Bosphorus Reflections: Barry Stocker's Weblog

New Blog: Barry Stocker Blog

2011-02-11T15:40:00.000+02:00

No more posting on this blog except to say I now have a new blog

Barry Stocker Blog

No more posts and no moderation of comments on this blog.

Other places I have blogged are also now dead.

Only blogging at the site above.

See you there

This blog is finished. Go to Barry Stocker's Weblog for more blogging

2010-09-21T18:11:00.001+03:00

This blog is finished. Go to Barry Stocker's Weblog for more blogging

Max Weber on Value Conflicts: Better than Berlin

2010-03-30T20:53:00.001+03:00

The sociologist Max Weber had some important things to say about value conflict and value pluralism, that is the inevitably of many ethical values and conflicts between them. Go here and here for Weber texts online.

The issue of value pluralism and value conflicts within liberalism is often discussed with reference to Isaiah Berlin. Weber’s discussion is more penetrating and deserves to be discussed more. First some clearing of the ground about Berlin’s limitations.

Isaiah Berlin was a distinguished figure in history of ideas, but I can’t really take him very seriously as a thinker about values. His most famous essay in this area, ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’ is much cited, but does not strike me as a very good essay. It gives very little sense of the real richness of the ideas of political and individual liberty, personal and social growth, in the period he is discussing. A book like Freedom and Its Betrayal: Six Enemies of Human Liberty is based on an extremely dubious premiss, that discussions about liberty can be reduced to football teams of enemies and friends. The ‘enemies’ in question are Helvétius, Rousseau, Fichte, Hegel, Saint-Simon, Maistre. 6 very different cases, and maybe none of them are completely innocent of arguments which are bad for liberty, but then who is completely innocent? Certainly Hegel has been rehabilitated by people with political views similar to Berlin, that is left-liberal/social democratic. Some notable French liberals (of a kind similar to Berlin) were members of a Saint-Simon Foundation in France from 1982-99. And so on. Berlin’s numerous contacts and connections, his clear style, impressive personal culture, fame outside scholarly circles, and delightful personality had the unfortunate consequence that simplified versions of the most simplistic elements of his thought have become widespread still, even after becoming at least partly discredited. The irony is that these simplifications have become common place amongst conservative commentators and the more absolutist and more simple minded free market libertarians, who find it helpful to resort to easy oppositions between ‘liberty lovers’ and their supposed enemies.

Back to Weber, who really should be more discussed as a political thinker. There are books and articles around, but not enough in comparison to references to Berlin. However, I am pleased to see that Berlin’s major defender JohnGray has alluded to the importance of Weber, in a recent newspaper review. Max Weber recognised that politics is caught between its more ideal claims and the pursuit of power. Weber also recognised that this is not a question of ethics versus power. The pursuit of an ideal must include the pursuit of the power to implement that ideas. We cannot tidily separate these two activities, even if we can introduce a conceptual distinction. An ethical perspective on a politician must include respect for the willingness to deal with power, and not be just an idealising spectator.

Weber also recognised that this kind of innate value conflict, within the pursuit of a value, is part of the innate value attaching to conflict. There is something deeply valuable about individuals, and groups struggling for their ideal and perspective. Weber was very willing to recognise the value of people he did not agree with engaging in very passionate struggle for their values, e.g. socialists and trade unionists. What Weber feared was that an economic system based on diverse individual initiative, capitalism, and a political system based on the same principles, liberalism, was decaying into conformity inducing bureaucratic states, a and private corporations allying with the state and seeking to stifle competition.

The liberty and strength of the economy, society, and politics, rests on the struggles for values. Struggles which can be defined in less ideal ways as well, but that does not detract from the importance of struggle between different value. It embeds the struggle more deeply. The free individual contains the struggle within, in this tension between abstract ideals and the power to implement ideals. The individual with the deepest calling for politics contains this struggle, and makes it evident, mobilising support for a position through a personal power of persuasion, which can never be purely rational but is not inherently contradictory with reason. Weber’s thoughts on leadership are widely misunderstood. He gave a positive value to persuasion through charisma, through the power of personal style. He thought that this was exemplified by 19th century liberal leaders like Gladstone and Lincoln, operating through democracy, and that this was necessary to the survival of democracy, if it was not going to sink into bureaucratic routine.

Rational bureaucracy is necessary in state and corporation, but the liberal state and the capitalist corporation will weaken if they do not find the means to promote individuality, and the exceptional leader has a necessary role here in enacting and performing strong independent character. The necessary components of depersonalised rules and reason, personal charisma and distinctness of character, along with tradition are conflicting and necessary components of a world of democracy and liberty. Liberty does not just rest on reasoned disputes about liberty equality, law and so on, but on deep conflict within society and inside personalities.

From Weber’s point of view, it is much easier to understand why a Hegel for emphasises the value of the coherence of laws and institutions in the state, a Saint-Simon who emphasised ‘scientific’ state administration, a Rousseau who emphasised the importance of a common political sphere, are not the ‘enemies’ of liberty. Parts of their thought tend away from individualist liberalism, and that leads to some problems to my mind. But, only an adherent of anarcho-capitalism or possibly a purely nightwatchman state, could reject those elements which tend away from pure individual freedom. At some point, the existence of laws and institutions, and some shared values, must restrain pure absolutist individualism. Even anarchism and minarchism cannot escape that dilemma, though it is a necessary aspect of such positions, to try to ignore or abolish it.

Original version of this post at Barry Stocker's Weblog.

Max Weber on Political Liberalism

2010-03-22T22:43:00.002+02:00

I’ve written about liberal political thought in Max Weber for LiberalVision recently.

Points covered include

His movement from conservatism to liberalism

The economic and social conditions of liberty.

Understanding of democracy in relation to realism and competition with regard to power

Discussion of German situation

Why his understanding of charismatic leadership is at least as much to do with democratic leaders like Abraham Lincoln and William Gladstone, as it is to with authoritarianism.

Primary version of this post at Barry Stocker's Weblog.

Nietzsche's Democratic Hero: Pericles

2010-03-16T23:15:00.002+02:00

In Daybreak aphorism 168, Nietzsche is praising the historian Thucydides, author of the Peloponnesian War, an account of the 30 years war between Athens and Sparta. He refers to Thucydides as the outcome of a culture, the culture of Athens: ‘Thus in him the portrayer of man, that culture of the most important knowledge of the world finds its last glorious flower: that culture which had in Sophocles its poet, in Pericles its statesman, in Hippocrates its physician, in Democritus its natural philosopher […]. (translated by R.J. Hollingdale, Cambridge University Press, 1997).

Again we see ambiguity in Nietzsche’s politically significant comments. Thucydides is not not always considered a friend of democracy, and he chronicles the defeat of democratic athens by oligarchic Sparta. However, chronicling defeat does not always mean condemnation of what is defeated, and he gives a famous speech to Pericles, a naval commander who was the most distinguished of Athens’ democratic leaders. That speech famously praises democracy in Athens.

We see that Nietzsche includes Pericles in his great products of Athens, which culminate in Thucydides. We have other examples of Nietzsche praising Pericles, most famously in On the Genealogy of Morals, Essay I, 11. There what Nietzsche emphasises in Pericles is not democracy but the value of strength, itself appropriate to the ‘realism’ of Thucydides. That does not exclude respect for democracy. Machiavelli, Spinoza, and Max Weber all defended democracy as the strongest basis of the state, as the basis of a state that can be effective internally and influential in the international state system.

Again it is not a case of saying that Nietzsche can be defined as a ‘democrat’, a ‘republican’, or a liberal. It is a case of saying he is not the anti-democrat, anti-republican, or anti-liberal, and that he is sometimes the friend of the republic, the democracy, the liberal. He may be the friend whose criticisms are valuable. Where he expresses reservations about these political ideas, he often does so in terms which he shares with advocates of them. Here I can only briefly mention Hume, Kant, Constant, Tocqueville, and John Stuart Mill.

At the bare minimum, Nietzsche can be said to sometimes lean towards the republic, democracy, and political liberty; and where he opposes them, he does so in terms that very frequently overlap with the concerns of the great friends of republic, democracy, and liberty. There are also issues here to addressed later, hopefully, about the relation between these terms, which I assume can conflict but work best through mutual reinforcement.

Original version of this post at Barry Stocker's Weblog.

Nietzsche's Republican Hero: Lazare Carnot

2010-03-11T21:41:00.001+02:00

Daybreak, 167

there is a a profound maxim worth laying to heart: ‘What matters is not people but things [quoted by Nietzsche in French]’. This maxim, is like him who spoke it, great, honest, simple and taciturn - like Carnot, the soldier and republican. - But may one now speak to Germans of a Frenchman in this way, and of a Frenchman who is a republican? Perhaps not; perhaps, indeed, one may not even recall what Niebuhr ventured in his time to tell the Germans: that on one had given him so strong an impression of true greatness as Carnot. (R.J. Hollingdale translation, Cambridge University Press 1997)

Nietzsche throws a republican Frenchman at Bismarkian imperial Germans. His description on Carnot as great and simple in some ways matches his ideals from the classical past and his hopes for individuals in an age to come . That may not be the full story, but it is still part of it.

It’s worth thinking about Carnot and his life. I confess to not knowing much before. I will be getting what appears to be the standard current autobiography, by Jean and Nicole Dhombres, from an online bookseller very soon. What I have found out is a variety of accomplishments leading to the reception of his remains in the Panthéon, the place which commemorates the heros of the French Republic. A leading military figure in the wars which followed the 1789 Revolution, who was co-founder of what is now the École Polytechnique, one of the leading higher education institutions in France. He stayed true to Republican ideas even after Napoleon acquired semi-monarchical status and then became emperor. As a result he lost the chance for the highest honours, though he did receive some. That indicates a somewhat equivocal role, he was a member of the Committee of Public Safety which lead the Terror of 93-94, and then played a leading role in its downfall and the new government. I would need much more information to evaluate these incident, but my initial impression is of a decent record for a time of great violence and political about turns. He wrote on geometry and spent time in exile during the beginning of Napoleon’s rise writing a book on the metaphysics of calculus. His son Said was a prominent scientist, who had a major role in the emergence of thermodynamics. A grandson was President from 1887 to ’94.

I would not want to simply state that Nietzsche was a republican, and even a Jacobin on the basis of this remark. The remark has a context, which is to challenge the assumptions of German politics and culture after Otto von Bismark unified Germany in a war with France, and turned the King of Prussia into the Emperor of Germany. Nietzsche turned against the nationalism and the elevation of power politics over culture he saw in that period. That has a conservative aspect, a sharing of Goethe’s belief in the value of many German states with traditional rulers providing many cultural centres. That is nevertheless a conservatism with at least some liberal aspects.

Returning to Carnot the Republican, his apotheosis by Nietzsche may serve purposes other than the justification of republicanism, but it is still important that Nietzsche thought it worth quoting a Republic hero and praising him. If his praise for Carnot has a context which might lead us to qualify any republican gesture, it must also be the case that the kind of remarks Nietzsche makes about Carnot should lead us to qualify the critical remarks he makes about the French Revolution in On the Genealogy of Morality, Essay I. We will not understand Nietzsche if we only see him as the enemy of republicanism.

Next post, a democratic hero for Nietzsche.

Original version of this post at Barry Stocker's Weblog.

Democratic and Republican Moments in Nietzsche

2010-03-10T00:01:00.002+02:00

One difficult and necessary discussion with regard to Nietzsche is his attitude to liberalism, democracy, and republicanism. To put it very briefly, there are just too many people with various perspectives who want to dismiss these moments. Would it be a good idea to say that Nietzsche is a liberal, a democrat or a republican.? No, but then it would not be a good idea to say that he is simply purveying the opposite of those positions. Can we define Nietzsche politically at all? Difficult, I would at least say that he is willing to endorse liberalism, republicanism and democracy, where he thinks they serve some selective purpose in finding those willing to overcome negative forces in themselves. Is he willing to endorse other political forms for the same reason? Yes, but the goal of selecting the individual of strong individuality and abundant life, always has some to offer someone who thinks that democracy, liberalism, republicanism rest best on such individuality, not such an unusual or strange idea.

Next post, a republican hero for Nietzsche, after that a post on a democratic hero and age for Nietzsche.

Original post at Barry Stocker's Weblog.

Nietzsche's Virtues

2010-03-09T00:22:00.001+02:00

More general comments on Nietzsche’s ideas of virtues after some discussion in passages in Daybreak in recent posts. Concentrating on Daybreak, Gay Science, and Thus Spoke Zarathustra, which Nietzsche declared to be his yes-saying books, I have the following ideas of what positive values Nietzsche looks for, and the virtues that come after morality, or after the morality of good and evil.

Virtues come out of sickness rather than health, at least some of the time. The merit of virtue at its best is that it disrupts normality and universality. Truly individual virtue must seem sick from some perspective, and is a disruption of normal physiological and psychological functioning.

The above point seems to me to refer to difficulties in taking Nietzsche as a completely Aristotelian theorist of the virtues, and in taking Nietzsche as an adaptationist naturalist in his attitude to the origin of the virtues. That is Nietzsche does not take virtues as emerging from a passive reaction of psychology, or physiology, to external circumstances.

Virtue is individuating and intimately connected with strength of character, in its capacity for self-discipline.

The disruption necessary for the emergence of these virtues is likely to at least seem ‘evil’ and to create something dark and impenetrable in individual characters.

The values emerge from selfishness, and selfishness is the prime virtue. A prime virtue that disrupts common virtues, and emphasises individuation.

There is rejection of values associated with the neighbour, sympathy and pity. These are values in which we lose ourselves in orienting ourselves towards others, and subject others to the tyranny of our desire to change them. They reduce individuation and increase conformity.

The superiority of friendship and hospitality to neighbourliness and sympathy or pity.

There is a wish to give and receive, in forms which do not lead to domination, dependence, and co-dependence.

The above is described in terms of sharing beauty and shelter, the taking away the burden of what someone wants to give from the self, the abundance of the self that is so strong it leads to a painful desire to give it away.

Giving as a giving of the self, so that it can be repeated and perceived, taking as generosity because it takes away a burden, distance between individuals which enables individuals to create in a way which is individual and can be shared.

Original post at Barry Stocker's Weblog

Link to TV Discussion of Adam Smith

2010-03-04T23:06:00.001+02:00

C-Span (USA) discussion of Adam Smith’s economics and ethics

Samuel Fleischacker, left-liberal political philosopher, and Russ Roberts, free-market libertarian economist, discuss Adam Smith’s economics in An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations and The Theory of Moral Sentiments.

An example of one of my favourite themes, free market libertarians and left-liberals in dialogue and mostly agreeing. Roberts and Fleischacker agree on all the interpretative issues, including Smith’s ethics. He is not advocating wealth as an end in itself, he is advocating moral choices and moral relations between humans, with free economic exchange, as a necessary component, but just a component. Roberts agrees with Fleischacker that the government does more than provide law and order, and national defence, and that money is just a part of life; Fleischacker agrees with Roberts that the US government bail outs of finance and industry are a bad thing, rewarding bad business decision, and that the state should do less. Roberts and Fleischacker’s only clear disagreement is on whether ‘single payer’ health care (i.e. comprehensive government health services paid for our of general taxation) is in the spirit of Adam Smith. Both admit that various positions could be found to have support in Smith, but I think that where they agree, they essentially set the reasonable limits to plausible interpretation.

My own view, looking at what Smith says about education, is that is in the spirit of Smith for the government to ensure that everyone has health care, but that this should be achieved as far as possible by private arrangements, and through the government keeping down costs by preventing anti-competitive practices; the government only to be involved in purchasing, and possibly providing, health care, where those on low incomes, or in circumstances difficult to insure or save for, need help.

I’ve been posting recently on Nietzsche’s criticisms of ideas of the ethics if sympathy and the domination of the producer by the consumer in commercial society. It’s a coincidence that I am posting this link, but a useful one. We can see in the conversation that commercial society and an ethics based on sympathy are both present in Smith, and are brought together. There are aspects of Smith I’ve alluded to before, which connect his thoughts with the Antique virtues Nietzsche puts forward against sympathy and commerce. I hope to return to those issues in future.

Original version of this post at Barry Stocker's Weblog.

Nietzsche from Sympathy to Hospitality

2010-03-04T22:22:00.001+02:00

A third post on Dawn/Daybreak (Mörgenrothe), referring to 174. Last few sentences of 174 can be found at the bottom of this post. I74 contains linked criticisms of sympathy and commercial society, which deserve a post of their own. For the moment, I will just look at the positive value suggested at the end of the aphorism. That is the value of creating something beautiful and restful rather than of sympathy in relation to another. The beauty is of more use, suggesting that the Hume and Utilitarian style of arguments both overlook the usefulness of creating something. This undermines the other directed nature of usefulness, sympathy, and utility in values, where we are concerned about pleasure for others rather than pleasure for ourselves. Though that pleasure, for Nietzsche, should certainly not be a maximisation of passive pleasure experiences, but rather the pleasure of activity, and self-transformation, which does not put pleasure at the centre.

The self-transformation, expressed as the construction of a walled garden, both keeps out the other person, and provides something beautiful for that other person. The aphorism ends with the idea of the ‘hospitable gate’, leaving open the question of whether the other person enjoys the beauty before entering through the gate. Are we to take the walls as beautiful, as part of the beauty of the garden, or as what conceals beauty while keeping hostile forms of the outside, storms and the dust of the roadway. The roadway has an ambiguity similar to that of the wall: it threatens the garden with its dust, but also brings the other person who can experience the beauty and the hospitality.

The implied positive value of hospitality can be opposed to the negative value of tyranny, an unmistakably political term. In ‘Of the Friend’ in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche opposes friendship to the slave-tyrant relation, which should lead us to think of such issues in the ethical and political thought of Cicero and Aristotle. That would take us back to the last post on Aristotle and Nietzsche. This is typical of the way political ideas appear in Nietzsche, particularly diffuse, fragmentary and ambiguous, even by his own standards. I hope to return to some of this on another occasion.

The tyrant is opposed to the hospitable, and associated with sympathy. It sympathy which is either ineffectual or a tyrannical control of another person. Sympathy in Hume and Smith is linked with ideas of commercial society, as Nietzsche has suggested (though not through mentioning those names), and also with principles of political and social liberty. Some things to explore on another occasion. For now, it can be said that Nietzsche implicitly defines liberty as being outside relations of sympathy in which someone forces help on another, and relations of hospitality, in which the pleasure of beauty is offered and accepted freely.

In the meantime, the question itself remains unanswered whether one is of more use to another [dem Anderen] by immediately leaping to his side and helping him — which help can in any case be only superficial where it does not become a tyrannical seizing and transforming — or by creating something out of oneself that the other can behold with pleasure [Genuss]: a beautiful, restful, self-enclosed garden perhaps, with high walls against storms and the dust of the roadway but also a hospitable gate.

(German text at NietzscheSource)

Translated by R.J.Hollingdale, Cambridge University Press, 1997)

Original post at Barry Stocker's Weblog.

Nietzsche and Aristotle on Gods, Humans, and Beasts

2010-03-04T01:28:00.002+02:00

Yesterday’s post looked at Nietzsche’s relation to Hume’s view of sympathy through his comments on the Neighbour in Dawn 146. Altruism is an underlying issue there. We could take Nietzsche as a following a precedent in Hume that undermines selfless altruism, we could take him as breaking with Hume in rejecting an altruism based on sympathy, we could take him as reworking Hume’s ideas of values based on common experience. I don’t believe it would be a good idea to quickly come down for any of those three options. Rather than getting into a full discussion of that, I will move onto Dawn 147 (reproduced in full at the bottom of this post, which follows on in discussing human experience of commonality and selfishness.

Just as 146 looks very much like a comment on Hume, or more likely a Humean way of thinking Nietzsche picked up from other sources; 147 looks very much like a comment on Aristotle. I find this particularly interesting, since there is some recent work on seeing Nietzsche in terms of Aristotle (e.g. Christine Swanton) and Hume (e.g. Peter Kail), and certainly Nietzsche needs to be situated in relation to them. The naturalist elements may be a big sources for naturalist elements in Nietzsche, though we would also need to think about Lucretius and Spinoza here.

What 147 suggests to me is certainly that we need to think about Nietzsche in relation to Aristotle, but not by seeing him as continuous with Aristotle. There is a very strong opposition made in 147, though that is not the end of the story either, A full account of Nietzsche on value (moral values or values of life, there is an interesting issue here of which is more appropriate), should certainly bring in Aristotle on virtue, or excellence. (arete/άρετή); more on that, and all these issues, on other occasions.

The first thing to note about 147 is that it is directed against Aristotle’s well known statement in Politics I, that man is a political, or social animal. Aristotle goes on to suggest that life outside the community (polis/πόλις), is only possible for a god or an animal. In 147, Nietzsche refers to ‘divine selfishness’ and ‘the dear animal world’ in being alone. He brings up that possibility as a reaction to the possibility of being loved by everyone. Being loved by everyone, instead of one person, is an unbearable burden. In this Nietzsche might be following Aristotle. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle does suggest that the more friends someone has, the less value friendship has. He also suggests that a god has a perfect live, which does not need friends, in a life of self-contemplation. That leads us back to the god in the Politics outside the community. However, in the Politics, Aristotle suggests a rather grotesque kind of divinity, Polyphemus, the one eyed giant, son of Poseidon. The divine and the bestial come together. Nietzsche provides a more positive sense of how the divine and the bestial can combine.

This divine-bestial possibility is staged as a negative reaction to the extreme of universal love, but it is not just staged as a reaction to an extreme circumstance. Nietzsche is drawing out attention to something disturbing about the ideal of love between humans, how can we respond to universal love? How can we keep our own individuality, decisions and actions? Love as altruism, this seems not to be eros that Niezsche is discussing, is again undermined as it was in 146. The implicit target was Hume, or ‘English psychologists’, now it is Aristotle.

Dawn 147

Cause of ‘altruism’. — Men have on the whole spoken of love with such emphasis and so idolised it because they have had little of it and have never been allowed to eat their fill of this food: thus it became for them ‘food of the gods’. Let a poet depict a utopia in which there obtains universal love, he will certainly have to describe a painful and ludicrous state of affairs the like of which the earth has never yet seen — everyone worshipped, encumbered and desired, not by one lover, as happens now, but by thousands, indeed by everyone else, as the result of an uncontrollable drive which would then be as greatly execrated and cursed as selfishness had been in former times; and the poets in that state of things — provided they were left alone long enough to write — would dream of nothing but the happy, loveless past, of divine selfishness, of how it was once possible to be alone, undisturbed, unloved, hated, despised on earth, and whatever else may characterise the utter baseness of the dear animal world in which we live.

Translated by R.J. Hollingdale, Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Original version of this post as Barry Stocker's Weblog

Nietzsche on the Neighbour; Hume on Sympathy

2010-03-02T22:57:00.001+02:00

It seems to me that Nietzsche’s comments on the neighbour could be taken as comments on Hume’s view of sympathy in moral philosophy. I have placed a shortened version of aphorism 146 from Dawn at the bottom of this post, which I think is paticularly pertinent.

