness to act on it) cannot reach the top, as it cannot in a kleptocratic regime, where submission to the leader is preferred over loyalty to the state or truth. The contrasting images between an isolating Putin at one end of his long table and a Zelensky surrounding by his team in wartime Kyiv under fire is going to haunt the dreams of all the friends and admirers of authoritarian, purported strong men. 

While there is huge amount of support for Ukrainian freedom across the European continent,  this has not made prior association with Putin truly toxic to European electorates. Orban got re-elected comfortably. And while Le Pen lost, she did make it to the second round and got an incredible 44% (more than doubling her dad's numbers a generation ago). It is by no means obvious if, say, NATO can survive a second Trump administration. 

One of the oddities of the last few weeks has been Sweden's political elites' rush to join Finland in membership application of NATO. Sweden's policy of neutrality -- while it involved some  deviations -- basically existed for two centuries prior to 2009. And while it has a whole bunch of recent mutual defense agreements, it has, as Professor Erik Angner has noted, avoided a large public discussion of the costs and benefits of joining the NATO alliance. (Swedish publish support for NATO membership only went over 50% after the Russian invasion of Ukraine.) This may well cause downstream trouble once it has to join NATO missions unpopular domestically.

My take on the Swedish elite decision is this: Sweden, which has to deal with tactical Russian naval and air incursions in the Baltics on a regular basis, has been an EU member for over twenty five years. Its political class has clearly come to the conclusion that a true intra-European defense capability is never going to be generated (perhaps one of the side-effects of Brexit). That is to say, it does not expect 'Europe' to find a way to match its economic power with independent military capabilities. And so it has opted for American protection now that it can sell the choice. America's empire may well last a while longer unless its political class falls into the self-inflicted precipice it's been dangling over.

Huizinga on Schmitt and the Collapse of the Whole System of International Law

    Though there may be abundant traces of play in domestic politics there would seem, at first sight, to be little opportunity for it in the field of international politics. The fact, however, that these have fallen to unheard of extremes of violence and dangerousness in political life among nations does not in itself exclude the possibility of play. As we have seen from numerous examples, play can be cruel and bloody and, in addition, can often be false play. Any law-abiding community or community of States will have characteristics linking it in one way or another to a play-community. A system of international law is maintained by the mutual recognition of certain principles and maxims which, in effect, operate like play-rules despite the fact that they may be founded in metaphysics. The explicit acknowledgment of the pacta sunt servanda principle is a de facto recognition that the integrity of the system rests on a  willingness to play along. Once a party withdraws from the rules of the system, the whole system of international law must, if only temporarily, collapse unless the outlaw is banished from the community as a "spoilsport." 
   The maintenance of international law has always been dependent on the [continued] validity of principles such as honour, decency, and good form. An important part of European rules of warfare developed, after all, out of the code of honour proper to chivalry. International law tacitly assumed that a defeated state would behave like a gentleman and a good loser, even if it seldom did. The duty to declare war officially, though often violated, belonged to the good form of warring states. In short until quite recently modern European war included and still retained the ludic elements of war, which we have uncovered in all archaic eras, and on which the absolutely binding character of the rules of war in large part rested. 
   A common phrase in German speech speaks of the entry of war as "Ernstfall". In strictly military parlance the term is correct. Compared with the sham fighting of manoeuvres and drilling, 'real' war is undoubtedly what seriousness is to play. But it's altogether different when he term "Ernstfall" is understood politically. It would entail that foreign policy has not attained its full degree of seriousness, her real effectiveness, until the state of war is reached. This view is confessed by some. [In the Dutch, but not English, there is a note to Huizinga's (1935) In the Shadows of Tomorrow.] For them all diplomatic intercourse, insofar as it moves in the paths of negotiation and agreement, is only a preface to war or a transition between two wars. It is logical that its adherents, who regard war and its preparations as the sole form of serious politics, should deny that war has any connection with contest [Huizinga uses 'wedkamp' here which as he notes earlier, signals the rolling of betting in legal and athletic contests--ES] and hence with play. The agonistic factor, they tell us, may have been powerfully operative in earlier eras, but contemporary warfare is elevated above the old contest. It is based on the "friend-enemy" principle. All real political relationships among nations and states, so they say, are dominated by this principle. [Here Huizinga cites Schmitt's Der Begriff der Politischen in Dutch and English editions.]** The other group is always either your friend or your enemy. Enemy, of course, is not to be understood as inimicus or εχθρός (echtros), i.e. personally hated, or though wicked, but only as hostis or πόλεμιος, i.e. the stranger, who is in your group's way or about the stand in its way. Schmitt refuses to regard the enemy even as a rival or adversary. He is according to him just an opponent [tegenstander] in the most iteral sense and is thus to be liquidated [uit de weg ruimen]. If ever anything in history has corresponded to this gross reduction of the idea of enmity, which turns it into an almost mechanical relationship, it is precisely that archaic antagonism between phratries, clans or tribes where, as we saw, the play element was of considerable significance, and from which the growth of culture has carried us beyond. In so far as there is a glimpse of correctness in Schmitt's inhuman delusion, the conclusion has to be: war is not the 'Ernstfall,' but peace is. Only by conquering that pitiable friend-enemy relationship will humanity lay claim to the recognition of her dignity. With everything that evokes or accompanies it, war always remains ensnared in the daemonic witchcraft of the game.--J.H. Huizinga (1949 [1944]) Homo Ludens: A Study in the Play-Element in Culture, London Routledge pp. 208-209. {With corrections by Eric Schliesser in bold.}*

Homo Ludens appeared in Dutch in 1938. After the Von Leers incident (recall), Huizinga was effectively black-listed in Nazi-Germany (see Gossman's "Afterword" to Otterspeer's article). Somewhat amazingly the English translation was translated from the German edition, which, according to the English translation,  is supposed to have appeared in Switzerland in 1944. But, in fact, Huizinga was also pretty effectively black-listed in neutral Switzerland. The book first appeared in German with Pantheon (a small press) in Amsterdam in 1939. Pantheon, which was not a Jewish firm, continued operation during the war. In Switzerland, the book was finally republished by Burg-Verlag in Basel, including a 1944 edition, which seems to have been a source of the English translation. I write 'a source' because the (anonymous to me) English translator appended the following note to the book:

THIS edition is prepared from the German edition published in Switzerland, 1944, and also from the author's own English translation of the text, which he made shortly before his death. Comparison of the two texts shows a number of discrepancies and a marked difference in style; the translator hopes that the following version has achieved a reasonable synthesis. (vii)*

While it is tempting to turn swiftly to Huizinga's argument against Schmitt, it is worth noting that in Dutch the sub-title of the book is, "Proeve Eener Bepaling van het Spel-Element der Cultuur." In contemporary Dutch, a 'proeve' primarily means a 'tasting,' but in the past it is often used in terms of a 'trial' or 'assaying' (or 'essay'). It shares a root with the English 'proof'. And if you read the book, it's pretty clear that Huizinga intents to convey that the book involves taste and assaying. The first word ("Essai") of the sub-title French translation ("Essai sur le fonction sociale du jeu") captures these resonances by using 'Essai', although interestingly enough the rest of the sub-title is rather over-interpretive (even reductive). But I also suspect, as (also) passages that I quoted above from near the end of the book imply, Huizinga means to suggest that in his own day the play-element of culture is being challenged if not in danger of collapsing (a proeve in the sense of a beproeving--an ordeal or test).

