Digressions&Impressions

On the Marketplace of Ideas: on Mill, Holmes, Kalven, Condorcet and Carl Schmitt

Since the work of Jill Gordon (1997) it ought to be common knowledge that J.S. Mill did not defend the idea that the market place of ideas would inevitably lead to truth. (This fits with my own view that I have expressed over quite a number of digressions: see, for example, here; here,  and here.) Unfortunately, this leaves a bit puzzling how the phrase and idea came to be associated with his name and a kind of (providential) liberal faith. (And depending one's political commitments this is a sign of liberal naivete or well grounded liberal optimism.) Moreover, most sophisticated liberals would never assert that markets always produce optimal outcomes, so lurking here is also a question about the mechanism. (I return to that below.)

I suspect that true scholars are familiar with the fact that Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes's dissent in Abrams v United States (1919) is often thought to originate the idea and closely associated phrase. (As it happens Holmes did re-read Mill's On Liberty that year.) But Holmes wrote, "the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market." This does not actually claim that truth will prevail in the market for ideas (and does not use the phrase 'marketplace of ideas' at all). Holmes' position is more sober than that. I am persuaded by Vincent Blasi (2004) that Holmes never intended the providential claim about the competition of ideas. (Blasi is also the source of my claim that Holmes did read Mill.)

In a footnote (41), Blasi suggests that in 1935, David M. Newbold used the phrase "market place of ideas" first in a letter to the New York Times. But as quoted by Blasi that letter does not connect it to generation of truth (but to 'public opinion.') It's likely that this Newbold was the author of a book called Notes on the Introduction of Equity Jurisdiction Into Maryland:1634-1720. So he was probably a lawyer or law professor. In a Denver Law Review article of 1940, one can read that "Our entire system of free public education is based upon it and out of it has developed the American type of government of public opinion. Our people from the earliest days, unconsciously perhaps, have been demonstrating in every generation their faith in the doctrine that the test of truth is its "ability to get itself accepted" in the marketplace of ideas." This clearly quotes Holmes, but with Newbold's phrase. The first connection between the 'market place of ideas' and 'truth' that I have been able to find with some googling is in Senate testimony in June, 1941, by Mr. Louis G. Caldwell, an attorney representing mutual broadcasting system to the Interstate Commerce committee (here). The context is freedom of speech (and the role radio has in expanding it or not). A decade later the phrase, and its connection to truth is much more widespread. But I have been unable to find anyone expressing the idea that the marketplace of ideas leads to truth, and that somehow Mill had defended it before 1960. 

In 1960, the very eminent law professor, Harry Kalven Jr. did a kind of retrospective in The Chicago Law Review on the Scopes trial to celebrate the (near) centenary of Darwin's Origin of Species. To people who have any association with The University of Chicago, and those who have studied debates on academic freedom, Kalven's name is quite familiar (recall here on the Kalven report). The retrospective is interesting in its own right. But here I just quote a passage: "It is keyed, in the tradition-honored phrases of Milton, Mill, and Holmes, to confidence that truth will not be bested in a fair fight, to competition in the marketplace of ideas." (p. 516) Kalven's own view is not quite this, I think. But that's for another time. The quoted passages does come pretty close to the idea usually associated to Mill. (And unusually for memetics, also provides evidence for the role of Holmes in the process.)* And since Kalven was important and influential it is not unlikely he is the source of connecting Mill to truth prevailing in the marketplace of ideas (which starts to circulate widely in the 1960s).

That's the best I can do on this. I am open to learning from other people's search abilities. I could close here, but I was still left with a puzzle how the idea mistakenly associated with Mill came to be thought of as somehow intrinsic to liberalism. And I think I have a (surprising) answer to that, although it is a bit convoluted. I quote a long paragraph:

De Maistre and Donoso Cortes were incapable of such "organic" thinking. De Maistre showed this by his total lack of understanding of Schelling's philosophy of life; Donoso Cortes was gripped by horror when he was confronted with Hegelianism in Berlin in 1849. Both were diplomats and politicians with much experience and practice and had concluded sufficiently sensible compromises. But a systematic and metaphysical compromise was to them inconceivable. To suspend the decision at the crucial point by denying that there was at all something to be decided upon must have appeared to them to be a strange pantheistic confusion. Liberalism, with its contradictions and compromises, existed for Donoso Cortes only in that short interim period in which it was possible to answer the question "Christ or Barabbas?" with a proposal to adjourn or appoint a commission of investigation. Such a position was not accidental but was based on liberal metaphysics. The bourgeoisie is the class committed to freedom of speech and freedom of the press, and it did not arrive at those freedoms from any kind of arbitrary psychological and economic conditions, from thinking in terms of trade, or the like. It has long been known that the idea of the liberal rights of man stemmed from the North American states. Though Georg Jellinek recently demonstrated the North American origin of those freedoms, the thesis would hardly have surprised the Catholic philosopher of the state (nor, incidentally, would it have surprised Karl Marx, the author of the essay on the Jewish question). Further, the economic postulates of free trade and commerce are, for an examination within the realm of the history of ideas, only derivatives of a metaphysical core. Donoso Cortes in his radical intellectuality saw only the theology of the foe. He did not "theologize" in the least; there were no ambiguous, mystical combinations and analogies, no Orphic oracle. The letters about actual political questions revealed a sober attitude, often frightening and without any sort of illusion or any touch of the quixotic; in his systematic train of thought there was an effort to be concise in the good dogmatic tradition of theology. His intuition into things intellectual was therefore often striking. His definition of the bourgeoisie as a clasa discutidora and his recognition that its religion resides in freedom of speech and of the press are examples. I do not consider this to be the last word on Continental liberalism in its entirety, but it is certainly a most striking observation. In view of the system of a Condorcet, for example, whose typical meaning Wolzendorff, perhaps because of intellectual affinity, recognized and superbly described, one must truly believe that the ideal of political life consists in discussing, not only in the legislative body but also among the entire population, if human society will transform itself into a monstrous club, and if truth will emerge automatically through voting. Donoso Cortes considered continuous discussion a method of circumventing responsibility and of ascribing to freedom of speech and of the press an excessive importance that in the final analysis permits the decision to be evaded. Just as liberalism discusses and negotiates every political detail, so it also wants to dissolve metaphysical truth in a discussion. The essence of liberalism is negotiation, a cautious half measure, in the hope that the definitive dispute, the decisive bloody battle, can be transformed into a parliamentary debate and permit the decision to be suspended forever in an everlasting discussion.--Schmitt (1922/1935) Political Theology, translated by George Schwab, The University of Chicago Press (2005), pp. 61-3 [Originally published as Politische Theologie: Vier Kapitel zur Lehre von der Souveranitat]+

Okay, there is much going on here. Donoso Cortés (1809 – 1853) is a fascinating character who was familiar with the first political group to call themselves 'liberal' and eventually became an ardent opponent of them. (Since Adam Smith describes his system of natural liberty as 'liberal,' I don't think it's anachronistic to claim him also as a liberal--despite learned protestations in Cambridge.) Schmitt admires both Maistre and Donoso Cortés, but as this passage reveals he also sees some of their intellectual limitations.

It is by no means easy to establish in each sentence where Donoso Cortés ends and Schmitt begins. But it's pretty clear that for them liberalism is identified with freedom of speech and the bourgeoise as the disputational/discussing class (clasa discutidora).** (Schmitt almost certainly made a transcription error because Donoso Cortés used the phrase 'las clases discutidoras' in a letter of 1851.**)

But$, strikingly, that freedom of speech will generate truth is then associated with 'the system of Condorcet.' And, in fact, given the significance given to voting in Schmitt's argument, it's pretty clear we have a kind of reference to Condorcet's famous Jury theorem. And, indeed, in the jury theorem the more voters there are (alongside some minimal assumptions) the more likely one is to reach truth. And, over time, as voting population keeps growing, this becomes pretty infallible. Here truth is a kind of outcome of a process, and it is correct to say of it that (give some modest assumptions) "truth will emerge automatically through voting." 

However, I use a 'kind of reference' because the original jury theorem requires no communication among voters. So it's a pretty bad model for thinking about free speech/press.++ It's unclear to me if the conflation is in Wolzendorff or in Schmitt. Part of the historical problem is that Condorcet did also defend freedom of speech (with some attenuations) in a famous fragment from 1776. 

So, here's my suggestion: Schmitt is the source of the idea that liberalism is intrinsically committed to the idea that truth naturally will emerge from free discussion. This idea is associated with Condorcet (who was indeed a proponent of freedom of speech). But it's based on a (perhaps honest) misunderstanding of the jury theorem and the role it plays in Condorcet's thought! 

Schmitt's criticism of the idea he attributes to liberalism is not that it's false or a bad mechanism to discover truth, or somehow naïve. Rather, it's that it's a device to avoid decisive, existential decisions: "The essence of liberalism is negotiation, a cautious half measure, in the hope that the definitive dispute, the decisive bloody battle, can be transformed into a parliamentary debate and permit the decision to be suspended forever in an everlasting discussion." That's actually a sound interpretation of the liberal ideal of rule by discussion, which is all about avoiding fighting (worst possible outcome) if one can continue talking (probably bad, but not so bad).

