Nietzsche's Republican Hero: Lazare Carnot

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.

Aristotle Against Orientalism: Carthaginian Perspective

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

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.

Liberal and Libertarian Foucault I: Overview

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.

FNS 09: War and Liberty; Aristocracy and Liberalism

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.

The Relevance of Adam Smith

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

I’m retuning to the issue of interpreting Adam Smith, which I referred to when posting in the Manchester Metropolitan University Workshops in Political Theory two days ago, I had hoped to post on Adam Smith yesterday. As I indicated two days ago, there was a paper on Adam Smith I found very unsatisfying. I made some comments on the paper but was only able to mention a few of the problems I found with the paper, and as far as I can see it other people in the workshop made the same criticisms after I spoke, but in less direct ways. I found the paper disappointing, but useful, in making a standard series of errors about Adam Smith which are typical of one kind of left-inclined commentators. I am going to summarise this as briefly as possible, and referring as much as possible to the very obvious mistakes, rather than the more subtle problems that will arise in any interpretative work. At the bottom I refer to what I think was good in that paper.

Mistake One

Adam Smith was not an original thinker, because a lot of what he said had been said by other people before.

Reply.

All great thinkers are preceded by various people who express parts of what appear’s in that thinker’s work. The achievement of major original thinkers, like Smith, is to integrate a wide range of previous work on the topic, adding some new thoughts along with grasping links and contradictions which appear when integrating everything. Just about everyone agrees that Smith produced a great original classic: An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.

Mistake Two

Adam Smith is not relevant to current economics, and we know this because Mil refers to Smith’s work as partly obsolete and imperfect everywhere (in The Principles of Political Economy). Another supporting argument was that An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations covers a wider range of material than current economics and is therefore irrelevant to current economics.

Reply.

Most economists continue to refer to Smith as the founder of the discipline and refer to his ideas.

Miill’s comments are a statement of the obvious: any book on economics becomes increasingly obsolete over time because of new developments in the discipline and changing economic circumstances. However, economists continue to use use ideas from Smith and his earlier successors, particularly David Ricardo and Karl Marx. Smith’s relevance compared with Marx has clearly increased in most people’s minds since the 1970s.

Recent economists, most notably the Nobel Prize winner, Gary Beck, have been very interested in taking economics into the territory of psychology, anthropology and sociology. This means that recent economists have written about things like the history of religion, and the development of social ethics, discussed by Smith in Wealth of Nations.

Mistake Three

Adam Smith regards value and wealth as essentially the produce of agricultural labour, and regards industrial production and trade as less valuable.

Reply.

As others pointed out in the workshop, Smith thought that agriculture was more productive only in the sense that it requires less capital (though of course this has changed over time).

There is a confusion in what the speaker said between Smith and the Physiocrats the French economic school which included Turgot, Quesnay, and Mirabeau the Elder. The Physiocrats opposed Mercantilist restrictions on trade and thought all economic value comes from land. Smith clearly rejects their emphasis on land, even if by later standards, he exaggerates the role of agriculture. The slightly more subtle mistake the speaker was making here, was to confuse Smith’s emphasis on natural stages of development with a critique of wealth from industrial production and trade. As I suggested in a post on August 16th, Smith was tied to a teleological way of thinking in which nature and society unfold in necessary steps, a way of thinking which was not throughly challenged until the late 19th Century. The result of this is that he is disturbed when agricultural wealth is stimulated by towns, though even this is ambiguous since in some passages he refers approvingly to the ways in which urban wealth increases agricultural wealth.

Mistake Four

Smith was a left-wing, therefore anti-free market thinker because he opposed Mercantilism.

Reply.

Im extrapolating a bit here, but that seems to be the only way of understanding the way the speaker framed criticisms of Mercantilism. Mercantilism refers to the belief that the world contains a finite amount of wealth, particularly in god, and that trade between states is a way in which one country takes wealth from another. Imports are to be discouraged because paying for them causes wealth to leave the country, and exports are to be discouraged where it means that objects of value are leaving the country. Mercantilist policies were tied to the aristocratic and monarchic states of the time, and Smith criticises those states. The speaker used a slippage between criticising those states and criticising capitalism.