Okay, with that in place let's turn to Huizinga's argument. It is no surprise that writing in an age of the collapse of the League of Nations into farce that Huizinga would have thought that the system of international law was rather fragile--that a single defection could make it collapse unless the rest is strong enough to banish the rule-breaker altogether from the system. We now know that this is need not be the case. The international system can survive considerable rule breaking by even its vital and leadings members and, what is more amazing, can maintain many of its norms with important rule-breakers while they are knowingly violating international law. So, for example, even while countries are putting sanctions on Putin's regime, Russia participates in an enormous range of international commercial and technical practices that are regulated by international law that nobody will consider revoking. Obviously, there is a tipping point where that may not be true anymore.

One way to understand Huizinga's diagnosis of Schmitt's position is that according to Huizinga (and I have a distinct feeling that this anticipates Foucault's interpretation of liberalism), and in a reversal of Clausewitz's famous dictum, Schmitt treats ordinary politics and diplomacy as a continuation and extension of war. It's in this fact that, according Huizinga's Schmitt, the paraphernalia of diplomacy and politics have their true significance.   

Now, the position attributed by Huizinga to Schmitt that ordinary politics and statecraft are just the continuation of war and preparation for it implies that on the Schmittian picture there is no escape from the Hobbesian state of nature at all. So, it is worth noting that Huizinga converges on a crucial agreement with Strauss's criticism of Schmitt: (recall) that Schmitt remains, despite his own self-understanding, in the Hobbesian ambit. (I have no evidence that Huizinga was familiar with Strauss' reading of Schmitt.)

In addition, Huizinga attributes to Schmitt an ideal of progress. (Again, this is accord with Strauss, who discerned the existential providentialism in Schmitt, who is for all his rejection of liberalism a committed modernist.) But according to Huizinga, Schmitt's idea of progress presupposes the overcoming of the ludic and agonic ideals that were once inherent in the conceptualizations of war. And, on Huizinga's account this makes modern warfare the true barbarism because it mechanically promotes the killing of enemies.

Here, Huizinga echoes the practice -- from Thomas More forward, but reaching its peak in Enlightenment thought -- of treating modern Europeans as the true barbarians. And this is supposed to meet Schmitt on his own terms because according to Schmitt it's those very humanitarian ideals -- which turn the enemy into a inhumane monster -- that lead to total war. 

At first sight, it might seem that Huizinga misses in his analysis of Schmitt is that enemies are symmetrical to each other: that there is a moment of existential choice in which some are recognized as friends to which one belongs and other social unities as enemies. This parity is absent in social domination and subordination. So, something of the agonic element is maintained even in Schmitt's analysis. And, in fact, I think this is Huizinga's position ("war always remains ensnared in the daemonic witchcraft of the game"), although it's unclear if Huizinga also thinks this is an immanent critique of Schmitt.

Be that as it may, while it's true that there is a sense in which Huizinga's response to Schmitt is question-begging (humanity is not common ground), it is not silly, and strikes me as coherent.+ In particular, Huizinga promotes the idea that the overcoming of the friend-enemy distinction is a real possibility and once this overcoming is associated with humanity's dignity (there are Kantian deals lurking here) a worthy ideal. In this, Huizinga echoes Ortega Y Gassett (recall) and he anticipates Popper's argument (recall). This is something that cannot be denied by Schmitt because the enemy-friend distinction itself presupposes an existential choice; and so could be otherwise. (Again, Strauss who parts ways with these liberals had noticed that Schmitt shares common ground in such matters with his liberal opponents.) Huizinga's position does not deny that politics plays a role in culture or in games, but rather that such activities, even when fully immersed in them, can reach beyond themselves to something ethical (or sittlich in a soft-Hegelian sense).

Huizinga does not claim that all of culture is play. In fact, he invites us to consider the renewal or development of a political art in all seriousness: this is the art of peace, how to achieve it and how to maintain it. (And given the Kantianism, this is really the art of world-federation.) And Huizinga claims here (and at the start of Homo Ludens) explicitly the authority of Plato's Laws 803:  "It is the life of peace that everyone should live as much and as well as he can." And matching Schmitt's Christian political theology, with Plato's, we learn that in order to be serious about the art of peace, we must learn to understand ourselves, looking up, as God(s)'s playthings. 

 

 

A note on Le Guin and Fanon, and Carl Schmitt

"You are the same species, race, people, exactly the same in every way, with a slight selection towards color. If you brought up an asset child as an owner it would be an owner in every respect, and vice versa. So you spend your lives keeping up this tremendous division that doesn't exist. What I don't understand is how you can fail to see how appallingly wasteful it is. I don't mean economically!"

"In the war," he said, and then there was a very long pause; though Solly had a lot more to say, she waited, curious. "I was on Yeowe," he said, "you know, in the civil war."

That's where you got all those scars and dents, she thought; for however scrupulously she averted her eyes, it was impossible not to be familiar with his spare, onyx body by now, and she knew that in aiji he had to favor his left arm, which had a considerable chunk out of it just above the bicep.

“The slaves of the Colonies revolted, you know, some of them at first, then all of them. Nearly all. So we Army men there were all owners. We couldn’t send asset soldiers, they might defect. We were all veots and volunteers. Owners fighting assets. I was fighting my equals. I learned that pretty soon. Later on I learned I was fighting my superiors. They defeated us.”

“But that—” Solly said, and stopped; she did not know what to say.

“They defeated us from beginning to end,” he said. “Partly because my government didn’t understand that they could. That they fought better and harder and more intelligently and more bravely than we did.”

“Because they were fighting for their freedom!”

“Maybe so,” he said in his polite way.

"So ..."

"I wanted to tell you that I respect the people I fought."--Ursula K Le Guin (1994) "Forgiveness Day" in The Found and the Lost: The Collected Novellas of Ursula K. Le Guin, p. 287.

Because I am about to teach The Dispossessed (recall) again, I am trying to read all the books in the so-called Hainish cycle. "Forgiveness Day" is part of a series of interlocking stories (also collected in Four Ways to Forgiveness) about two planets, Werel and Yeowe. As the quoted passage suggests, Werel is a slave-owning society that treated Yeowe as a colony. In fact, Werel is an extremely patriarchical society, too, which treats its women in the way Athens treats theirs. 

The nameless 'he' is Rega Teyeo, a scion of a rural soldiering elite; conservative and stoic in his ways. He discovers that after the lost war on Yeowe his own people, who are modernizing and shifting toward commerce, have little use for him. So, he ends up a bodyguard to Solly, the alien (female) ambassador to his planet. In many ways it's a humiliating end to his public service. 

The quoted exchange takes place in the turning point in the relationship between Rega and Solly, which itself occurs when they think they are in mortal danger. I am not a big fan of "Forgiveness Day" because the writing is relatively clunky and the characters are relatively stereotypical. Because it's Le Guin, there is still plenty of food for thought about the nature of patriarchy and the interlocking forms of oppression and resistance it generates.

The quoted passage illustrates my complaint about the writing in the novella; that Teyeo respects the people he fought is already abundantly clear before Le Guin makes it explicit ("I wanted to tell you that I respect the people I fought."). 

Having said that, the passage did remind me (no surprise we are in the ambit of Hegel's master-slave dialectic) of a kind of symmetrical point in the famous first chapter of Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth that in the Manichean world colonialism, "At the individual level, violence is a cleansing force. It rids the colonized of their inferiority complex, of their passive and despairing attitude. It emboldens them, and restores their self-confidence." (p. 51)

Le Guin invites us into thinking that when you have been defeated on the battle-field it is difficult to deny the fundamental equality of your victor. She published "Forgiveness Day" when the Vietnam war was living memory. As Le Guin's novella shows, that individual experience on the battle-field need not transform wider social attitudes toward those thought inferior if that society can insulate itself, to some respect, from the military defeat. As a cursory glance at history shows, for every Rega Teyeo whose attitudes are transformed, there may be a lance corporal who prefers a dagger-stab legend. And in her story Le Guin, who is not naïve about such matters, suggests that individual character matters a lot to when a potentially existential experience becomes transformative.