Schmitt, a jurist himself, was very widely read. So, my hypothesis is that Schmitt's idea about the nature of liberalism as a regime of talk that will produce truth circulated among jurists (perhaps with the reference to Condorcet being dropped once it moved into Anglophone world), and at some point merged with Judge Holmes' idea to produce Kalven's formulation. Okay, that's enough speculation -- I almost wrote 'cheap talk' -- for a day.

 

On Liberal Exemplification: tempered liberalism and the problem of education

Tempered liberals certainly did not present themselves as models to be imitated; this would have been inconsistent with the modesty and self-subverting irony that were important features both of the ethos they advocated and their own ways of being in the world. But they did seek to exemplify a liberal ethos by putting it into practice--in their personal interactions with others, their manner of thinking through problems, and the authorial persona or voice that each cultivated--and by depicting it in earlier thinkers, fictional characters, or political leaders. At their best, they show us, by the force of example, how to cultivate these qualities, and how to urge them gracefully upon others.
The practice of exemplification and emulation is a deeply imperfect response to the liberal problem of character formation. Relying on some to rise to the challenge of exemplariness, and leaving others free to emulate them or not, presupposes that most individuals already have significant ethical resources. This will often not be the case. It may not be possible to have a decent politics without a degree of both personal goodness and political skill that is beyond what most people are mostly able to attain. And the effort to make people better may lead to more suffering and horror. Introspection, self-cultivation, and exemplification--frail reeds though these may be--may also be the best (least bad) means to foster elusive but indispensable virtues. Reflection on exemplars may help to replenish the moral foundations of liberal democracy--habits and ideals of civility, empathy, fortitude, self-restraint, solidarity, circumspection, respect for nuance and for others--by reminding us of why we need them, as well as displaying how admirable they can be.--Joshua Cherniss (2021) Liberalism in Dark Times: The Liberal Ethos in the Twentieth Century, 211

Cherniss's Liberalism in Dark Times is a fascinating book with studies of Max Weber, Raymond Aron, Camus, Niebuhr, and Isaiah Berlin. He treats the latter four as 'tempered liberals." They are treated as admirable exemplars, but by no means not perfect. (210) The main argument of the book is nicely foreshadowed in this passage:

Proponents of “tempered liberalism” accordingly undertook three broad, interlinked tasks. First, they sought to critically reconstruct liberalism--to identify and correct liberalism’s internal weaknesses and failings. Second, they sought to reconceive liberalism as a particular “temper,” a “certain condition . . . of mind or state of being,” rather than (merely) an institutional framework or policy. Finally, they sought (with varying degrees of self-consciousness) not only to explicate, but to exemplify, a liberal spirit, which could belie anti-liberal ethical critiques, and resist the temptations and pathologies of an anti-liberal ethos. (38: emphasis in original)

The passage nicely suggests that a certain kind of ethos is an important feature of being a tempered liberal. My interest in today's post is the nature and status of of liberal exemplification (the third task). In my book on Adam Smith, I had explicitly treated Smith as an exemplar of a certain kind of liberal thinker. I had done so in part, by focusing on the way Smith used Hume's life and thought as a positive and negative exemplar; I had also drawn on resources in Smith that centered on the roles of exemplary characters in his moral psychology and political theory. (These characters are largely abstract fictions.) Smith, in turn, drew on Hume's practice of exemplification and (as I insinuate in the book) Spinoza's (who also uses abstract fictions in this way). Of course, the practice has an important ancient and Machiavellian pedigree.

In both Smith and the tempered liberals, exemplification plays an important role in moral-political education. It's required because these kind of liberals (as well as Smith) highly value contextual judgment. But my approach to exemplification in Smith is different from Cherniss' in some important respects: on my account Smith is a systematic thinker and understands himself as such; exemplification is very much an integral part of this system not a kind of substitute for it as it is, by contrast, in Cherniss and his four tempered liberals. In addition, Smith rejected the kind of modesty Cherniss ascribes to his four tempered liberals, and he seems to advocate emulation of worthy exemplars as models, whereas Cherniss' tempered liberals primarily wish that only a particular kind of ethos is emulated and rejects the idea of a life as a model to be imitated (see the first quoted line above).

There is, thus, an important distinction lurking here between an agent as an exemplary model to be studied and imitated and, say, a style of agency that is exemplified. I will return to that distinction below. But it is important to recognize that on both sides of the distinction there is a commitment to the idea that some things don't fall under a rule or principle, but require the acquisition of certain dispositions and cultivated judgment. (The crispness of this observation I owe to reading David Owen's forthcoming, "On Exemplarity and Public Philosophy.")

But in reading Cherniss I also came to realize I had not really thought through what liberal exemplification might mean. So, what follows is an exploration of Cherniss' account with an eye toward that larger project. As my remark above implies, the status of Weber in Cherniss' argument is a bit ambiguous. Anyone familiar with the depth of Weber's nationalism (and his anti-Polish sentiment) will be hard-pressed to call him a 'tempered liberal.' But he is important to Cherniss to set up the themes of the book. I quote an important passage:

Weber rejected both; this rejection was central to his own revision of liberalism. If liberals sloughed of the elements within liberal thought that reflected an ethic of normative necessity and an ethic of success, they could fortify their commitments and themselves for the hard, uncertain struggle ahead. To look for guarantees reflected inner weakness. Liberals should exemplify, as well as advocate, a dignified and free life, by affirming and defending principles without guarantees, devoting their lives to values that could not be demonstrated as rationally necessary and whose ultimate triumph was in doubt. (67)

It's unclear to me what, according to Cherniss, leads him to think that Weber advocates such exemplification. But it's clear that on Cherniss's account of Weber, exemplification is something that liberals as such should aim for. It's difficult not to think here of, say, puritan (and protestant more widely) ideas about the elect having to live godly lives as individuals and the community. I don't think that association is an accident: in the first half of the twentieth century, as Liberalism seems to be in retreat, the idea that liberalism rests on faith, or requires faith, shows up in other places. I have documented this in the case of Lippmann (here); and it's also visible in the title of Morris R. Cohen's (1946) Faith of a Liberal. (Cohen was then arguably one of the most important philosophers Stateside.)*

Interestingly enough, in the rest of Cherniss' argument, it seems not everyone should aim at such exemplification. Rather this is reserved for liberal intellectuals and public figures (like the four tempered liberals discussed by Cherniss), and, perhaps, also liberal statesmen. On Camus' possible self-understanding as an exemplar see p. 76 (and p. 85). Aron is treated by Cherniss an exemplar (p. 102, and also by Alan Bloom (p. 131)!), but I see no evidence to think Aron thought of himself that way. Cherniss convincingly suggests that Niebuhr did see himself that way (159ff).

That liberal statesman and artists could be exemplars is clearly Berlin's position. Cherniss skillfully takes us through Berlin's portraits of Herzen and Turgenev. Cherniss treatment of Berlin's "accounts of such leaders--Winston Churchill, Chaim Weizmann, and Franklin Roosevelt" is terser and in my view not especially convincing. This is a shame because the question "how political greatness and moral goodness could be balanced, in ways that could serve to sustain a liberal politics" (182) is a vital one. For, I would have liked to have read Cherniss on Berlin's blind-spots (e.g., Churchill's racialized imperialism (which led to a grossly inadequate response to Indian famine) or the fire-bombing of German cities). [To be sure such problems are hinted at by Cherniss because it's acknowledged they were a "morally mixed bunch, as he [Berlin] acknowledged." (pp. 182-3)] Chaim Weizmann as exemplar is even more complex because he was never more important than, say, Ben Gurion. In political terms, much of the last (say) decade of Weizmann's life was a sort of failure. And because of this Weizmann also seems to have been somewhat removed from decisions surrounding Zionist ethnic cleansing during Israel's war of independence.

As a non-trivial aside, in my view Berlin's personal admiration for Weizmann arguably prevented a sober reflection on Weizmann's political life by Berlin. In fact, I read Berlin as treating Weizmann as a model of a new kind of Jew: see his much quoted claim about Weizmann, as the "first totally free Jew of the modern world." But in that same sentence Berlin goes on to claim "the State of Israel was constructed, whether or not it knows it, in his image." And this part of the sentence has aged badly if it ever was plausible.

Now, Cherniss extracts a kind of gross generalization from these portraits by Berlin: "Berlin suggested that the cultivation of political judgment might indeed be connected to the promotion of a more humane politics--and that the dispositions that contributed to failures of political judgment also tended to produce inhumanity." (183) As a generalization it's not very remarkable. But it can only convince, I think, through the sketching of biographies/lives. So, the focus on exemplars allows for a species of political education, especially with those already sharing a certain ethical outlook. This is, in fact, Cherniss own understanding (while drawing on Linda T. Zagzebski and Nancy Rosenblum).

I quote a lengthy passage because I think it helps illustrate what it might mean (for Cherniss) to think of what I called 'a style of agency that is exemplified.'

Pedagogic exemplification involves two elements: exemplification itself, and emulation. The latter consists not of slavish imitation, but a conscious, critical attempt to identify what is admirable and applicable in the exemplar, and to adapt this to the situation and the already-partially-shaped character--of the emulator. Exemplification respects liberty and individuality because the selection of an exemplar reflects the judgment and the needs of the “student,” rather than the exemplar’s will or ability to use force. This means that success is never fully in the hands of the exemplar. As a form of persuasion and guidance, rather than conditioning or compulsion, exemplification relies more on conscious human action--and requires less comprehensive control over background conditions and the experiences of the learner--than a program of habituation. At the same time, since it employs the force of example rather than (or in addition to) purely rational persuasion, it can appeal to the emotions, and promote skills of judgment that are not rule-based. (p. 210)

What's nice about this passage is that helps illustrate what is distinctly liberal about Cherniss' idea of exemplification (although not necessarily unique to liberalism). This is a form of teaching and moral/political education that leaves considerable freedom, individuality, and agency to those of us who wish to become better at being liberal (or liberal intellectuals, citizens, politicians, etc.) It echoes Mill-ean ideas (as well as those we find in Montessori) about education itself being an experiment in living and the cultivation of one's moral sentiments through the development of personality and authenticity.