This is not a question of Hume directly influencing Nietzsche, or of Nietzsche consciously reflecting on Hume. As far as I know, Nietzsche did not read Hume and he certainly not discuss his texts. However, he was concerned with ‘English psychologists’ (On the Genealogy of Morality, Essay I, mentioned explicitly in 1 and discussed from 1 to 3) and had an idea of Hume’s ideas from their influence on German Idealist philosophy, Schopenhauer’s references, and the work of his friend Paul Rée. He refers to Rée’s book 0f 1877 in The Origin of the Moral Sensations in the Genealogy (Preface, 4).

The point is that I am arguing that there is something to be gained from thinking about some passages in Nietzsche’s as if they were polemical comments on Hume. Discussion of the ‘Neighbour’ are particularly relevant here. Nietzsche takes a critical view of the relation of ‘neighbour’ and implications he finds in it of dependence and herd existence. In particular, in this passage from Dawn, he questions the value of concerning ourselves with the suffering of the neighbour. Our automatic reaction to the pain and pleasures of others, is the most important component of moral sense for Hume (rather complicated by his scepticism and sense of social evolution), and is what he refers to as sympathy. Sympathy comes from seeing ourselves in others, and is increased by closeness in space and similarity of qualities to ourself. This is in line with what Nietzsche says about the Neighbour, who is clearly part of a general relation not just defined by living next door. This context for the ‘Neighbour’ is justified by ephorisms 143-5. 132 mentions sympathy in relation to Mill and Schopenhauer,

Nietzsche rejects sympathy for the suffering of the Neighbour in the strongest terms, welcoming the sacrifice of a few neighbours to the future, in what is is his most apparently sinister tone. However, what he also says is that we should sacrifice the Neighbour in so far as we are willing to sacrifice ourselves. This indicate that Nietzsche is probably not referring to the culling of a few people to serve the future, there is no way in which he suggests suicide in the service of the future. There are various ways in which he suggests that a willingness to take risks, and encounter danger, are valuable for the self.

What Nietzsche suggests is that we benefit the Neighbour by placing such a person under the same values of risk and danger, struggle and over-coming, as we place ourselves. In one way that is a return to ‘sympathy’, to the value a concern for commonness of concern. However, it is also a rejection of Humean sympathy, because it avoids reduction and dependency in our own sense of self. Nietzsche proposes the value of demanding sacrifice and self-overcoming, from ourselves, in the creation and promotion of a sense of individuality. Aphorism 175 takes an unfavourable line on how commerce creates a sense of the wishes of the consumer, limiting the sense of self; and Nietzsche compares the competition of commercial society unfavourably with the contests of Ancient Greece. 146 (including sentences I’ve replaced with ellipses). refers unfavourably to a morality of consequences and utility. All these remarks could be taken against Hume.

Dawn 146

Out beyond our neighbour too.— […] May we not at least treat our neighbours as we treat ourselves? And if with regard to ourselves we take no such narrow and petty bourgeois thought for the immediate consequences and the suffering they may cause, why do we have to take such thought in regard to our neighbour? Supposing we acted in the sense of self-sacrifice, what would forbid us to sacrifice our neighbour as well? […] Finally: we at the same time communicate to our neighbour the point of view from which he can feel himself to be a sacrifice, we persuade him to the task for which we employ him. Are we then without pity? But if we also want to transcend our own pity and thus achieve victory over ourselves, is this not a higher and freer viewpoint and posture than that in which one feels secure when one has discovered whether an action benefits or harms our neighbour? We, on the other hand, would through sacrifice — in which we and our neighbour are both included —strengthen and raise higher the general feeling of human power, even though we might not attain to more.

Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Original version of this post at Barry Stocker's Weblog.

Progress of Democracy in South and East Asia

2010-03-02T00:05:00.002+02:00

Let’s demolish a widely held claim, sometimes made by people who should really know better.

The main claim: East Asia is not democratising

Sub-claim 1: Market economies are progressing in East Asia, so there is no link between market economies and liberal democracy.

Sub-claim 2: East Asia is culturally different, some inner spirit of Confucianism, or something, resists liberal democracy.

I’m bringing in Souther Asia as well, because the issues of new economic power and non-western culture are together there as well, and there are strong cultural connections, particularly through Buddhism.

What’s wrong with the above claims?

Large number of East Asian and Souther Asian countries which are now solid if more or less rough, democracies, including the 2nd, 4th. 10th and 12th most populous countries in the word. (Relevant details at bottom of story).

What of the non-democracies? We’re really only talking about one country China. North Korea is non-democratic, but the South which is more populous is more democratic. Vietnam, Laos, and Burma are non-democratic, but Cambodia, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, and the Philippines are more or less democratic (much less in Burma’s case), and certainly more than they were.

Singapore has an extraordinary and economically successful mix of formal liberal democracy and substantive one party rule. Singapore has a population of 5 million and is now the only other example apart from China of economic success and a non-democratic ‘Asian’ values authoritarianism. Singapore is really about the mildest version of semi-authoritarianism ever devised, with rule of law and good individual rights if you don’t directly take on the legitimacy of the government.

So that’s it the distinctive Asian Confucian Authoritarian model combining political illiberalism with capitalism can be found in China and Singapore. OK throw in Burma, Vietnam and Laos, still a small number. The one thing that makes these ‘Asian model’ claims even superficially viable is that there are so many people in China and it’s had so much economic growth.

Let’s just look at China.

Is it a mature liberal democracy? No.

Is it more democratic than under Mao, and becoming more democratic? Yes.

I don’t want to trivialise or dismiss the terrible human rights violations still going on, but if we look at the trajectory since Mao

End of mass purges and political terror across the whole country.

End of mass starvation from demented economic policies forced on the country by a totalitarian machine

Contested elections at local level

Constant growth of civil society, and the increasing sources of opinion and opportunities for debate created

Much more protection of individuals from state apparatus, even though more is still needed.

Hong Kong incorporated with its semi-democracy and strong rule of law still remaining.

Democracy needs to be understood as shorthand for the following

Contested elections

Rule of law

Freedom of opinion

Civil society (institutions outside the state)

Social tolerance of differences of various kinds

A country in which some of these things is improving is moving towards liberal democracy. China is improving in all these areas. China is moving towards democracy at the same time as the economy is growing. Economic growth is the product of market reforms, and these are feeding into progress towards democracy.

Both advocates and opponents of capitalism are disposed to make claims that China is evidence against the links between capitalism and democracy. They are simply and obviously wrong, if we look at China as a whole, or if we look at the whole of Eastern and Souther Asia.

There has never been democracy without capitalism. Even if we go to the Ancient world, we see commercial trading culture in the early democracies. Capitalism is just a word with insulting overtones in some people’s minds, for individual property rights and enforceable contracts. That is, individuals make voluntary contracts which are enforced by law. There has never been a democracy without those individual rights under law, and there never been a society where such rights are strongly entrenched which has not been moving towards democracy, if it is not already democratic. Economies based on individual property rights, rule of law, and competitive markets have a strong cultural and social tendency towards overall openness, legalism, negotiation, dialogue, pluralism. Of course we can find less pleasant aspects in the development of such societies, but it is the direction of change which is significant, and which brings an end to colonialism or the violent construction of nation states, for example. Finally, on the economic issues, Asian growth was not based on ‘pure’ free market capitalism, but those countries which grew and are growing now were and are the ones which make more market oriented than the other countries, and more market oriented than they had been in their own history. It is those countries which could grown economically, raising living standards for all, and generating the income to pay for education, public services and social protection.

There is no Confucian Asian model. The Confucian ‘model’ is itself open to interpretation and Confucianism has been open to a great variety of interpretations over its many centuries of history. Even just China mixes Confucianism with Daoism, and a very strong and old Buddhist influence, to which we can now add Christianity and an old Muslim influence in some regions. Even in just East Asia, we have Shintoism. Islam, Buddhism, and Christianity deeply embedded in many people. Extend to Southern Asia and we have a Hindu tradition which also influences south east Asia.

The last gasp of the ‘Asian Values’ model would be to refer to more traditional communal family based pietistic cultures, but all these are strongly present in European history and have only been recently displaced from the centre, and have not yet completely disappeared.

East Asian countries that have adopted democracy since the ‘80s, after periods of authoritarian government

Indonesia

Population 230 million. 4th most populous country in the world. World’s most populous Muslim country

Philippines

Population 92 million. 12th most populous country in the world. Predominantly Catholic in religion.

Republic of Korea (South Korea). Population 50 million. 24th most populous country in the world. Strong Confucian heritage, nearly half the population are Buddhist or Christian

Malaysia. Population 28 million. 43rd most populous country in the world. Mostly Muslim country with significant numbers of Buddhists, Christians and Hindus. A small Confucian minority. Constant rule by one party (in fact a party alliance) and a lively opposition which governs many states in the federal system.

Taiwan (Republic of China). Population 23 million. 50th most populous country in the world. Strong Confucian heritage, but also strong influence of Buddhism, Taoism and Christianity.

The distinct case of Japan

A liberal democracy since World War Two, though one party has been in power most of that time. Population 127 million, 10th most populous country in the world. Strongly influenced by Confucianism, but mostly Buddhist and Shinto in religion.

More marginal cases

Thailand. Recent military government, but still a multi-party democracy. Population 63 million. 21st most populous country in the world. Mostly Buddhist in religion, with a Muslim minority.

Cambodia. Not a mature liberal-democracy, still run by those parts of the Khmer Rouge who broke with Pol Pot, but a lot more democratic than under Pol Pot. Population 14 million. Mostly Buddhist in religion.

Southern Asia:

India. Rising economic power. Liberal democracy, with a lot of bad spots, but a functioning liberal democracy since independence in 1948. Population 1 billion 177 million. World’s 2nd most populous country. Mostly Hindu in religion, but with the world’s second largest Muslim population.

More marginal.

No details here, but Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Nepal all have claims to be functioning liberal democracies with various ups and downs in recent history, not perfect liberal democracies but liberal democracy keeps persisting and coming back.

Original version of post at Barry Stocker's Weblog

Kierkegaaard's Ambiguous Virtue Ethics

2010-03-01T01:29:00.002+02:00

Kierkegaard is sometimes understood to be a virtue ethics theorist, that is he has a view of ethics derived from Aristotle’s discussion of excellence, habits and reflection in relation to action in a community. This is a view of ethics which emphasises the learning of correct habits in a well balanced personality that interacts with others successfully. This understanding generally refers to the two very long letters of William to an unnamed Young Man which make up most of Either/Or II.

Kierkegaard himself is not, however, expressing himself through William, and he makes that very clear in the very last section of Concluding Unscientific Postscript a few years later. It should be clear enough that Kierkegaard sets up the religious perspective in the sermon that forms the very final section of Either/Or as distinct from William’s point of view. William attaches the sermon to his second letter but simply does not get that his ethics does not encompass religion at its deepest. There are a number of hints that William is a complacent character of limited understanding at abstract and common sense levels, within his letters, and in Victor Eremita’s Preface to Either/Or. There are plenty of reasons to see the aesthetic fragments of Either/Or I as encompassing insights necessary to the religious lacking in a purely ethical perspetive.

Nevertheless, the people who have seen Kierkegaard as William and as endorsing his version of virtue ethics are not just being obtuse. Kierkegaard us trying to draw his readers into a complete immersion in every perspective he explores, there is no blame in doing so. We need to see what happens when philosophers take up one voice in Kierkegaard’s text as the voice of Kierkegaard.

Even taking William as the Voice, we can see some ambiguity in what he says. He takes ethics to be what emerges from a commitment to repetition over time (not in the deepest sense of repetition for Kierkegaard, but that issue will have to wait for another time), including the commitment to marriage, in which he claims that the fist moments of love are preserved in marriage. He recognises possible contradiction of the preservation of the moment over time, but assumes its resolution. His view of life, and therefore his view of ethics, has referred to a contradiction he cannot confront. As far as virtue theory is concerned, on Kierkgaard’s account it looks like it is troubled by an unresolved tension between the moment of experience and enduring experience, habit.

William’s account is not theoretical, but does implicitly refer to views of ethics which resemble Kant, Aristotle, and Hegel. Following on from the last point, Kierkegaard is implying that Hegel does not resolve the contradictions he claims to have, he has only covered over them. We can see Hegel as attempting to resolve Aristotelian ethics with Kantian ethics, and that makes a good frame for thinking about William’s letters. In that context, we can think about Fear and Trembling where Kierkegaard suggests that ethics can be seen both as Kantian universal abstraction and Aristotelian virtue, with a very social content.

The above suggests that Kierkegaard regards virtue theory as caught between contradiction between the moment and habit (the contradiction between the aesthetic and the ethical) and the contradiction between habits and the abstraction of the rules governing those habits (virtue theory and Kantian universality).

Original version of this post at Barry Stocker's Weblog

Kierkegaaard's Ambiguous Virtue Ethics

2010-03-01T01:29:00.000+02:00

Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, Paradox

2010-02-27T23:15:00.000+02:00

I haven’t been blogging for months. One reason is that I’ve been writing a paper about the philosophy of paradox in Søren Kierkegaard and Ludwig Wittgenstein. It looks like it will be published later this year in a collection on Wittgenstein.

I just looked at Wittgenstein’s first book. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, but a few books on Kierkegaarrd’s side since it is difficult to isolate his writings from each other. I quoted from ‘Johannes Climacus’, Fear and Trembling, Philosophical Fragments, and Concluding Unscientific Postscript. Similarities between Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein suggest influence of Kierkegaard on Wittgenstein. It is well established that Wittgenstein was an enthusiastic reader of Kierkegaard, but I did not look at how that works. I simply looked at connections of ideas between Kirkegaard’s writing concerned with literature, aesthetics, ethics, psychology, and religion in comparison with Wittgenstein’s thoughts on logical philosophy.

The major points I made include:

Kierkegaard is concerned with three stages of thought tied up with life

Aesthetic (experience of the isolated moment)

Ethical (experience of universal rules over time)

Religious (experience of the self as an absolute self over time)

The three stages are all concerned with paradoxes of thought, the way that contradictions are generated from within a point of view.

The aesthetic life is faced with the contradiction between momentary experience and experience over time

The ethical life is faced with the contradiction between the self which follows rules and the self which has agency, the decision making capacity, that can follow or not follow rules. This opens up the problem of why any individual would choose to follow rules.

The religious life is faced with the contradiction between the contingent self of the moment and the self that is absolute over time. That contradiction is also an affirmation of unity which extends to the contradiction and unity of the passing moment and eternity, and other paradoxes.

These paradoxes in Kierkegaard are compared with the the paradoxes Wittgenstein faces in the Tractatus, I look at those in the transitions between the 7 basic propositions on the Tractatus, which are joined by sub-propositions. For example, the transition from seeing the world as a whole to a world of distinct states of affairs. The reframing of propositions as they are shown to lead to contradiction establishes a structure which has parallels with Kierkegaard’s arguments.

The connection around the issue of paradox becomes particularly clear towards the end of the Tractatus as Wittgenstein refers to the world as a whole and the status of philosophy. I make some distinctions between Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein here, suggesting that there is an element of mystic quietism in Wittgenstein, in contrast with Kierkegaard’s embedding of paradoxes of thought in life.

Both Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein are deeply concerned with the paradoxes that come from trying to represent experience as whole, represent the world as a whole, represent representation itself. If we try to think about the limits of thought, we are trying to think about what cannot be thought.

Free Market Libertarians and Left Egalitarians Agree on Third World Poor

2010-02-27T22:50:00.003+02:00

Some links on how egalitarian left moral and political philosophers concerned with Third World poverty and under development can find themselves in agreement with free market libertarians.

Peter Singer, a leading moral philosopher committed to strong egalitarianism, in conversation with Bill Easterly at bloggingheads.tv.

Easterly is a passionate advocate of Third World development and a passionate critic of state and celebrity based aid politics. A Professor of Economics at NYU, who runs the blog AIDWATCH: just asking that aid benefit the poor.

Singer and Easterly agree on the following points: the moral obligation of individuals to help the poor, the wasteful of many aid organisations and the importance of getting information about organisations before donating (details of useful websites given), wastefulness of state aid when as often happens it is designed to help a constituency in domestic politics rather than the Third World poor.

Also listen to Thomas Pogge being interviewed by Alan Saunders, or read the transcript at ABC’s The Philosopher’s Zone, ‘The Right to Property and the Right to Health’.

Pogge has a very different philosophical foundation from that of Singer. Singer is a Utilitarian, Pogge is a follower of Rawlsian reasoning from first principles about justice. Like Singer, he is deeply concerned with equality between nations as well as within nations. Though definitely not an advocate of libertarian (i.e. free market individualistic limited government liberalism), Pogge points out that there is an mportant areas of agreement between egalitarians and libertarians, on issues concerning the Third World poor:

Property rights and patent laws.

Patent laws which prevent all physical production of objects which are covered in very broad interpretations of intellectual property conflicts with basic property rights which have at their centre ownership and control of physical possessions. The importance for the Third World here is that patent laws make it extremely difficult for Third World pharmaceutical producers to manufacture medicine which has any resemblance, however accidental, or secondary, with already patented medical product. The same issue applies to developing new seed strain.

As Pogge points out this only applies to the position that some libertarians take on property rights, but he is certainly right to point out that there is a form of free market libertarianism which opposes broad and strict intellectual property rights. This often comes up in discussion software and computerised products. Two ‘libertarian’ points come up: it stifles innovation and interferes with property rights if companies can prevent others from incorporating existing knowledge into new products; innovation is an interactive discovery process involving many people and this should not be covered over by IP laws which presume that one person or company is solely responsible for innovation. On this version of libertarianism, complete reproduction of someone else’s product is wrong but no use of knowledge incorporated into that product.

Primary version of this blog, Barry Stocker's Weblog.

Foucault, Virtue, Second Nature, Scepticism

2009-12-21T22:07:00.000+02:00

John McDowell suggests that Aristotle’s ethics are a forerunner of second nature in German Idealism, the nature that comes from social existence( Mind and World, Lecture IV, which should be compared with Part I of Mind, Value, and Reality). There is some parallel with what Foucault argues in relation to a style which is not defined by nature, which is not in conformity with every other aspect of the subject’s life. Foucault goes a step further than McDowell in suggesting that the second nature fragments between different styles, and a step further again in arguing the individual second nature self fragments between different parts of existence. There is no unified style for humans and not even a unified style for the individual. There are differences in virtues between individuals and differences between different aspects of the life of an individual. If we think about the famous discussions about the unity of the virtues in Plato, Meno, Euthrypo and so on, we should not take Foucault as a simply reversing Plato’s elevation of the one over the many. In Plato’s account, that would still mean a distinct virtue for every type of individual. There is no such stable list of virtues for individuals or even situations in Foucault; there is always self-invention and choice.

Foucault’s arguments should not be taken as just the affirmation of indeterminacy of choice. There is a point of reference for choice, and that is the truth of the inner agon. The truth is not a pre-given virtue, or character, it is a more living changeable thing. That does not deny any naturalistic, or psychological, discussion of the origins of character, we could put all of this in the strongest neo-Humean naturalistic-psychological deterministic terms. If we do that, we still need to describe what is happening in the style of the self, we would still need to respect the difference between internal causation and external physical compulsion, as Hobbes and Hume did. Not that an argument is being offered here for such strong determinism (the author is inclined towards indeterminist argument for free will), but the question of whether we prefer strong determinism over all the positions allowing some role for freedom of will is not what is at stake here. In naturalistic terms, the styles of the self are the outcome of different natures in different selves, including natures which are changeable. The real issue here is that even if second nature is the deterministic outcome of first nature, that nature still divides between different possibilities in different agents and different possibilities within those agents. There is something exemplary about the agent who contains possibilities and moves between them. That would be the highest virtue, the nearest thing to a cardinal or unifying virtue. That highest virtue would also contain self-mastery in the existence of a sovereign self which creates its own styles of existence. A self which speaks freely from its inner agonistic truth. There are some traces of the right to make promises and the creation of a sovereign agent that Nietzsche deals with in Genealogy of Morality II; as with Nietzsche there is the ambivalence about whether we are offered an ethical ideal or the over socialised product of historical-cultural violence. In Foucault’s case, we should not forget that care of the self ends with Augustinian asceticism.

What Foucault offers is an ethic of inner struggle and social contestation, which tends to come up in the political context explaining why it has not been dealt with here. An ethic of the plurality of life styles, between and within individuals. An ethic of natural humanity opening up every possible way of life in the nature of the social. Foucault’s analysis of the ‘classical age’ (the early modern era) suggests that every possibility has to be realised, as can be seen in Leibniz’ concern with compossibility or de Sade’s wish to enact every desire (The Order of Things). Some of that spirit can be found in Foucault’s ethics, though not in sense of the absolute mastery possessed by God or nature, in the time of the Classical Age.

One thing that Foucault may have omitted from his account of ancient care of the self is the sceptical tradition in the New Academy and the Pyrrhonists through Aenesidemus to Sextus Empiricus. This has its own concern with the care of the self, in seeking a balance between conflicting beliefs. The conflicting sides should both be treated with scepticism, releasing the self from their conflict and from one sided ways of thinking and living. Foucault has often been awarded the label of sceptic or relativist, but does not pick up on the Ancient arguments, in the Sophists, the New Academy, or the Pyrrhonists. Kierkegaard and Nietzsche both gave respect to Ancient scepticism above Cartesian scepticism on the grounds that the ancient sceptics lived out their scepticism, it was a philosophy of life. There could be a productive approach to Foucault in working through the relevance of the antique sceptics, together with Kierkegaard and Nietzsche.

Agonism and Virtue in Foucault’s Ethics

2009-12-21T00:22:00.001+02:00

I’m looking at Foucault’s work on antique ethics in History of Sexuality, as an agonistic virtue ethics. It is virtue ethics, because it is an ethics of flourishing, in which human excellence is taken as the source of value. It is agonistic, because Foucault himself uses that word to refer to the role of struggle within the self, to command oneself. That struggle is also a struggle with others to have the right to command in a state, but that kind of agonism is only considered in passing, as a political struggle. There is an ethics of egalitarianism in Foucault, which emerges from his consideration of erotic pleasure and the ways that antique thought places erotic pleasure within a care of the self. That care of the self emerges in Plato and is deeply ambivalent. In one part it leads to Christian asceticism, in another part it leads to a sense that pleasure is good but must be regulated from the point of view of reason and health. The kind of virtue ethics in Foucault is also agonistic because it is pluralistic. It is more pluralistic than Swanton’ pluralistic view of virtue ethics. Foucault does does not root virtue in a single human nature, he regards care for self as best expressed in an aesthetics of life, a style of existence which is invented by the individual and is more than what universal categories suggest.