Mistake Five.

Smith did not approve of capitalism because there was less of it in his time and the word did not exist.

Reply.

The fact he word ‘capitalism’ did not exist is irrelevant and it is a feeble rhetorical trick to suggest it is relevant. Clearly Smith wanted to see more and more of what we now call capitalism.

Mistake six

Smith did not opposed socialism because the word did not exist.

Reply.

Again a feeble rhetorical manipulation. Smith opposed what we now call socialism, when he supported the sanctity of private property and opposed most forms of intervention in the economy.

Mistake Seven

Smith was like left-wingers now because his ideas were taken up by late 18th and early 19th century radicals and labour movements, including many French revolutionaries, so by people opposed to monarchical and aristocratic privilege.

Reply.

Left used to refer to people who though allocation of resources was better done by markets than by the state, this has nothing to do with the current socialist left, or even social democrats. Labour representative were concerned with forms of state intervention which held down wages, prevent labour from organising, and pushed up the price of basic items in the budget of labourers. Again these are different from the major aims of the current left. Left wing people in power, or even conservative states trying to accommodate working class demands, moved the issue away from cutting down that state to expanding the state as a means of regulating the economy and redistributing wealth.

Mistake Eight

Free marketers now support state interventionism and therefore contradict Smith’s demands for a less statism.

Reply.

This contradicts other comments the speaker made. It is simply not true that current free marketeers accept existing state interventionism. I drew the attention of the speaker to libertarian thinkers who oppose the privileged relations between corporations and the state. The speaker started stonewalling and trying to change the subject to how libertarianism used to refer to left wing positions, an obvious sign that he could not back up his argument. I insisted on pointing out that free market thinkers like Hayek, Mises and Friedman, and organisations using their views, are extremely critical of links between corporations and the state, including the use of war in promoting sectional economic interests.

Mistake Nine

The speaker clearly though the Thatcher and Reagan governments, and other ‘free market’ governments since represent the most radical forms of free market thinking.

Reply

Reagan and Thatcher get some support from free market thinkers for some of their economic policies. They are also strongly criticised for leaving the essence of the interventionist state in place, and for continuing state support for favoured economic enterprises.

Mistake Ten

The speaker claimed that books IV and V of An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations justify levels of state interventionism and social welfarism in contradiction with current free marketeers.

Reply.

This is true in reference to anarcho-capitalists like Murray Rothbard and Hans-Hermann Hoppe, or minarchists (night watchman state) like Ludwig von Mises and Robert Nozick. It is not true with reference to Friedrich Hayek or Milton Friedman who are considerably more influential than the minarchists and anarcho-capitalists. The speaker clearly thought Friedman was less interventionist and welfarist than Smith. So what is the interventionism that the speaker alluded to in Smith. Books IV and V of The Wealth of Nations are concerned with: reducing ways in which states have limited trade and taken private property from subjects; expanding education, which should be mostly provided privately with the state supporting the poorest; raising revenue from taxes on consumption; protecting trade outposts fro violence through state military support. This is definitely a very limited role for the state, and certainly goes no further in that direction than Hayek or Friedman.

Mistake Eleven

The speaker said that Smith would be against free markets now because he takes the side of labourers.

Reply.

Smith takes the side of labourers in preferring low taxes on necessary goods, and in allowing labourers to seek the highest possible wages by removing barriers to competition between labourers and between companies when they are hiring labourers. Clearly this has nothing to do with being against free markets and capitalism.

Mistake Twelve

The speaker appeared to think that the discussion of negative and positive liberty comes from Isaiah Berlin, in his 1969 essay, ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’. That is the distinction between liberty from state compulsion and the liberty that arises from state action to expand human capacities.