Earlier in the story, after Rega has requested a discharge from his duty to protect Solly, his request is declined by his (and her) employer as follows:

"Love of god and country is like fire, a wonderful friend, a terrible enemy; only children play with fire. I don't like the situation. There's nobody here I can replace either of you with. Will you hang on a while longer?"

What's striking about the response is that it is couched in terms familiar from Schmitt (with its friend-enemy distinction) [recall here and here mediated via Popper]. This is interesting because the employer I have just quoted represents in Le Guin's story, and in the wider Hainish cycle, the Kantian federative ideal of the aspiration toward perpetual peace founded in human equality. And what Le Guin recognizes is that one can accept that in some circumstances the friend-enemy distinction is empirically adequate of people's ('childish') behavior even though one is oneself committed to a different ideal that is supposed to abolish or overcome it.

Now, in light of "Forgiveness Day" it is tempting to suggest that the friend-enemy distinction itself rests, if not conceptually then at least on the battle-field, in a kind of symmetry between the two foes. And this symmetry is itself ground in a kind of equality or mutual recognition. And so, one may be tempted to see in this observation a refutation of Schmitt.

As an aside, this is why 'wars' on cancer, drugs, and on poverty are such strange ways of speaking. (This is extended to the "courageous battle" one wages against a fatal disease.) They do not have the latent possibility of such mutual recognition. Norman MacDonald (who died of cancer) makes the point in a sketch here. His punchline is that, if you die, the cancer dies at exactly the same time in your body. “That, to me, is not a loss. That’s a draw.”

Be that as it may, of course, Schmitt anticipates the point and suggests that the political distinction is orthogonal to any moral interpretation of such mutual symmetry.  It is entirely compatible with his view that one can find one's enemies moral, even beautiful. (I doubt he would grant that they are superior, but it seems logically consistent.)

Now, it is important to Schmitt's analysis that these judgments involve collectivities not individuals (as it is in Le Guin and Fanon). And so there is an important sense that Schmitt can accommodate the point about symmetry or the transformative experience of the battle-field, as long as (and I find this ironic) it is understood in, and limited to, individual terms. 

And, in fact, one of the psychological, perhaps, social conditions for Rega's judgment, or maybe it's an effect of it, is his disenchantment with his own society. And while this turns out to be a pre-condition for his political understanding (he starts to see through slogans) it also leads him to withdraw from it emotionally, politically, and eventually physically. Part of the closing line of the story with him going into a kind of exile is (also) explicit about this: "he had lost his world." And so, while one can read the Hainish cycle as resting on a kind of faith that Schmittianism can be overcome, Le Guin recognizes that there are circumstances in which its logic is impeccable. 

 

 

 

On Pynchon on 1984

By the time they have left the Ministry of Love, Winston and Julia have entered permanently the condition of doublethink, the anterooms of annihilation, no longer in love but able to hate and love Big Brother at the same time. It is as dark an ending as can be imagined. But strangely, it is not quite the end. We turn the page to find appended what seems to be some kind of critical essay, "The Principles of Newspeak". We remember that at the beginning, we were given the option, by way of a footnote, to turn to the back of the book and read it. Some readers do this, and some don't - we might see it nowadays as an early example of hypertext. Back in 1948, this final section apparently bothered the American Book-of-the-Month Club enough for them to demand that it be cut, along with the chapters quoted from Emmanuel Goldstein's book, as a condition of acceptance by the club. Though he stood to lose at least £40,000 in American sales, Orwell refused to make the changes, telling his agent, "A book is built up as a balanced structure and one cannot simply remove large chunks here and there unless one is ready to recast the whole thing . . . I really cannot allow my work to be mucked about beyond a
certain point, and I doubt whether it even pays in the long run." Three weeks later the BOMC relented, but the question remains, why end a novel as passionate, violent and dark as this one with what appears to be a scholarly appendix?
The answer may lie in simple grammar. From its first sentence, "The Principles of Newspeak" is written consistently in the past tense, as if to suggest some later piece of history, post- 1984 , in which Newspeak has become literally a thing of the past - as if in some way the anonymous author of this piece is by now free to discuss, critically and objectively, the political system of which Newspeak was, in its time, the essence. Moreover, it is our own pre-Newspeak English language that is being used to write the essay. Newspeak was supposed to have become general by 2050, and yet it appears that it did not last that long, let alone triumph, that the ancient humanistic ways of thinking inherent in standard English have persisted, survived, and ultimately prevailed, and that perhaps the social and moral order it speaks for has even, somehow, been restored.--Thomas Pynchon (2003) "Introduction" Nineteen Eighty-Four By George Orwell [HT: Victor Gijsbers]

We know that Pynchon is not the only major novelist that grappled with Orwell's Appendix to Nineteen Eighty-Four; at the end The Handmaid's Tale, Atwood, who according to her own testimony about 1984, "read it again and again," pays homage to it in the "Historical Notes" themselves "Being a partial transcript of the proceedings of the Twelfth Symposium on Gileadean Studies, held as part of the International Historical Association Convention held at the University of Denay, Nunavit, on June 25, 2195." In presenting these historical notes, Atwood, reassures the reader, who may have no taste for (recall) Socratic metaphysics --  "for everything that has come into being destruction is appointed, not even such a fabric as this will abide for all time, but it shall surely be dissolved" (Plato, Republic, 546a)" -- that the "Gilead period," too, will come to an end in some sense. 

Pynchon, who is not exactly known for his optimism, is right to pay attention to the Appendix to 1984, but I am not entirely sure that his hesitant ("perhaps") optimism about what the Appendix signals can withstand scrutiny. His interpretation assumes, first, that the (let's call it) authorial stance of the Appendix has to be taken at face value. That's decidedly odd because 1984 represents us with a world in which just about every text is a forgery of some sorts. (While it would be a mistake to treat them alike, Orwell and Borges were contemporaries, after all.) In fact, much of the action of 1984 consists in the production of forgeries (not just of texts of memories). The production of newspapers by the Ministry of Truth and the torture chambers of Ministry of love have this in common. So, why would the Appendix be any different?

As an aside, the apparent function of the forgeries in Oceania appear to be to produce a totalizing infallibility about everything, not the least the past, of the Party. (No Pope would dream of this!) And what it illustrates is that even if one were to grant (for the sake of amusement) the linguistic idealist, that all is text, what one may call the production values that inform or are exhibited by the production of texts make a huge difference. Linguistic idealism comes in many varieties. If one treats this focus on 'values' as bourgeois, feel free to replace 'production values' with 'means of production' in the previous sentence. In so far as Orwell is a true socialist (and an author), this attention to the conditions of textual production need not surprise. 

But let's stipulate that we need to take the Appendix at face value. You may say, 'What else can we do, after all?' It's true, as Pynchon emphasizes, that the Appendix treats Newspeak as a thing of the past. Given that Pynchon explicitly understands Newspeak as the essence of Oceania, and in his argument tacitly relies on the metaphysical principle, I'll paraphrase Spinoza (E2D2), that when its essence is taken away the entity ceases to be, Pynchon infers from the demise of Newspeak quite reasonably that Oceania must have ended.