Of course, the question is how much (to use Cherniss' language) pre-shaping is necessary for this to work as partially intended. That may be an empirical question. But it is also a political one (that is theoretically highly salient since the days of Plato). For example, Mill thought such pre-shaping had to be made compulsory, but was best left to the judgment of parents. Most liberal democracies have thought otherwise. And while this is no criticism of Cherniss' book, it is worth noting that in its very un-systematicity, tempered liberalism as such -- with its neglect of institutions -- has no answer to this question.+ To be continued...

 

 

Liberalism after Ukraine, Part 1: two kinds of nationalism and a new cold war

Don’t turn a blind eye on this...Come out and support Ukraine as much as you can...

If we fall, you will fall,...

And if we win, and I’m sure we’ll win, this will be the victory of the whole democratic world, this will be the victory of our freedom, this will be the victory of light over darkness, of freedom over slavery...

And if we win we will become as blossoming as Europe and Europe will be flourishing more than ever.--Volodymyr Oleksandrovych Zelenskyy (March 4, 2022)

I am writing this in a protectorate under the umbrella of Pax Americana, which I understand as empire with liberal characteristics. It is imperial because it fundamentally relies on a hegemon who holds the strings of military and economic power, and benefits from having the world's reserve currency. Some of its protectorates fall under NATO or AUKUS umbrella, others have more direct effective security guarantees (Japan, South Korea, Israel, Taiwan, Singapore, etc.) In some cases it's not entirely clear how wide the freedom of independent movement in foreign policy is for countries under Pax Americana. But anyone who has followed the development of a new sanctions regime on Russia during the last two weeks would have noticed that this empire is capable of rapid coordination and consensus building even when non trivial economics interests are at stake.

I use 'liberal characteristics' because within the empire it is broadly governed by public rules, by mutual consultation, and commitment to free-ish markets in goods and capital, and Pax Americana functions most smoothly when the protectorates themselves approximate liberal democracy. It is not wholly liberal (as restrictions on movements of peoples testify), and it lacks a federative structure (although some sub-units have it) among other obvious shortcomings (including non-trivial rights violations of populations in non-trivial number of places). It is also not wholly liberal in its approach to the world, especially when it comes to energy supply, Islamic rejectionists of Pax Americana, and revolutions that are taken to be anti-capitalist in character. 

One interesting feature of Pax Americana since 1989 is its ability to accommodate a modus vivendi with would-be-competitors (China, Russia, and even to some degree India) who reject liberalism or American hegemony (or both). The motives for this accommodation have, as in most statecraft, been varied: ranging from nuclear deterrence and from economic opportunism (including legalized graft with American and European elites being bought by foreign interests), to a liberal faith that drawing states into win-win rule-governed trade and cultural/scientific relations will transform would be competitors into would be collaborators. This has also meant ignoring and soft-pedalling, even appeasing, all kinds of military aggression and local/regional rights violations. More insidiously, it has meant that the red lines of Pax Americana became fuzzy to its enemies and, more dangerously yet, to its own rulers (with former President Trump going so far as repeatedly signaling acquiescence in the dissolution of Nato and its network of treaties). 

By contrast, I understand China and Russia, for all their differences, as mercantilist, nationalist dictatorships (hereafter MNDs). By 'Mercantile' I mean an approach to trade designed primarily to increase state power and to serve the economic interest of relatively narrow ruling elites. Under mercantilism war is profitable to the elites and the state, and so always a live option. By putting it like this I don't mean to ignore wholly the fascist elements in contemporary Russia (not the least the willingness to use thugs to enforce obedience), or the ways in which Christianity (in its orthodox variety) has become an instrument of state, and the significance of one-party nominally Marxist rule in China. I also don't mean to deny that war is quite profitable for some elites in liberal empire.

I don't mean to suggest only China and Russia (etc.) are nationalist. It's fair to say that neither nationalism nor war has been banished from Europe. That's sad, but not unexpected. But the reactions to the (2022) Russian invasion of Ukraine also reveal that there really are two kinds of nationalisms competing for influence at the moment, and surprisingly hostile to each other. The first kind is a nationalism that instinctively leans toward authoritarianism & strongmen. It may well be democratic (as in majoritarian rule), but it dominates local minorities, and has a distrust of pluralism and open borders. If given the opportunity such nationalism may well grow into imperialism. These authoritarian nationalists are cheering on Putin (or are quiet now).

The second kind of nationalism is stimulated by a foreign enemy, and need not be authoritarian at all. The nation is a means toward independence and freedom that's compatible with cosmopolitan desire to join up with other independent nations while protecting minority rights. The second kind of nationalism can be found in folk cheering on Ukrainian nationalism (which, in practice, may not always be so pluralist). The ideal type of this kind of nationalism is Scottish civic nationalism. And when President Zelenskyy addresses European crowds and heads of state he is very much drawing on a shared understanding of this more cosmopolitan nationalism centered on a common idea of a free and peaceful Europe. If one wishes to avoid confusion one can call the second kind of nationalism -- with a nod to Kant [8:291] -- 'patriotic.'

Historically, during the nineteenth century especially, liberalism has made common cause with nationalism of both varieties. (Roughly: before 1871 the second kind; after 1871 the first kind.)  The escalated attack on Ukraine, which is being attacked in part because it wishes to participate in and taste the fruits of Pax Americana and join the EU, has clarified for many that they do not wish to be fellow travelers of the first kind of nationalism. And even for those that often naturally embrace the first kind of nationalism (e.g., the leadership of Poland, Hungary, and, perhaps, Turkey), see in Pax Americana a lesser evil than Russian expansion.

A lot of friends of cosmopolitanism and pluralism have a natural distrust of intense nationalism, especially because its loudest advocates are natural authoritarians. So, the revival of a more civic and cosmopolitan nationalism to balance it is not altogether unwelcome even to those who keep a distance of patriotism and national identity. And Ukrainian heroisms will strengthen the prestige of patriotic nationalism. For, Putin's recent escalation of his eight year war on Ukraine and patriotic Ukrainian heroism has  induced re-armament of European liberal democracy, has increased its willingness to arm Ukraine, and has ended European appeasement of Putin. 

By focusing on Putin's regime's mercantile-nationalistic character (and downplaying its Christian-fascist tendencies), I want to facilitate a sober discussion of its escalating aggression, especially amongst those liberals (of classical free market and egalitarian types), who naturally and quite humanely recoil from the current sanctions regime which falls asymmetrically on innocents and the less well connected in Russia, and is likely to entrench the existing regime because now its elites have more opportunity for rents, bribery, and smuggling. It is foreseeable that the sanctions and policy of isolation strengthen the repressive apparatus and reduce the likelihood of regime change in the short run because they undermine the (relatively weak, alas) opposition in Russia. The war and sanctions also hurt poor people the world over, especially because it is to be expected that food and energy prices will increase. 

MNDs are not easy to defeat; often the best one can hope for is gradual mitigation and internal evolution. And while this is not heroic, it is always to be wished for. And, if in its foreign policy, China remains as cautious as it presently is it will remain a viable competitor to Pax Americana while simultaneously being enriched and enriching (economically, scientifically, and culturally) those that fall under Pax Americana.* And, perhaps, in its rivalry it will even occasion further renewal of liberalism. (As regular readers know, during last decade or so, I have come to believe that the survival of liberalism in its traditional Anglo and European heartlands cannot be taken for granted and that it exhibits malaise and drift through financial recession, pandemic, Brexit, and a 'war' on terror that jointly have made authoritarian, nationalist-mercantilist leadership increasingly seem more attractive to non-trivial parts of electorates.)

But MNDs can be defeated. Liberalism both grew out of mercantilism and, where joined to nationalism, has defeated some MNDs before. And it has done so by bankrupting them while maintaining military supremacy. The most notable example is, of course, the implosion and bankruptcy of the French monarchy over a thirty year period after the Seven Year's war.

I argued last week that while sanctions and isolation are lousy policies, the alternatives are worse. In my view the justification of the present sanctions and policy of isolation and disinvestment toward Russia is to reduce its war-making capability, to increase its internal coordination costs, and to end the enrichment that has made its aggression toward its neighbors so easy. The present plans to accelerate decoupling from Russian hydrocarbon sources fit this strategy, too. The asset freeze on the Russian central bank has induced a financial implosion and will, I suspect, end ruble convertibility. And while I worry that Ukraine is being armed and financed just sufficiently and cynically to maintain itself in a war of attrition with Russia without any hope of acquiring the kind of arms that could see it reverse Russian gains, such a war of attrition will also bankrupt Russia (and/or make it a client state of China which, I argued last week, is probably the best to be hoped for by outsiders in present circumstances).+

But while it is unlikely that Putin will change his policies or be unseated by sanctions and isolation, these also make it unlikely that his regime can survive his demise (he is almost 70 now). Maintaining the unity of the Russian federation with its ageing population will be a herculean task once foreign cash is absent. More important the battle-field in Ukraine and the more visible economic stagnation and relentless propaganda will sap its slogans from whatever vitality they might once possess; its military victories, if any, will take on an increasingly pyrrhic character. And he has gifted Europe's liberal democracies the greatest gift of all: a population re-alerted to what is at stake in political life, and nearly united, patriots and cosmopolitans alike, in rejecting Putin's poisoned chalice.   (To be continued.)