Reply

I believe Isaiah Berlin’s essay to be highly overrated, its greatest virtue is to draw readers back to important late 18th and early 19th century discussions of liberty. At this time, Kant referred to negative and positive freedom in ethics; Wilhelm von Humboldt referred to negative and positive welfare; Benjamin Constant referred to the liberty of the moderns and the ancients. These all refer to the negative/positive liberty type distinction, though in Kant it’s a distinction about the relation of reason to action. These discussions are anticipated by what Hobbes and then Montesquieu have to say about the kinds of liberty which exist in different ancient and modern states.

Mistake Thirteen

Takes us back to mistake two. The speaker seemed to think that Smith’ status as a Professor of Moral Philosophy and the broad range of topics he lectured and wrote on undermines his place as an economist and free marketeer.

Reply.

The speaker seems to assume that economics is only about prices, when it is about more general questions of ranking choices in individual and social action, which connect with questions of law, ethics etc that Smith was also concerned with. The speaker claimed that An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations was a wok of moral inquiry. In some ways it is, which in no way contradicts its status as a work of economics. The speaker appears to be making the absurd assumption that one cannot be simultaneously concerned with ethics and with issues of choice, and preference, which are often expressed in terms of prices within a monetised economy.

Mistake Fourteen

The speaker assumed some contradiction between: Aristotelian elements in Smith like a concern with standards of value, and teleology (the end towards something is moving); and free market capitalist thinking.

Reply.

The speaker exaggerates the Aristotelian elements in Smith. Unlike Aristotle, Smith was not concerned with determining a real value and excluding price variations, and he was certainly not supporting the limits in economic inequality (between citizens) proposed by Aristotle. Smith cannot both be strongly teleological in thinking, therefore seeing natural inevitability in the movement from land to city to trade, and believe that movement away from agricultural wealth is bad. Smith sometimes seems inclined to weak versions of those propositions, making it possible to refer to a tension perhaps, but the speaker referred to both propositions in a very strong way without noting the problem.

Generally Badly Formed Argument

Some of this is covered above, as when the speaker implies that Smith is left wing in the current sense by referring to the links between Smith and non-socialist radicals of the original left.

A really obvious problem is that the speaker claimed that Smith would be against capitalism as it is now and that he is irrelevant.

If Smith is irrelevant, his supposed arguments against capitalism must be irrelevant.

The speaker condemned current free markets while saying there are no free markets.

USEFUL POINTS

As I have already noted, the speaker drew attention to the way early radicals like Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin and Jeremy Bentham, used Smith’s ideas. I have already stated what I think is wrong with taking this as a reason for thinking Smith can be connected with socialist though. When they do lean towards a redistribution of wealth they are going beyond Smith.

The speaker referred to liberty in Smith as independence rather than as the ‘negative liberty’ or freedom from external compulsion. We might wander how much difference there is between the two and the speaker did not express this potentially useful thought clearly. If we clarify the thought, the point is that Smith was concerned with more than just leaving people alone but also with promoting the virtue that will enable the best possible use of that liberty in a spirt of general independence of mind. As I suggested in a post of 22nd August, this does bring Smith close to classical republican thinking which values political participation, rather than the more anti-political individualism of a lot of current libertarian thinking. On the other hand, individualistic liberalism and republicanism are widely recognised to have been combined in a variety of thinkers from Locke to Mill. I agree that it is unfortunate that current libertarians tend to ignore this. Gerald Gaus provides an interesting and valuable exception.

Adam Smith: Bourgeois Republican Patriotism

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

The final post on my recent re-reading of An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. The end of the book is taken up with discussion of taxes. The most ideal situation for Smith here seems to be found in the modern merchant republics of Hamburg and the Netherlands. In both cases, he suggests that occasionally taxes are raised through a wealth tax, tax on the total worth of individuals which is paid voluntarily, Everyone makes a payment based on unchallenged self-assessment, and Smith claims that great honesty is shown in both states. Smith does not suggest that taxes could be regularly raised in this way, even if citizens could be expected to be frequently so honest, frequent taxes on the total worth of individuals would destroy the capacity to pay taxes up by using up all individual wealth.