Before I get to the merits of Pynchon's argument, a reader may suspect that I will object to Pynchon's metaphysics as an imposition on the world of 1984. Of course, I am assuming you are not the kind of reader who may find my parading of metaphysical jargon quite pedantic. Even so it's worth noting that the core torture scenes in Part III of 1984, emphasize that metaphysics is salient. The torturer, O'Brien, repeatedly, in fact, reminds his victim, Winston Smith, that metaphysics is not his "strong point." So I am not going to object to the form of Pynchon's argument.*

Newspeak is what the philosophers call a final language. In the text -- I have in mind both 1984 and its Appendix -- this is marked by the contrast between the provisional versions (as, I now quote the Appendix, "embodied in the Ninth and Tenth editions of the Newspeak Dictionary") -- and its definitive form "embodied in the Eleventh Edition of the Dictionary."  As we learn from the Appendix and, earlier in the novel, from Syme, who, before he is presumably vaporized, is one of the developers of Newspeak, Newspeak is supposed to be an austere language: its vocabulary culled down, and, through some semantic tools the expressive power of particular words is greatly enhanced, the language's expressive power is curtailed. It's a final language designed to be spoken and used by the Party.**

Now, Syme indeed suggests that the "Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect. Newspeak is Ingsoc and Ingsoc is Newspeak." The narrator of 1984 adds that this is expressed with "a sort of mystical satisfaction." And indeed this idea, the perfection of language, is characteristic of what we may call Enlightenment mysticism (and satirized by Swift). Pynchon's interpretation of 1984 is rooted in Syme's understanding of Newspeak.

The Appendix, which follows Syme's interpretation of Newspeak sometimes literally, omits this mystical claim. I'll quote the Appendix (and then suggest an alternative to Pynchon's interpretation):

The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought--that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc--should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words. Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express, while excluding all other meanings and also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods. This was done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and by stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings, and so far as possible of all secondary meanings whatever.

Unlike Syme, the Appendix places greatest emphasis on the fact that the purpose of Newspeak was to make what in 1984 is called 'Thoughtcrime' impossible. Even a Quine-ean couldn't be heretical through indirect methods in Newspeak. We might say, then, that it is regimentation that is the fundamental function of Newspeak as a final language.

Interestingly enough, this is an aside, the author of the Appendix recognizes that once Newspeak is perfected, it would make translation of books and even complex fragments from older languages into Newspeak in a certain way impossible unless they either referred "to some technical processor some very simple everyday actions." (The Appendix offers the Declaration of Independence as an example of how "impossible" would be to render it into Newspeak.) One wishes (recall) our advocates of formal languages would keep this in mind.

Be that as it may, a more natural interpretation of the demise of Newspeak presents itself now.  For, from the point of view of the Party, the elimination of even possible Thoughtcrime would be self-defeating. For Thoughtcrime grounds the repressive apparatus of the Party. The possibility of Thoughtcrimes are -- as much as the conditions of permanent War -- central to the structure of self-discipline of the Party. The elimination of Thoughtcrime as a category would spell doom to the survival of the Party because it would lose its main means of self-control as a ruling, corporate spirit. It would then have to start codifying laws of some sort and bureaucratize, formalize these. This was not a problem in the world of 1984 because the perfection of Newspeak had been projected, as the Appendix notes in its closing sentence, into a more distant future (2050).

So, a more natural political possibility is that the Party abandoned the project of Newspeak because it saw that its perfection would be self-undermining and incompatible with the ideological needs of Ingsoc in power.*** (By contrast, a socialist language planner like Carnap recognizes that Esperanto, for example, is great for a world of public Enlightenment.) And the Appendix reflects the writings of someone who is intimately familiar with the abandonment of Newspeak (not the demise of Oceania).  Admittedly, there are some passages in the Appendix that exhibit a rather free-thinking attitude: the use of the Declaration of Independence as an example, in particular, is rather cheeky. And it forms the best evidence for Pynchon's interpretation. But the more literal reading of the Appendix understands it as a fragment from a reconstruction of the rise and fall of Newspeak as a social enterprise. That is compatible with the survival of Oceania once the Party realized that the mystical attitude toward Newspeak threatened to make it the essence of Oceania.+

 

 

International Arbitration, and a forgotten precursor to Liberalism

Suppose for instance that peace is signed to-day, that it is published to the whole world: how do we know that posterity will ratify the articles. Opinions are changeable, and the actions of the men of the present time do not bind their successors. To put an end to this objection, it suffices to  remember what we have said about the causes of war, which not being considerable, for the reasons given above, there is nothing that can occasion the rupture of a peace. Nevertheless, to prevent the inconvenience of this, it would be necessary to choose a city, where all sovereigns should have perpetually their ambassadors, in order that the differences that might arise should be settled by the judgment of the whole assembly. The ambassadors of those who would be interested would plead there the grievances of their masters and the other deputies would judge them without prejudice. And to give more authority to the judgment, one would take advice of the big republics, who would have likewise their agents in this same place. I say great Republics, like those of the Venitians and the Swiss, and not those small lordships, that cannot maintain themselves, and depend upon the protection of another. That if anyone rebelled against the decree of so notable a company, he would receive the disgrace of all other Princes, who would find means to bring him to reason. Now the most commodious place for such an assembly is the territory of Venice, because it is practically neutral and indifferent to all Princes: added thereto that it is near the most important monarchies of the earth, of those of the Pope, the two Emperors, and the King of Spain. It is not far from France, Tatary, Moscovy, Poland, England, and Denmark. As for Persia, China, Ethiopia, and the East and the West Indies, they are lands far distant, but navigation remedies that inconvenience, and for such a good object, one must not refuse a long voyage.--Émeric Crucé (1623) The New Cyneas, translated by Thomas Willing Balch, pp. 102-104 [page-numbers of modern translation].

The perspective of modern liberalism tends to be future oriented and too involved with the problems of governing, that liberals tend to forget key episodes from its own history of social activism. This, more than the framing by their Marxist critics, helps explain why Richard Cobden has become associated with the reductive label ‘Manchester liberal.’ But even when liberals remember free-trade and the corn-laws as victories, the liberal tradition tend to ignore his anti-imperialism[1] and his courageous anti-militarism. In addition, even within free-trade, he was creative and instrumental in making most favored nation status as a key device of a liberal trade order. And, finally, in opposing gun-boat diplomacy and militarism, he was an incessant advocate of international arbitration as an alternative to war.

While you, my dear educated reader, have at least heard of Cobden, I am pretty sure that  Crucé is almost certainly obscure to you (unless you paid attention to my recent blog post). But while it would be anachronistic to call Crucé a liberal – but perhaps less so than calling Locke a liberal --, Crucé definitely deserves attention for articulating many of the best features of a liberal program long before they were popular (religious toleration including non-Christians (pagans, Jews, Muslims, etc.)), the virtues of commerce, the significance of public works, and the rule of law, low taxes, etc. Crucé’s larger program is founded on cosmopolitan principles of common humanity and sympathy.

Because I started this digression with Cobden, today I want to focus on one of the more technocratic devices, his idea of a truly international court of arbitration. The first thing to notice is that he includes non-Christian and non-European sovereigns in the process. This is very much untainted by the kind of racism that plagues so many of such (later) proposals. To be sure, at times Crucé expresses genocidal hatred of barbarians and savages. And while he may sound like Aristotle (“I place among beasts savage people who do not reason” (52)), but, upon closer inspections, these only involve folk who refuse to play nice with others (and so Crucé is not inclined to treat one approach to political life as superior than others). In general Crucé loathes the admiration of conquerors in the European tradition, and wishes honor and admiration to accrue not “by sackings, massacres, and acts of hostility, but by gentle government, a legitimate and regulated power.” (48)

Crucé is not especially interested in the law. And I understand why lawyers have not treated him as one of their own because he asserts early in the book, “Jurisprudence is also not necessary, and a good natural judgment is sufficient to finish lawsuits, without resorting to a multitude of laws and decisions that only con-fuse cases instead of simplifying them.” (82) So, the arbitration council is, perhaps, better seen as an anticipation of the security council than the international court of arbitration.