 

 

On Sanctions, and Realism

One unexpected benefit of teaching a large lecture course in English to students who are overwhelmingly non native English speakers is that ambiguities in (my) English are noticed by them. So, for example, one student was confused by my use of 'sanction' a few weeks ago (in the context of a comment I made on Chinese political philosophy). For, 'sanction' has two standard meanings that are, in their valences, the opposite of each other: it can either mean something like 'official permission for an action' or it means 'a penalty for disobeying a rule.' And, after my exchange with one of my students I remembered a disagreement with a colleague a few years ago that turned on a mutual confusion in what sense the other was using 'sanction.'

As regular readers know, I thought last week that the call for expelling Russia from Swift would have largely symbolic effect. I did not anticipate that there would also be a (much more potent) central bank asset freeze. The jury is out on how effective these and related sanctions will be (a lot will turn on the details of enforcement and the way exceptions are allowed, as well as on Russian skill in patching together alternatives). One fears that by the time sanctions are enforced many oligarchs have moved assets out of reach. But what I did not foresee at all is that these sanctions would promote a classic bank-run, and that Russia risks a financial meltdown. In addition, it's quite clear that lots of other countries one could have expected to ignore these sanction have joined in, and that many important companies (in energy, microchips, and transportation), sports federations, and art organizations have been nudged into actions that effectively isolate Russia in financial and cultural ways.

Of course, sanctions are not the only source of pressure on Russia. There is an increasing supply of weapons being sent to Ukraine. Most of these weapons are defensive in character (anti-tank missiles and anti-aircraft missiles), but there has been talk of some older fighter jets being shipped to  the Ukraine by the EU (this is important for EU's future). As long as the Polish-Ukrainian border is in hands of the Ukrainian government these kind of shipments may well reach Ukraine's defense forces in an effective manner. But, this kind of support tends to be limited, in practice (and mostly symbolic), because nobody wants to get entangled in a shooting war with Russia, which has a major Nuclear arsenal.  What may happen is that outsiders will support proxy wars (as they have done in lots of conflicts during the last few decades).

In general, sanctions tend to enrich the well-connected in the country being sanctioned because they tend to have new forms of rents and can gain in all kinds of ways from new forms of smuggling (through bribes and monopoly profits). They also tend to be a form of collective punishment on the rest of the population, who are thereby impoverished and for whom ordinary life becomes much more challenging (not the least because they will be asked for a lot more bribes), and so hard to justify. In general, they also tend to be not very effective if the goal is regime change or to induce changes of behavior. In fact, they tend to strengthen the repressive apparatus directly (or indirectly by providing an excuse for more repression) and to enrich it, and so seem self-undermining.

Before I get to my own view of the matter it is worth distinguishing conceptually three kinds of critics of sanctions because they come at it from different angles (even if these can overlap in practice and even if they embrace the claims in the previous paragraph). First, one kind of critic has a liberal sensitivity and thinks that isolation is a sure route to permanent conflict. This kind of 'liberal' can be the classical liberal who praises markets and soft-war power of culture, or the more Kantian liberal who likes internal treaties and organizations (there is, of course, partial overlap in these ideal types.)* They may even note that such a course of action will drive Russia into the hands of the (rather illiberal) Chinese government, which is thought undesirable for western interests or world peace (etc.). So, faced with Russia's invasion of Ukraine the liberal critic of sanctions and isolating Russia has to accept facts on the ground and/or support the mostly symbolic military assistance to Ukraine. 

In general my own sympathies are liberal and I often sign up for the kind of views expressed in the previous paragraph. But it is fair to say that such liberalism is unwilling to acknowledge that integrating Russia into the global order has been a failure if the goal was to pacify Russia after the collapse of its empire. In effect globalization has allowed Russia to enrich itself and thereby become more menacing to others. During the last few decades, Russia has been almost constantly at war. Several of the wars involved the reconquest and pacification of breakaway regions, but a few of them also involve(d) sovereign states, including Georgia and since 2014 Ukraine. So, the liberal who wants to double down on the path of mutual interdependence is revealing a touching faith in the light of cold facts. In a future post, I return to what liberalism can take away from this going forward.

The other kind of critic (who may also have liberal commitments) is a self-described realist. Such a realist will emphasize that Russia has legitimate security concerns and interest and these have been threatened by NATO expansion. And that, in fact, self-congratulatory sanctions in the past and the new ones in the present are themselves a cause of conflict (here's part of the overlap with some liberals). 

Now, as I hinted last week, I have some sympathy with the realist critique of Zelensky (who is otherwise hugely admirable and heroic). Once it became clear to Ukraine that NATO and EU were unwilling to help defend Ukraine (after 2014), despite the occasional and reckless lipservice to the contrary, he should have aggressively sought out other allies. And, in fact, it's pretty clear that Ukraine tried to develop Chinese support, and that this was torpedoed by Trump during his presidency (recall my link last week). What is puzzling is that there seems to have been little success and/or effort to return to the Chinese after Biden's victory or to interest Turkey and Israel into supporting Ukraine independence with military aid. And given how badly western countries have treated their nominal allies in Afghanistan and Iraq (Vietnam, etc.) it is puzzling why any state would count on them if they are not a member of Nato or covered by American nuclear deterrence. 

For, one oddity of the purportedly realist 'Putin/Russia has legitimate security concerns over Nato expansion' trope, is that the security concerns of Russia's neighbors are constantly belittled, discounted/ignored, and/or trivialized. This has two perverse effects: First, it privileges great power interests over the others. This is a feature not a bug of such purported realism, for such realists will probably say something like, ''it's only natural that great power interests matter more than other powers." What's odd about this (in realist terms) is that it fails to account for the efforts at balancing and coalition forming against great powers by smaller and other powers (which is what the realism that does not victim blame ordinarily suggests). This matters because the underlying logic of realist thinking requires such balancing/coalition forming and also requires a willingness by outsiders to balance and if necessary contest aggression on the battle-field.**

 

Second, because doctrines have effects in the world (they can be performative or be causes of actions), the doctrine that is biased toward great power interests over smaller power interests effectively legitimizes aggression by greater powers against the smaller powers while masking as an explanation. I don't mean this as a criticism of realism as such, only the realism that is not serious about the security interests of smaller fish. A lot of such realists are blabbering about 'Ukraine neutrality with security guarantees,' while ignoring that these guarantees have been worthless for the last few decades (and as was clear (recall) by 2014). Such realists tacitly assume that Russia is a status quo power rather than revisionary/revanchist. And these victim blaming pretend realists are really ignoring the facts of the last few decades. (That's compatible with the thought that liberal democracies have been irresponsible in all kinds of ways, including the speaking in split tongues and the unwillingness to help check Russian expansion as some realists should have urged.)

 

Some realists suggests that Ukraine should have pursued a neutrality course familiar from Sweden, Switzerland, Jordan, and Finland. All these countries had assets that Ukraine lacked (not the least non-trivial military capacity and willingness to fight) and had outside countries who had a clear stake in their continued existence as a buffer or neutral services. Ukraine's neutrality would have been more like Dutch neutrality at the start of WWII; nice if it's respected, useless otherwise. But again, it is pretty rich for people who call themselves 'realist' to suggest that Russia would have respected such neutrality given the evidence of the last few decades.

 

Again, I am not criticizing real realism here. I am critical of those who pursued their perceived interests (and so left Ukraine out to dry in return for Russian energy, legalized graft, and being a gateway for money laundering) in the name of realism without paying attention to the need to balance and check Russian power or to help Ukraine create its own security coalition. As it is, such purported realists seem to have no place for the heroic national defense by the Ukrainians of their homeland, and so in a way misunderstand the facts on the ground (even if Ukraine is successfully occupied or carved up, it is clear that the Russians cannot keep their hold on it without enormous costs downstream) . 

 

There is also a third kind of critic of sanctions, who worries that it is foreplay to Armageddon. This too comes in two kinds of flavors. First, there are those who worry it's possible that sanctions and military assistance to Ukraine lead to a kind of tit for tat escalation that turns this into WWIII and/or nuclear Armageddon. I think the risk of this is fairly low because Russia and the US have considerable experience in proxy warfare that they always manage to contain during the last few decades. The other worries that isolation and sanctions of Russia (alongside a drawn out conflict in Ukraine) lead to the implosion of Russia. This, in turn, can be a civil war, destabilizing of other countries, or, again, nuclear Armageddon (if Putin feels very threatened). I grant this is is uncharted territory and a real concern. 

 

So, let me wrap up. I personally hope and advocate that the sanction regime can be improved such that ordinary, individual Russians don't have to carry an enormous burden through it. So, with the more symbolic sanctions (say sports boycotts), I  think it's completely legitimate to boycott national teams (of Russia and Belorussia) and anything involving Gazprom sponsorship, but would urge a reconsideration for individual athletes (and artists, educators etc.) It would be good if face-saving mechanism to help de-escalate were developed, but these must also involve non-trivial roll-back of Russian expansion (and so I do not expect this to happen).