Foucault’s turn to overtly ethical writing in his last years offers a distinct form of virtue ethics. This does not emerge abruptly in his later writings, it is rooted in the earlier fascination with the plurality of forms of knowledge and power. Christine Swanton wrote on a pluralistic view of virtue ethics (Virtue Ethics: A Pluralistic View, 2005), and brought in Nietzsche. However, that approach cannot properly capture what is in Nietzsche or Foucault. It is just Foucault who is considered her, the discussion of Nietzsche will take place elsewhere, but it is appropriate to acknowledge here that Nietzsche is both part of the background to Foucault and a different case to Foucault. What Foucault offers is something very distinct for virtue ethics, and the discussion of this contribution has hardly begun yet.

The idea of agon, of struggle, is fundamental to Foucault’s ethics and to his politics. His two most obvious predecessors on this issue are Nietzsche and Machiavelli. Unfortunately he is inclined to take Machiavelli as ‘Machiavellian’ in the familiar sense. He does not seem to notice Machiavelli the Republican idealist behind the cynical rhetoric of The Prince; and Machiavelli the admirer of conflict within a political community, as a strengthening of republican self-government. Foucault does not say a great deal directly about Nietzsche, and does not need to since the connection is well known. His account of ethics and politics in his texts on the Ancient world (History of Sexuality Volumes II & III, Hermeneutics of the Subject, The Government of Self and Others, Fearless Speech), can be taken as formed partly through an implicit transformation of Nietzsche’s view of the master-slave relation in antiquity, as established in the Genealogy of Morality.

The political aspects of Foucault’s writings on antiquity, including his ways of understanding of republican thought is a matter for another place. What is developed here is an approach to the explicit discussion of ethics in Foucault’s thought about antiquity, and the ethical implications of his discussion. In Foucault’s account we can see traces of Nietzsche’s evaluation of master morality as more affirmative than slave morality, but what Foucault is looking at is not Homeric heroes versus Christian saints. It is the ambiguous development of ethical, political, medical and erotic thought from the Athens of Socrates and Aeschylus to the Rome of Augustine. The ambiguity can be found within Plato, which is something that Nietzsche had already implied. Foucault does not use the language of mastery and slave, but amongst other things he refers to self-government and the government of other. The external relation of master and slave is thought of as entwined with an internal relation of self-mastery, again something that can already be found in Nietzsche. The self-mastery is entwined both with government of others and a refusal of government. The Nietzschean elements are certainly not to be taken as a revelation of what Nietzsche really meant, or as a revelation of what he should have said, though Foucault’s implicit use of Nietzsche can certainly be taken as relevant to those questions about Nietzsche.

Here the focus is on ethics in the narrowest possible sense. Foucault does not approach ethics in an isolated way, that is not the way he writes. He is always concerned with a historical phenomenology, or history of discourses, in which political and ethical ideas, along with methodological and epistemological positions emerge rather than appear in fully articulated form; though there are times when he is relatively explicit. Even in the latter cases, the approach is to show rather than say, where discourse has a phenomenological aspect.

That’s a summary of some of what is distinctive in Foucault’s approach. In a less Foucauldian style, there is the question of where Foucault belongs in broad categories of ethical theorising. It’s not the kind of question Foucault asked, but it is the kind of question that needs to be asked about Foucault. As has been noted by Neil Levy

(Levy 2004), but by remarkably few commentators as a whole, Foucault belongs in virtue theory. That is he is concerned with the cultivation of the kind of self which is ethically desirable, rather than with consequences of actions and rules, or the following of rules, or the grasp of moral intuitions. Virtue theory is something largely defined with regard to the antique authors Foucault is discussing: Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics. His approach has some distance, but accepts essential aspects of virtue theory. In a general definition, Foucault belongs to virtue ethics in the same way that Nietzsche does, as noted by Christine Swanton for example. There are ways in which Nietzsche deviates from antique virtue ethics, and so does Foucault. Nietzsche’s deviation can be explored elsewhere, though it does provide a precedent for the agonism in Foucault’s virtue theory.

Foucault: Genealogy, Hermeneutics, Ethics, Sexuality

2009-12-17T01:40:00.000+02:00

Looking at History of Sexuality II (The Use of Pleasure) and III (The Care of the Self), as I have been over the last few weeks, I need to modify something I posted on 10th December about Foucault’s use of the term ‘hermeneutic’. I said that it is not really correct to label the ’82 to ’83 lectures at the Collège de France, as ‘hermeneutics of the subject, because those lectures deal with the Ancient world, its ethics and sexuality, as does History of Sexuality II & III. The hermeneutics of the self properly speaking belongs to the 19th Century and belongs to the movement from a medicalised-moralised account of sexuality in ‘deviant’ forms to psychoanalysis.

I’m not abandoning that suggestion, but it is also true that in the discussion of the Ancients, Foucault does occasionally refer to hermeneutics, along with ‘subjectivisation’. Both are associated with post-Enlightenment conceptions, but seem to be emerging in the Ancient world, particularly in association with Neo-Stoicism and the Roman Empire. That brings up questions about how Foucault uses ‘hermeneutics’ and ‘subjectivisation’ which I am not ready to address right now, but which I need to at some point.

The ambiguity in the use of the term ‘hermeneutic’ comes from the way that Enpire-Neo-Stoicism are the time of moralised medicalised attitudes to sexuality, foreshadowing the 19th century. At the same time, that era is the time of care of the self, a style of the self which are largely positive terms of Foucault. Though the Empire-Neo Stoicism puts an emphasis on observing monogamy that does not enthuse Foucault, he is positive with regard to an attitude of equality and mutual obligation. This can be traced back to Aristotle as style and care in relation to the self can be traced back to Plato. Ambiguities about distinct periods, what we have is repetition with difference. There may be an attempt to avoid teleology here, but there is teleology inevitably. Foucault cannot avoid a forward looking narrative, but he does disrupt it. This could be part of what he means by genealogy. Of course I could refer to some other Foucault texts on this, but I have not been looking at them recently, and I prefer to leave this post as it is, a reaction at one moment.

Questions remain to be addressed on what genealogy is and what hermeneutics is in Foucault, along with archaeology, the term he put at the centre in the late 60s in Archaeology of Knowledge and Order of Things, and which is still briefly invoked in History of Sexuality.

Me on Mises’ Liberalism at LiberalVision and some supplementary comments

2009-12-12T02:57:00.000+02:00

Click here to see my introduction to Ludwig von Mises and summary of Liberalism.

The account of Mises largely avoids what I find most dubious in Mises, apart from a suggestion that he is too harsh on John Stuart Mill’s contribution to liberalism by emphasising his leanings towards socialism over time. As far as I am concerned, Mises makes mistakes just as big. I certainly think anyone with an interest in classical liberal and libertarian ideas should read Mises.

I have not read as much as I need to so far, I would like to tackle his masterpiece on economics, Human Action. It’s rather large and I feel I should accompany with some other reading in the less mathematical parts of economics, which is where Human Action belongs. John Maynard Keynes’ The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money is an obvious point of comparison. Also given that Mises sees sociology and economics belonging together, and quite rightly I believe, I would like to also make a contextual reading of Max Weber’s Economy and Society. Weber and Mises had good personal relations, and there is certainly some interesting looking material around comparing them. However, these three texts individually are all big reading challenges; reading them together is clearly an extreme challenge, and it is very difficult to read so much material in a focused continuous way excluding other research projects.

Returning to Liberalism, some concerns I have which I did not bring up in the LberalVision piece, for reasons of space and because I want to get people who visit that site to read Mises for themselves and make up their own mind. My own blog has different more self-involved purposes than my LV contributions. However, since someone left a comment about how Mises was better than Mill, I did leave a comment about Mises supporting Italian Fascism in the book. Mises argues that Italian Fascism saved civilisation without going into much detail. What I presume he means is that Mussolini’s regime was better than a Communist regime, and that in 1922 when the Fascists first came to power, there was a real chance of a Communist Party take over. Mises was certainly right to argue that the Fascism of 20s Italy was a more mild kind of authoritarianism than the USSR at that time. Nevertheless I find his position perverse. The greatest risk of Bolshevik style revolution in Europe outside Russia was in 1920. The 1922 entry of the Fascists into government with strong support from parts of the traditional elites was certainly partly a result of the destabilisation of liberal democracy by the 1920 turmoil, but the issue was collapse of faith in liberal democracy not an imminent danger of Red terror.

In general Mises had an alarming tendency to support conservative authoritarianism, as can be seen in his close association with Engelbert Dolfuss who abolished parliamentary democracy in Austria.

‘Before Dollfuss was murdered for his politics, Mises was one of his closest advisers.’

as Hans-Hermann Hoppe wrote for the Mises Institute in 1997.

Hoppe mentions Dollfuss as an opponent of Naziism and omits reference to his destruction of parliamentary democracy and all political opposition in a country which been a democratic republic since 1919. Hoppe represents a side of ‘libertarianism’ I don’t care for at all, an Anarcho-Conservative who prefers monarchy (and it would seem other forms of conservative dictatorship) to democracy. I should emphasise some more liberal democratically minded people who follow Misian economics, Peter Boettke and Peter Leeson, two economic commentators who are very interesting for non-economists, and I strong recommend them. Still there is a side of Mises which leads to Hoppe.

It is certainly to Mises’ credit that he supports equality between the races, open immigration (unlike Hoppe), liberal democracy in politics (unlike Hoppe), and an end to colonialism in Liberalism. Even so, there is quite a lot of chauvinism, mostly directed at Russia. Bolshevism is apparently a consequence of barbarism in Russia, a barbarism lacking in central and western Europe, apparently. Though in that case, one might think it odd that such countries need Mussolini (Mises published Liberalism in 1927, so we’ll put aside events of the 1930s). According to Mises, the great Russian literary figures who preceded Bolshevism were part of this savagery, and were ‘neurotics’ . Mises believed that anyone who was a socialist of any kind was a neurotic, which does not strike me as a high level of argument. And I hardly think that all pre-1917 Russian writers can be dismissed in this way. It’s of course very sad that the two greatest, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky were not advocates of liberalism, but to dismiss them as agents of savagery is itself uncultured and unintelligent. There is much to learn about the depth and value of the individual from reading them, something any liberal should appreciate. In any case, at least one great literary figure from that time in Russia had liberal sympathies, Ivan Turgenev.

Mises, someone who is a highly important part of the continuation of the original liberal tradition after what he quite rightly describes as the tendency for liberals to become moderate socialists, an original thinker in economics, and a man of great moral courage; but also highly flawed with regard to reasoned argument, consistency of liberal democratic principles, and nationalistic stereotyping.

Style, Hermeneutics, Speech; Ethics & Politics in Foucault

2009-12-10T02:06:00.000+02:00

Some intermediate thoughts on working I’m doing on ethics and politics in Foucault.

First.

Something really obvious struck me earlier today, which is that The Hermeneutics of the Subjects , the book based on the lectures Foucault gave at the Collège de France in the academic session of 1981-82 (edited after Foucault’s death) is misnamed. It’s a book about what precedes the ‘hermeneutics of the self’, the ‘subject of sexuality’ which we are used to in the modern world. As Foucault says in History of Sexuality:

Putting it schematically, we could say that classical antiquity’s moral reflection concerning the pleasures was not directed toward a codification of acts, nor towards a hermeneutics of the subject, but towards a stylization of attitudes, and an aesthetics of existence.

The History of Sexuality II The Use of Pleasure (92)

On pourrait dire schématiquement que la réflexion morale de l’Antiquité à propos des plaisirs ne s’oriente ni vers une codification des actes ni vers une hérmeneutique du sujet, mais vers une stylisation de l’attitude et une estétique de l’existence.

Histoires de la sexualité II L’usage des plaisirs (125)

In some ways Foucault is advocating a return to the morality of style and aesthetics.

Two mistakes should definitely be avoided here: that Foucault is advocating a nostalgic recreation; that Foucault s obliterating ethics in an aesthetics or stylisation without moral aspects. So

No recreation of ancient society

No stylisation or aesthetics without moral aspects.

There is ‘emergent’ morality as there is in Aristotle’s accounts of ‘action’, ‘habit’ and ‘virtue’/’excellence’. There is not categorial shift from aesthetic to ethical, and ethical to political.

Foucault uses the idea of style against hermeneutics, so that we can learn from the liberty of the Ancients in thinking about the liberty of the moderns. Anyone familiar with liberal thought from the 1740s to the 1790s (Montesquieu, Smith, Constant, Humboldt) might think I am making reference here to the ways that for a few decades these thinkers wrote about ancient republican liberty and modern individualistic liberty, and they would be right That is something I will have to deal with more fully on another occasion, however. But I think that is a useful clue about how the return to the Ancient in Foucault is not a desire for recreation.

In his texts on antiquity, Foucault is concerned with three processes which emerge simultaneously: moralisation of sexuality, the care of the self (tied up with knowledge of the self), the emergence of ‘free speaking’ (parrhesia). The free speaking emerges in tension with speech as rhetoric, in a rather Socratic-Platonic triumph of truth over power, but also a rather anti-Platonist general disruption of language and categories. Foucault partly explains this as the disruption of the ‘performative’ (J.L. Austin referrred to the way in a linguistic act can be an act with consequences in the non-linguistic sphere, with this term) ‘Free speaking’ is the speech that is not defined by predictable consequences, that opens up to chance and defies necessity.

Second.

How does Foucault separate the ethical and the political in these categories? There is a way in which that is the wrong question, a bad question. The ethical and the political and entwined in Foucault’s discussion. ‘Free speaking’ and ‘care of the self’ both refer to ethical and political realms, through the issues of what kind of self-relation is good for the individual and good for the individual’s place in politics.

There is also a way in which we have to make the distinction. There must be some way in which Foucault makes some distinction, however provisional and variable, between individual life and life in politics. It is his account of pleasure which is most ethical in the sense that it is concerned with individual life, which is of course modified by communal customs, norms and laws. The care of the self has a strong element of preparing the self for political power, and free speaking enters strongly into politics. Free speaking also enters into the individual/religious realm of tragedy (particularly Oedipus Basileos and Ion), but then that is a very political form in Ancient Athens.

Not wishing to make an absolute distinction at all, but I think that pleasure, and the questions of the aesthetic and style are the most ethical rather than political aspects of Foucault’s discussion. These feed into care of the self and free-speaking, and there is feedback. Something similar applies to Plato and Aristotle.

What I am trying to do at present is focus the ethical and the political in Foucault in that way, with all due regard to the way in which they feed into each other, interweave, and influence each other.

Me on Montesquieu at LiberalVision

2009-12-04T20:13:00.000+02:00

My summary of The Spirit of the Laws (1748), by Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu (1689-1748). Liberal Vision, 3rd December.

Main points:

The impossible ideal of democratic republicanism based on equality of poverty and law which comes from custom, and is obeyed without coercion.

The possible ideal of a republicanism which may influence modern monarchies or be present in confederations of city-states.

The role of commerce and trade in this kind of realistic liberty, which brings different peoples into peaceful communication.

The principle of honour in monarchy, which incorporates the ideas of a harmonious competitive individualism with regard to wealth and status, fusing aristocratic and bourgeois competition.

Any state should be a moderate state limited by law.

Law should apply punishments in the mildest way possible, as harsh punishments are intrinsically undesirable and are part of despotism.

The value of a division between government and legislation, and decentralisation of government.

Enlightenment values present throughout, including opposition to slavery and oppression of minorities.

A social-historical method unifying the study of geography, history, law and political institutions.

Academic Peer Review: the Reality Exposed

2009-12-01T20:55:00.000+02:00

Another Downfall parody on YouTube, but a great one. Hitler has to deal with a third reviewer of the paper he submitted to an academic journal, and goes nuts in the bunker.

Hat tip, Michael Munger’s Kids Prefer Cheese blog.

Go there now, a great blog for politics, economics and humour, I check in everyday.

No Democratic Perfection in the Birth of the USA

2009-12-01T19:59:00.001+02:00

‘A Constitutional Counterfactual’, FreedomDemocrats, 1st December, 2009.
I’ve linked with this item from the FreedomDemocrats, a free market libertarian group within the US Democratic Party, because though it does not mention the Lisbon Treaty which amends the core treaties of the European Union, it is very relevant. I’ve got quite a lot of detailed argument coming, so here is the big point up front. The United States was founded through a process which makes the process of ratifying European Union treaties look like text book democratic fastidiousness, despite which the right-leaning element amongst opponents of European integration, which is the dominant element in the UK, tend to be hyper-enthusiasts for the United States as an example of liberty, constitutionalism and limited governments (things I’m rather supportive of myself). That would be a model of federalism, instituted through considerably less fastidious means than those used by the EU political elite.

In addition it should be noted that the United States fought a Civil War to prevent the secession of the Confederate (southern) States of America. I am sure a few Confederate enthusiasts can be found amongst the Eurosceptics, but not many. No one can deny that the American Union was created by abrogating the Articles of Confederation in favour of the more centralising Constitution of the United State of America; and no can deny that this federal Union was re-founded, and strengthened by President Lincoln and the Republican Party of the time, in the blood and iron of a war fought to coerce the Confederacy to stay in the Union.

The methods employed in that war included a deliberate policy of the destruction of the property of southern whites, suspension of habeas corpus in the Union, and covertly sanctioned illegal violence against the anti-war press. One could argue about how much of this was justifiable, but I would say the price was worth paying to the recreate the Union as a unified democracy freed of slavery, showing as Lincoln argued in the Gettysburg address that the government by the people, of the people, for the people, could succeed and endure. That’s not an unusual argument, and its one shared by most Eurosceptics as well as Euro-federalists who give any thought to American history.

What is the ‘Eurosceptic ‘ criticism of the Lisbon Treaty? In part, that it is the rape of democracy, because only one country held a referendum to ratify it, Ireland, and that country held the referendum a second time, after a no vote on the first occasion. In the language of the Eurosceptics, this was like a rapist who never accepts ‘no’ for an answer from a woman, and a form of totalitarian oppression equivalent to that prevailed in the USSR and its satellite states. I’m not making this up, or exaggerating, this is the standard discourse. Rapists do not request a second answer which might be the same as the first, they use violence. Totalitarian regimes do not hold a referendum a second time, they rig elections in the first place through falsifying results in an atmosphere of terror against opposition.

Even if we take the Eurosceptic language in its (rather rare) calmer moments, it makes accusations of lack of democracy which cannot be sustained. It is the Eurofederalists who are arguing for more direct accountability of EU institutions to a European electorate, through increasing the power of the Parliament, and maybe considering a directly elected head, and certainly a head selected through an open and competitive process in the Parliament. The Eurosceptics oppose such ideas, fiercely, so reducing the EU more and more to a venue for intrinsically unaccountable diplomatic manoeuvres between states lacking a common democratic decision making body.

The second vote in Ireland was held in the context of assurances from the European Union and the Irish government that the claims made by treaty opponents about restricting Irish sovereignty, particularly with regard to military neutrality and the constitutional ban on abortion. were not at all true. No one of any honesty and integrity whatsoever can deny the truth of those assurances and the misguided nature of contrary claims made by anti-Treaty campaigners. Of course politics is a rough nasty business, and everyone tells lies, directly or implicitly. Nevertheless, those who directly use obvious lies, or at least rely on their widespread circulation, cannot reasonably complain when a referendum is held a second time, to test whether the electorate will still vote No after some of the more blatant lies have been countered by official assurances, based on clear law. The Irish people were very free to say no a second time, they did not. The Irish government was very free to block the Treaty of Lisbon, it did not. The Treaty was ratified in other countries through votes in freely elected parliaments in 27 of the world’s more solid democracies. Each of these 27 parliaments was very free to derail the Treaty, none did.

All of these countries have experienced moments of change in national political and constitutional arrangements without a referendum, no one denies that these countries are democratic. Of course a referendum can be appropriate in deciding on constitutional issues, but most established democracies in the world allow constitutional change without referendums. A referendum is a tool of democracy, not the only aspect of democracy; and while a few Eurosceptics may be advocates of government by direct democracy, most are not, and no one has tried to argue that established democracies are not democracies, because at least part of their constitutional development took place without legitimation through referendum.

It must also be noted that while the Eurosceptics shriek about undemocratic repression, the Lisbon Treaty increases the power of the European Parliament in relation to the non-elected decision making elements of the European Union (Council of Ministers and the Commission). That would be the kind of ‘totalitarianism’ that keeps transferring more and more powers to freely elected, multi-party bodies then. A variety I had previously overlooked, and which Hannah Arendt, Albert Camus, and George Orwell carelessly ignored.

So back to the FreedomDemocrats. Like many of the UK Eurosceptics, the FreedomDemocrats identify themselves as libertarians of a kind who advocate free markets. There are other Eurosceptics, but the dominant tendency, such as the United Kingdom Independence Party and Daniel Hannan, a well known Conservative Member of the European Parliament (!), the current Big Man in Conservative Eurosceptic circles. UKIP Libertarianism is the kind which favours reducing immigration, that would be the kind of libertarianism that reduces individual liberties to cross borders freely. I would like to say that this kind of nonsense is unusual, but unfortunately it is all too normal for militant social conservatives to adopt the ‘libertarian’ label to mean freedom to be oppose rights for people they don’t like. The point of the item I’ve linked to, is that the (federal)Constitution of the United States of America was adopted without a popular vote, and that it is clear that a popular vote would have failed. The only consultative vote that would have had any chance of succeeding would have been one restricted to the biggest property owners. The FreedomDemocats like the idea of a history in which the Constitution was not ratified, which they think would have meant a number of regional confederacies lacking the power to violently expropriate Native Americans or create a militaristic interventionist superpower.

That brings up the whole question of the ‘libertarian’ (in the sense of individualist property owning and limited government principles) basis of the United States Constitution. The idea that the Constitution is either a perfect libertarian document, or at least that the adoption of the Constitution was the nearest the United States has ever come to libertarian perfection and that is has been in constant decline since some later point at which it apparently started to move away from the Constitution, is rather prevalent amongst US libertarians, though particularly those who could best be described as conservative-libertarian fusionist, and who tend to think conservative and libertarian mean the same thing.

The FreedomDemocrats in this item, and others posted on their website, correctly insist that the US Constitution was designed by large property owners who wished to use political power to preserve an existing pattern of property distribution, including ownership of slaves, and the freedom to increase property by violating the rights of Native Americans, along with various trade, tax and monetary rules designed to give their property a privileged status. The FreedomDemocrats lean towards minarchism (a state that does nothing but uphold the right to life and property rights in a purely neutral way), and even outright anarchism. I cannot go along with them on that, partly because I think what they say in a critical way about the US Constitution is really inevitable, in some form, to stabilise and legitimise the state body that is necessary to uphold law. A feasible libertarianism can only try to make the trades of self-interests around the constitution and around state policy, as balanced and as genuinely beneficial to the common good as is possible.