The worst examples Smith gives of taxation are in France, at that time an absolutist monarchy administered at local and national level by the aristocracy in patchwork of different tax regimes. The irregularity of tax is one problem, another major problem is that heavy taxes are placed on the necessities of life. Smith strongly believes that taxes should fall most heavily on luxuries mostly consumed by the rich. Smith is not a redistributionist though, he does not suggest progressive rates of tax, and restricts taxation to taxes on consumption rather than on income (leaving aside occasional wealth taxes). His reasons for opposing taxes on the necessities of life are explained just as much in terms of keeping the cost of labour down, as in terms of assisting the labouring classes, but the two things are difficult to keep completely distinct.

Britain occupies a middle place between the Dutch Republic and France. Smith welcomes the lack of taxes on internal trade within Great Britain, but is concerned about taxes on the necessities of life. He is very condemnatory of customs on imported goods, suggesting that these promote smuggling and are not respected by citizens who frequently buy from smugglers; he suggests that customs taxes should be replaced by excises taxes (both used to be levied by a distinct unit of British government) on the manufacture of goods.

The discussion of British taxes runs into a more general discussion of the political system in Britain. He suggests that Scotland benefited from the union of the Scottish Parliament with the English Parliament, that is the abolition of the Scottish Parliament and the inclusion of Scottish representatives in the English Parliament. The reason he offers is the escape of the Scottish people from aristocratic domination. Smith objects to the principle of aristocracy rather than the Scottish aristocracy as such. He describes the Scottish aristos as honourable, as deserving of their station and so on. There is an implicit rejection of the very ideas of honour, station, and so on, there. He calls for a similar Act of Unio between Ireland and Britain to rescue the Irish from domination by a worse aristocracy, a Protestant English aristocracy who despised Catholic Irish tenant farmers. An Act of Union did take place in 1800 (creating the United Kingdom, the Irish component now only consists of Northern Ireland), and political discrimination against Catholics was ended in 1829. Unfortunately this did not bring about an end to mutual hostility, including violence.

Smith hints at hostility to aristocracy, and even monarchy, in contrast to his friends Edmund Burke and David Hume. It’s important to distinguish Smith as the least conservative, and most liberal, of that trio. There may be some tension with his idealisation of the merchant republics of the Netherlands and Hamburg. As Smith himself explains, the taxes paid by the Dutch merchants are dependent on their dominant place in Dutch politics. He gives a shining account of the republican patriotism of the Dutch merchants: their profits from trade and from lending money are greatly lowered by the taxes they pay. On the other hand, he believes that they will not be willing to pay those taxes if their political influence wanes. Smith did not really entertain the idea of democracy as votes for all, or certainly not in the text of The Wealth of Nations. He advocated representative government, but implicitly for the merchant class.

It may be that Smith assumed that the merchant class would be the most natural politicians, even in conditions of universal suffrage. His views are based on the assumption that labourers and merchants have common interests under a set of clear laws which maintain ‘free trade’ (by which Smith understood all that we would understand as free market, or open market). It seems to me that this is broadly correct, but Smith clearly underestimated the degree to which merchants and labourers would use the state, its laws and regulations, its expenditure and employment opportunities, as ways of promoting monopolies, and restrictions on market exchange; and clearly underestimated the degree to which these would become the sources of political conflict and the ways in which political parties would try to appeal to electoral alliances of various interests of these kinds. He did also gave us the intellectual tools to understand and criticise that process.

Slavery and Absolute Property in Adam Smith

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

In An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Smith is concerned with slavery in a number of ways, all of which condemn slavery. For reasons I cannot currently fathom, clear universal condemnation of slavery only begins in the 18th Century. That certainly confirms that the Enlightenment really was a great movement, as in the condemnation of slavery in Montesquieu. Rousseau, Hume, Smith and less well known figures like Gershom Carmichael. Carmichael was the first Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Glasgow, a post later filled by three great thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment: Francis Hutcheson, Adam Smith, Thomas Reid. I hope to return to Carmichael.