 

A policy of far-reaching sanctions that isolate Russia ought to be pursued in large part because the alternatives have so clearly failed, and because they do raise the cost of aggression (even at the expense of one's own economic welfare). It's the least bad of the existing options and can be expected to fall short of triggers that might lead to world war. It also buys time to wean oneself off energy dependence on Russia. A foreseeable effect of this is that Russia (with structural population decline and all the problems of imperial overreach) will become increasingly dependent on China (with whom it shares an enormous border and where it has strategic vulnerabilities). While the circumstances are very bad, this dependency would itself not be a bad outcome because (i) it can forestall Armageddon; (ii) and, while China, too, is a nationalist dictatorship which treats its own citizens shabbily and with design on some of its neighbors, it has repeatedly signaled its eagerness to play by global rules and it has shown far more restraint in pursuing its international aims. And in fact, China has more capacity to restrain Russia when the latter is a client state of it.*** Okay, let me stop here and explore the implications of the new political realities for liberalism, and its relationship to nationalism and federalism, in a future post.+ 

 

 

On appeasement today

“Our sanctions are not designed to cause any disruption to the current flow of energy from Russia to the world,” Daleep Singh, a deputy national security adviser, told reporters Thursday.

Since Russia produces one out of every 10 barrels of oil the world consumes and up to a third of Europe’s natural gas supplies, the petroleum card gives it strategic leverage well beyond its nuclear arsenal. That is the same card that members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries once played.--New York Times, Feb. 27, 2022,

Since the implosion of the Soviet Union, Russia has been almost constantly at war. Several of the wars involved the reconquest and pacification of breakaway regions, but a few of them also involve(d) sovereign states, including Georgia and since 2014 Ukraine. The latter is notable because in 1994 it gave up an enormous stockpile of nuclear weapons in return for a commitment to its territorial integrity from Russia, the USA, and the UK (the Budapest Memorandum).  In 2014, after the Russian occupation of Crimea, I wrote that is shows that "security guarantees by the USA/UK are ultimately worthless if the aggressor is another nuclear power."*

In addition, anyone who compares, say, the Iranian relatively frank response to its accidental shooting down of the civilian airliner PS752 to the Russian continued stonewalling and propaganda responses in the aftermath of the shooting down of MH17, can only conclude that the Russian regime is villainous. To this day, the Russian government fabricates lies, and has prevented a resolution of the case in an effort to cover up involvement of its key military personnel. The lack of generosity to innocent foreign victims should not surprise given the Russian government's treatment of its own citizens not the least the assassination of journalists and politicians, and the violent intimidation of critics of the regime. 

The response of the liberal democracies to the Russian regime during the last thirty years has been one of appeasement fueled by a demand for Russian energy (here), and lubricated by legalized graft of European politicians (think Gerhard Schröder, Wolfgang Schüssel,Karin Kneissl, etc.)* and capital from Russian financial elites invested in property, football, and art. In addition, in the background is Russia's gigantic nuclear weapons' capacity which has generated understandable caution. 

During the last few weeks, US intelligence was extraordinary accurate about Russia's invasion. Unusually, the Biden administration, including the President himself, have been quite forthright publicly about sharing their knowledge. But this forthrightness has not been matched by robust policy response. There have been only minor arms shipments to Ukraine without much urgency before the invasion. The current sanctions will not scare Putin; as long as, say, Gazprom and Gazprombank are left untouched they are mostly symbolism. Even banning Russia from Swift -- the great false symbol of true resolve this week -- while a great inconvenience, will not cripple its sources of income or war-making capacity. European energy consumers are pretty much funding Russia's war on Ukraine, and would continue to do so after removing Russia from Swift.

As I write this on the third day of the invasion, an energy blockade of Russia is not on the table. That politicians in liberal democracies fear high domestic energy prices is not news: it also prevents a rational response to the unfolding climate crisis, and has contributed to disastrous policy toward Iraq and Saudi Arabia. And because Pax Americana is so successful, the vast majority of Europe's politicians and public inside NATO do not truly fear Russian aggression, and so perceive little reason to either change energy consumption or to re-arm significantly. (The exceptions live in some of the former Warsaw Pact countries, and perhaps Finland.) Stepping back: it's notable that before the shooting starts, foreign affairs are invisible in European media and play almost no role in elections. This reflects, in part, the continued success of the EU of depoliticizing much intra European politics, and in part the effect of being de facto protectorates of the USA which has made political decision-making narrower and irresponsible. The latter is especially noticeable in the recurring temptation to pretend after 2014 that NATO membership was in the cards for Ukraine, despite the well known vetoes over it.** 

Thus, it's fair to say that the inexperienced President Zelensky has played a bad diplomatic hand badly. Put simply: Ukraine tilted far to the Western alliance without receiving much military benefit from it. To what degree this was perceived as a genuine threat to Russia, I leave to others. But it is worth noting that US policy has prevented military integration between the Ukraine and China, and this has left Ukraine without real allies to deter Russia. Even so, it is difficult not to admire his integrity, heroism, and moving rhetoric of the last few days. Perhaps, Ukrainian nationalism will save him. 

I used 'appeasement' not to suggest that Putin (for all his fascist tendencies) is Hitler. But rather that the liberal democracies are adrift, and that worse may well to come: China's unwillingness to condemn the invasion, and its refusal to join in with even minimal sanctions against Russia, is a sign that it is unwilling to defend the principle of sovereignty as such or defend the current system of international law. (Something similar, albeit less consequential, is the case of India.) If the world's great powers look away from each other's unprovoked aggression, they give themselves a free hand for their own actions, as we have already seen in Hong Kong (recall here; here), and may expect in Taiwan one day.**

One need not romanticize really existing liberal democracy, to believe that even when imperfect and malfunctioning it's preferable over the existing alternatives if one values the many varieties of freedom, and the hope that anyone can contribute to collective improvement. (That's compatible with a long list of evils, alas.) That so many authoritarian-leaning politicians within liberal democracies loudly cheer on Putin's invasion suggests that they instinctively recognize that it weakens the more cosmopolitan and democratic forces in their own countries. The bungled withdrawal from Afghanistan has projected weakness, and these politicians sense that the forces that brought Trump to power are not fully overcome yet. For authoritarians everywhere any defeat anywhere of the ideals of the open society is a domestic victory.

Liberal democracies are more secure when other countries are liberal democracies. This is not primarily because of the idea that liberal democracies don't attack each other (although if it were true, that's very helpful), or because they can mutually enrich each other. But rather because they need each other to keep each other reasonably honest, to learn from each other's experiments in living, and to secure each other in the faith that a people's self-government is enduring and that the lure of authoritarian strongmen, so tempting in insecure times, can be resisted. If Kiev falls it will not end our civilization, but if the drift continues it will be a nail in our coffin.

 

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. 

 

 

On When the Rector (Huizinga) canceled a Nazi

The rector [Huizinga] reports that he has been informed that Dr. J. von Leers, leader of the German delegation to the current ISS Congress, is the author of a pamphlet entitled "Forderung der Stunde, Juden 'raus!" [The call of the hour: Out with the Jews!], which was reprinted in March 1933 and in which can be found a passage on the ritual murder of Christian children. The passage in question concludes that this popular belief should he consid­ered an urgent threat from which there is need for protection even today. In the event that the report proves to be true, the committee believes the Senate should make its views known unequivocally and discuss possible further measures. Finally, it was agreed that, through Professor van Wijk, Dr. von Leers should be invited to discuss the matter with the rector in the Senate Chamber, in the presence of the Clerks, at which point he will be asked whether the report is correct. If he denies that it is correct, a protocol to that effect will be drawn up, to be  signed by him. If he admits this is correct, the Senate will communicate its disgust by requesting char he no longer avail himself of the hospitality of the university, and by reserving the right to rake further measures.--Quoted from Otterspeer, Willem. "Huizinga before the Abyss: The von Leers incident at the University of Leiden, April 1933." Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 27.3 (1997): 396. Translated by Lionel Gossman and Remier Leushuis 

I recently read Huizinga's Homo Ludens. I was surprised that it closes on a profound criticism of Carl Schmitt's views on the friend-enemy distinction. (Huizinga explicitly cites Der Begriff der Politischen.) I intended to write a blog post about it, and decided to look at some secondary literature. I found two very stimulating papers on their wider exchange (see here Geertjan de Vugt 2017; and here Alexander Lambrow 2020.) The Lambrow paper confirmed the existence of a 'Von Leers incident' mentioned on the Wikipedia page devoted to Huizinga. Lambrow referred me to Otterspeer's study which is very much worth reading (not the least for its dry commentary). The passage quoted above is from the Archives of the Leiden University Senate, and are the minutes of its meeting. The date of the the event is April 11, 1933.