The other tendency in libertarian thought, to make the Constitution a quasi-religious document is just bad for liberty, bad for legal thinking, and bad for critical rational thought, for reasons I cannot explain in this already long post. But returning to the right-wing UK Eurosceptics, they cannot both: commend a US Constitution adopted with no referendum and designed to be very difficult to amend; and condemn the European Union for a process of progressive integration through Treaties, all ratified by representative assemblies elected by popular vote. The Treaties have been ratified by the unanimous agreement of all parliamentary bodies in all member states. It is difficult to reverse these treaties, but that is because the requirement of unanimity goes both ways. It would be good to see easier means of amending treaties, or even rejecting them at a later date. but that would only be possible if the ratification became easier in the first place.

Michel Foucault, Care of the Self, and the Classicists

2009-11-27T04:10:00.001+02:00

I was present at a talk recently from a classicist visiting Istanbul. I don’t want to give details of the talk or the name of the speaker. I have a critical point to make, but I don’t want to appear to be targetting someone who gave a good talk, was very friendly, and as far as I can tell is a classicist of a very high level. The talk tell with Roman Stoicism and very briefly referred to Foucault. I brought up Foucault (amongst other things) in my questions in the discussion after the talk, and the discussion continued.

The point that prompted one of my question was the claim that Foucault’s notion of the ‘care of the self’ is something he associates with two things

Narrow self-interest

The rise of Neo-Stoicism in the early Empire, that is the period of Roman history from 27 BCE when the honorific name Augustus, used by all the subsequent Emperors, was given to Gaius Julius Caesar, more generally known as Octavius (he was born Gaius Octavius Thurinus).

NARROW SELF-INTEREST DEFINITION

Foucault certainly does not think ‘care of the self’ is just a matter of self interest, though it is true that he thinks of ‘care of the self’ reducing to mere concern with privacy in the time of Octavius Augustus. As I have pointed out before Foucault does not define ‘care of the self’ as mere selfishness but as a threefold which include privacy. Privacy on its own is maybe close to just being self-interested in a very narrow way, but Foucault does not go so far as that in his explicit discussion.

As I’ve already pointed out, care of the self has the following three aspects

CARE OF THE SELF

RIGHT TO GOVERN (IN A REPUBLICAN CONTEXT)

SELF-RELATIONSHIP, RELATIONSHIP OF THE SELF WITH ITSELF

PRIVACY

BOTH 2 AND 3 INVOLVE SOME SENSE OF GOING BEYOND THE ISOLATED SELF.

STOICISM OF THE EARLY EMPIRE

On the second point from the Classicist speaker

Foucault clearly situated the emergence of the ‘care of the self’ in Plato’s Socratic dialogues. Plato was alive 429-347 BCE, so he died 320 years, more than three centuries before the beginning of the Augustan era. So there is clearly something wrong with saying that Foucault thought ‘care of the self’ emerged in the early Empire, and that would still be the case if we went back to the Stoic leanings of Cicero who died as the Republic was dying, in 43 BCE.

CLASSICISTS AND FOUCAULT

In the discussion I had with the Classicist, he said that the Classicists had been big fans of Foucault, and then turned against him for being too schematic and inaccurate in his approach to history. It’s peculiar that they turned against him on those grounds, as they were the best situated people to notice those problems in the first place. In general, Foucault is open to those criticisms in relation to everything he wrote. That sort of criticism could miss the point. It’s a good thing to discuss the accuracy of Foucault’s historical details, but overall we have to judge him as someone who develops a series of general theses about different ways in which knowledge and power appear over history in which historical scholarship provides the starting point for necessarily reductive, but powerful and creative generalisations which are subtle and complex in their own terms.

Judging from what the Classicist said about Foucault, and which I have criticised above, the Classicists themselves are inclined to schematic claims about Foucault, lacking accuracy in the detail. What the Classicist said about the Classicist culture gave a reason for this, a tendency to legitimise themselves by adopting thinkers popular with literary theorists but only after the literary people have moved onto a new theorist. I hope the Classicists no longer feel the need to justify themselves in this way, particularly since as far as I can see the literary theory field has not had any major new developments for some years.

Foucault on the Self and Individualism

2009-11-21T02:08:00.000+02:00

A few thoughts inspired by my current reading of The Use of Pleasure and The Care of the Self, volumes II and III of Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality. History of Sexuality is concerned with movements in the knowledge and ethics of the self, with a focus on the erotic.

Foucault defines three aspects of individualism: the value of individuality, private life, the relation of the self with itself. The movement of the argument is to suggest that privacy has been given too much emphasis, and the other two aspects not enough. This overemphasis on privacy is linked with the 19th Century bourgeoisie and with the Rome of Augustus. That is Ancient Rome under its first Emperor Augustus. Foucault puts the well known edicts of Augustus to control sexuality as being about pushing ‘deviant’ sexuality into the private sphere, and links this with the movement in Antique ethics towards the rationalism and asceticism of Stoicism.

What Foucault sees in pre-Augustus antiquity, and even in the careful reading of the Roman and Hellenstic Neo-Stoics (Seneca, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius), is a richness of understanding of the self and care for the self. It is care for the self, which establishes someone as a citizen with political rights, That provides a breach of private/public barrier in a link between self-government and the right to political self-government and the government of others. Evidently Foucault finds the self-government the most interesting aspect.

Within that affirmation of the self as political self, Foucault introduces an important distinction. That is the distinction between following external laws and style of activity. ‘Style of activity’ arises where the individual goes beyond natural order and positive law. It arises in the interpretation of dreams, where the actor in the dream goes beyond the ‘natural’ in sexual activity.

Style of activity is one way in which individuality and the relation of self with itself can be enhanced. The activity of self-creation and presentation is the most liberatory experience. The Antique culture struggles with this, even it most open moments. Ancient Athens tolerated open homosexuality, but gives it a low value because it is seen as an older man as penetrating a younger man of lower status. Homosexuality is low because it means connections with lowness, and the same is true for relations with woman. Virility, sexual capacity, is given value in Ancient culture where it is linked with citizenship. The citizen should govern, and impregnate, a woman who gives him a child. Since the woman has low status with no political rights, sexual relations with her must be disgraceful, undermining the social-moral status given to a man with a woman he governs.

Style of activity seems to be Foucault’s alternative to a degradation of the self in asceticism. The invention of the self as outside the ‘truth’ of nature or the prescription of laws, proves a way of valuing individuality and the relation of the self with itself. This in itself contains further distinctions. Truth is valued where it comes from the self and is not an external imposition. There is a truth of being someone different, of new inventions of selfhood, which expresses some resistance to metaphysical and legal ‘truths’. In this way, Foucault suggest forms of individualism, beyond mere privacy, for the contemporary world.

Spinoza and the Twilight of Stoic Rationalism

2009-11-21T01:19:00.001+02:00

This post is prompted most immediately by teaching, though it also fits in with other things I am contemplating. Spinoza’s Ethics is a continuation of the kind of Stoic virtue theory I referred to in my last post. The Stoics turned the earlier virtue theory in a direction which gave maximum emphasis to the idea of the domination of desires by the will, which was already in Platonic and Aristotelian ethics. It was that understanding which dominated Early Modern ethics, and cultural assumptions about ethics well into the 18th Century, and certainly influenced Kant at the end of the century.

So the influence of Stocism continued well after Spinoza who died in 1677. Nevertheless there was a twilight in which Spinoza looks like the last stand of Neo-Stoic Rationalism. What is emerging, at that time or soon after, will not fit in the Neo-Stoic Rationalist paradigm. The discussion of the origin of moral ideas in the sensations that we find in Hobbes, Locke and Hume does not belong in the older ethics. If we turn away from theoretical philosophical ethics to the broader cultural context, we can think about the Maxims of La Rochefoucauld in the 17th century. They had a power to shock in the 18th century, as can be seen in the reactions of David Hume and Adam Smith, even if they were themselves investigating non-moral psychological sources of morality.

What La Rochefoucal emphasises in his aphorisms is the non-moral, and egocentric, motivations behinds apparently moral actions and phrases. He emphasises the passionate aspect of human nature, its desire for passionate love, and the difficulties of achieving the kind of communication desired by love. He does a lot to set up the concerns and style of French literature from Laclos to Proust. We can go back earlier than that to two literary works where he may have had and influence, and certainly connections with their authors, The Princess de Clèves by Madame de Lafayette and The Letters of Madame de Sévigné. Of course this is an extremely abrupt way of summing of literary history, but it is as good as such an abrupt summary can be, and this is not the place for more complexity.

My point here is the contrast and congruence, between Spiniza’s Rationalist Neo-Stoic ethics and the new emphasis on the labyrinth of the passions in literature and thought. The contrast is between La Rochefoucauld and Spinoza’s denigration of emotions in relation to reason. The congruence is the labyrinth Spiniza himself recognises in which the least bad emotions have to be used against the worst emotions in order to lead individuals towards reason. There is a far far greater sense in Sponoza than in his predecessors of the complexity and interaction of the emotions, and of irrational motives. This also reflects the complex interactions of nature, even on a mechanical model, in Early Modern science and the very noticeable rise of commercial society in the 17th Century Dutch Republic, already producing treatises that anticipate aspects of Smith’s economic treatise.

Laclos’ Dangerous Liaisons and Smith’s An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations compared with Spinoza: Spinoza looks like the last Rationalist Neo-Stoic. An oversimplification, but not a terrible one.

Virtue, Economy and the Self: 5 Links

2009-11-21T00:15:00.000+02:00

My thoughts for this post came about in the most immediate sense from Will Wilkinson: a post at his blog Will Wilkinson, entitled Now Let us Praise Results-Facilitating Virtue, dated 20th November 2009. Wilkinson is an economics and public policy commentator, with a background in philosophy. He is responding to an blog post where the George Mason economist Tyler Cowen praises one of his colleagues, Robin Hanson, who responds in his own blog by arguing for the importance of praising consequences of individual actions, rather than the individual concerned. Links to all of that in Wilkinson’s post. What Wilkinson gives in reaction to all that is a beautiful little essay on character, virtue, and advantages to the economy. As he explains, ‘virtue’ as an idea in ethical though refers to the character traits which the good individual forms and which benefit society. What Wilkinson emphasises is the collective economic benefits of individuals in the society with virtue.

Since for non-philosophers ‘virtue’ amy seem like something to do with abstract moralising, it is worth explaining that ‘virtue ethics’ refer mores to a cultivation of individual excellence which serves the ‘virtuous’ individuals and society as a whole. Virtue on this account is really more to do with strength and constancy of character, rather than giving priority to the demands of external moral obligations. The Antique tradition of virtue was taken up in Medieval Christian philosophy, most notably in the thought of Thomas Aquinas; and at that point it maybe acquires a sense of moral imposition, though that is something of a brutal generalisation. That antique sense of virtue has been increasingly discussed in philosophy since the 1950s, along with an increasing recognition that it was still very present in 18th and 19th Century philosophy.

For a very handy summary of Aristotle’s ethics by a leading commentator, Roger Crisp, go this podcast posted at the Faculty of Philosophy, Oxford University. For an equally admirable summary of some later developments in Antique ethics, around Seneca and Stoicism, click here for a link to a recent podcast of am interview of Rick Benitez conducted by Alan Saunders for his PhilosophyZone radio show.

The virtue ethics tradition, as mediated by the Antique Stoics, was a major influence on Adam Smith in An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, as well as in his ethical treatise, The Theory of the Moral Sentiments. For a great discussion of this click here for a pdf of Deirdre McCloskey’s paper ‘Adam Smith, the Last of the Former Virtue Ethicists’. McCloskey is a professor of economics, history, English and communications at the University of Illinois, Chicago, which gives an idea of the way that she integrates different areas of the humanities and social sciences. McCloskey points out that Smith’s philosophy and economic thought are shaped by Stoicism and theories of the virtues, and not just the virtue of prudence. She also has a very good sketch of how economists, and the culture in general, lost sight of this kind of integration until philosophers revived Antique virtue theory.

One possible fault with McCloskey’s analysis is in the title, in its suggestion that Smith was the last of the virtue theorists. This has some justification if we think of how Smith’s thought is distinguished from what was then the emergent moral school of Utilitarianism which very definitely looks at ethics from the point of view of the consequences of actions, and not quality of character. However, there is at least one major candidate amongst late 19th Century philosophers for the label of virtue ethicist, Friedrich Nietzsche. We can see his philosophy as a return from theories of external moral excellence to a theories of individual excellence. That’s a rather large question I can’t deal with here, but an excellent brief summary of why Nietzsche might be considered a virtue theorist can be found in Lester Hunt’s paper ‘The Eternal Recurrence and Nietzsche’s Theory of Virtue’, click for the pdf.

I expect to return to these issues very soon in relation to Benedict de Spinoza and Michel Foucault.

Me on Joseph Schumpeter at LiberalVision

2009-11-19T17:23:00.000+02:00

Joseph Schumpeter’s Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy. LiberalVision November 19th 2009

I look at the following points in Schumpter’s book.

The possibility and maybe inevitability of socialism

Socialism depends on a mixture if economic stasis and concessions to market mechanisms to work.

Capitalism as better than its predecessors, or any possible socialist society, for delivering improving living standards for everyone including the poorest.

Capitalisms rests on the individual initiative of entrepreneurs, which is important in economic theory. It is also important for liberty, in a culture of individual rights and respect for law.

The tendency of capitalism to create its own opponents in a disaffected intelligentsia and to protect their rights, and even to elevate them to high cultural status.

The tendency of capitalism to create big businesses and share holders who are detached from day to day economic profits and losses, and tend to lose the entrepreneurial spirit.

Socialism cannot work as intended by its most idealistic supports, partly because of he inevitability of at least some inequality and some price mechanism; and partly because of the impossibility of forming a pure will of the people.

The problems of forming a pure will exist in democracy in general, as there are always different interests and factions within the People, and different ways of constructing that will. In general democracy becomes a way in which electors seek economic advantage and political groups try to get majority support through offering such advantages.

Schumpeter offers a paradoxical classic of liberalism, in showing the strength of anti-liberal tendencies in liberal capitalist society. It’s a classic of liberal thought in showing the decline of freedom and economic dynamism involved, so showing what needs to be resisted.

Joseph Schumpeter and Paul Feyerabend on Galileo

2009-11-15T02:38:00.000+02:00

In Against Method (Verso, London, 1975, 1988, 1993), Paul Feyerabend argues that Galileo’s theories of astronomy an physics were not intellectually or empirically superior to the theories they were contesting. In this influential work on the philosophy of science, Feyerabend argues that Galileo’s theories won out because of social and political forces inclined to strengthening the secular sphere against the church; they supported Galileo regardless of scientific criteria in a struggle against the church. Feyerabend extends this into a general theory of the irrational bases to developments in science.

In 1942, the economist Jospeph Schumpeter (like Feyerabend an Austrian who made his life and career in the English speaking world) published Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. This suggested the inevitability of socialism, though probably of a limited kind, and explained why this would not be an advance for human civilisation. In discussing bourgeois civilisation, Schumpeter refers to the support of the early bourgeoisie (page 124), arguing that they found Galileo to be an individualist like themselves. While Schumpeter is arguing that bourgeois civilisation is the best civilisation, he does not claim that the bourgeoisie supported Galileo for reasons of scientific truth; they simply thought his personal style resembled their own superior ethical values of individual effort and rational risk taking.

I’ve quickly checked the scholarly literature through GoogleScholar. I found some articles linking Schumpeter to Thomas Kuhn, as well as Feyerabend, but not with reference to that sociological explanation of the success of Galileo’s theories. What I found compares Schumpeter’s notion of creative destruction in a capitalist economy, with Kuhn’s idea of paradogm shifts and scientific revolution, along with Feyerabend’s epistemological anarchy. So what has been considered is a parallel between change in science and change in the economy.

As far as I can see this clear connection around the sociology of early modern science has been overlooked. Is the connection just coincidence, or did Feyerabend read Schumpeter?

Peter Heather on the End of the Roman Empire

2009-11-13T23:43:00.000+02:00

I’m no expert on Ancient history, and I never read much about the end of the Roman Empire in the west. Nevertheless, Peter Heather’s book The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History (PanMacmillan, Basingstoke, 2005) does look like a reasonable summary of where the historical understanding of that period is. It’s very readable and has plenty if supporting sources and interesting arguments. I recommend it, though clearly not as an expert.

Anyway, he’s clearly an academic expert in the field who got the chance to write a relatively commercial book. with a slightly populist cover. So even if this is not the best perspective, it certainly represents a highly scholarly perspective. There seem to be a few relatively popular recent books by academic experts around, so I hope to read a bit more and post on those perspectives in time. There is the interesting question of why these books are appearing. Does it reflect some general sense that the ‘West’ is declining in relation to the rising countries of Asia? Or is there another reason? I can’t really think this through right now, but maybe I’ll come back to this.

What is Heather’s perspective?

The Roman Empire was not in long term decline after the last of the ‘Golden Emperors’, Marcus Aurelius (d. 180). It remained in very robust shape, as reformed by Diocletian (reigned 283-305), with regard to borders, political cohesion and military strength until the very last years of the Fourth Century.

The Empire did change, particularly under Diocletian who introduced a tetrarchy to control the Empire more effectively (the tetrarchy was two senior emperors and two junior emperors, one of each in the west and the east). This responded to a very real need to diffuse power from Rome, but in a limited way. There were often conflicts between western and eastern emperors, but these did not threaten the administrative structure of the economic substance of the empire.

Power was diffused, to some degree to secondary centres: Milan, Ravenna and Trier in the west; Salonika in the east. This slowed down some forms of communication between the emperor and administrators, but not so as to cause serious problems.

The Empire continued to ‘Romanise’ until very late. That is, more and more members of local elites emerged who were educated in Latin language and literature to the same level as the most educated Romans. ‘Barbarians’ entering the Empire were Romanised, partly through military service.

Parts of Germany which were not in the Empire were very Romanised and were effectively satellite states. There was no proto-German nation, but shifting tribes with shifting coalitions and geographical locations. The Germanic areas were mostly very poor until late in the Empire.

The Germans who extended into what is now Romania became more economically sophisticated in the late Fourth century, which allowed them to pose more of a military threat.

The movement of Huns into Roman territory and other parts of Europe, created new movements of people and new incursions into Roman territory with very destabilising effects on the Empire.

Defeat by Parthians in Persia put some strain on the Empire at a very bad moment, because the unprecedented movement of tribes began soon afterwards.

There was some decline of tax revenue, and of spending from the centre in the late Fourth Century. This made local elites more autonomous but did not have a major effect on the Empire, Local elites stayed loyal until barbarian incursions tested loyalty to the Empire too much.

The weakening to the Empire set in during the last decade of the Fourth century, producing an accelerating disintegration with some variations until the overthrow of the last Emperor in the west in 476. So there was less than 100 years of the kind of decline often attributed to the Empire after 180, which create 300 years of decline.

Diocletian’s changes killed of the Republican residues still lingering earlier in the Empire, and the later emperors were God-Kings never challenged in the Senate, or any other political arena. This did not harm the cohesion of the Empire. Local elites and the bureaucracy had good reasons to be loyal to the Emperor who financed them, gave them jobs and enforced the strong property rights of Roman law.

The Roman Empire continued in the Byzantine Empire of the east, but only until the Seventh century Muslim conquests deprived Constantinople of large amounts of land, and most of its revenues, The Byzantines continued to identify themselves as Romans, but after this point, their state had become a Hellenic fragment of the Empire, rather than a continuation.

Foucault on Truth and Ethics; Nussbaum’s Error

2009-11-12T22:21:00.000+02:00

Recently I read Michel Foucault’s Fearless Speech (edited by Jospheph Pearson, Semiotext(e), Los Angeles CA, 2001), based on lectures he gave in California about parrhesia in Ancient Greek philosophy, literature and politics. Parrhesia is translated in my abridged Liddell and Scott Greek-English Lexicon (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1891) as ‘free speaking’. It does not appear in Georg Autenrieth’s Homeric Dictionary (translated by Robert Keep, Duckworth, London, 1984), which is only to be expected, because as Foucault points out it’s a word that comes into use in Golden Age Athens. It does appear in Alexander Souter’s Pocket Lexicon to the Greek New Testament (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1916) as ‘boldness, freedom, liberty, shown especially in speech’. All of this, and more is incorporated into Foucault’s discussion of the negative and positive uses of the term in Euripides’ tragedies, commentary on Athenian democracy, Cynic philosophy, and so on. In a rather indirect way Foucault himself develops a position on ethics, communication and liberty. More of that on another occasion I hope.

Recently I was also listening to a podcast of Martha Nussbaum being interviewed on Australian radio about Stoics, Epicureans and Sceptics, on the reissue of her recent classic The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics (original edition: Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ, 1994) with a new introduction. Click here to go directly to the podcast. Click here to go to the relevant link at the podcast aggregator site earideas.

A great summary of her work in that area, and it is a great body of work. Nussbaum has some grudging respect for Foucault, in contrast to her attacks on anyone else who might be regarded as influenced by, or adjacent to, Foucault’s approach. Her somewhat prejudiced mindset gets the better of her in the podcast, when she shows some regard for Foucault’s work on antique ethics. Nussbaum claims that Foucault ignores truth in his discussion of self-formation through ethics in the ancient world.

The lectures in Fearless Speech focus in the importance of truth, the right fort he lower classes to speak truth in a vulgar manner in Athenian democracy, the value and danger Euripides sees in unrestrained truth telling. There are ways in which Foucault would say that these truths are subjective not absolute, but that is not the same as devaluing truth.

In an approach reminiscent of Mill in On Liberty, Foucault emphasises the value of struggle for truth, the great agon. No one condemns Mill as a dangerous sceptic, subjectivist etc, for emphasising the value of a permanent conflict over truth in which no one ever has a complete victory, so maybe there’s no need to condemn Foucault on the basis of such accusations.

Me on Tocqueville at LiberalVision

2009-11-05T15:44:00.000+02:00

‘Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America’, LiberalVision 5th November 2009.

I look at Tocqueville, as a liberal thinker, with regard to the following points

Danger of the tyranny of the majority

Influence on Mill, particularly with regard to the above

Political centalisation, administrative decentralisation

Desirability of the passion for equality of rights, and the dangers of universal conformity

The democratic state as standing above local ‘tyranny of the majority’ but also a possible source of despotism

The dangers of the loss of aristocratic spirit of individual honour and excellence in the democratic world

The role of courts and law in providing a democratic equivalent to the aristocratic spirit of conservation of valuable institutions and awareness of long term and broad interests of a society

Advantages of private property and self-interest where it includes generosity; the dangers of a narrow individualism

Exploration of a new world of republicanism and democracy in the mid-Nineteenth century.

Economic freedom, participation in politics, participation in civil associations (voluntary bodies) as mutually reinforcing aspects of liberty.

For social assistance to the poorest, against economic equality and state intervention in the distribution of property.

Aristotle Against Orientalism: Carthaginian Perspective

2009-11-02T00:39:00.000+02:00

Aristotle is turning up as a major party to a supposed ‘Orientalist’ tradition in political theory. ‘Orientalism’ in general refers to the perspective in which western culture has considered other cultures to be both opposite and inferior to itself. This approach has had some productive results but also its own blind spots.