The point is not so much to build up, and develop an international case law, but rather to prevent war and maintain peace among those – great powers – most likely to resort to war. And to achieve this, what’s required is not so much knowledge of the law, but good worldly judgment. This is also reflected in the composition of the international arbitration council of ambassadors.

Unlike the modern security council, in Crucé’s arbitration tribunal great powers do not arbitrate their own cases. But like the modern security council, there may well be enforcement troubles. Crucé is probably too optimistic in assuming that collective security is possible if a great power is just adamant on going to war. But it is worth noting that that for the vast majority of states declining to obey the outcome of arbitration, and violate international norms, does tend to come with a steep price. An even know, EU member states have come in the habit of resolving all their disputes peacefully either by law, or very much in the spirit of Crucé’s proposal (with ambassadors in Brussels). So, while he recognizes, repeatedly, that his proposal will be treated as utopian (Plato’s Republic not More is treated as the exemplary work), we ought to pause that we live, partially in such utopian world.

Unlike Kant, Crucé does not think such a scheme is only possible with suitably reformed states (who should be liberal republics with division of powers). From what he writes I suspect Crucé agrees with Kant that such states are more pacific. And much of the book (about which some other time more) is devoted to creating the conditions of peaceful public administration. But from Crucé’s perspective, the urgency of his proposal is precisely that its absolute sovereigns that need to be constrained. This is why it’s clearly more important to have kings and emperors represented in Venice than republics.[2]

I do think there is a democratic sentiment tucked into Crucé’s proposal. For it is quite clear that one ground of inclusion in the arbitration council, is great populous-ness. Admittedly this is easy to miss because shortly after the passage quoted, Crucé addresses the worry about the relative rank of the ambassadors next at great length. But it’s pretty clear  this reflects the preoccupation with hierarchy of his intended audience more than his own sensibility. And one cannot help but think that part of his rhetorical strategy is to make such preoccupation seem like a ridiculous species of superstition. Even so, it is pretty clear that Crucé's proposal is a concession to realism; this is a feature not a bug of his proposal.

Anyway, I often intend my digressions as invitations to read the works discussed, but I hope this post has made you intrigued about Crucé to explore his “little book” (350) The New Cyneas (which is easily found on the internet).

Adam Smith, Plutarch, Foucault, Leibniz, and a Forgotten Utopian.

Wherever prudence does not direct, wherever justice does not permit, the attempt to change our situation, the man who does attempt it, plays at the most unequal of all games of hazard, and stakes every thing against scarce any thing. What the favourite of the king of Epirus said to his master, may be applied to men in all the ordinary situations of human life. When the King had recounted to him, in their proper order, all the conquests which he proposed to make, and had come to the last of them; And what does your Majesty propose to do then ? said the Favourite.--I propose then, said the King, to enjoy myself with my friends, and endeavour to be good company over a bottle.--And what hinders your Majesty from doing so now? replied the Favourite. In the most glittering and exalted situation that our idle fancy can hold out to us, the pleasures from which we propose to derive our real happiness, are almost always the same with those which, in our actual, though humble station, we have at all times at hand, and in our power. Except the frivolous pleasures of vanity and superiority, we may find, in the most humble station, where there is only personal liberty, every other which the most exalted can afford; and the pleasures of vanity and superiority are seldom consistent with perfect tranquillity, a the principle and foundation of all real and satisfactory enjoyment. Neither is it always certain that, in the splendid situation which we aim at, those real and satisfactory pleasures can be enjoyed with the same security as in the humble one which we are so very eager to abandon. Examine the records of history, recollect what has happened within the circle of your own experience, consider with attention what has been the conduct of almost all the greatly unfortunate, either in private or public life, whom you may have either read of, or heard of, or remember; and you will find that the misfortunes of by far the greater part of them have arisen from their not knowing when they were well, when it was proper for them to sit still and to be contented. The inscription upon the tomb-stone of the man who had endeavoured to mend a tolerable constitution by taking physic; 'I was well, 1 wished to be better; here I am; may generally be applied with great justness to the distress of disappointed avarice and ambition.--Adam Smith The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 3.3.31, pp. 150-151.

The charming exchange between The King of Epirus and his favourite receives a note by the editors of the Glasgow edition of Adam Smith's works; they helpfully point to Plutarch, Lives, Pyrrhus, x4. And then add, "The king was Pyrrhus, the favourite Cineas." The passage is introduced by what we may call an axiom of status quo bias: "Wherever prudence does not direct, wherever justice does not permit, the attempt to change our situation, the man who does attempt it, plays at the most unequal of all games of hazard, and stakes every thing against scarce any thing."

The latter part of the axiom is reminiscent of Pascal's wager, but then in reverse. The axiom basically suggests that only in the context of the established rule of law (that's how I am glossing 'justice' here), and then only when one acts prudently, can it be sensible to try to change one's situation. At this point it is easy to get caught up in the circular nature of the axiom because presumably it is only prudent to play games of hazard when the odds are favorable.

But notice that there is a more important point lurking here -- one pertinent to the exchange between Pyrrhus and Cineas -- that outside the rule of law, one should not act from honor, ambition, spirit of revenge, or desire for plunder at all. That is, one should not go to war unless one is sure to win (and, if there is established internal law, within one's right). Since one is rarely sure to win in war, Smith's axiom is quite anti-militaristic. And this fits with Smith's much broader criticism of mercantilism (which exhibit a warlike spirit). I don't mean to deny that the axiom also fits his criticism of projectors/speculators (who are over-optimistic and over-ambitious). The passage also links up with other themes in Smith (about the nature of true happiness, and the tendency of our imagination to delude us).

Now, as it happens, the axiom is not in Plutarch.

Recently, I noticed that in a lecture of 22 March 1978, Foucault directs attention to a now forgotten work called The New Cyneas. The author was a man called Émeric Crucé (1590–1648). While I am only a third way in, The New Cyneas is an amazing work. It's relative obscurity is a reminder that as a society we are keener on remembering the conquerors, the Clausewitzes, and the liberators, than creating statues of the true friends of peace. I will blog a bit about the book when I can. 

I do not mean to suggest he was always obscure. As others have noticed, Leibniz had read the work as a young man and told others about it (see here; here). Interestingly enough, on one such occasion Leibniz repeats the anecdote from Plutarch:

When very young, I came to know a book titled the New Cyneas, whose unknown author counseled sovereigns to govern their states in peace and to resolve their differences through a tribunal; but I can no longer find this book and no longer recall any details. We know that Cyneas was a confidant of King Pyrrhus, who advised him to rest [and rejoice] first, since it was his purpose (as he confessed) when he had conquered Sicily, Calabria, Rome and Carthage.--Leibniz to Leibniz to Saint Pierre, 4 April, 1715. (The Abbot Saint Pierre wrote a famous proposal for European pacific Federation, which also inspired some work by Rousseau (recall))

In Leibniz there is no hint of Smith's axiom.

However, and unterestingly enough, we find a predecessor to Smith's axiom at the start of The New Cyneas. After pointing out that wars are usually fought for honor, profit (plunder), or revenge, and then dismissing the idea that they are fought for religious purposes (which "serves most often as a pretext), Crucé goes on to write that the ordinary fruits of war is a bunch disasters. He proposes as a fine lesson to Princes,

[T]o learn that there is more dishonour to fear, than glory to hope for in war. For the bad comes often [in war]  than the good; and if it is considered a folly to leave the certain for the uncertain, princes should guard their honor, without risking it [sans le mettre au hazard] for the appetites and promptings of those who nourish them with hopes, and hold out to them what they can gain and not what they can lose.--Translated by Thomas Willing Balch (1909)

Now Crucé wrote before Pascal and Fermat had their celebrated exchange. I do not want to claim that he anticipates all the details of Smith's axiom. But I hope it is fair to say he anticipates its spirit. As I hope to show soon, Crucé anticipates quite a bit more in Smith. 