The ISS Congres was an opportunity for students from Germany, France, England, and Holland to meet. The Congress was hosted by Leiden university and had been opened by Huizinga. In 1933, Von Leers (the leader of the German student delegation) was not a student anymore. He had been added to the delegation, presumably by the new regime in Germany. The meeting between Huizinga nd Von Leers was quickly arranged, and Von Leers confronted with his writings. I quote some of the minutes:

When the incriminating passages were read out, he had admitted the possi­bility that they might be his own words, with the proviso, how­ever, that the passage might turn out to be a quotation. With that same proviso, the rector had expressed the Senate's "tiefen Abscheu und tiefe Verachtung" deep revulsion and deep con­tempt-in German in the text], had added that he reserved the right to take further  measures, and that he requested that Dr. von Leers no longer avail himself of the university's hospitality. Dr. von Leers had noted first that the reproved opinions were shared by the Reichs Chancellor and other high officials...Since the conversation seemed likely to become needlessly painful, [Huizinga] had put an end to it, observing chat he could no longer shake hands with Dr. von Leers. (396-7)

Now, Huizinga was already a famous scholar for his Herfsttij der Middeleeuwen (1919), translated as Herbst des Mittelalters (1924), and as The Waning of the Middle Ages (1924). And he was by no means a Marxist, Socialist, or Positivist. In fact, Huizinga had been invited to the Lippmann colloquium in 1938, so during the period he was viewed as potentially sympathetic to liberalism. In the article, Otterspeer, himself an accomplished scholar, suggests that he is "what we would now call a conservative liberal, and in his version of that posi­tion, he expressed the values of a petit-bourgeois elite." (413) I don't think this is false, and it is certainly worth noting, as Otterspeer does, that Huizinga had expressed some skepticism about parliamentarianism (especially in its mass form (415-416)). But it is also worth noting that Huizinga was astutely sensitive to what we now call 'cultural' even 'agonistic pluralism' (anticipating Lippmann's own views) and that's a view we don't tend to associate with what in the low countries passes for conservative liberalism. In addition, Huizinga was not especially known for philosemitic views.

I used a cognate of 'canceling' in this the title of this post not just as click-bait. (Von Leers really was a Nazi.) As the passages reveal, Huizinga revoked the university's hospitality while Von Leers was in Leiden. (This led to the conference ending prematurely amongst other consequences.) In addition, he used the occasion to formally express the "deep revulsion and deep con­tempt" of the university to Von Leers and this is symbolically reiterated by the refusal to shake hands. What is especially notable about this, is that all reports suggest that Von Leers remained polite throughout. And that while Von Leers had expressed anti-Jewish sentiments at the conference, the desire to take action did not come from any student participants, but from the rector, that is, Huizinga, who had been informed that Von Leers was the author of an anti-Semitic pamphlet which espoused blood libel.*

Now, as it happens some members of the board of governors, who had been exposed to German complaints about Huizinga's decision, were not happy with Huizinga's actions. It's not entirely clear if their lack of approval is due, as seems most likely, their sense that Huizinga over-stepped his authority and took a decision which he should have run by the board first, or whether they thought it was imprudent to make enemies out of the new German government. It's also possible they thought he made the wrong decision on substantive grounds (although Otterspeer offers no evidence of substantive criticism). Much remains unclear to me about the subsequent interaction between the Board and Huizinga.** 

It seems to have been self-evident to Huizinga that somebody who expressed blood libel as an imminent danger to the German people in print had no place at a serious university. This also means he didn't really formulate the principles on which he was acting. Lionel Gossman, who wrote an afterword to Otterspeer's paper in the English translation, thinks that Huizinga decided to act in order to defend "the honor of the university" which embodied so many of his ideals. (p. 417) What this amounts to Gossman explain near the end of his afterword:

Von Leers's transgression seems rather to be of nonprofessional conduct-not playing by the basic rules of the scholarly or academic game. For Huizinga evidently assumed that as an educated man, von Leers knew that the popular stories about ritual murders or Christian children by Jews were unfounded and had been shown to be so by historical scholarship. In other words, von Leers had cynically sought to manipulate public opinion by presenting palpably false statements in the guise of historically valid ones. He had only played at playing the scholarly game; in fact, he had shown no respect for any partner nor observed any rules. (324; this interpretation is endorsed with some elaboration by Lambrow 2020: 827)

Gossman's account also fits with the argument that Huizinga was to develop in Homo Ludens. But in the absence of direct evidence, it must be treated cautiously as informed speculation.

Having said that, what I like about Gossman's suggestion is that Huizinga intuits an important distinction between scholarship and ersatz scholarship as an ideal worth policing at a university. And that it is unbecoming to universities to welcome those that promote ersatz scholarship to the public. For all involved in the dispute it is telling that Von Leers seems to think that the approval of the Reichs Chancelor is at all salient to the matter at hand. Why this is so is worth articulating.

Gossman makes clear that Huizinga's expulsion of Von Leers should not be merely interpreted as Huizinga seeing Von Leers as a spoilsport. (These can be useful sometimes according to Huizinga.) Rather, it is Von Leers' aims that are very much part of the problem. (And this is where Gossman connects the issue to Huizinga's later polemic with Schmitt--some other time I return to this.) "He had betrayed," Gossman writes," "and undermined the game, had ''played" at playing, for the sake of no higher principle, no prin­ciple at all nothing but the elimination or all obstacles for the untrammeled exercise of power." (429)+ This must be met by contempt and expulsion.

Clearly, Huizinga's position as attributed to him by Gossman, presupposes a willingness to make two kinds of substantive judgments: first, that some agent is involved in ersatz scholarship; second, that this ersatz scholarship does not serve a proper aim or principle. And, in fact, the approval of the Reichs chancelor is not a proper aim of scholarship. And whatever else one can say about Huizinga, he was not deluded about the nature of National Socialism in 1933.++

Huizinga's position cannot be defended under freedom of speech and seems to go against the ordinary norms of hospitality, but it is wholly intelligible in terms of academic freedom. For, academic freedom recognizes that scholarly speech is rule-bound (and evidence/method-bound) in lots of evolving ways, and that it presupposes judgments of quality on a regular basis. And engaging in ersatz scholarship disrespects the scholarly community and its members. In addition, Huizinga's position presupposes that once a determination of ersatz scholarship has been made, there is a willingness to judge the ends it is serving. And it is pretty clear that these ends are in this case not just incompatible with commitment to truth, but also what we may call the spiritual authority of a university--it must not be seen as a mere servant of power. It is surely not a coincidence, that mere weeks after Hitler acquired dictatorial powers, Huizinga didn't treat Von Leers' past writings as an insignificant curiosity.

Now, Huizinga's stance is not an easy position to defend. It's notable that Huizinga was not being critical of what Von Leers said at the conference (where he was plainly anti-semitic, as Otterspeer notes), but of his previous published writings. But it can help explain the particular animus shown to some scholars who present themselves as scientific authorities, but avoid (say) the normal practices of scholarly peer review and scholarly give and take, and who seem to welcome the protests they generate as good for business or  the political ends they serve. I have come to think this is characteristic of, say, the work of Charles Murray (recall here for evidence; here), but fill in your favorite example. Of course, such judgments can and must be defeasible. (Notice, that Huizinga makes a real effort to establish whether Von Leers is the author of what's attributed to him.) Of course, once one has established that someone is engaged in ersatz scholarship, it is very difficult to treat their ends as somehow redemptive. 

I perfectly grant that a lot of apparent and real contemporary canceling is not like this on contemporary campuses. So, I don't want to suggest Huizinga anticipates all the versions of canceling and the excesses of our age. I also think that it is perfectly legitimate for universities to invite despicable characters in order to facilitate mutual understanding among hostile groups (which is what ISS was trying to promote). Some celebrated universities today have friends of torture and other war criminals on faculty, after all. 

But in virtue of Huizinga's willingness to take academic life seriously, and the fact that his academic achievements were not insignificant (and, for all the limitations we have discovered in them by now, still worth engaging with), I do wish to treat him as a kind of exemplar. Huizinga was rather cautious about involvement in political affairs, and for most of his life he kept his distance from politics. Huizinga's role in the Von Leers incident challenges many common preconceptions about the significance of canceling not the least the claim that the policing of academic speech is somehow extraneous to academic life or motivated by political ideologies or partisanship of various sorts. Unlike those that conflate academic freedom with freedom of speech, Huizinga recognizes that academic speech is governed by rules and an ethos that need to be enforced. And to respect these rules and that ethos, one most be willing to discriminate and judge, and hold some agents accountable for their words such that they are unwelcome on campus. It's incumbent on each academic community to figure out if they are willing to live by such demanding ideals.***

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Ortega y Gasset (and Lerner, even Burnham) vs Schmitt: a note on political theory of the 1930s,

    Restrictions, standards, courtesy, indirect methods, justice, reason! Why were all these invented, why all these complications created? They are all summed up in the word civilisation, which, through the underlying notion of civis, the citizen, reveals its real origin. By means of all these there is an attempt to make possible the city, the community, common life. Hence, if we look into all these constituents of civilisation just enumerated, we shall find the same con1mon basis. All, in fact, presuppose the radical progressive desire on the part of each individual to take others into consideration. Civilisation is before all, the will to live in common. A man is uncivilised, barbarian in the degree in which he does not take others into account. Barbarism is the tendency to disassociation. Accordingly, all barbarous epochs have been times of human scattering, of the pullulation of tiny groups, separate from and hostile to one another.
   The political doctrine which has represented the loftiest endeavour towards common life is liberal democracy. It carries to the extreme the determination to have consideration for one's neighbour and is the prototype of "indirect action." Liberalism is that principle of political rights, according to which the public authority, in spite of being all-powerful, limits itself and attempts, even at its own expense, to leave room in the State over which it rules for those to live who neither think nor feel as it does, that is to say as do the stronger, the majority. Liberalism-it is well to recall this to-day-is the supreme form of generosity; it is the right which the majority concedes to minorities and hence it is the noblest cry that has ever resounded in this planet. It announces the determination to share existence with the enemy; more than that, with an enemy ,which is weak. It was incredible that the human species should have arrived at so noble an attitude, so paradoxical, so refined, so acrobatic, so antinatural. Hence, it is not to be wondered at that this same humanity should soon appear anxious to get rid of it. It is a discipline too difficult and complex to take firm root on earth.
    Share our existence with the enemy! Govern with the opposition! Is not such a form of tenderness beginning to seem incomprehensible? Nothing indicates more clearly the characteristics of the day that the fact there are so few countries where an opposition exists.--José Ortega y Gasset (1932) The Revolt of the Masses (anonymous translator), p. 75-77. [HT Jeffrey Bernstein]

Regular readers know I am not a fan of the use of a barbarism/civilization contrast in social theory and political life because it facilitates the domination of the barbarians by the self-proclaimed civilized. It is pretty clear that for Ortega y Gasset the barbarous are in a Hobbesian state of nature, and so one may well suspect that he advocates their submission to a civilizing authority. And many humane critics of liberalism are eager, not wholly unfairly, to tie it to the evils of imperialism and colonialism. Even so, I want to convince you there is something important in this passage.