One suggestion in that approach is that western accounts of democracy, republicanism and any political way of thinking rooted in ideas of freedom, have been exclusively rooted in Greek origins. Aristotle’s political ideas keep turning up as something rooted in a Greek centred view, in which non-Greeks have despotism and Greeks have freedom. In this context it is sometimes pointed out that earlier people in the Near East had On the barbarians to the north of the Greek world, Aristotle recognised some freedom in electing kings, though not much freedom under that king.

Most significantly, in The Politics, Aristotle does refer positively to a semitic people related to the semitic peoples of ancient Sumeria and Babylon, and sharing a common ancestry with modern Arabs and Jews, that is the Phoenicians. The Phoenicians who spread commerce and the first alphabet around the Mediterranean. Aristotle refers approvingly to the Carthaginian constitution as like that of Crete and Sparta. These were not Aristotle’s most favoured constitutions, but the main point here is that he recognised that Carthage belonged to the group of good constitutions, which are not dominated by tyranny, oligarchy or democracy (in the sense of rule through popular assemblies).

He describes Carthage as a ‘polity’, his most favoured state form, also referred to in English as a republic, a mixed constitution, or a political state. That is the kind of state where democracy, aristocracy (rule of the virtuous) and oligarchy (rule of the rich) are mixed, a situation which offers the best possible protection against forms of government which deny freedom: tyranny (lawless rule of one person), oligarchy (lawless rule of a rich minority), democracy (lawless rule of the majority). The polity leans towards democracy, but possible acts against freedom and reason are mitigated by rule of the rich minority and rule of the virtuous minority (educated aristocrats).

He refers to Carthage as a polity which leans towards democracy in the power of a popular assembly, and leans towards oligarchy in that the ruling council contains wealthy people and people with multiple positions. A couple of passages at the bottom of this post, confirm that.

There is a tendency around to think that the ‘west’ is anticipated in ancient times by Rome and by the Greek city states. Rome had an epic struggle against Carthage, most famously when Carthaginian armies where led by Hannibal. After defeat of Carthage, which was an obsession for some Roman leaders, the city was destroyed, though later rebuilt. This leads to the background assumption that the Greeks regarded Persia as the enemy and called it despotic, therefore the same view of Carthage must have been held by Greeks and Romans, so that we have an element in ‘western’ history of denial of the ‘Oriental other’. We could add to that the appearance of Phoenicians as ‘Philistines’, an enemy people of the Israelites, in the Old Testament.

Aristotle did not deny the Phoenician-Carthaginian ‘other’ in a move of Orientalist violence. he assumed that the Carthaginians had a polity, like the Greek polities, and that it deserved to be placed alongside them. ‘Orientalist’ approaches have emphasised what needed to be emphasised about the ‘non-western’ cultures, but has also under-emphasised the ways in which the classical writers may not have been pure examples of `Orientalism’.

Quotations from Aristotle’s Politics (translated by H. Rackham, Loen/Harvard University Press).

1272b Book II VIII

Carthage also appears to have a good constitution, with many outstanding features as compared with those of other nations, but most nearly resembling the Spartan in some points. For these three constitutions are in a way near to one another and are widely different from the others–the Cretan, the Spartan and thirdly, that of Carthage. Many regulations of Carthage are good; and a proof that its constitution is well regulated is that the populace willingly remain faithful to the constitutional system, and that neither civil strife has risen in any degree worth mentioning, nor yet a tyrant. Cathage is

1273b

Now most of the points in which the Carthaginian system that would be criticised on the ground of their defects happen to be common to all the constitutions of which we have spoken; but the features open to criticism as judged by the principles of an aristocracy or republic are some of them departures in the direction of democracy and others in the direction of oligarchy.

Some Good Links: Persons, Ethics, Politics, Economy

2009-11-01T09:15:00.001+02:00

1. Persons (and ethical agency)

‘The I in Me’.. Thomas Nagel reviews Galen Strawson’s book Selves: An Essay in Revisionary Metaphysics. London Review of Books. 5th November 2009.

Nage; a distinguished figure in metaphysics and ethics discusses Strawson’s view that there is no deep ‘I’ or ‘self’ that endures over time. Nagel does not add much of his own views, but an excellent account of Strawson. One thing Nagel does not mention is that the title of the book is a riposte to Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics (1959), well known book by his father Peter Strawson. P.F. Strawson though metaphysics should be descriptive, that is should be close to our common sense and everyday language, and was a strong defender of the view that the ‘self’ or ‘person’ is a basic substance of metaphysics. G. Strawson is a critic of common sense and everyday language, claiming that these are responsible for misleading notions like the substantive ‘I’, leading him towards what his father called ‘revisionary metaphysics’, that is a metaphysics which looks for structures concealed by common sense and everyday language. There are questions of moral responsibility that arise in discussion of personal identity, that Nagel only refers to briefly. G. Strawson’s view poses a challenge to ideas of moral responsibility, by questioning the existence of a person who can be held responsible. The next link refers to the issue of personhood and ethics from another direction.

Ethics (personhood and virtues)

‘Integrity and Fragmentation’ by John Cottingham. Clicking on the link starts automatic download of .doc file from Cottingham’s website. The paper will be published as an article in the Journal of Applied Philosophy in 2010.

Hat tip philpapers

Cottingham looks at the role of integrity in ethics, drawing on the virtue theory tradition, which is concerned with the kind of character and habits conducive to human flourishing and ethical actions. Drawing on ‘Athens and Jerusalem’ (Greek philosophy and Judaeo-Christian religious texts), Cottinghman finds an implicit role for ‘integrity’, partly captured by Aristotle as ‘the unity of the virtues’. From these sources, and their coming together in Aquinas, we understand that the unity of live over time, and the unity of our character traits, is necessary to the good life, if not all that is necessary. Cottingham brings the more recent ethical philosophy of Bernard Williams and Harry Frankfurt into the discussion, particularly with reference to the inadequacy of integrity on its own, to fill us with a sense of obligation. As Cottingham points out, this is a central insight of Nietzsche’s. G. Strawson takes Nietzsche as the source of arguments against the idea of a deep self over time, so we see here how metaphysics and ethics connect.

Politics (ethics and economy in republican political theory)

‘Freedom in the Market’ by Philip Pettit, a freely available pdf of a 2006 article in Politics, Philosophyy & Economics.

Hat tip philpapers

Pettit’s best know book Republicanism produces a theory of freedom in which the ethical value of individual freedom is not just freedom from constraint , but freedom from ‘domination’, where domination means being bound by laws or commands to which we have not consented, directly, or indirectly through representative political procedures. That leads into ‘republicanism’, the tradition in political thought, which refers to freedom, and human flourishing, as including political rights and participation, at their centre. Pettit approached this tradition in Republicanism in a perspective which seems indifferent to the freedom of individuals in the market, and very concerned with rectifying apparent threats to freedom in capitalist society. I sometimes get the impression in that book that the republican critique of a minimal liberal commitment only to freedom from direct coercion, is embedded in a negative attitude to the liberal market economy. However, in this paper Pettit does pay tribute to the importance to freedom in the market place, he notes the importance of property rights and free exchange in the economy as ways of escaping the coercive subordination to a master that is the fate of many in a economy lacking in markets. Markets create choice including a choice of employer/master. Pettit distances himself from ‘libertarian’ notions that all regulatory constraints on exchange and property are wrong, but he puts himself in the same territory as moderate libertarians (in recent political theory Jerry Gaus, going back a bit further early Hayek,and going back even further most of the Classical Liberals) by referring to trade offs between property rights and the more collective public kinds of goods. That is we have to choose which combination maximises liberty.

Politics (Political and Economic Liberalism)

‘From Liberalism to Social Democracy’. Geoffrey Kurtz reviews Liberal Beginnings: Making a Republic for the Moderns by Andreas Kalyvas and Ira Katznelson. Dissent. 26th August 2009. A bit late with this link, but the story is still on Dissent’s homepage. so I can just about include it.

`Kurtz, following Kalyvas and Katznelson, refers to the way that Classical Liberalism of the late Eighteenth and very early Nineteenth century, was constituted through a move from Antique Republicanism to a consciousness of a more modern individualistic kind of liberty. Thomas Paine, James Madison, Adam Ferguson, Adam Smith, Madame de Staël and Benjamin Constant are considered, That is an advocate of the American and French Revolutions, one of the main figures in the early American Republic as a President and political writer, a Scottish Enlightenment historian and political thinker, a Scottish Enlightenment professor of moral philosophy who wrote a great work of economics, two French writers of literature and political thought. These were all people concerned with the kind of freedom pertaining to the ancient republics, based in civic duty and participation, the death of those republics, and the kinds of liberty possible in a modern individualistic commercial society. Completely the right context for discussing the origins of liberalism. The argument goes onto the suggest the inevitable evolution of classical liberalism into social democracy, which to my mind is not as necessary an evolution as claimed, but it is certainly an outcome of that republican-liberal moment, rooted as it was in appreciation of the liberty of commercial society.

Economics (a return to Political Economy)

Econ Journal Watch

It’s free to download, economists of reputation write in it, and it contains no equations. It can certainly be read by anyone with a basis understanding of political and social issues. Any reader of Adam Smith would have gone beyond it in dealing with economic complexity. The basis of the journal is that contributors criticise articles in established economics journals, and the author(s) of the piece under criticism are offered the chance to reply and have the final word, which they often take up, if not always. I haven’t had to go through it systematically yet, but so far I’ve read some very interesting debates about interpretingAdam Smith and the success of Swedish welfarism. Something else that caught my eye, but have’t read yet is a debate with Bill Easterly, one of the world’s leading development economists. and a major contributor to debates about ending Third World poverty.

The journal has a methodological bias and a political bias. The methodological bias is towards non-mathematical economics, the belief that economics is a broad discussion of individual and social rationality and action, in which maths may be useful but which is distinct from mathematics. The political bias is towards free market classical liberal and libertarian thinking. The methodological and political orientation come together as ‘Austrian Economics’, most famously represented by F.A. Hayek, who was preceded by Carl Menger, Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk and Ludwig von Mises (the latter is the most important figure for many ‘Austrians’). The beauty of the journal is that in some ways it gives the advantage to those who are most against the journal’s approach, so in some ways it’s the Keysians and non-free marketeers who should read the journal to see sympathetic views, rather than ‘Austrian’ liberals and libertarians.

The editor, and founder, Daniel Klein, is someone who is very interested in, and aware of, bias in economics and takes very seriously the idea of exposing bias in the most serious and consistent way, of admitting to his own biases, and finding ways of formulating discussion between those with differing biases.

This journal deserves to be read by a broad audience. Please have a look.

John Bruton tipped for EU Presidency

2009-10-29T23:51:00.000+02:00

‘Bruton for EU Presidency’, Croooked Timber, 29th October, 2009

An item today in the leading political theory, and politics, blog Crooked Timber suggests that John Bruton will run for the ‘EU Presidency’, i.e the two and half year presidency of the European Council (council of minister of EU member states).

Bruton was Prime Minister of Ireland from 94 to 97s, and has served as Ambassador of the European Union to the United States. He was leader of Fine Gael, a centre-right party which sits with the largest political group in the European Parliament, the European People’s Party.

Why Bruton? The connection with the EPP is a good starting point. He is an ideal anti-Blair, a centre-right figure from a small member state. Blair’s candidature is not popular all over Europe, and the idea of a centre-right figure from a small country is the popular alternative. Fine Gael is not as Euro-federalist as most of the EPP, it sat with the British Conservatives in satellite group of the EPP before the British formed a new Euro=sceptic right group. it would therefore not be so easy for the UK to veto him, and presumably would be an advantage in other less federalist countries.

Blair is unpopular for various reasons: could be too dominant, and out of control, in a currently undefined position; did not take the UK into the Euro, did take the UK into the American invasion of Iraq using now discredited arguments; David Miliband (current UK foreign minister) is apparently a candidate (he denies it) to be High Representative for Foreign Affairs (which might turn out to be more important that the Presidency), and no one thinks two people from the same party in the same country could occupy two out of three of the senior posts in the EU (the other is President of the Commission).

UK Classical Liberals Commemorate Foundation of Turkish Republic

2009-10-29T20:31:00.000+02:00

TODAY IN HISTORY

29 October 1923: Republic of Turkey is founded following the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire.

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Government adviser: Ecstasy less harmful than alcohol

2009-10-29T19:36:00.000+02:00

Alcohol worse than ecstasy - drugs chief. Alan Travis. The Guardian 29th October, 2009.

This article in (UK newspaper) The Guardian refers to the views of David Nutt, an Imperial College professor, a government adviser appointed by the government, and then ignored. There was a time when British politicians were taking about evidence bases policy, here is the evidence that has been ignored.

(more detail in this article by Nutt,’Estimating drugs harms: a risky business?, link leads to pdf. Amongst other things, Nutt points out the damage caused by ‘skunk’, strong cannabis, is grossly exaggerated.)

30 People die a year from ecstasy, 100 people a year die from horse riding accidents.

Alcohol is the 5th most harmful drug, ahead of heroin, cocaine, barbiturates and methadone.

We could stop one case of schizophrenia, if we prevent 5 000 men aged between 20 and 25 from ever taking cannabis, i.e. the risk of mental illness from using cannabis is very small.

On a personal note I don’t find drugs other than alcohol attractive, and people who claim to have their mind expanded by drugs bore me, but the number of people harmed by alcohol far exceeds those harmed by illegal substances.

The issues raised here are not simply those of drugs policy, they refer to the role of reason and evidence in politics, and public policy, and disturbing evidence of their lack in those fields.

Link: Me on Milton Friedman, ‘Capitalism and Freedom’

2009-10-23T06:45:00.001+03:00

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Milton Friedman (1912-2006), Capitalism and Freedom (1962) at LiberalVision, 23 October 2009.

Looks at income tax, basic income, public goods and bads, business-government links, public housing, rent control, school choice in an influential book on public policy by a major economists. There is an emphasis on how much Friedman was looking at improving the situation of the poorest, and government action in areas of public goods and bads.

And no the recession has not ‘disproved’ Friedman or ‘proved’ Keynesianism which continues to be a lot less influential that it was in the 60s and 70s. And no Friedman, and those associated with him did nor ‘forget’ the ‘lessons’, of the Great Depression, about which Friedman was very well informed as shown in his book A Monetary History of the United States. Most free market orientated economists do not accept his views on money supply in their pure form, but has a continuing influence on the nature of economics, and the political economy of public policy.

Milton Friedman: Progressive Social Justice Thinker

2009-10-23T06:20:00.001+03:00

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I’ll be posting a link soon to a summary I wrote of Milton Friedman’s book Capitalism and Freedom for LiberalVision. I’d like to precede that with reasons why Friedman might not be the right-wing villain of much left-wing imagination, and indeed might not be what a lot of people on the right might want him to be, certainly the more socially conservative, authoritarian, national security-nationalist, and big business, orientated parts of the right.

Points listed below, mostly referring to Capitalism and Freedom, but some others as well.

Friedman argues that businesses are guilty of trying to rig markets and get economic favours from governments. This increases inequality as economic resources are directed to those who are already rich and powerful.

Government should create an unconditional basic income, he teferred to as ‘negative income tax’, because the income information on tax forms would e used to establish a basic income for those with low or zero earnings.

Public housing is bad because it inevitably groups together a disproportionate number of the socially and personally dysfunctional, since some proportion of the poor have low income because of those kind of problems. Friedman certainly did not suggest that is the only, or main, reason the poor are poor, but obviously it is a factor and Friedman thought that a very negative atmosphere would be created for the poor by concentrating such people together.

The poor should have a choice of schools, and not just those rich enough to afford private schools. This is why Friedman advocated ‘education vouchers’ which can be used to purchase education at a number of schools.

Minimum wages are bad for the poor, because they make a few people better off while making others even poorer because they cannot find work at the legal minimum, depriving them of a chance to move up the ladder of income levels in the labour market. This effects the poorest, most marginal, and most discriminated against groups the most.

Rent control is bad for the poor, because it reduces the incentive to rent out property, and build for rent. Those who receive the benefits of lower rent are a minority and find that low rent leads to bad service from landlords who are not making money. Everyone else loses out even more because less housing is available.

Government should provide public goods, which Friedman referred to as positive neighbourhood effects, that is generalised goods which cannot be charged for in any kind of practical way.

Government should act against public bads like pollution, bad neighbourhood effects, because the more individualistic reactions to them as in court action cannot hope to compensate everyone harmed.

Inflation control should be at the centre of economics. This protects the incomes and savings of the poorest, the people who are closest tot he margin of destitution if the value of incomes and savings rapidly diminishes.

High income taxes for the richest entrench inequality and prevent social mobility, because if we lose most of every extra bit of income we earn as we move up the income scale incentives are strongly reduced to make it into the highest income brackets. High social mobility evens out inequality over time, though it can increase it at any one moment, because over time individuals move between income levels.

These objections to high taxes on high income were recognised by two Democratic presidents who reduced such taxes: John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Baines Johnson. LBJ was the most left-wing president in office after Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and massively increased social spending in his ‘Great Society’ project. Even under Reagan, one of the major tax cuts cam about through a bill co-sponsored by two Democrats: Richard Gephardt and Bill Bradley.

Highly regulated industries prevent competition, by making it more difficult for new and small businesses to enter the market, which raises prices for consumers and slows economic growth. This had an influence on deregulation of airlines and road transport in the 1970s, sponsored by Senator Teddy Kennedy, one of America’s most famous left-liberal political figures in US history, and was supported from outside Ralph Nader, then a consumer rights activist, and now the most famous American politician to the left of the Democratic Party.

Friedman was a social libertarian who advocated legalisation of drugs and an end to military conscription in peace time.

Friedman, and free market ideas, have been adopted by the conservative tight, but that does not tell you much about reality. Friedman thought that some policies of Thatcher and Reagan were in line with his ideas, but definitely did not think that they had followed his position of a real break with the corporate-political nexus, the way that regulation and intervention always suits entrenched interest groups.

A standard accusation thrown at Friedman is that he was connected with the dictatorship of Augosto Pincohet in Chile. It’s true that some of Chile’s more market oriented policies were welcomed by Friedman, but he never endorsed the dictatorship. It’s true that many regime economic advisers came from the economics department at the Pontifical Catholic University, where there was a partnership with the Chicago department where Friedman was a professor. However, the Chicago department, then as now, was a large department with many big names in economics, so there is no way that links with Chicago could have turned the ‘Chicago boys’ in Chile into instruments of a Friedmanite plan. though they were certainly ell educated in his ideas. Friedman visited Chile in the early years of the regime, and met Pinchet, but did not endorse the regime. Advice is not endorsement. The speeches Friedman gave in Chile mentioned the role of government in undermining centralised government, far from an endorsement of authoritarianism. Later on Friedman made a explicit link between the economic advice he gave and the intended gaol of weakening the power of a strong state. Friedman gave advice and lectures throughout the world in countries with every possible kind of government. Though Friedman welcomed market oriented economic changes in Chile, how could he not welcome such changes in any country, some of Pinochet’s policies were in direct contradiction with his views, most obviously keeping the copper industry nationalised. The massive corruption that Pinochet and his family were later found to have been engaged in, was exactly the kind of consequence of political intervention in the economy that Friedman warned against.

Foucault’s Two Perspectives on Liberalism: 75-76

2009-10-17T03:43:00.002+03:00

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This is a somewhat delayed thought coming out of the Beyond Boundaries conference on European studies at Bahçeşehir University, Istanbul earlier this month (check blog archive for earlier posts). In between leaving the conference, and giving my paper, a conversation came up about the relation between Michel Foucault’s 1975 book Discipline and Punish and what I said in my conference presentation about Society Must be Defended based on lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-6. The books appear to overlap in time, though presumably Foucault did most of the work for Discipline and Punish before 1975.

Even if we take the two books as sequential rather than simultaneous, comparison between them suggests a dual attitude to liberalism, which illuminates his attitude to liberalism from 1975 until his sadly early death in 1984.

The political understanding of Foucault has on the whole been to take him as very left inclined, and as both Marxist influenced, and as establishing the grounds for a Post-Marxist radical left, maybe under the name of radical democracy. There has been a gradual shift away from that in the understanding of his work from 1975 onwards, but the shift is far from complete. Discipline and Punish was the key text for most of this kind of understanding of Foucault as it puts sovereignty, power, law, and coercion at its centre, and could be taken to endorse a strategy of localised struggles against alliance between state power and economic power. Even that has an ambiguity not noticed by many, which is that classical liberal/free market libertarian thought is also against that alliance. Left wing Foucault followers are not likely to notice that, since like most left thinkers they assume market liberalism is about defending the corporate-state alliance. This is partly because self-styled libertarians and classical liberals have often done that in practice, however, that is in contradiction with the principles of classical liberalism. The most radical parts of that spectrum share with Marxists a utopian belief in the abolition of all state connections with economic interests, in a completely spontaneous socio-economic order.

At least one commentator noticed that the Foucault of that time was open to the free market kind of liberatarianism, Martha Nussbaum. That’s a rather awkward example since Nussbaum has a very dismissive attitude to French ‘theory’, regarding Foucault as no more than the best of a bad bunch. Still, she gives Foucault some credit, and sometimes the person outside the community of enthusiasts is better equipped to pick up on aspects of the thinker concerned.

There is a critique of liberalism in Discipline and Punish, but in retrospect that can be seen as critique in the Kantian style, that is the way that Kant thought of critique as establishing the foundations, and limits, of thought. Here is a list of what we might regard as criticisms of liberalism in Discipline and Punish

Enlightenment concern for the sufferings of those exposed to torture and execution in the judicial process, is a step on the road to the greater coercion of long term imprisonment and attempts at inner ‘reform’ .

The struggle of the accused, and the convicted, with torture and execution, gave them more power to resist power, that the hidden process of the prison regime.

Public execution provide opportunities for popular revolt against sovereignty, which are eliminated in the world of ‘humane’ punishment.

The claims to rest punishment, and all laws, on internalised ‘norms’ of reason is a greater aggression and coercion than judicial torture, and public execution, on the body of those facing sovereignty.

The most direct critique of liberalism maybe in the account of the ‘panopticon’, the model prison designed of Jeremy Bentham, a major figure in early British liberalism. The panopticon is analysed by Foucault as a diagram of modern power, which rests on the internalisation of norms. All prisoners can be observed at any time from the central observation of tower, and them ‘internalise norms’ by following rules at all time and they could be under observation at any time.

Politics as war

The first thing to note here is that ‘liberalism’ has not necessarily ignored these issues. The idea of the movement to universal social rationality was very much noticed by Max Weber, the great sociologist, who played a role in German liberalism. He did not regard this as an entirely good thing, and Foucault’s account is dependent on Weber’s though I am not sure if this is directly or indirectly, consciously or unconsciously. Confirmation can be found in David Owen’s 1994 book, Maturity and Modernity: Nietzsche, Weber, Foucault and the Ambivalence of Reason, though I doubt that Owen would support the political conclusions I am drawing.