 

14 March 1979: Foucault's Science Fiction of Neo-Liberal Eugenics (XXX)

[I]n Gary Becker there is a very interesting theory of consumption, in which he says: We should not think at all that consumption simply consists in being someone in a process of exchange who buys and makes a monetary exchange in order to obtain some products. The man of consumption is not one of the terms of exchange. The man of consumption, insofar as he consumes, is a producer. What does he produce? Well, quite simply, he produces his own satisfaction. And we should think of consumption as an enterprise activity by which the individual, precisely on the basis of the capital he has at his disposal, will produce something that will be his own satisfaction. Consequently, the theory, the classical analysis trotted out a hundred times of the person who is a consumer on the one hand, but who is also a producer, and who, because of this, is, as it were, divided in relation to himself, as well as all the sociological analyses—for they have never been economic analyses—of mass consumption, of consumer society, and so forth, do not hold up and have no value in relation to an analysis of consumption in the neo-liberal terms of the activity of production. So, even if there really is a return to the idea of homo oeconomicus as the analytical grid of economic activity, there is a complete change in the conception of this homo oeconomicus.
So, we arrive at this idea that the wage is nothing other than the remuneration, the income allocated to a certain capital, a capital that we will call human capital inasmuch as the ability-machine of which it is the income cannot be separated from the human individual who is its bearer. How is this capital made up? It is at this point that the reintroduction of labor or work into the field of economic analysis will make it possible, through a sort of acceleration or extension, to move on to the economic analysis of elements which had previously totally escaped it. In other words, the neo-liberals say that labor was in principle part of economic analysis, but the way in which classical economic analysis was conducted was incapable of dealing with this element. Good, we do deal with it. And when they make this analysis, and do so in the terms I have just described, they are led to study the way in which human capital is formed and accumulated, and this enables them to apply economic analyses to completely new fields and domains.
How is human capital made up? Well, they say, it is made up of innate elements and other, acquired elements. Let’s talk about the innate elements. There are those we can call hereditary, and others which are just innate; differences which are, of course, self-evident for anyone with the vaguest acquaintance with biology. I do not think that there are as yet any studies on the problem of the hereditary elements of human capital, but it is quite clear what form they could take and, above all, we can see through anxieties, concerns, problems, and so on, the birth of something which, according to your point of view, could be interesting or disturbing. In actual fact, in the—I was going to say, classical—analyses of these neo-liberals, in the analyses of Schultz or Becker, for example, it is indeed said that the formation of human capital only has interest and only becomes relevant for the economists inasmuch as this capital is formed thanks to the use of scarce means, to the alternative use of scarce means for a given end. Now obviously we do not have to pay to have the body we have, or we do not have to pay for our genetic make-up. It costs nothing. Yes, it costs nothing—and yet, we need to see ... , and we can easily imagine something like this occurring (I am just engaging in a bit of science fiction here, it is a kind of problematic which is currently becoming pervasive).
In fact, modern genetics clearly shows that many more elements than was previously thought are conditioned by the genetic make-up we receive from our ancestors. In particular, genetics makes it possible to establish for any given individual the probabilities of their contracting this or that type of disease at a given age, during a given period of life, or in any way at any moment of life. In other words, one of the current interests in the application of genetics to human populations is to make it possible to recognize individuals at risk and the type of risk individuals incur throughout their life. You will say: Here again, there’s nothing we can do; our parents made us like this. Yes, of course, but when we can identify what individuals are at risk, and what the risks are of a union of individuals at risk producing an individual with a particular characteristic that makes him or her the carrier of a risk, then we can perfectly well imagine the following: good genetic make-ups—that is to say, [those] able to produce individuals with low risk or with a level of risk which will not be harmful for themselves, those around them, or society—will certainly become scarce, and insofar as they are scarce they may perfectly well [enter], and this is entirely normal, into economic circuits or calculations, that is to say, alternative choices. Putting it in clear terms, this will mean that given my own genetic make-up, if I wish to have a child whose genetic make-up will be at least as good as mine, or as far as possible better than mine, then I will have to find someone who also has a good genetic make-up. And if you want a child whose human capital, understood simply in terms of innate and hereditary elements, is high, you can see that you will have to make an investment, that is to say, you will have to have worked enough, to have sufficient income, and to have a social status such that it will enable you to take for a spouse or co-producer of this future human capital, someone who has significant human capital themselves. I am not saying this as a joke; it is simply a form of thought or a form of problematic that is currently being elaborated.
What I mean is that if the problem of genetics currently provokes such anxiety, I do not think it is either useful or interesting to translate this anxiety into the traditional terms of racism. If we want to try to grasp the political pertinence of the present development of genetics, we must do so by trying to grasp its implications at the level of actuality itself, with the real problems that it raises. And as soon as a society poses itself the problem of the improvement of its human capital in general, it is inevitable that the problem of the control, screening, and improvement of the human capital of individuals, as a function of unions and consequent reproduction, will become actual, or at any rate, called for. So, the political problem of the use of genetics arises in terms of the formation, growth, accumulation, and improvement of human capital. What we might call the racist effects of genetics is certainly something to be feared, and they are far from being eradicated, but this does not seem to me to be the major political issue at the moment.--Michel Foucault, 14 March, 1979,  translated by Graham Burchell, Lecture 9, The Birth of Biopolitics, 226-229 [emphasis added on 'inevitable'].

It is difficult to write this blog post because I am so in awe of Foucault's analysis. For, in these pages, and the ones that follow and precede it, Foucault basically articulates the whole paradigm in which economic analysis becomes incapable of self-limiting and, thus, totalitarian. The question becomes not just how the genetic endowment, but the "child’s family life will produce human capital?" (229) And as Foucault notes this means that everything that can be measured in this environment must be measured to uncover its effect on human capital formation. Deep learning was made, we might say, for human capital theory.

And this human capital will not just be the principle that generates (possible) income into the future, but also the skill to consume it. Foucault's analysis of Becker's treatment that consumption isn't merely a passive doing, a mere hedonic receptacle, but an effect of human capital is masterly. We must not merely acquire taste but must gain the skill to enjoy our acquired commodities. We might say, as a serious joke, that Becker and Mincer (and Schultz, etc.) re-discover Rousseau and Kames in the vernacular. Foucault alerts us to his own interest in this merging of the philosophy of culture and education with the logical of capital/computing by calling it 'very interesting' (226) which is a stark contrast to the 'banalities' when he discusses political history (216/218). 

As an aside, I noted last week the brilliant almost counterfactual history of economics inscribed in this ninth lecture. But it is also worth noting a bizarre lacuna. For in Foucault's hands it is immediately obvious that this strain of Chicago economics -- the human capital, economic imperialism one -- rediscovers and revives the eugenic features of late nineteenth century and early twentieth century economics most associated with names like Galton and Pearson, but visible and significant in wide variety of American and British progressives, such that it infected the foundation of the welfare state nearly everywhere.* 

That is to say, what Foucault misses, and with him many other well-meaning intellectual commentators, is that part of the neo-liberal reaction against "Keynesian policy, social pacts of war, and the growth of the federal administration through economic and social programs" which "formed the adversary and target of neoliberal thought, that which it was constructed against or which it opposed in order to form itself and develop" (217) had a further moral underpinning (other than the anti-war, anti-collectivism already explicit in Foucault's analysis) one that had high salience after the Nazi-era is that of human moral equality. And this fits even Becker and his Chicago allies/teachers because in their version of human capital theory, after the Robbins redefinition of the nature of economics, the individual agency of each (recall last week) of us matters.  