Not unlike James Burnham (recall here; here), Ortega y Gasset accepts the diagnosis of the Italian Elite school that in political life necessarily some minorities rule. And because of his relentless cultural and meritocratic elitism, Ortega y Gasset is an unlikely friend of democracy. But while no martyr to the ill-fated Spanish republic, he served, I think, it with honor (see for some hints to the contrary here). In fact, alongside his friend Johan Huizinga, he was one of the people invited to the Lippmann Colloquium in 1938, although both declined to attend.*

That it is constitutive of liberal democracy to permit systematic opposition to authority is, of course,  a cliché by now. Theoretically it originates in eighteenth century British parliamentary life and its classical theorists are Hume and Burke (writing as a Whig).  It is generally articulated in terms of a loyal opposition or party competition with the opposition being a government in waiting. In parliamentary systems the leader of the opposition is granted all kinds of privileges including not infrequently considerable access to state secrets. In some Presidential systems, the opposition can even be in control of the government or major legislative chambers. 

Okay, with that in place I want to make two observations on Ortega y Gasset's approach. First, as the relentless repetition of 'enemy' suggests, he is clearly responding to an argument or position we now associate primarily with Carl Schmitt. I can't prove that Ortega y Gasset read  the (1927) journal article version of Schmitt's "The Concept of the Political" (published in Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, 58(1), pp. 1–33). But since Ortega y Gassett was partially educated at Berlin and Marburg, he certainly knew German well. But I leave this to the specialists.

And Ortega y Gasset is quite clear that the enemy remains an enemy within some political unities. So, his defense of liberalism, which relies on some Christian tropes, does not require that the opposition is treated as (agonistic) friends (or -- if one takes Schmitt's self-revisionism at face value -- as foes). In fact, he is quite adamant that a liberal state can constitute a radical pluralism with a majority and a minority people 'who neither think nor feel as it does.' In my view he anticipates Popper here (recall). 

Now, one may well wonder how this is supposed to work beyond bald assertion. And I don't think Ortega y Gasset has all that much to say about it other than stating it as a (rare) fact. (One may well suggest that some linguistically and religiously diverse federations  -- canonically Switzerland -- provide some evidence for the kind of forbearance that Ortega y Gasset has in mind.) So, that's disappointing. But near the end of Revolt of the Masses, he does offer a kind of historical explanation of the possibility of living with the enemy. And here he anticipates an observation by Foucault (recall in Birth of Biopolitics): that the European state system, which provides the context for the development of nation-states, actually taught Europeans to accommodate themselves to, and even trade regularly with, enemies, and recognize at least fellow Europeans  as fundamentally equal (pp. 177-178). This is a remarkably optimistic point to take from the wreckage of the first world war. 

But I think Ortega y Gasset is right that there is an important line between forbearance to a domestic enemy and allow for some kind of common life, and a desire to crush enemies. And within liberalism this line should not be crossed.** And this gets me to the second point. Given Ortega y Gasset's rhetoric I quoted one must think that that the view I have attributed to him is kind of idiosyncratic, a foolish high minded aristocratic liberalism whose time has passed. But this point is actually more common in the 1930s across the political specter. 

Take, for example, Max Lerner, a self-described liberal collectivist, who in It is Later than you Think: the need for a militant democracy (1939) writes eloquently in favor of the "majority principle" and defends the utility of (at least some) demagogues, and who treats defenses of 'minority rights' as thinly disguised efforts to promote "oligarchical rule." He advocates collective planning, technocracy, and explicitly rejects separation of powers. His "insurance against tyranny must be placed...squarely on the party system." (233ff) The necessity of an "opposition" must be cherished. (237 with positive claims about British parliamentary practices.) And he thinks that only collectivist planning can allow for a functional true opposition system.

And, again, moving to another angle of the political spectrum, James Burnham who (having left his Trotsky-ism behind) is an adamant and eloquent critic of liberalism. In re-founding modern conservatism,  he argues, in a book that draws heavily on the Italian Elite school, The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom (1943) that liberty involves "above all...the existence of a public opposition to the governing elite....it is the only effective check on the power of the governing elite." (223) For him, "the existence of an opposition means a cleavage in the ruling class." In fact, for Burnham opposition need not be only party opposition--what a free society requires is a clash of social forces to generate what I called (recall), in my own reading of Machiavelli, 'creative turbulence" (recall also this post on Popper). This, too, requires a certain forbearance against those that one may well see as the enemy.+ 

Okay, when confronted with one-party totalitarian states and calls for direct action, very different theorists in the 1930s discerned that it is crucial to maintain a more than merely formal mechanism of internal opposition. And this provides us, I  think, with a useful heuristic when looking at contemporary political movements and parties and leadership-cults that self re-present as defenders of freedom and liberty (often speaking in the name of the people against corrupt elites). Do they actually recognize a place for opposition to their future rule? If not, they are mortal enemies of liberty. 

 

 

 

The Haifa Republic and the Future of Liberal Zionism, Pt: 2: On Zionist Theodicy

The liberal intellectual narrative and the suppression of the Nakba that accompanies it is beginning, however, to face challenges. Ari Shavit’s 2013 My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel, for example, does break a certain amount of new ground. A major best seller in North America, the book was celebrated as a conversation changer: The New Yorker excerpted it; and The New York Times ran three glowing reviews. Shavit’s main thesis is that the occupation—deplorable and pernicious as it may be—isn’t Israel’s main problem. The country has deeper historical and existential reckonings to make. First, the historical fact of the expulsion of the Palestinians must be openly admitted. Second, it is necessary to recognize that the demographic problem that led to this expulsion continues to be the main threat to Israel’s existence. “Today 46 percent of all of the inhabitants of greater Israel are Palestinians,” Shavit writes. “Their share of the overall population is expected to rise to 50 percent by 2020 and 55 percent by 2040. If present trends persist, the future of Zion will be non-Zionist.” Lastly, Shavit warns of the danger of being “blinded by political correctness.” The Tel Aviv elite, he argues, “instilled ad absurdum a rigid political correctness by turning the constructive means of self-criticism into an obsessive deconstructive end of its own”—that is, through excessive self-criticism, Israel has lost its national unity and sense of justification. Americans and Europeans can perhaps afford the luxury of being “politically correct” about things, Shavit contends, but Israelis cannot: only by the sword can Jews survive in the Middle East. They have no choice but to get their hands dirty.
Shavit, in short, is a liberal Zionist who recognizes the Nakba’s role in Israel’s national narrative, and this is no mean achievement. We see this most clearly in the book’s Lydda chapter—the one that gave it its fame—in which Shavit retells the city’s story of expulsion and massacres....