Society Must be Defended, and other books based on Foucault’s Collège de France lectures, suggests that for Foucault, disciplinarity and other forms of modern power, like biopolitics, can occur in more despotic state and more moderate state systems. It’s difficult to see any political project for a going beyond the moderate state, which can also be called the liberal state. There are things going beyond liberal politics as previously understood, such as the self-creation of the self, or selves, and the interest in the rebellious actions of the most marginal groups. Neither of these things are in contradiction with liberalism though, particularly as Foucault puts them in the context, respectively, of antique republican government and resisting state power as such, even where justified by Marxist and other radical left discourses. Liberal thought contains accounts of the value of differing and varied personalities.

On war, Locke recognises that the state is always close to the point where it is war with the population, because it breaches natural rights and government by consent, Humboldt saw war as having value in he formation of independent personalities. Weber emphasised the irreducibility of force and violence in the existence of the state.

In general, what emerges in Foucault’s 75 to 84 phase is a dual attitude to liberalism.

A strong critique of any idealisation of abstract norms and universal laws; and any humanist ideal of a unifying ideal human direction in history.

A strong critique of all non-liberal politics, and the recognition of the value of a civil society which has a market economy at its core in limiting state power.

Link: Me on Humboldt, Limits of State Action.

2009-10-16T03:34:00.002+03:00

Also available, with visual content, at Barry Stocker's Weblog (web.me.com)

And without visual content at Stockerblog (wordpress)

Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835). The Limits of State Action

LiberalVision, October 15th 2009

I use Humboldt’s life and friendships to set up a summary of his contribution to liberal political thought,

Topics covered include

Relations with Goethe and Schiller, Mme de Stäel and Benjamin Constant

War, Character, and Struggle with Nature

Negative and Positive Welfare

Liberty and threats to liberty in the ancient and modern world.

The value of freely chosen relations between individuals, the beauty of the society that grows out of this.

Contributions to linguistics

Classicism and Classical Scholarship

Political Career

Influence on Mill

Habermas: Humanitarian Schmittian?

2009-10-15T01:48:00.002+03:00

This post available with visual content at Barry Stocker's Weblog

Looking at Habermas’ paper in NATO intervention in Kosovo (‘Bestiality and Humanity: A War on the Border between Legality and Morality’, Constellations 6:3 1999: 263-227), I noticed an oddity in his way of dealing with Schmitt

Habermas partly expresses his position through condemning the authoritarian conservative political, and legal, theorist Carl Schmitt for reducing international relations to this constant war, which leaves no room for the just war that enforces international order. This criticism comes up in pages 266-7 of the cited article. What he emphasises in Schmitt is the idea that there is not basis for war in human rights or universal values. What Schmitt is opposing is the tradition in which state actions are prescribed and limited, by a hierarchy of laws, and norms, which is erected on the basis of the most universal ethical norms. Schmitt is largely attacking the Jurist and legal theorist, Hans Kelsen; and Habermas makes reference to a normative cosmopolitan tradition from Immanuel Kant to Kelsen in the fourth paragraph of the paper, favourably, which looks like a challenge to Schmitt, A challenge confirmed by remarks on 266-7, which include a quotation from Schmitt that humans are beasts,

Habermas is does not think this intervention can be fully justified by the international law as it previously existed. The UN charter strongly opposes interference in the internal affairs of member states. Habermas did not write to condemn the Kosovo intervention It is an intervention which refers to morality rather than existing law, it is the intervention based on acting as it there is a global civil society, though it does not yet exist. The intervention was not wrong, it was however a precedent that should not be taken as a precedent. Self-legislating improvement should not be accepted. Habermas talks about being between morality and law, but he is halfway between legalism and the sort of decisionism he criticises in Schmit. Some force took the decision to intervene rather than follow international law, and that itself is a welcome intervention. We might wonder if Habermas really has disposed effectively of the Schmittian arguments: there is an Enemy, so terrible that he must be defeated regardless of previous law. Where does that leave Habermas’ transcendental approach to the universalisation of norms? What Habermas is referring to in the article, is Schmitt’s denunciation of humanitarian wars, and prediction ideas of universal values lead to war, to impose them on those lacking sufficient universality . So he agrees with Schmitt that humanitarianism leads to war, and he agrees that we should sometimes break international law, if only in relation to an emergent cosmopolitan morality.

So is Habermas a Schmittian humanitarian?

Link: New Book from Robert Brandom

2009-10-09T03:05:00.002+03:00

Primary version of this post, with visual content, at Barry Stocker's Weblog.

Reason in Philosophy: Animating Ideas by Robert B. Brandom, Harvard University Press, 2009.

Extract

Hat tip to Thomas Gregersen.

A book which looks more accessible than Brandom’s Making It Explicit, the central book in his work, and distinctly long and arduous text. However, Reasons in Philosophy still looks like a rather demanding read, though Brandom claims the second part is more accessible than the first part.

Brandom continues his work of look at reason as a matter of reasons as norms and as inferences used in argument, contributing to the emergence of a community of rational beings. Brandom is putting ideas about concepts, meanings, and judgements as abstract entities into the context of pragmatic communication, persuasion and sharing of norms. In this project he has integrated Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Frege, Heidegger, Wittgenstein and philosophical Pragmatism into a comprehensive theory of concepts and reasons as what exists in a space of persuasion, belong to a social context emergent from discussion of semantics.

A new book from Brandom is an event, and this broadens the project with an account of the place of American Transcendentalism, most associated with Ralph Waldo Emerson, a key cultural figure in 19th Century America, in broad political and social concerns as well as philosophy. Movements towards broader democracy and the abolition of slavery were often put in Transcendentalist terms, and had a great influence in literature through Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and others.

Link: Book Review on Colbert, Knowledge, the State

2009-10-09T02:33:00.003+03:00

Primary version of this post, with visual content, at Barry Stocker's Weblog

‘The Colbert Report’. David A. Bell on The Information Master: Jean-Baptiste Colbert’s Secret State Intelligence System by Jacob Soll, in The New Republic, 7th October, 2009.

Bell discusses one of the great figures of the early modern state, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the most distinguished minister of Louis XIV of Ftance, through his review of what appears to be a very admirable book by Soll.

Colbert had been working for a previous great figure in the emergence of the modern state, Cardinal Mazarin who dominated France while Louis XIV was a child king. France produced three great figures in the administration of the modern state, the other was Louis XIII’s Chief Minister Cardinal Richelieu. Despite the work of Richelieu and Mazarin, Colbert encountered a chaotic state of overlapping, and conflicting forms, of royal and local privileges and jurisdictions. Colbert had run Mazarin’s library, itself the core of what is now the national collection, and also inherited from Mazarin a belief in the secrecy of state knowledge. Colbert did massive work in gathering, and archiving, knowledge throughout France and in neighbouring states. Knowledge that was kept secret in the interests of state power, planning war with neighbouring states, and invasions of local privileges. The massive work of Colbert could not transform the essential incoherence of the state administration, which is why it was ready to collapse in 1789. In some ways Colbert contributed to this collapse with a proto-Utilitarian mentality of a state acting on behalf of a centrally defined national interest, rather than in accordance with aristocratic privileges. This encouraged a meritocratic attitude at odds with an aristocratic and monarchical state.

As Bell points out, many of these points seem close to the work of Michel Foucault. I won’t even try to outline the progress of Foucault’s work in this respect, which is somewhat more complex than Bell indicates. I will just mention that in his later work Foucault often sounds as if he is following on from Montesquieu and Tocqueville, and it looks as if Soll also does. Bell points out that Soll does not have much to say about Foucault, because Foucault;’s work is too rigid and schematic to be incorporated into empirical historical work, nevertheless such work can evidently benefit fro m absorbing Foucauldian notions.

Link: Libertarian & Left Liberal Dialogue

2009-10-09T02:02:00.007+03:00

Primary version of this post, with visual content, at Barry Stocker's Weblog

Bloggingheads.tv, One-Handed Applause with Joshua Cohen and Brink Lindsey, 6th October 2009.
Brink Lindsey coined the term ‘liberaltarian’ for a fusion between free market libertarians and liberals (in the American sense for people who would otherwise be known as social democrats). Lindsey works for the Cato Institute and represents the most moderate side of an organisation distinctly inclined towards libertarian-conservative fusionism. ‘Liberaltarianism’ has not really taken off as a major new fusion, but Lindsey has continued his own dialogue with lef-liberal Democrats. In this webcast (can also be downloaded, or played in the browser, in wmv audio-visual, or mp3 and mp4 audio formats, I recommend the wmv option), Cohen and Brink chat about health reform and the overall progress of Obama;s presidency.
As they point out, the two biggest influences on libertarian thought, Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek, both supported forms of universal health coverage. Brink builds on this in supporting universal health coverage, but with competition between providers and a removal of current barriers to health markets. As he points out, there are various forms of interventionism in the health market, particularly tax deductions for employer provided insurance. This creates at least two major problems: lack of interest in cost control, difficulties in transferring health coverage when changing jobs. Cost control is not necessarily about restricting access to health care, it is about recognising that health care will be better distributed if users are aware of cost comparisons, and are not inclined to waste money on ineffective health care.
Cohen’s ideal option is ‘single payer’, i.e. universal health care from general taxation. They do reach a lot of agreements on possible health care solutions if ‘single payer’ is not a likely option. Singapore is discussed most, that is minimal government health care supplement by compulsory contributions to personal health savings accounts. Lindsey is very critical of current health care in the US, quite rightly as this strange mix of government provision (Medicare and Medicaid) and heavily regulated private insurance markets, does not satisfy free market or social justice criteria.
The major advantage he sees in the current US system is that most medical innovation comes from the US, which he links with the unwillingness of government controlled systems to pay for innovative drugs and technologies. His major concern, quite rightly, is to make sure universal coverage is designed to create competition between providers with regard to both cost and innovation.
Cohen and Lindsey finish with a discussion of the Obama presidency. They agree that Obama is not a transformational left wing president, and remind viewers that he ran as a more centrist candidate than Hillary Clinton. They also agree that he is politically skilled but has not been very successful at getting many policies through so far, and that it is too soon to judge the presidency.

Link: Me on Robert Nozick in LiberalVision

2009-10-05T02:46:00.001+03:00

Primary version of this post, with visual content, at Barry Stocker's Weblog.

‘Robert Nozick (1938-2002): Anarchy, State and Utopia (1974)’. LiberalVision, October 1st 2009.

Philosophy of Europe, reflections on an Istanbul Conference

2009-10-05T02:13:00.003+03:00

Primary version of this post, with visual content, at Barry Stocker's Weblog.

On Friday and Saturday, I was at the conference Beyond Boundaries: Media, Culture and Identity in Europe at the Beşiktaş campus of Bahçeşehir University, Istanbul. I gave a paper on Saturday, ‘Political Theory and the Idea of Europe: Foucault Against Habermas’, the abstract formed the basis of my 2nd September post, ‘Foucault, Libertarianism and Europe’.

The conference had very pleasant surroundings, in very modern and well equipped university buildings overlooking the Bosphorus.

An overview of the conference and how I related to the papers and discussions.

The conference was mainly media, communication, and cultural studies, in content. There were some philosophically oriented papers. Two of these covered similar ground about Hannah Arendt on refugees and Jacques Derrida on hospitality. References to Derrida in those papers and others tended to emphasise the view of a Europe with no centre, and continuity. One problem here is that too many people are trying to cover similar ground in the same texts when talking about Derrida, and taking the discussion of hospitality too much as an unconditional ethical command and nothing else. Derrida’s point is just as much to question the idea of pure hospitality as too assert the merits of hospitality. Hospitality defines the outsider, as an intruder and outside, and ties that person within laws of hospitality. The expectation of hospitality can itself justify colonialism over non-hospitable people, a very real aspect of the growth of colonialism. Adam Smith, who was no fan of colonialism, regarded trading forts as inevitable in relation to hostile locals, and recognised the danger of expansion into full colonies.

Just emphasising Derrida’s ‘deconstruction’ of European identity, is to overlook the Eurocentric and traditionalist elements of some of his accounts of philosophy and religion in Europe; the criticisms of Eurocentrism themselves are complicit with a kind of Eurocentrism which emphasises changes, diversity, openness and the welcome of outsiders.

One attitude to issues of European identity on display was to dismiss it in favour of a pragmatic evolutionary approach, derived from the ‘functionalism’ of the original designers of European institutions, like Jean Monnet and Robert Schuman. This ‘functionalism’ is also known as ‘institutionalisation’ and refers to the idea that European integration proceeds through economic, technical and administrative contribution, which creates its own momentum for greater integrationism, without any reference to a politics of European federalism.

There are at least two problems here: Monnet et al were certainly influenced by an ideal of Europe’s identity; the ‘institutionalist’ argument has an undemocratic aspect to it, deals done by political and administrative elites to create institutions with an interest in expansion on the basis of apparently limited agreements.

The argument was presented in the context of criticism of communitarianism and communalism as implicitly authoritarian, demanding a public domination of private life with regard to language, identities, symbolism etc. This was backed up with an overfamiliar strategy of decontextualised quotations from Rousseau, to make him seem as totalitarian as possible. This was accompanied by the usual tiresome jibe at contract theory, that no one remembers signing the contract. It’s clear enough that contract theory can be explained through tacit agreement with the laws and institutions of a country. Anyway, apart from being cliched and decontextualised, and really rather cheap, this kind of account of Rousseau is not really adding a lot to discussions of European identity.

What that presentation suggested was a strong contrast between formal depersonalised forma social associations and associations of strong unity around language, identity and shared emotion, accompanied by the suggestion that only the former forms of association is relevant to Europe’s emergent polity. One problem with this line of analysis, is that it does not match reality. There are ideas of European identity around, even among those who oppose political integration, and they precede the emergence of the European Union by some distance.

It is not possible to make such a distinction between two forms of association. Both forms of association are present in all associations, and there are no associations at any level which lack both sides. Roughly speaking associations are more densely integrated by lines of connection between individuals at the local level, but these forms of connection are present at the higher levels, up to the global community defined by shared interests and passions of all humans.

Link: Elections in Germany, Liberal Progress

2009-09-29T20:20:00.002+03:00

Primary version of this post, with visual content, at Barry Stocker's Weblog .

‘Germany’s Shift to the Right’, Dennis Nottebaum. 28th September, 2009 in OpenDemocracy.

An article in the left leaning democracy and human rights website OpenDemocracy. Nottebaum points to the surge for the FDP (Free Democratic Party), a liberal party which emphasises free markets, a limited state, and civil rights, led by the first open gay to lead a major German party, Guido Westervelle. The FDP came third in German elections, which is evidently a limited kind of success, but it’s the biggest third party vote ever in the Federal Republic, the biggest FDP vote ever, and marks a big shift in power.

I don’t entirely endorse the notion of a shift to the right. It could also be descried as a shift away from social conservatism to social liberalism, and from monumental dominant parties to a more varied political scene in Germany freed from political machines linked with the churches, trade unions, and businesses seeking corporate welfare. The main parties, SPD (social democrats) and CDU-CSU (Christian Democratic Union-Christian Social Union), fell back from what was already a historically low share of the vote.

The Greens and the Left increased their proportion of the left inclined vote, and the Greens were co-lead by a German of Turkish origin, Cem Özemir.

The FDP matched the SPD in the youth vote.

The FDP ran on a platform of reducing regulation and taxation, showing that the current economic down turn is not leading to an automatic inexorable move to more regulation of the financial sector. And quite rightly so, it’s a big myth that the decline in value of financial assets was due to deregulation, seeing as the deregulation is a myth.

The existence of the FDP, and its success, shows that civil liberties, human rights, and social pluralism, are not the sole possession of the left; it shows that free market policies go with social tolerance and limitations of the security state.

Links:Thomas Gregersen. PoliticalPhilo/Political Theory

2009-09-29T19:31:00.002+03:00

Primary version of this post, with visual content, at Barry Stocker's Weblog.

Thomas Gregersen of Copenhagen is running two great online sites in political theory and philosophy.

PoliticalPhilo is a primarily a Twitter service, but also exists as a website with an RSS feed, which is how I keep up with it, as I do not use Twitter. Great selection of links to books, interviews, blogs, articles, news item etc in political philosophy. Alright, it did link to my first ‘Liberal and Libertarian Foucault’, which is how I know about it, but great links in general.

And

Political Theory - Habermas and Rawls A blog devoted to news and items relevant, broadly defined, to those two recent giants. Not favourite thinkers of mine, but certainly thinkers who cannot be ignored and who continue to inspire important discussions. I particularly recommend a recent item, with links to articles in the German press, about a dispute in German newspapers between Peter Sloterdijk and Habermas’ student Axel Honneth, referring to Sloterdijk’s Nietzscheanism and leanings towards cutting down the state, including the social state.

O Fortuna: Foucault, Rawls, Habermas, Nussbaum

2009-09-29T00:45:00.002+03:00

Primary version of this post, with visual content, at Barry Stocker's Weblog.

In Security, Territory, Population, Michel Foucault is concerned, amongst other things, with the way that the early modern state tries to master fortune and chance. I’m not sure if Foucault quotes Machiavelli’s rather notorious suggestion in The Prince that fortune is a woman who needs to be beaten, but he brings The Prince (but unfortunately not The Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy) into his discussion on the early modern state, and the issue of the state controlling chance is a persistent one. As Foucault suggests in Lecture II, there is a tendency from the Renaissance to Napoleonic times, to think of nature and history containing uncontrollable fortune of a rather personified, something that could be traced back to earlier ideas of a wheel of fortune. and the work of the fates.

Yesterday I posted on Foucault and the Physiocrats, which really approaches the issue of new attitude to fortune, fate and chance, in which allowing the market to work ends the repetition of famines which had seemed like the results of harsh fortune. Chance of one kind is limited by allowing chance of another kind.

A contrast can be made with John Rawls’ concern with minimising chance in A Theory of Justice. Chance is limited in these ways, and possibly more: the initial situation and veil of ignorance attempt to eliminate chance from the rational design of principles of justice; theoretical equilibrium between intuitions and reasoning aims to ensure that the optimal principles will be revealed; the attitude to inequality is that it should be compensated and eliminated where it is the result of chance, which must be an unfair outcome.

I would not want to reject all that Rawls says, but this urge to minimise and eliminate chance is unsatisfactory for various reasons, including the way it must allow extremes of state intervention in the emergent outcomes of market, and other voluntary, networks of actions and decisions. There could be a strong case for wanting to modify some outcomes, some kind of state supported social minimum is something I would support, but Rawls’ approach inevitably leads to a gigantic and ramifying apparatus of intervention and rectification from above.

It is is important that Jürgen Habermas, though more Marxist than Rawls in his formation, shows concern with this possibility, though not while discussing Rawls. I don’t see that Habermas has a solution, but at least he recognises the problem.

Martha Nussbaum’s case is interesting here. She pushes further than Rawls in an interventionist rectifying direction than Rawls, or further than Rawls mentions in A Theory of Justice where Rawls is trying to accommodate neutral comparison between many designs for justice. In that respect, Rawls does allow chance in, through accepting many possible outcomes of the initial position.

However, in Nussbaum’s ethics, certainly as presented in The Fragility of Goodness, she is very concerned with arguing that strong rational control of chance is not the best option for ethics as it lacks sensitivity to chance and the passions. Something argued largely against Plato, or some moments in Plato, with reference to Aristotle, tragedy, poetry and some moments in Plato.

As far as I can see Nussbaum has failed to apply the lessons of her ethics to her political theory. I think she would probably reply that the complex kind of welfarist interventionism she favours is necessary to respond to the complexity of different kinds of human, and human situation, and she would want to add the complexity of allowing for animal rights as well.

I claim that Nussbaum has overlooked the dangers of too much control of chance in the socio-political sphere. It would be a good idea to reflect on what she has written with regard to her ethics, and with regard to Habermas and Foucault.

O Fortuna. Not in the rigid sense of fortune as an agent, but in the sense of pure chance and indeterminacy in the natural and social universes.

Liberal and Libertarian Foucault III: Physiocrats

2009-09-28T02:29:00.002+03:00

Primary version of this post, with visual content, at Barry Stocker's Weblog.

Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, Lecture Two (page 207)

Actually, we can say that thanks to these measures, or rather thanks to the suppression of the juridical-economic straitjacket that framed the grain trade, all in all, as Abeille said, scarcity becomes a chimera.

The context of this quotation is a discussion of the impact of Physiocrat doctrines in 18th Century France. Quesnay, Turgot and others argued that grain shortages could not be cured by the measures the French monarchy had been using, that is measures of state coercion to keep down prices and prevent hoarding. The measures of the absolutist French monarchy to prevent farmers from storing grain and pricing it according to demand, are still the kind of things a lot of people find immediately convincing. Many states in the United States now, have laws against ‘gouging’, that is charging high prices for goods in an emergency which causes shortages. The issue of hoarding is linked, since those selling grain, or any other good, will not hoard it unless they expect to charge high prices for it in some future shortage. A reaction popular now, shared by despotic French monarchs is that shortages arise from hoarding, and shortages arise from sellers charging too much during an emergency.

Foucault endorses the Physiocratic policies, which anticipate Adam Smith who met the Physiocrats in a visit to France. As Foucault points out, it’s the Physiocrats who coined the phrase ‘laisser faire’ (letting it happen) in economics, and linked phrases like ‘laisser aller’ and ‘laisser passer’; and as Foucault implies, that policy worked. Allowing farmers and merchants to ‘hoard’ and ‘gouge’ ensures that enough grain is produced, and stored, to mean that there is no starvation even in times of relative shortage. As Adam Smith pointed, France was much more prone to hunger than Britain with less measures to restrain prices and prevent large scale storage ‘hoarding’. As Foucault recognises, the starvation of the poor was alleviated by following English style policies, which allow prices to go up. That benefits the poorest, since such market incentives mean there will still be grain available in times of relative shortage and much more cheaply at those times, than if the price of grain has previously been restrained.

In these lectures, Foucault is as much describing, or analysing, as judging or evaluating. The evaluations often have to be inferred, nevertheless the context really does not allow any interpretation other than that Foucault thought that the Physiocrat policies were an improvement on Mercantilist regulation. The quote above makes it clear that Foucault thinks such policies limit the power of the state in a desirable way.

It would be wrong to present Foucault as simply celebrating the market policies of 18th Century governments; he is constantly concerned with the way that limits on the ‘juridical-economic straitjacket’, or more generally sovereignty, biopolitics and disciplinarity, are consistent with their expansion. The French monarchy accepted Physiocratic policies in order to keep its power. That does not change the reality that Foucault recognises a preferable kind of power where state regulation is limited.

On a more general note, I ma titling this series of notes ‘liberal and libertarian Foucault’. Making this more precise, I would not link Foucault with those who insist that Classical Liberalism, or Libertarianism, means the end of all welfare and all regulation; and certainly not with those who think the state should be abolished or turned into a nightwatchman only, minarchist entity. Somewhat earlier, when Foucault was in contact with Maoists was the time he was closer to anarchism. Later text display anarchistic tendencies, but are overall disposed to look for a reasonable limitation on state power, and more dispersed forms of power, rather than abolition.