Returning to Carmichael’s second successor in that chair, Adam Smith, Smith suggest that in his time slavery is more humane when administered by the absolutist monarchy of France, rather than by the constitutional parliamentary government of Britain. Slavery is relatively humane, when administered under an absolute government, according to Smith, because such a government will interfere with the rights of property owners while a constitutional government will not.

Smith is thinking of the relative administration of slave plantations in the British and French Caribbean. He is also thinking of classical references familiar to all Enlightened educated readers of that time. He also refers to the way in which slavery became more moderate under the Roman Empire, than under the Republic (that great exemplar of the slef-government of citizens). He is most certainly thinking of Tacitus, the historian of the early Empire nostalgic for the Republic. It is Tacitus who refers to a Senator during the early Empire, who complains of the increasing regard shown for the legal rights of slaves.

Looking at the European Enlightenment, it is Giambattista Vico, who refers to the Empire as more democratic than the Republic in Roman History, in The New Science. I doubt that Smith was aware of this book. Like Alexis de Tocqueville later, Vico thinks of democracy as about equal rights rather than political participation Tocqueville clearly thinks democracy is significantly about elections and participation, but his starting point is that democracy means equality of conditions.

What we are referring to here is the republicanism based on oligarchy. Still at some points, democracy has been linked with slavery. e.g. the leaders of the Confederate States of America (the break away slave owning southern states who precipitated the Civil War).

The point I am concerned with here is the United States was founded by slave owners, so one of the great moment in modern constitutional government, the formation of the USA, was embedded in the desire of property owners to defend their property including slaves.

I’ve been looking at the US Constitution, which is a short document. Despite what some people claim there is nothing about property rights, there is a lot about constitutional federal government. Despite what the libertarian-conservatives say, the Constitution is not a document devoted to absolute property rights, as some US libertarians less tied to conservatism, have noticed.

From a progressivist libertarian point of view, I suggest that the absolutism of property rights in US history begins with the belief of slave owners that their property has foundations beyond any particular law.

The belief that the US constitution is concerned with absolute property rights rather than the benefits of republican self-government, is false and false by a big margin.

No right is absolute in the sense that it overrides all other rights. Absoluteness of property rights comes from the time of slavery. Smith opposed such a notion, property rights cannot override the right of the slave to seek liberty. This property absolutism, right or wrong is not supported by Smith. Property rights must be judged by their general social consequences,

Adam Smith, the City, Natural Order, Republicanism

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

At the end of Book III, Chapter 1, ‘Of the Natural Progress of Opulence’, of An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Smith refers to a unnatural and retrograde order. What he means is the inversion of a natural progress from agriculture, to manufacture to international commerce. That natural progress is the progress from improvements in agriculture which allow the formation of towns and investments in manufacture, and a similar progress to international trade.

The unnatural event takes place in European cities where international trade has introduced new luxuries to cities. These luxuries influence domestic manufacturers who compete in that new market, and that further influences agriculture.

I’ve mentioned dialectic in Smith a few times, and Smith as bringer of dialectic into his definitive work on political economy. The idea of an unnatural order is either a break down of dialectic, or a suggestion that dialectic leads to rigid unifying forms. Writing about Pascal and Smith as dialecticians yesterday, I suggested that Pascal’s form of dialectic is more contradictory, more concerned with paradox than Smith’s. Kierkegaard also provides a model of a more paradoxical kind of dialectic, he had a good phrase for it, dialectic of the absurd.

Smith is shocked by something that is clearly inevitable, I would have thought. That is the feedback consequences of a long historical process, so that ‘older’ forms of wealth are influenced by the older forms. There is a moralism here about the influence of ‘luxuries’, not that Smith ever thinks it would be a good idea to try to restrict them. At an earlier point in The Wealth of Nations, Smith even recognises the positive impact of the wealth of towns on the surrounding countryside. He also suggests that an alliance between monarchs and cities in the Middle Ages was a good thing in hastening the end of feudalism, and the increase in free trade.