In describing Lydda as Zionism’s “black box” and “dark secret,” in recognizing that “substantial contradiction,” Shavit accomplished something that Israeli liberal intellectuals like Oz et al. had refused to even attempt.
The acknowledgment, however, only goes so far: throughout his book, for example, Shavit carefully avoids even using the word “Nakba.” In such a book, this cannot be an accident but rather a conscious decision: the refusal to name the occurrence is a refusal to recognize it as history....not mentioning the Nakba is in line with Shavit’s later argument, which is to concede the expulsions and massacres happened and to embrace that hard truth for the sake of Israel. Thus, he writes, “if need be, I’ll stand by the damned”—referring to those Israeli war criminals who are responsible to Lydda. “If it wasn’t for them,” he explains, “the State of Israel would not have been born. . . . They did the dirty, filthy work that enables my people, myself, my daughter, and my sons to live.”
Despite appearances, this isn’t a courageous confession of Israel’s existential tragedy. On the contrary: such statements are designed to disarm the tragedy’s impact on Israeli consciousness—dismissing its relevance to current Israeli concerns or the future of liberal Zionism. To think otherwise, we are told, is to yield to political correctness. Far from incorporating the Nakba into liberal Zionist consciousness, Shavit transforms that into the consciousness of the right, which has never had any need to repress the facts.
The left’s relation to memory and tragedy is relatively easy to distinguish from that of the right. Being on the left consists in the understanding that a people must change, sometimes radically, in order to come to terms with the tragic past. By contrast, being on the right consists in endorsing your people’s history and tragedy as givens—embracing them as the inescapable preconditions of who you are. Under a pretense of liberalism, Shavit does just that. “The choice is stark,” Shavit concludes: “either reject Zionism because of Lydda, or accept Zionism along with Lydda.” Somehow, the one reasonable possibility remains unmentioned: that Zionism need not be rejected because of Lydda, nor ever, absolutely never, accepted along with it; that confronting Lydda, and Haifa, and Deir Yassin, and Safsaf—and so many other names of places in our country and our past—means that Zionism must be transformed.
Susie Linfield, in an interview she conducted with Shavit, gets to the root of his confusion. Shavit is “essentially arguing,” Linfield points out, “that war crimes can be committed even in the course of a just war.” The war’s justness “is not erased by such crimes; conversely, the criminality—the barbarism—of the acts in question cannot be mitigated by the justness of the cause.” That’s how Shavit would like his argument to be seen, but we must ask what he considers to be a just war. For Shavit the Nakba is about Israel’s survival, but this is misleading—misleading in the same way that not mentioning the Palestinians in the 1944 Atlantic City Resolution was. As Arendt knew then, what’s at stake isn’t bare survival, but ensuring the ethnic Jewish majority that’s necessary for a Jewish democracy. In other words, and Shavit is clear that this is Zionism’s “dark secret,” the violent mass expulsions of Palestinians did not just happen in the course of the war. They were intrinsic to the war’s aims, yet still he deems them just. Hopefully the future’s liberal Zionists will look at this reasoning and refuse to budge: if you’re willing to accept ethnic cleansing as a just cause, no doubt you will end up thinking that your war’s “justness” isn’t diminished by war crimes committed in its midst. Logically, this is consistent, but this is the logic of the right—the violent far right even—rather than of what anyone would recognize as the left.
But Shavit will have none of it: that is all “political correctness,” or what Zangwill, a hundred years earlier, dismissed as “grandmotherly
sentimentalism.” With the demise of the two-state solution, the “dirty, filthy” work Shavit justifies as a necessary part of Israel’s past may now be invoked as necessary to secure its future. The chauvinist willingness to dismiss human conscience as grandmotherly sentimentalism threatens to degrade Zionist politics into a form of barbarism.--Omri Boehm (2021) The Haifa Republic: A Democratic Future for Israel, pp. 118-123,

Last week (recall), I explored Menachem Begin's (1977) ill-fated plan for a kind of confederation involving Jordan, Israel, and a Palestinian Council at the instigation of Boehm's extended pamphlet, The Haifa Republic. And while Begin's plan has some genuine limitations, it has been, to the best of my knowledge, the only truly liberal peace plan rooted in individual rights and individual choice (and if you are unfamiliar with it go read that Digression first). But inspired by it, Boehm (a leading scholar of the history of philosophy) proposes an outline (not a blueprint) of a "one-state" bi-national "single federation." (150) And it is worth exploring the details of Boehm's plan before long.

But before I get to that, in this post, I address some features of Boehm's argument. One important strain of the argument is about the nature of historical memory (and forgetting) in nationalism, Zionism in particular. Here he draws on Renan and Yehuda Elkana. Some of his views on this are hinted at in the excerpt (paragraph 5) quoted above from chapter 3 (aptly titled "Remembering and Forgetting: The Nakba"). But the second strain of this argument is that these views are inscribed in a polemic -- as the quoted passage reveals, from "the left" -- against what Boehm calls 'liberal Zionism.' That Boehm is interested in this polemic is familiar to readers of this blog (recall) because I wrote on it back in 2016. 

Now, to put some of my cards on the table, 'liberal Zionism' is primary an American (and formerly British) construction. (As regular readers know, I  claim that Zionism is the effect of the failure of liberalism (and this is why it's interesting to political theory) and that there never was a truly liberal Zionism in Israel ((recall here and here), especially here and here; and here),) By this (that is, "construction) I mean its audience is Anglophone public opinion (not just exile Judaism, but also gentile editorialist and politicians). To be clear, it does not just have merely propaganda value, but it also plays a role in the never ending public relations debates (and fundraising) that surround nearly all discussion of Israel and Zionism in leading American outlets. Within the history of Zionism and Israeli political life, liberal ideas played a marginal role (recall this post on Franz Oppenheimer), primarily associated with Chaim Weizmann (the first President of Israel). Yes, there have been liberal Zionist intellectuals and some small parties that are liberal in some broad sense. I actually suspect Boehm agrees with this observation (see his comment about The New Yorker and The New York Times in the quoted passage above). And this is one reason why I stressed the uniquely liberal characteristics of Begin's "Home Rule" plan.

Now, it's worth noting that my claims are illustrated by Shavit's position, which even leaving aside his views on the Nakba, are markedly illiberal. Self-criticism is the life-blood of liberalism; and the focus on relative demographic strength between groups completely ignores the moral priority of individual rights and choices. As critics of liberalism never tire of complaining, liberalism's focus on minority rights, proceduralism, and legal review are mechanisms by which the majority is tamed. The whole point of having a liberal institutional structure is that one does not have to fear the majority--in fact, one can be absent from political life (so maddening to many of its critics). The obsession with demography is, in fact, nearly always a sign one is dealing with illiberal arguments. Finally, it is constitutive of liberalism to reject zero-sum frameworks and the glorification of open-ended war ("only by the sword can Jews survive in the Middle East").* What does happen, alas, is that Israelis (like Shavit) that reject settlement programs and that are, in some sense, pro-peace tend sometimes to be lionized as 'liberals' abroad.

The claim "only by the sword can Jews survive in the Middle East" is a self-fulling prophecy (and self-justifying of many crimes) that dooms Zionism to failure. What's needed, both for the health Zionism and to give liberalism a chance in Israel, is a program that gets Israel's borders recognized and peaceful. (I think Boehm and I agree about this.)  The constructive ambiguity over Israel's final borders that has been so characteristic of Israeli political life for so long creates and sustains the conditions for open-ended warfare.

I do not mean to suggest that Boehm is wrong to take Shavit (and Benny Morris) to task for the consequentialist justification for ethnic cleansing (Boehm also uses 'expulsion' and 'transfer politics') during the Israeli War of Independence. One of the great merits of Boehn's Haifa Republic, is its relentless unwillingness to let many of Israel's most cherished public intellectuals, who have enabled a culture of silence surrounding the Nakba, off the hook for their participation and construction of a culture of silence. Again, as Boehm notes the culture of silence is only partial, and given the dominance of Israel's Right, not very successful. But Shavit is no liberal, so (ipse facto) no liberal Zionist.

A much more liberal approach -- which the German Federal Republic recognized in a treaty with Israel -- is to recognize Palestinian claims on property and lives lost, and pay out generous compensation to individuals and their offspring. In practice, Israel has sometimes recognized this fundamental fact, but often in the context of pushing (the legitimate) claims of Jews who had to flee Arab (and Persian) lands, and often in the context of demanding a final settlement. In my view such compensation should be offered ahead of a final settlement, and regardless of Arab reciprocity, especially because living claimants will not live forever. (It would also unfreeze a lot of discussions among Palestinians, and show good faith.) Notice that such compensation does not imperil Israel or changes facts on the ground.

As an aside, I admit I am taking no stance on the question of bare survival. Unlike Boehm, I don't think it was completely foregone conclusion that Israel would survive war with the Arab Legion and Egypt simultaneously. Boehm does not mention, I think, that Jews were expelled from the West Bank -- some of which very long standing Jewish settlements -- and the Old City conquered by the Arab Legion during the war of Independence.

A consequentialist may wonder why I sided with Boehm against Shavit. Why not see -- with a nod to Kant -- such ethnic cleansing as the necessary unsocial sociability that drives history? As it happens here I do not object to what we may call secular theodicy as such. But there are two important features of Shavit's argument that make me side with Boehm. First, as Boehm notes Shavit's stance is basically a carte blanche for war crimes (including these in the future). The problem isn't just the brute fact of war crimes, as Boehm notes, but also (and here I echo Plato (recall) and Kant (recall)) that the way one fights a war also signals something about one's attitude toward peace (or lack thereof). An unwillingness to acknowledge the Nakba and to pay compensation for its misdeeds, signals a fundamental unwillingness to consider true peace to one's enemies. This point does not require any wishy washy views about human nature but is ground in self-interest and realpolitik.

Second, it's an important constraint on secular theodicy that those that are harmed by progress or one's political goals are victims on your own side. (I am not sure what to call this principle.) There is nothing wrong with glorifying those that freely sacrificed or martyred themselves (in some sense) on your behalf. Of course, in practice there can be a lot wrong this, but that's generally because of the manner of glorifying or remembering the sacrifice. But sacrificing or harming others on your behalf turns a problem of evil into (ahh) a legitimacy of evil. The fact that people like Morris and Shavit miss this really simple distinction is evidence of the corrosive effect of their nationalism on their judgment.

Again, what I am saying is orthogonal to the question of dirty hands (or even Left/Right distinctions--reading Lenin is not for the faint hearted). I am not suggesting that dirty hands can be avoided in political life. Rather, I am suggesting that if one takes the problem of dirty hands seriously (qua liberal, but not just a liberal), one must also accept the need for atonement and reparations and a way to find a place for one's injustices in one's historical memory. As noted, Boehm has intriguing proposals on how to do this, and to these I will turn next (and then conclude my series by looking at his political proposal). To be continued.