Foucault was always a man of the left, but I would argue on the basis of his later texts, that he was moving closer to an earlier sense of ‘left’ or ‘radical’ which regarded state intervention on behalf of sectional interests, or increased statism in general, as the enemy of liberty and of opportunities for the poorest to improve their living standards. Again, we must recognise the critical side of this; Foucault also points out that the original radicals, along with later socialists and anarchists, had attitudes based on ‘race war’, that is identifying the state and privilege with a non-national entity. I also doubt that Foucault thought all the forms of growth in state intervention since the early Nineteenth Century could, or should be, terminated. Extrapolating from these late texts, what others close to him have said, and so on, I would say that Foucault moved towards a position where he was in broad culture and allegiance on the left wing of politics, but in details on the left, or more moderate, side of free market libertarianism, allowing for state welfare but suspicious of the consequences of allowing state activity beyond very strict limits. I should also add that his concerns with disciplinarity and the dispersed nature of power, precludes a position in which the presence or the absence of the state is the definitive issue.

Nietzsche’s Positive Ethics (Not his Genealogy)

2009-09-27T01:17:00.001+03:00

Primary version of this post, with visual content, at Barry Stocker's Weblog.

In Ecce Home, Nietzsche refers to a distinction between his no-saying philosophy and his yes-saying philosophy. The book which has been most discussed in recent years, On the Genealogy of Morality, is listed as no-saying and we cam take it that genealogy is part of his no-saying philosophy. Three books are listed as part of his yes-saying philosophy: Dawn, Gay Science, Thus Spoke Zarathustra. There’s certainly nothing wrong with studying the Genealogy or the wave of work concentrating on it, but we should be wary of taking that book as definitive of Neitzsche’s ethics. It might be definitive of his diagnosis of ethical illusions, but not of the ethics he is offering. Recent studies of the Genealogy may sometimes recognise it as a diagnostic work with regard to previously existing, but tend to stop there rather than move onto any kind of fully considered positive ethics in Nietzsche. Where Nietzsche is considered as an ethicist with a positive ethics, this often becomes Nietzsche as moral élitist or Nietzsche as aesthete of life. Neither position is necessarily wrong, but there could be more work on the details of what Nietzsche has to offer.

One problem is that at least some of the time, Nietzsche is saying that ethics, or morality, as such is an illusion, and a barrier to life. With that in mind, it could be said that Nietzsche has a philosophy of life rather than an ethical philosophy. However, I don’t think it is necessary to do this, as Nietzsche sometimes distinguishes between better and worse ethics rather than denouncing ethics as such. If we do resort to talking about ‘enhancement of life’, we risk talking about ethics, while calling it something else. In any case, ‘enhancement of live’ sounds like ‘virtue ethics’, though in that context the phrase ‘flourishing of life’ is more normal. It’s useful to discuss Nietzsche in the context of ‘virtue ethics’, and he fits better into that category than the other normal categories of moral theory, nevertheless Nietzsche should also be seen as challenging virtue theory, as it has normally been defined with reference to Aristotle, or maybe Plato, or the Stoics. A complete discussion of virtue theory would bring in (Saint Thomas) Aquinas, certainly complicating things. That’s not something I can go into now. What I do have is a list of points about Nietzsche’s ‘yes-saying ethics’, largely inspired by a recent reading of The Gay Science, Book III.

Virtues are something we should learn to be sceptical about, with regard to defining ourselves with regard to courage, generosity etc.

Virtues begin with adaptation to herd living in the earliest stages of human existence. Later stages of human existence break up the herd, and lead to more individualistic moral systems, or systems of virtues.

The separation of individuals from each other is progress in the human species and leads to progress in ethics. Growth, abundance and variety and signs of natural strength.

Ranking, and comparative evaluation, are necessary and admirable activities. It is important to say what or who, is better or worse than some other thing or person.

We can expect a future in which art, science and ‘practical wisdom’ are unified to create something which would make current law givers, doctors artists, and scholars, look petty (Gay Science 2nd edition, 113). The reference to ‘practical wisdom’ looks like a reference to phronesis in Aristotle, which includes ethics, an impression reinforced by Nietzsche’s reference to law givers, who by Aristotle’s standards are engaged in phronesis, or practical wisdom.

The loss of the world of God based ethics, particularly ethics based on Christianity, creates a sense of being lost in an ocean, and being on the verge of the infinite (Gay Science 2nd edition, 124).

The sense of moral scepticism advocated by Nietzsche partly comes from Christianity because of its scepticism about Ancient virtues. The sceptical work is taken further in Enlightenment’s scepticism about Christian virtues.

Christianity gives use the sense that Ancient virtues of courage, generosity etc, conceal sin, or in Nietzsche’s terms undermine any idea of perfection in a personality dominated by any one virtue (Gay Science 2nd edition, 122).

Nietzsche does not advocate a return to Ancient ethics, he says that it looks childish to us now, and as we have seen thinks Christianity has done a useful job of undermining Ancient ethics.

One criticism Nietzsche has of Ancient ethics is that is morality based on mores (der Sittlichkeit der Sitte), which was challenged by Plato and others, when they tried to introduce new moralities. Nietzsche criticises any ethics which is just a following of existing customs. (Gay Science 2nd edition, 149)

Nietzsche regards the different moralities of different nations as evidence of illusion about the nature of ethics. He also advocates new ethics, and the multiplication of ethical views. This apparent contradiction can perhaps be resolved by thinking about the value Nietzsche gives to the integration of multiplicity and conflict into one organism, or one work of art.

Every experience, and every judgement, is moral, because always embedded in our sense of honesty and justice (Gay Science 2nd edition, 114). This is one reason why Nietzsche is not arguing overall that we can abandon ethics, even if we try to expose ethical illusions. We are always concerned with what justice and honesty are.

One thing that justice requires is to see that different people are not the same and are not equal. Presumably different morality, or different virtues, are good for different people.

I don’t see that Nietzsche is saying that some people should be denied rights, though he does think some people are better others. These are two distinct points in any case.

Nietzsche is against altruism, we should not do something because it is good for someone else, and we should not wish to sacrifice ourselves for that reason. Some of what comes about through altruism may still come about through a self-interested desire for strength, growth and health. Individual health may be associated with generosity and indifference to injury.

Mill:Liberty/Socialism, Principles of Political Economy

2009-09-26T16:06:00.002+03:00

Primary version of this post, with visual content, at Barry Stocker's Weblog.

Returning here to a topic I addressed on September 9th. The ways in which Mill seems to depart from On Liberty in Principles of Political Economy, though he was working on it at about the same time. The several editions the Principles went through somewhat confuses that interpretative issue.

More ways in which Mill departs from the On Liberty perspective, in Book II on Distribution (which does not appear in all versions currently in print).

Wages are at least to some degree determined by custom rather than markets. Mill here seems to be referring to those upper professions which tend to be linked with the upper classes and have social power, law, medicine and so on. One might expect Mill to suggest that that non-economic power had enabled members of these professions to increase their welfare through restricting entry, monopoly of practice of that profession through compulsory member of a professional body, and so on. Adam Smith had already made similar points. However, Mill seems to regard these examples as evidence that distribution of income can generally be separated from supply and demand in the market.

The previous point feeds into the consideration he gives to the possibility of communism, which I have already mentioned. In connection with what he says on custom determining income, he suggests that income distribution could be flattened and there would still be an efficient economy.

The last point itself connects, if indirectly, with the suggestion that there could be a static economy, with no further development. It might be easier to conceive of a state reallocation of income, of the economy has reached some kind of plateau, in which case rearranging who gets what income might not seem like to harm the economy. Mill thinks such a state could be reached if existing materials and technology have been exploited to the full. This ignores the tendency to innovate with regard to the use of materials, technological innovation and the possibilities of innovation in the organisation of labour.

There may be societies which have reached some stasis. I would guess irrigation based agricultural communities in Pharonic Egypt, or pre-Columbian Guatemala. In both cases, a despotic political system presided over, and was reinforced by control of irrigation. In both cases, the political and economic stasis killed innovation and I believe led to a lack of adaptation which led to catastrophic collapse in the face of climate change or over use of fixed resources. Mill’s hypothesis of a static economy would be the product of political despotism, and a connected killing off of incentives to innovate. If that is part of Mill’s argument for the possibility of socialism, then it’s a rather dark picture, counteracting Mill’s growing tendency to believe over time that personal liberty might co-exist with communism.

Link: Return of Jefferson’s Deism in the US

2009-09-25T00:53:00.002+03:00

Primary version if this post, with visual content, at Barry Stocker's Weblog.

Steven Waldman, ‘Deism: Alive and Well in America’, Wall Street Journal

Waldman refers to the Deism influential among the Founding Fathers of the United States, particularly Thomas Jefferson. That is a position according to which religious scriptures are regarded as unreliable, but God is accepted, along with aspects of religious teaching falling short of complete acceptance of the standard dogmas of religious tradition. Waldman could also have mentioned that Abraham Lincoln had Deist inclinations, though was also inclined to think of God as a providential force in history in late life. Deism in its strictest sense may exclude all intervention by God in the universe he created, but as Waldman points out, a kind of impure Deism was what Jefferson and others of that generation followed. The main contemporary point is that as the more conservative forms of religious belief are declining in the US, Deism is on the increase along with complete non-belief.

Liberal and Libertarian Foucault II: The Bosphorus

2009-09-22T06:25:00.002+03:00

Primary version of this post, with visual content, at Barry Stocker's Weblog

Michel Foucault

Security, Territory, Population. Lecture Two. 18 January 1979

To tell the truth, this structuring function of space and territory is not something new to the eighteenth century. After all, what sovereign has not wanted to build a bridge over the Bosphorus or move mountains? Again, we need to know the general economy of power within which this project and structuring of space and territory is situated. Does it involve marking out a territory or conquering it? Is it a question of disciplining subjects, making them produce wealth, or is it a question of conquering something like a milieu of life, existence, and work for a population?

(page 29)

The Bosphorus stands here for chance which government attempt to overcome. For Foucault, a major feature of the period from the 16th to the 18th centuries is the growing awareness of chance, and the need for an art of government which can master it. This is embedded in the rise of commercial life, and its analysis through ‘economy’. and with the growth of interest in chance and the analysis of probability. Foucault notes the 16th century rise of books of government, advice on how to control chance in affairs of state. Machiavelli’s The Prince is taken as the main example. Foucault seems to ignore the republican aspect of Machiavelli, which would have suited his argument perfectly well. He treats Machiavelli’s book as guide on how the Prince can maintain, and extend his estate. What he fails to note, as far as I can see, is that Machiavelli is also referring to a notion of public interest which the Prince ought to serve, as well as failing to note Machiavelli’s wish to recreate Roman republicanism. This fits with Foucault’s analysis because he sees the move to state control as fitting with the growth of some forms of freedom. The interest in state control for thinkers like Francis Bacon and thinker-statesmen like Richelieu, or even writers of tragedy like Jean Racine, arises from the growing sense of uncontrollability. The people are always inclined to rebel, as is the upper class. Attempts to subordinate the economy to state edicts, as in price controls on wheat, prove to be counter productive: enforcement of a lower price for wheat reduces supply and causes starvation.

In the reference to bridging the Bosphorus, Foucault may have the story of the Persian King Xerxes, recorded by Herodotus, bridging the Hellespont (Turkish Straits) during his attempted invasion of Greece. Xerxes succeed in the building the bridge, but not in subduing Greece. The point of the permanent desire to bridge the Bosphorus (which now has two bridges), is that dramatic efforts to master nature may sometimes produce great results, but this may create an illusion of complete mastery of fortune. Xerxes could not conquer Greece, and the mighty absolute monarchs of early modern Europe could not guarantee sufficient bread for all by attempting to conquer the forces of markets and prices

Liberal and Libertarian Foucault I: Overview

2009-09-22T03:18:00.002+03:00

Primary version of this post, with visual content, at Barry Stocker's Weblog.

Michel Foucault is often taken as emblematic of radical leftism, but it is also well known that from about 1975 he showed considerable interest in ideas of limited government and the role of market economies in limiting government.

In 1975, he published Discipline and Punish, which famously refers to the forms of punishment as a way of understanding social power in general. Also famously, he suggests that there has been a movement from spectacular punishment (public execution) to disciplinarity (confinement in prison). In explaining disciplinarity, he seems to be targetting liberal thought at various points.

As is very well known, he illustrates disciplinarity with Jeremy Bentham’s design for a model prison, the panopticon, In bringing this up, Foucault was not just commenting on the history of prison architecture, he was referring to a whole phenomenology of the relation between visibility and surveillance. In the panopticon, the prison authority can observe all prisoners at all times, so even if they are not being observed at any one time, their behaviour is modified by the constant possibility of being under observation.

This is how power in general works, as all institutions have such an architecture in their buildings which make strategies of power visible. This is also a strategy which conceals itself behind talk of reforming prisoners, and more generally of the movement from coercion to norms as the social foundation.

The targetting of liberal thought can be seen in the apparent unveiling of Bentham’s panopticon. Jeremy Bentham was associated with early British liberalism and was the godfather of John Stuart Mill, a very big figure in mid-Nineteenth Century liberalism, and liberalism since. The reference to norms as new ways of coercing people, but without manifest violence, could be taken as a dig at Max Weber, the sociologist closely associated with German liberalism. There is critical discussion of Enlightenment thinkers who exaggerate the offence to humanity of torture and death, as compared to long periods of imprisonment. This might be taken as a dig at Montesquieu, a major influence of liberal political thought, though Montesquieu does refer to the ‘inhumanity’ of all forms of extreme punishment including long prison terms.

In general, Foucault has appealed to a kind of left wing thinker who regards ‘liberal’ as a purely negative terms for a way of thinking which denies real relations of power behind formal appearances. The other aspect of this way of thinking about liberalism is to associate it with ‘humanism’, something criticised by Foucault. Foucault did criticise the idea of ‘humanism’ in at least two senses: taking humanity as an ideal, taking the individual human as an undivided agent which is completely aware of itself and is the same over time. However, humanism in either sense is not a necessary aspect of liberalism. Who criticised the idea of a undivided agent, unchanging over time? Most famously David Hume, usually taken as a liberal thinker, though perhaps at the more conservative end of the spectrum. It would be a travesty of the thought of Montesquieu and Weber to talk as if they thought any society had, or ever could, end coercion and allow the completely spontaneous development of human essence. I can think of someone who did think like that though, Karl Marx.

Even given these apparent digs at liberalism in Discipline and Punish, the text does not fit neatly into any left wing classification. If claims to emancipation lead to new forms of power, where does that leave radical left wing claims to emancipation? Why should we think that the socialist revolution, or any socialist transformation, will be less prone to violence and coercion than the liberal state? In Discipline and Punish, Foucault comes close to a rather anarchist position, in which all power should be resisted, though he does nor provide an anarchist program of how a society could exist without coercion. His assumption that power has a positive constitutive aspect could just as well be taken to support the view that society rests on the existence of coercive power.

In introducing the themes of anarchism and constant resistance to power, we have introduced libertarianism. This is itself a highly ambiguous word. It was originally associated with French anarcho-communists but from the 1950s was used in the United States to refer to pure free-market anti-state ways of thinking. In general this sense of libertarian has become dominant, so that in political philosophy, libertarianism is usually taken to refer to the kind of minimum state property rights society advocated by Robert Nozick. Even here there is some ambiguity since there are left-libertarian political theorists who aim for redistribution of wealth in a minimum state context. The other aspect of that ambiguity is the way that libertarian is often used as a another word for conservatism.

It would offend less people to call Foucault a libertarian rather than a liberal, since the left Foucauldians certainly appreciate the idea of liberation from authority, though strictly speaking they should be just as sceptical about that as they are about liberal calls for a society purely based on law, individual rights, and representative institutions. It seems consistent with the kind of Marxism proposed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in the early 70s, with which Foucault associated himself for a while; and with the ‘Italian Marxism’ of Giorgio Agamben, who provides a dominant perspective on Foucault for many. We might see Discipline and Punish as a flowering of that anarcho-marxism. Politically Foucault had Maoist leanings for a while and you cannot get more radically Marxist than that. This Maoism was based on illusions that Foucault later rejected. It’s a strange reality that Maoism, a version of Stalinism that was every bit as nasty as Stalin’s original, appealed to those who wanted liberation from all forms of state authority. Mao’s claims to be challenging bureaucratic authority in the Cultural Revolution were amazingly successful at convincing large numbers of educated leftists that some kind of liberation movement was going on in China, rather than the violent and sadistic destruction of anyone, and anything, independent of Mao Zedong, or which might possibly weaken his power in any way.

However, since Foucault’s sadly early death in 1984, his weekly lectures at the College de France have been published going back to 1974. It’s certainly interesting to compare Discipline and Punish with the lectures of 1975-6, published as Society Must be Defended. Anyone who sees the lectures as justifying a Marxist, or post-Marxist or neo-Marxist reading of Discipline and Punish is engaged in tortuous interpretation. Any kind of Marxism in power is referred to with the greatest of suspicion in the book, and the book does what the title suggest. It concentrates on the idea that society could be independent of the state, and that the role of government should be limited. A distinction is made between more absolute and more limited forms of government. Left wing politics is given a history linking it with ideas of race war against a supposedly foreign ruling class. The overall direction of the book is to establish some value for liberty in the sense used by liberal thinkers, before liberal started to mean left wing and statist; and in the sense used by libertarians when the word is not a synonym for a kind of right wing conservatism rebelling against the liberal state.

Later lectures develop ideas of governmentality, as limited government (in the spirt of Montesquieu’s idea of moderate government), against the absolute power of the state, rooted in ideas of the sovereign as shepherd of the people. Foucault does not lose his sense that apparent freedoms are tied up with coercion, but he emphasises the reality of those freedoms. He emphasises the superiority of Physiocratic free market solutions to wheat shortages in 18th Century France over Mercantilist attempts to regulate prices. In doing this, he is essentially repeating arguments mades by Adam Smith. He emphasises he the role of Ordo liberalism, that is a very free market liberalism, in the intellectual opposition to Naziism. He examines the work of Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises, the Austrian economists and political thinkers who have had a major impact on Classical (free market limited government) Liberalism and Libertarianism. He emphasises the way state power has been extended through biopolitics, the ways in which the state takes on the role of improving and extending life.

We do not even need to read Foucault’s lectures. A lot of this is apparent in the three volumes of the History of Sexuality which Foucault was able to write before his death. Extensive discussion of antique attitudes reveal a strong inclination towards the idea of the self-creation of character, in a kind of self-mastery strongly linked in the antique world with ideas of citizenship and political rights, what we would not call republican virtues. So Foucault’s later work is deeply influenced by ancient and modern notions of individualism and limited government.

Of course there are those who prefer to find some way of taking this up in terms of Marxism, or some kind of radical left thinking at least partly rooted in Marxism. However, even among the left Foucauldians there are those who recognise and regret his shift towards ‘neo-liberalism’. Amongst those associated with Foucault, Jacques Donselot has referred to liberal aspects of Foucault’s thought. His assistant at the Collège de France, François Ewald, has worked on the rise of state welfarism from a liberal point of view.

More to come, expanding on the points above.

Link:Me on Hayek, The Road to Serfdom in LiberalVision

2009-09-18T16:00:00.001+03:00

Primary version of this post, with visual content, at Barry Stocker's Weblog

A summary of The Road to Serfdom and a a brief introduction to F.A. Hayek for LiberalVusion. A statement of Classical Liberalism greatly praised by John Maynard Keynes, amongst others.

FNS 09: War and Liberty; Aristocracy and Liberalism

2009-09-15T00:45:00.002+03:00

Primary version of this post, with visual content, at Barry Stocker's Weblog.

In my first post (three posts ago) on the Friedrich Nietzsche Society 2009 conference, I mentioned a point I made in the discussion after Brian Leiter’s presentation. I suppose this might be making a big deal out of a question, but I was dealing with some things I find important and have been working on for some time.

My point was in response to two claims from Leiter

Nietzsche links fighting in war with liberty, and no other philosopher has done so. Therefore Nietzsche cannot be linked with political liberalism.

Nietzsche attributes different moral worth to different kinds of individuals. Therefore Nietzsche cannot be linked with political liberalism.

My counter claims

Kant refers to war fought according to the laws of humanity as sublime in the Critique of the Power of Judgment. The experience of the sublime is way, for Kant, in which we encounter out transcendental self which stands outside natural determinism. This is our free self. This itself connect with remarks in the Metaphysics of Morals about the positive freedom, with reference to a will to perfection in following moral law which goes above mere minimal obedience, and again refers to our freedom in the most perfectionist way of rising above mere impulse and determinism. This clearly connects with Kant’s view of politics as a kind of perfectionist liberal republicanism, that is citizens rise to the highest levels of human personality in respect for law, as the basis for freedom in a state based on political participation. It also feeds into discussions about the liberty of the moderns and ancients in Benjamin Constant, and Wilhelm von Humbldt’s discussion of positive and negative welfare, two great figures of liberalism. Humbold also linked war with liberty saying that power of the state was less dangerous to liberty in the Ancient Greek states because constant war enhanced independence and strength of character. This is in Humboldt’s great contribution to political philosophy, The Limits of State Action.

Various major liberal thinkers have not been purists with regard to moral equality between humans. Before Alexis de Tocqueville they mostly assumed that only the propertied classes should have political rights. Tocqueville accepted the inevitability, and desirability, of democracy but with reservations and thought it would require a new kind of aristocracy in the legal profession and political leaders. John Stuart Mill thought the educated should have more political rights and that backward peoples should have no political rights until educated to the necessary level. Mill even suggests that some people are just lacking in moral character, suggesting that universal education would not make everyone equal. In politics, William Ewart Gladstone, the great British Liberal Prime Minister, and symbol of democracy and liberty throughout Europe, explicitly believed in aristocracy in the political system rather than pure democracy. As Tocqueville pointed out, representative government under law tends to produce its own aristocracy in any case. These liberal thinkers were picking up, though also revising, ancient republicanism in Aristotle, Cicero, Tactitus etc, which was rooted in the belief that liberty required an aristocracy proud of its rights and national independence. This continued into early modern republicanism, and then fed into Classical Liberalism.

FNS 09: The Italian Job. Nietzsche Texts and Studies

2009-09-15T00:17:00.002+03:00

Primary version of this post, with visual content, at Barry Stocker's Weblog.

One interesting thing I noticed at the Friedrich Nietzsche Society 2009 Conference (see last two posts) was the contribution of Italian commentators, who were present in greater numbers than from any nation after the USA and UK, more than Germany. One distinctive aspect of this is Nietzsche editions, and associated work in philology, and thoughts about Nietzsche on language, philology and rhetoric.