My language of 'misses' in the previous paragraph is misleading. Given Foucault's knowledge of the study of deviance, it is unlikely he is not aware of this. And, in fact, he clearly signals he is aware of it: "call the racist effects of genetics is certainly something to be feared, and they are far from being eradicated," but he tells us why he does not alert us to this in his treatment: it "does not seem to me to be the major political issue at the moment." This comment raises tough questions about the hermeneutics of Foucault. 

The whole lecture series is (recall) oriented around the liberal art of government. And foucault makes clear that in one sense his is descriptive treatment of praxis and theory, and in other sense he is constructing what we may call the optimal art of liberal government. Now, it comes as no surprise that Foucault is aware of his situatedness in a particular political context; I have tried to be alert in where he hints at this. But here he alerts us to the fact that his decisions about what to highlight are themselves a function of his judgment of what he takes to be a major political issue at that moment. But he does not tell us what -- to be reflexive for a moment -- what enters into the formation of, and what secures the ''output'' of this judgment, and what counts as political for him.

Okay, let's close with a final observation. Above I noted that Foucault rightly discerns a kind of totalitarian element in the neo-liberal turn of Becker, Mincer, Schultz because as a domain of enquiry it is incapable of self-limitation. What he discerns is that (nearly) everything that can become data or a data-set connected to human activity is, in principle, possible evidence (about genes, environment, learning, production, risk, etc.) in this theory. (The remainder of the lecture Foucault spells this out nicely and ambitiously--very much worth re-reading for its significance to theories of capitalism, imperialism, and development.) In so far as there are constraints these are determined more by search costs than by the nature of the paradigm. This is really a contrast to how many other forms of enquiry function, where the paradigm limits severely what may count as possible evidence. 

But, of course, one may object that the totalitarian tendency in enquiry is not sufficient to count something as totalitarian in political praxis. The objection misses the point here. For Foucault is clearly committed to the idea once certain questions become intellectually pertinent -- not to an individual but (notice the bourgeois or at least Weberian terminology of Gesellschaft) "society"* -- then they become also necessarily ("inevitable") pertinent to, and actionable for, political practice ("control, screening, and improvement of the human capital of individuals.") He does not explain why he believes in this kind of weirdly friction-free market in ideas such that the social problem must generate its own social praxis. It is notable that he does not offer a mechanism for why this is inevitably so, and a critique of the present must originate here. But that's for another time.  

To put the more arresting point of the previous paragraph as a serious joke, if one raises the question of what Plato [Republic 546d] calls the marriage number (viz. "the human capital of individuals, as a function of unions and consequent reproduction"), then even in a liberal society (focused on "individuals") there is, contra the hopes of Bacon no self-restraint on its pursuit.* That is to say, Foucault accepts the kind of Heideggerian/Thomistic critique of modernity without their moralism or, despite his latent political "fears," existential angst. 

 

 

On Kautsky and the Origin of the United States of Europe

Therefore there is today only one way: The union of the States of European civilisation in a confederation with a universal trade policy, a federal Parliament, a federal Government and a federal arm – the establishment of the United States of Europe.

This attained, something enormous would have been achieved. These United States would possess such overwhelming power that, without any war, they could compel all other nations, so far as these did not willingly do so, to join them, to disband their armies and give up their fleets. But with this would also disappear every necessity for the new United States themselves to be armed. They could then not merely give up all further armaments – the standing army, the warships for attack – the abandonment of which we to-day demand, but also every means of defence; even the citizen army itself would he longer be necessary.

Thereby would the era of eternal peace be securely founded, and unlimited economic means be set free – some 20 milliards it year in round figures for the whole world,

What rapid movement could this enormous sum by itself not give to social change, how painlessly might that change be thereby accomplished

But how is the constitution of the United States of Europe to be brought about?

....

Nevertheless the attempt to peacefully unite the States of Europe in a federal Commonwealth is by no means inconceivable. Its prospects are bound up with the prospects of the Revolution.

The Revolution in favour of peace may spring from two separate causes: one being the revolt against the intolerable burdens which have been imposed on the peoples by armaments; with the result that the peoples of Europe will have no other alternative than to drive to the devil all Governments which are imposing upon them new taxes simply in order to be able to continue indefinitely the development of armaments.

That it should come to this will be all the more likely in proportion as the armaments-folly takes on a more powerful form. But, really, it is so near that any Government which is most threatened by a revolution, which feels itself most threatened thereby, which, without prospects of escape, finds itself, as English people say, between the devil and the deep sea, would rather go down in the surging sea of war than give itself over to the devil of Revolution.

It would then forget, however, that it would not escape the devil by throwing itself into the sea; but that he would at once have it there completely. If the first possible cause of Revolution is the revolt against armaments, the second would be war itself.

The Revolution would follow upon war with unerring certainty; not as the product of a Social-Democratic plan, but from the foredoomed logic of the thing. Present-day statesmen count upon that outcome of war.

But whether the Revolution comes from armaments or from war, it will present an international phenomenon, and its first care will be to put an end for ever to the horrors of war. The Revolution will not, like our bourgeois pacifists, simperingly content itself with such petty palliative means as arbitration courts and armaments reduction, which at every moment may tweak down, but will strive to establish such conditions as will make a war thenceforth impossible. That it can only attain through the establishment of the United States of Europe. Governments which would, or could, set themselves in opposition would no longer exist.

Moreover, if the Revolution does not spring from the reaction against the burden of armaments, or against the horrors of war, but from some other ground, and it at the beginning it is not international but limited to a single State, it cannot in existing circumstances long remain so. It must spread over into other States, and it is inevitable that these then will combine. Together it is inevitable that these then will combine together in a close confederation which will exclude any possibility of war between themselves. The proletarian International will them have arrived at the reality of existence as a State. The United States of Europe and their final expansion into the United States of the Civilised World – that, and not the single nation is the stately foundation of the coming Socialist Society. What the cantons are for the Switzerland of today the present nations will be of the Socialist Commonwealth on the States of the future.--Karl Kautsky (1911), War and Peace

Earlier in the week, I noted that Kautsky's conception of the united states of Europe echoes, in some respects, Kant's Perpetual Peace. However, unlike Kant, who envisions multiple growing, regional defensive voluntary federations, Kautsky assumes that a United States of Europe's power is so overwhelming that, were it joined together, it can de facto enforce peace on the world and spend the peace dividend on prosperity. Despite the existence of mighty European empires and navies, it is to be doubted, with the benefit of hindsight, that this was an accurate understanding of the then existing balance of power (giving the growing industrial might of the USA and Japan, etc.).  

Kautsky thinks there are three routes to European peace: (i) a tax-revolt by citizens against the costs of armaments; (ii) a war so destructive that a socialist-cosmopolitan revolution would follow; (iii) a peace-time worker's revolution in a state that would be copied by others, and so usher in a cosmopolitan socialist federation.

As an aside, what's fascinating about this is the openness of the future in Kautsky's writings. At the time of this writing Kautsky is kind of the embodiment of orthodox marxism rejecting the accommodationist Bernstein (and others). While Kautsky does not seem to doubt the possibility of socialist revolution, he is not prophesying it either. He seems, in fact, more confident that once a revolution has been successful it will spread then that a revolution will be successful. 

More important, for Liberals interested in the retreat of liberal ideology after 1870 -- something lamented by then after the catastrophic first world war and at the height of the depression -- Kautsky offers a salutary reminder why this was so: imperialism was both profitable to many of liberalism's natural supporters and created the conditions for successful war-mongering among states. The Kantian (but not Smithian!) premise, that in a commercial society folk would be pacific gets fatally undermined.* It is to Kautsky's credit (this is the main message of the first two sections of the quoted essay) that he is willing to contemplate alliances with the weak, peace-wing of the bourgeoisie to forestall war. 