The moralism about cities appears in a slightly different form with regard to cities which are centres of political power. Smith refers to the huge waste of a royal court and its hangers on which outweighs even the wealth produced by Paris. At another point, Smith mentions the expense of royal courts and back tracks to refer to the honourable role of high royal servants. I’m disposed to believe that Smith was a covert critic of royalty. From that point of view, it;s interesting that in the discussion of the Navigation acts he repeatedly refers to what he normally calls Holland, also known then as the Dutch Republic, as the ‘maritime republic’. Smith strongly hints that royal courts continue the tradition of wasteful expenditure on hangers on, which is wealth diverted from investment, in nomad princes and the like.

The implied criticism of royal expenditure, and of the institution itself, is rather mingled with moralising about the sort of people to be found round royal courts. That lurking republicanism is maybe associated with the less rational dislike of the inversion of nature, since royal expenditure might be regarded as the diversion of economic capacity, occasioned by a premature entry of luxury goods from another country,

This odd outrage at countries which don’t follow economic stages in the right order, is in tensions with the feedback processes Smith otherwise values; and his general feeling that trade should be left alone, except where really very strong moral and national interests are at stake. It also suggests a limitation in the understanding of ‘nature’ at the time, which has natural theology somewhere within it, that is the view that everything in nature moves forward in orderly stages to an end ordained by God. I don’t think that notion is really abandoned, in general, until Nietzsche, and then later in the 19th Century when Darwinism became neo-Darwinism, and when the laws of thermodynamics led to a cultural interest in entropy in nature.

Liberating Republicanism

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

What do I mean by liberating Republicanism? A few things.

I mean liberating Machiavelli the Republican theorist from the crass parody of him as an opportunistic servant of tyrants, a cynical engineer of despotism, even a version of the devil. Here I can only say, read The Discources, then read or reread ,The Prince. If you think you know Machiavelli, but you haven’t done this, you are very mistaken.

Republicanism is a theory of freedom. A theory in which the state is limited and upholds liberties, but also a theory in which freedom in a society is enhanced by political participation and political rights, by the existence of a political sphere. As Machiavelli notes, there is lot of self-interest at work in that sphere; as Machiavelli also noted, given good Republican institutions that self-interest can be turned into a freedom enhancing struggle for relative prestige. So Republicanism is something liberating.

On the whole Republican theorists have been concerned with the protection of individual rights, including property rights, from the state and from the more extreme decisions of temporary majorities. The two main exceptions are Spinoza and Rousseau, though I wouldn’t want to go down the sad and sorry road of blaming Rousseau for everything bad in politics since the Jacobin Terror, and there are certainly things a Republican concerned with individual rights can learn from those two. On the other side, we have Aristotle, Cicero, Machiavelli, Harrington, Sydney, and Kant, as the clearest examples, I would also add Locke, Montesquieu, Smith, Jefferson, Madison, Alexis de Tocqueville and John Stuart Mill.

The obvious thing about that last list above is these are people often listed as Classical Liberals. I think it bizarre that Kant is often not listed among the Classical Liberals, but more on him a bit later. Current Libertarian thinking tends to take those Classical Liberals as all united by a view of individuals and their property as absolute self-contained capsules. On this basis, voluntary contracts and exchanges between individuals are regarded as the only legitimate social relation. The political sphere is seen as valueless in comparison, and at best something to be tolerated as a necessary evil.

This view is most strong in the United States, and is tied up with a disguised nationalism in which it is presumed that the US Constitution rests on the same assumptions. As even some hard core libertarians have acknowledged, this is not a realistic presentation of the US Constitution, or the people associated with its political and intellectual origins (Jefferson and Madison, we could also add Montesquieu and Locke as ghostly intellectual presences). Indeed the most hard core libertarians, particularly the minarchists and the anarcho-capitalists, are bound to concede this if they are at all honest. There is no way that the Constitution presents a night watchman theory of the state, and how could it be am anarchist document?