This was most apparent through the participation of Paolo d’Iorio, who directs NietzscheSource (see list of favourite sites in another section of this blog). This is itself supported by the European Union backed Discovery Project: Digital Semantic Corpora for Virtual Research in Philosophy. Discovery supports projects to put reliable digitised versions of the complete archives of major European philosophers online.

D’Iorio spoke at a special session of the conference about the work to digitise the standard Colli/Montinari edition of the complete works of Nietzsche and to put the complete Nietzsche archive online, including his written manuscripts. D’Iorio passed round stunning editions of printed versions of this, which were an extraordinary pleasure to examine. Now everything will be online and far more complete, and freely available through European Union support. This builds on the extraordinary fact about Nietzsche editions, the role Italians have played. Giogio Collini and Mazzino Montinari produced the standard print edition of Nietzsche in German and now D’Iorio is working with Italian collaborators to have very complete Nietzsche texts and archives online. This is not a purely Italian project, D’Iorio himself works in Paris and Oxford. This is not just philology for its own sake, D’Iorio gave a paper on ‘From dissolution into dead matter to the artistic construction of reality. Mind and nature in Nietzsche’s notebooks of Summer 1881’, which combined his research on texts and manuscripts with a major theme in Nietzsche’s philosophy. Another Italian working on the NietzscheSource project through Discovery was present at the conference, Benedetta Zavatta and gave a paper on ‘Nietzsche on mind and language: rhetorical reasons and embodied knowledge’, again combined the philological work with philosophical questions connected with philology.

Most of the Italian participants were not working on NietzscheSource and there was a broad spread of interests, so a really interesting scene there. A bit of that might be due to the time Nietzsche spent in various Italian cities. In Turin his final collapse of 1889 is commemorated and I have found an image online, but unfortunately not complete enough for me to post here.

FNS 09: Leiter versus Gemes, An Epic Duel

2009-09-14T23:23:00.001+03:00

Primary version of this post, with visual content, at Barry Stocker's Weblog

THE RUMBLE IN THE CHAPEL AT ST PETER’S COLLEGE, OXFORD

There was an unexpected bit of drama down at the Friedrich Nietzsche Society conference (see last post) on the Saturday. Brian Leiter’s plenary presentation in the Chapel was enlivened by a man who leafleted conference delegates with a photocopied sheet of quotations, headed CONTRA LEITER, and sprang to his feet after the talk to challenge Leiter, at some length on his denial of free will in Nietzsche’s philosophy. Who was this man? I did not recognise him during a long argument. It turns out it was Ken Gemes of Birkbeck College, London and the University of Southampton, well known figure in Nietzsche circles, in addition to a number of quality publications in philosophy of science and epistemology. Gemes is known, to me and most conference participants, as a good philosopher and a calm personality.

THE THRILLER IN THE FNS CONFERENCE

It certainly provided a fun topic of conversation in the college bar at the end of the day. Did the organisers feel the conference needed a bit of incident to make it particularly memorable, and put Gemes and Leiter up to it? Gemes and Leiter have been friends and collaborators in Nietzsche publications and events. They were seen chatting in a friendly way after the event. Was it some quarrel between friends which got particularly intense because they are such great mates? The context is obscure to me, but I appreciated the drama. Can we look forward to a rematch at the next FNS conference, preceded by insults and provocations in philosophy blogs? I do hope so, that would be wonderful. More please.

Friedrich Nietzsche Society Conference 2009 I

2009-09-14T21:16:00.002+03:00

Primary version of this post, with visual content, at Barry Stocker's Website.

Friday to Sunday I was at the Friedrich Nietzsche Society’s 2009 conference at St Peter’s College, University of Oxford. Plenary sessions and one quarter of parallel sessions took place in the chapel, which was an entertaining choice. The chapel was also used for a recital of Nietzsche’s piano music given by Michael Krücker. The chapel has great acoustics for music and it was a great opportunity to hear Nietzsche’s music in live performance. I don’t value his music highly, but it was a fine hour of live music.

The event was organised by Manuel Dries and Peter Kail. Many congratulations to them on a great job. A very happy, well organised conference with no real problems. Everyone I talked to thought it was a really good event in terms of the sessions and the social atmosphere.

BRIEF NOTE ON MY PAPER

I presented a paper, but I won’t go into that much as posts on Nietzsche over the Summer cover the same ground. Just a brief remark here. The session chair, Christine Lopes, asked me to clarify my position in comparison to the two other papers from Eric Nelson and Marie Fleming which touched on the issues of art and science in nature. I fell between the other two in advocating continuity in Nietzsche between the role of art and science as part of experience and inquiry into truth, but not a complete identity. On of the other speakers advocated something close to complete identity, and the other advocated a discontinuity, or a break. I’m disposed to the view that Nietzsche regards art and science as sharing the inquiry into truth, with the activity of inquiry regarded as more valuable than any goal of a final system of truth. I’m also disposed to the view that they offer different perspectives: a perspective in art of creating, and communicating through, forms; and a perspective in science of creating instruments which have value in prediction and in action.

SUMMARY OF PLENARY SESSIONS

Bernard Reginster

‘The Genealogy of Guilt’

Reginster concentrated on Genealogy of Morality, Essay II. He was corned with the relation of guilt to debt. Bad conscience seems to be an intermediate stage between guilt and debt leaving open the question of whether guilt is something other than debt plus bad conscience. Maybe it is the move from prudential obligation to categorical obligation. Will to power was defined as overcoming resistance, which Reginster defined as the source of pleasure in bringing about punishment, emphasised by Nietzsche as a major source of punishment. We should not see denial of instincts as necessarily self-directed cruelty, since prudential denial is a liberatory becoming indifferent to the instincts. Christianity is a distortion of previous guilt into a reason for self-abasement. Humans as sovereign individuals enjoy the pleasure of power in promise keeping, which is the source of promise keeping rather than fear of pain. Reginster takes the sovereign individual at the end of Essay II as an example of free will, which is also reflected in Christian guilt. Christian guilt is a rational passion motivated by responsiveness to reasons. As Reginster admitted, there is an elephant in the room with regard to this argument, how to account for the account in Essay I of free will as the illusion of salves seeking to claim that they choose slavery rather than admit they are slaves because they are weak.

Peter Poellner

‘Nietzsche’s ethics and the philosophy of mind: the case of ressentiment’

There is a problem with Nietzsche’s account of ressentiment: the Christian values that emerge from ressentiment are in contradiction wit hatred and desire for revenge. This means that the ‘slave’ who has a psychological structure of ressentiment, must both hate and not hate. This raises the problems that Sartre addressed to Freud, of how there can be unconscious motives. At some point, these motives must have conscious affects creating a contradictory situation. Ressentiment has a double purpose: self-vindication and object mastery, that is of making people feel better about themselves, and seeking to conceptually master objecta hostile external world. It has an instrumental purpose of harming the ‘masters’. Poellner argued that a not making explicit is enough to explain how we misunderstand ourselves with regard to ressentiment, and with no need to assume unconscious motivations and hidden mental processes. Despite the instrumental value of ressentiment, it has the self-harming consequence of promoting a divided self. Poeller had difficulty in defining the ‘not making explicit’ criticising Phenomenological accounts, and admitting during questions that his illustratuve example of playing tennis was inadequate.

GRAHAM PARKES

‘Nietzsche on soul in nature: an ecological perspective’

Parkes gave a short talk on ecology and Asian (Daoist and Buddhist) philosophy in relation to Nietzsche, with regard to the wish to find perceptions of nature which are not human centred and do not impose human concepts. He showed a film (in the Quicktime video application on his MacBook Pro computer, I would guess created in the Keynote presentation application and then exported to Quicktime) about Nietzsche’s relation to nature, mostly focusing on Sils Maria. Sils Maria is a mountainous lakeside resort often visited by Nietzsche. The video referred to the meditative rhythm of Nietzsche’s walks round Sil Maria which he found conducive to composing aphorisms, and the investments he had in the landscape. There were various scenes of natural beauty and briefly of industrial ugliness. During the discussion, Parkes conceded that it is unsatisfactory to oppose a purely beautiful nature to a purely ugly industrial world.

BRIAN LEITER

‘Who is the “sovereign individual”? Nietzsche on Freedom’

Leiter criticised any idea that Nietzsche favours free will in any form. He concentrated on the ‘sovereign individual’ at the end of Genealogy, Essay II. He rejected the idea that this is an example of free will. The phrase is only used once by Nietzsche, and is only used ironically to refer to a business person who can remember debts. Where Nietzsche refers to freedom and free will in apparently favourable ways, he is engaging readers so that that Nietzsche’s text will have an impact. Leiter shifted from freedom in the sense of free will to the political sense of political liberalism, arguing that nothing in Nietzsche can be taken as support for political liberalism. His views on the different moral value of different people, and the freedom created by participation in war, are in contradiction with political liberalism, according to Leiter. I intervened in the discussion period on the political issue, more on this and a bizarre confrontation between Leiter and Ken Gemes in a later post.

GALEN STRAWSON

‘Nietzsche’s metaphysics’

Strawson presented an argument for seeing Nietzsche as supporting the kind of metaphysics that Strawson himself favours. That would be a very Spinozistic metaphysics, which Strawson believes is confirmed by 20th Century physics. He mentioned Einstein’s Relativity theory, particularly with regard to four dimensionality and the equivalence of mass and energy; and Quantum mechanics particularly with regard to entanglement. Anyone seeking reliable introductions to these topics can go to these entries in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Jeffrey Bub, ‘Quantum Entanglement and Information’; Francisco Flores, ‘The Equivalence of Mass and Energy'; Robert DiSalle, ‘Space and Time: Inertial Frames’. Strawson presented his metaphysical theses in a hard out and here they are: no persisting and unitary self; no fundamental (real) distinction between objects and their properties/propertiedness; no fundamental (real) distinction between basal properties of things and power properties of things; no fundamental (real) distinction between objects or substances on the one hand and processes and events on the other; reality not truly divisible into causes and effects; objects not governed by laws of nature ontologically distinct from them; no free will; nothing can happen otherwise than it does; reality is one; reality is suffused with–if it does not consist of–mentality in some form or sense; everything is ‘will to power’. All delivered in Strawson’s habitual quirkily charming style.

GÜNTHER ABEL

‘Consciousness, language, and nature. Nietzsche’s philosophy of mind and nature’

A comprehensive account of Nietzsche’s view if mind, language, and knowledge with regard to Analytic philosophy, philosophical naturalism, philosophy of mind, and cognitive science, since W.V.O. Quine, by way of Putnam, Fodor, Dennett and others. The comprehensive nature of the presentation make sit particularly hard to remember particular points. The main theme was that language and mind are unified in knowledge of the natural world, and belong together in the context of the natural world.

JOHN RICHARDSON

‘Nietzsche’s value monism. Saying yes to everything’

Richardson looked at the implications, and difficulties, of Nietzsche’s call to affirmation of all of life. One difficulty is how we can say yes to everything however terrible, and however much suffering it creates. Another difficulty is that the affirmation must include the moments of life in which someone says no to life. Richardson suggested that these difficulties can be reduced by also referring to Nietzsche’s commitment to resisting value oppositions. He clearly rejects the opposition of good to evil. He appears to replace this with an opposition between good and bad, but Richardson argues that what is really happening here is the elaboration of a purely comparative evaluation of the difference, between the better and worst, rather than an opposition between absolute opposite.

I didn’t make notes on the parallel sessions I went to, but I would like to briefly indicate the names of speaker in those sessions and what themes I learned about from attending those sessions.

Nietzsche and Darwin: Alessandra Tanesini, Peter Sedgwick

Nietzsche on Rhetoric and language: Benedetta Zavatta

Nietzsche on Language and Consciousness: Mariano L. Rodriguez

Morality and Naturalism: Mario Brandhorst, Maria Fornari, Rogério Lopes

Nietzsche on Science and Nature: Babette Babich, Christian Emden, Paolo D’Ioro.

Posts coming on the bizarre Leiter-Gemes confrontation and the Italian contribution to Nietzsche editions and studies.

Philosophy and Literature: An Investigation

2009-09-11T04:15:00.002+03:00

Primary version of this post, with visual content, at Barry Stocker's Weblog.

I’ve had a bit of feedback, off the blog, on yesterday’s post, ‘Philosophical Beginnings of Early Modern Literature’. A few clarificatory remarks in response to that.

I’ve certainly no intention of suggesting that French or British literature should be given a starting point that is primarily contained in early modern philosophy. The literature emerged from various sources, including a history of canonical literary works, as well as philosophical texts. The history of French literature certainly requires reference to Rabelais and Ronsard, as well as Montaigne and Pascal.

The point about the remarks on philosophy and literature in Britain is not simply to refer the emergence of the ‘realist’ novel, the novel of psychological and social plausibility, to the empiricist (experience based) nature of British philosophy. Ian Watt’s 1957 classic, Rise of the Novel addressed that issue. Of course there is plenty that could be changed, or added to in Watt, but more than that i am concerned with how philosophical texts from Bacon to Hume are to be read as literary in a number of senses: their stylistic qualities, the narrative elements of their philosophical investigations, the concern with the tension between humans as part of nature and the natural development of human society. The last item refers to a tension where literature, and thought about literature, looks particularly relevant.

I think what I was saying yesterday is really addressed more against philosophers than against literary critics, if it is against anyone, Literary historians are aware of the links between ‘pure’ literary texts and other forms of literature, and are very aware of how recent current categories of literature and forms of writing were developed. Philosophers tend to look at texts as non-literary. Where philosophers or literary critics look at philosophy texts as literature, I think there is a tendency for this to be become philosophy as rhetoric and persuasion, or the collapse of philosophy into literature in general. I want to look at how philosophical texts develop arguments through literary means, and how literary texts use philosophical argument, and I want to look at the texts where both are clearly present. While there is no complete originality in looking at philosophical texts and literary texts together, I see a need to further the enterprise of looking at a unity of literary construction with philosophical claims about morality. identity, knowledge, and so on. Particularly with regard to taking literature into the philosophical texts, and reflecting back on the literature. It looks to me as if most relevant publications come from the literary side.

Roughly speaking I would say that in France there were very obvious ways in which philosophical texts were literary texts, and major contributions to literary writing. I don’t think this is so apparent in British literature, though there is some comparison to be made. Bacon does not have the status of Montaigne as a literary figure. I think it is noteworthy that Hume and Smith had difficulty with La Rochefoucauld, referring to him as an immoralist. There is something about the paradoxical and ironic approach in the French writers that cannot be easily absorbed by the British writers. Hume and Burke have many things to say which connect with the complexity of sentiments and passions in literature, but there is system, or at least a drive towards system, not matched in the French writers I have been referring to. Even Descartes explores the possibility of fiction, delusion, and insanity, entering philosophy in a way absent in a any direct way from the 17th and 18th Century British philosophers.

It is important that Montesqueiu and Rousseau wrote literary fictions while Hume, Smith and Burke did not. Descartes wrote an autobiographical account of how he came across truth, not something to be found in Bacon or Hobbes.

Me on Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations in LiberalVision

2009-09-10T20:05:00.002+03:00

Primary version of this post, with visual content, at Barry Stocker's Weblog.

‘Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations’ Liberal Vision, 10th September, 2009. A summary direct towards Smith’s relevance to liberal political thought.

Philosophical Beginnings of Early Modern Literature

2009-09-10T05:11:00.002+03:00

Primary version of this post, with visual content, at Barry Stocker's Weblog.

If we look at the emergence of modern literature in France and Britain, we could just as much talk about its origins in works of philosophy, and moral commentary, as in the historical development of literary genres.

Does any ‘purely’ literary figure contribute more to the emergence of French literature than Montaigne, Descartes, Pascal, La Rochefoucauld, La Bruyère? A case could be put for Rabelais, but in any case we cannot talk about French literature without talking about these philosophers and moralists. In the case of la Rochefoucauld, we could even see the relations between moral reflections and literature through his private relationship with Madame de La Fayette and his friendship with Madame de Sévigné. The most significant thing is that we can see a big contribution in La Rochefoucauld’s Maxims towards literary style and towards an informal theory of the passions which establishes the themes of French literature.

Literature and philosophy seem less obviously entwined in Britain, if critics put Shakespeare in a philosophical context, they tend to bring in Montaigne. But let us consider the following.

The contribution made to English style by Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, David Hume, Adam Smith and Edmund Burke.

The sense in Bacon and Hobbes the existence of the arts depends on the existence of sovereignty, law and the state.

Bacon’s use of utopian fiction in New Atlantis. Bacon’s emphasis on an orientation of the self towards the truth in nature and away from distracting idols. That seems to lead in the direction of an anti-rhetorical abstract philosophical language, but it is also the story of a dramatic struggle of the self with distraction. There is a historical and personal account of the orientation necessary for nature to reveal itself. That account includes the supremacy of law, instituted by a state.

For Hobbes, the existence of the arts depends on the existence of the covenant and the artificial man of the state. He believes in the truth of pure reasoning, but finds it necessary to resort to rhetoric to communicate his truths (as Quentin Skinner has pointed out at considerable length). The covenant and the artificial man is explain in the picture of the giant man made up of smaller people, and discussion of personation in drama and law.

In Hume, Smith and Burke we get theories of taste which incorporate permanent physiological sensation and changeable sociable agreement. Burke’s A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, has a rhythm governed by the moves from sensation to sociability and back again. Hume offers a theory of the mind as passions, and a theory of taste in which passions are understood as physiological and as formed by the evolution of social agreement. These ambiguities about sensation and sociability enter into Smith’s discussion of taste, of moral sentiments and his discussion of natural and non-natural order in the development of different forms of wealth (as I discussed in a post of 16th August 2009). These are ambiguities about the sentiments, how they affect each other and how they are affected by the external social and natural worlds. Al very germane to the literature of the time.

We might look at early modern British philosophy, as more than the establishment of an epistemological tradition, theories about how ideas of things relate to sensations of things and those things themselves, in which Locke on knowledge of physical is the defining discussion. There’s nothing wrong with that approach, but there is a lot to be said for considering other frames, and placing Locke himself in that frame.

Link: Philipe Legrain’s Blog: For Open Immigration

2009-09-09T23:33:00.002+03:00

Primary version of this post, with visual content, at Barry Stocker's Weblog.

Philippe Legrain, a blog largely devoted to defending the merits of immigration, and associated phenomena such as free trade. Issues he has spoken about and published on extensively. Various people for various reasons may wish to deny the association between the two, but arguments about free movement of goods and free movement of peoples have common moral and economic aspects. The worst tyrannies have always strongly restricted both, something opponents of open immigration and of free trade might like to ponder.

Legrain, now London based, has worked in financial institutions, financial journalism, academia, book writing, thinks tanks, transnational institutions and think tanks. He describes his outlook as economically and socially liberal, and as far as I can see he takes that in a centre-left direction. For example, he is associated with the magazine Prospect which is very oriented towards New Labour. The kind of social democrat who has classical liberal/libertarian tendencies.

Mill: Liberty/Socialism in Principles of Political Economy

2009-09-09T00:09:00.002+03:00

Primary version of this post, with visual content, at Barry Stocker's Weblog.

Since I worked out that John Stuart Mill’s Principles of Political Economy contains ideas in contrast with those of On Liberty I have obtained two copies of the book. Getting a definitive edition of the Principles is more difficult than I realised. I bought the OUP Oxford World’s Classics edition before realising that it had left out the first two books, though it did add Chapters on Socialism which were written at the time of the 7th edition of the Principles. The OUP edition is based on the 7th edition, and I suppose the original 7th edition left out the first two books, but I’m not sure. If that is not the case then OUP’s behaviour is very poor. The only way, I am aware of, for getting a definition version with all variations from all editions is the to get the Liberty Fund edition in two volumes. Liberty Fund editions are very cheap but not widely distributed. Their edition is also freely available online at the Online Library of Liberty.

I am looking now at a rather interesting edition a friend lent to me. It is edited by J. Laurence Laughlin and published by D. Appleton and Company of New York in 1901, though as Laughlin’s preface is dated 1884, I presume this is a reprint. The notable thing about Laughlin is that he was the founding chair of the Department of Economics at Chicago University. That means he founded one of he world’s great economics departments, associated most famously with Milton Friedman. Other major economists associated with the department include Hayek, Robert Lucas (the biggest figure in Rational Expectations), Gary Becker (the biggest figure in Behavioural Economics) and many other significant figures.

Laughlin provides a bridge between Mill and those figures, and seems to have been a major figure in market orientated thinking in his own time. Laughlin edits Mill’s Principles as part of the cycle in which the book was a major economics text book. Laughlin’s appropriation is somewhat crude, he adds an essay on the history of economic thought. interpolates his own comments, maps and charts, mostly referring to the United States. On some occasions he says he has deleted comments by Mill and replaced them with his own. It wouldn’t happen now, fascinating to see how it happened then.

The main points I have picked up from my reading so far, and checking through the online version is that Mill is less of what we would now call a free market libertarian in his economics than in On Liberty. This is surprising, at least by present standards, because on the whole economists are much more inclined towards free market thinking than other social scientists. Surveys show most academic economists to be left of centre, but nevertheless favour market mechanisms over collective and state solutions in ways which would startle most of the left inclined.

What I’ve noticed so far is that Mill does explore socialism, or even communism, favourably as a hypothesis, and became more influenced by this hypothesis over time. He never abandoned a belief in markets but thought distribution of income could be detached from the market mechanisms of prices. What I also notice is the élitism and anti-liberalism compared with On Liberty. In the Principles, Mill suggests that labourers cannot regulate their own lives and expenditure competently and that there should be laws to prevent the poor from marrying early and producing too many children. Mill’s socialist side is very patronising, arrogant and tends to deprive workers of freedom. It fits into the criticisms that classical liberals/libertarians make of socialists. It’s quite close to what Hayek accuses socialism of leading towards in The Road to Serfdom, The even greater irony is that Hayek was a real Mill fan in his earlier years, following Mill’s journeys and editing some of his letters.

Link: Philosophy and Literature Podcast

2009-09-08T20:05:00.001+03:00

Primary version of this post, with visual content, at Barry Stocker's Weblog

‘Philosophy and Literature’ with Lanier Anderson on Philosophy Talk presented by Ken Taylor and John Perry. Ken Taylor and John Perry of Stanford University are regular presenters of podcasts on Philosophy Talk which are also broadcast on Sunday mornings by the San Francisco Unified School District radio station KALW.

In this podcast from 9th August 2009, they take a very user friendly approach to discussing links between philosophy and literature. The podcast starts with the Monty Python sketch in which someone comments on Thomas Hardy writing a novel like a sporting event. Amongst a lot of informality and jokes, Taylor and Perry have a conversation with Anderson about philosophy as literature and literature as philosophy. The user friendly emphasis does break down the topic in to some clear points, which I find very helpful even after many years of thinking about philosophy and literature. The topics that come up are literature as mental simulation, literature as pretense, how we can have emotional reactions to pretense, imagining ourselves as characters, the psychology of morality including the psychology of evil, philosophical communication through genres like dialogue and aphorism, humans as narrating creatures, how philosophy now is less literary than a lot of the philosophical classics.