Chris Brooke, in comments on my previous post, noted that prior to decolonization most proposals for a federation of European States were, in effect, attempts at consolidating empire be it (to quote Lenin from 1915) "reactionary" -- with capitalism not overthrown -- or, as Kautsky hopes, "socialist." And, indeed, when the EU was founded, it still included non-trivial colonial empires (some of which a constitutive part of the EU). That the EU has survived shrinkage is conveniently forgotten by ardent federalists and Brexiteers alike.

That (iv) two catastrophic wars, hyperinflation, genocide, loss of empire and global hegemony, and, not least important, fear of soviet invasion did bring European political and financial elites voluntarily together around a European project was not foreseen by Marxists (although clearly Lenin does not rule out the possibility of a non-socialist Europe). [I am not ignoring the role of the US's efforts to nudge them into this!] It strikes me there are two, related important lessons here.

First, none of the Marxists believed in the strategic adaptability of European capitalism.+ All the Marxists believe in the inner contradictions of capitalism (with its rise of monopoly and surplus abroad) that create the conditions of war and revolution. They were not altogether wrong about this, but failed to foresee that in defeat, and when faced with possible revolution, European capitalism was more pragmatic than anybody ever imagined.+ In part, and here I echo Foucault, this is because Marxists have systematically underestimated (and ignored) the liberal art of government, which has a richer history than allowed.+ 

Second, one reason European capitalism could be pragmatic is because of the existence of a social democratic version of European federation. That this social democratic version has (inter alia) its roots in Kautsky, when he was still taken to be an orthodox marxist, is I think an important part of the story (something that had eluded me before). As is well known (I hope), Kautsky eventually preferred even imperfect democracy over dictatorship. And here he stands in for a world-historical possibility. For, when after WWII, European (liberal and christian democratic) elites moved to build European federation, social democrats, who had turned their back on the dictatorship of the proletariat and the permanent war-footing of Soviet experiment, were waiting for them. That is to say, they had followed Kautsky journey to the building blocks of a federated state, inspired by Kant and Adam Smith, Mazzini, (and going back to Rousseau, Spinoza, and More, with a joint trade policy and parliament. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Spinoza & Rousseau, On European Federation

Let us admit then that the Powers of Europe stand to each other strictly in a state of war, and that all the separate treaties between them are in the nature rather of a temporary truce than a real peace: whether because such treaties are seldom guaranteed by any except the contracting parties; or because the respective rights of those parties are never thoroughly determined and are therefore bound—they, or the claims, which pass for rights in the eyes of Powers who recognise no earthly superior—to give rise to fresh wars as soon as a change of circumstances shall have given fresh strength to the claimants.--Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1761) "Statement of St. Pierre's Project" [here's the French]

The passage is from a text that purports to be a summary of Abbé St. Pierre's proposal of European federation tied together by a permanent peace treaty, free trade, a standing army and what we may anachronistically call a European Council with a rotating presidency. The nineteen major European powers would be represented in this Council. As Rousseau presents it, the proposal would freeze boundaries and constitutional forms in place. The argument in favor of the proposal distinguishes itself from utopian projects by claiming to present the true (as opposed to apparent) interests of rulers and subject in peace which produces the conditions for (to quote Hobbes) commodious living and virtuous cycles of economic and population growth.

The key obstacle, and this is the main point of Rousseau's critical remarks in his "judgment" on St. Pierre's project, published separately (and posthumously), but written more or less simultaneously,* is that the transition from here to there is blocked by the way sovereigns and their chief advisors understand their interests. They recognize that war is a source of possible profit for them personally and that it is a pretext and mechanism to oppress their own citizens. One understands why Rousseau waited to publish this. Although anybody familiar with the first few books of Livy's Discourses and Machiavelli, or the way of the world, could have guessed that this is Rousseau's criticism.

And this gets me to Spinoza, and in particular his Political Treatise, published posthumously alongside Ethics (etc.) For, despite the many allusions and references to Machiavelli, one way to understand the unity among the various proposals of the best constitutional orders in Spinoza's Political Treatise, is (recall my treatment of (6:12 and 7:8)) to find institutional arrangements and incentives that make war unattractive to rulers and their advisors and, as Yitzhak Melamed has recently emphasized, to make states not threatening to their neighbors (7.28); on the significance of institutional arrangements to promote peace as an end, see also 3.10; 4.2; 5.2; 8.7; 8:31; and even 11.4 the last two sentences.

The reason I mention Spinoza in the context of Rousseau's European federalism, is three-fold (and connected). First, and less interesting by itself, the quoted passage above reminded me of Spinoza (and makes me suspect that this passage is one of the places that is more Rousseau than St. Pierre [whom I have  not read yet]). For, it is a doctrine notoriously associated with Spinoza:+ "every commonwealth has the right to dissolve its contract, [proinde unicuique civitati ius integrum est solvendi foedus], whenever it chooses ,and cannot be said to act treacherously or perfidiously in breaking its word, as soon as the motive of hope or fear is removed."(3.14; see also 4.6)** And, indeed, for Spinoza (and here he echoes Hobbes), the commonwealth is, relative to other states, still in the state of nature (7:22; 4.6, and especially 3:11.)).

But, second, and more interesting, in the Political Treatise, Spinoza, too, proposes a federation as a guarantee for peace in the very context in which he describes that treaties may be broken when they outlast their utility.++ 

To commonwealths, which have contracted a treaty of peace, it belongs to decide the questions, which may be mooted about the terms or rules of peace, whereby they have mutually bound themselves, inasmuch as laws of [308] peace regard not one commonwealth, but the commonwealths which contract taken together (Sec. 13). But if they cannot agree together about the conditions, they by that very fact return to a state of war.

The more commonwealths there are, that have contracted a joint treaty of peace, the less each of them by itself is an object of fear to the remainder, or the less it has the authority to make war. But it is so much the more bound to observe the conditions of peace; that is (Sec. 13), the less independent, and the more bound to accommodate itself to the joint will of the contracting parties. [Quo plures civitates simul pacem contrahunt, eo unaquaeque reliquis minus timenda, sive unicuique minor est potestas bellum inferendi; sed eo magis pacis tenetur conditiones servare, hoc est (per art. 13. huius cap.) eo minus sui iuris est, sed eo magis communi foederatorum voluntati sese accommodare tenetur.] Political Treatise 3.15-16,

Spinoza describes here the outlines of a federation of peace (more fully developed in Adam Smith and Kant). And the underlying insight is that if the state of nature of the international arena can be transformed into a state of peace when and only when the grounds of mutual fear among states are reduced. Strikingly, for Spinoza this does not require a common enemy (as nearly all the famous federations in history presupposed). Rather what's required is a transformation of their own internal dynamic or of their joint (state) system. That is to say, that once mutual accommodation can become the norm (without foolishness), in virtue of the expectation that the whole will try to maintain/impose conditions of peace, joint peace has a chance. And, looking ahead to Kant, the very growth of such a system (as more states join), the more pacific it can become. 

So, to sum up, Rousseau and Spinoza both draw on Machiavellian premises to develop institutional design for perpetual peace. Both explicitly deny, and this is my third reason, their approach is utopian in character (and this ties them to Hume and Adam Smith), and takes man as he is not as he ought to be (here in Rousseau; and here, more famously, in Spinoza), that is, they model humans as rational devils. I also believe, but have provided no evidence yet, that their ideas about how to solve the transition from here to peace are roughly similar. But about that some other time.