An honest approach would lead to dumping claim to the thinkers I listed from Locke to Mill, except with regard to particular passages and aspects, which are compatible with hard core libertarianism. I have addressed this recently with regard to readings of Locke and Étienne de La Boétie.

The earliest thinker who really fits in with hard core libertarian thought is Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835) in Limits of State Action, but even Humboldt didn’t follow the prescriptions of the book as a Prussian education minister. The next proto-hard core libertarian thinker is Frédéric Bastiat (1801-1850), a notable economic thinker. A really admirable and sometimes funny writer in the advantages of markets. I would say the same, as I would say about various libertarian economists since Hayek, great economic ideas, how very unfortunate that the view of politics and political liberties is so dismissive.

The intermediate step there is that economic ideas, which are great for explaining how social rationality emerges from free economic decision of individuals, are not so great for dealing with situations where the good is intrinsically collective, whether it’s transport planning or building a constitution. Both of those can, and should be, informed by market thinking, but the market cannot create a decision about whether or not to route a road somewhere, or what the voting system should be. In principle a non-state agency formed by economic agents could have the power to route roads, but then that would not be operating as a purely economic agent and would have acquired a political quasi-state role, and we’d have to ask who gave it this power and excluded other claimants.

One part of this is about showing that Republicanism promotes liberty. Another part of this is about showing that the Republican element in various Classical Liberal thinkers should be liberated from a large part of libertarian thinking. Another part of this is about showing how libertarianism needs to be liberated from the worst aspects of libertarianism. The last part is about liberating Republicanism from left-liberals, social democrats, and socialists.

Republicanism is big in political theory now, but not with people who aim to find some way of combining political culture with property owning individualism. It has become socialism for a period in which the idea has lost a lot of its force. On the political level, Republicanism has been picked up by Demos (a New Labour linked think tank in Britain, founded originally by hyper revisionist Marxists) and the Spanish Socialist Party, and probably some other left leaning groups and parties.

On the theoretical level, the most influential people are Philip Pettit and Quentin Skinner. We could also mention J.G.A. Pocock who preceded them with important studies of Early Modern Republicanism, but we’ll leave him aside in this context, Pettit’s idea of Republicanism is very much in the tradition of the egalitarian liberalism of John Rawls, but wishing to add more something, that is a right of non-domination which is one way of describing the idea of Republican self-government. But Pettit’s interest is in egalitarianism, of a kind which does not look very compatible with the kind of property rights and individualism of concern to Montesquieu and Locke. He has very little to say about political process and political culture, Skinner’s work is mostly on Early Modern political thought. Where he writes about the 19th Century, he produces a contrast between ‘Neo-Roman Liberty’ and liberalism of a kind which would leave us unable to account for a figure like J.S. Mill who believed in civic virtues as well as individual rights.

The left leaning use of Republicanism goes even further with Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri where it has become a part of neo-Marxism, drawing on Spinoza, Jefferson, Machiavelli etc. For Hardt and Negri, Republicanism itself is not the answer, but the proper reading of it as the precursor of some transformed version of Marism and communism for the present age. This picks up on well established tradition of seeing Kant as the precursor of Marx, not as a whole but through the reading into Kant’s ideas of transcendental production and unity, of a prefiguring of Marx’s ideal of an emancipated community. There is a whole current of cosmipolitics around in post-Marxist post-Modern political theory, which interprets Kant’s ideas about world federation as fitting into that frame. I’ve even heard these people use Kant as what they regard as an alternative to liberalism and a critic of it.

This kind of reading of Kant can be found in Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973) in Socialism, Mises is one of the inspirers of current libertarianism, a free market economist who interpreted liberalism as being about property rights in the most non-political, and even, anti-political way. Kant’s tendencies to talk about a kind of transcendental unity of humanity and history, are interpreted by Mises as socialist, proto-Marxist talk. This is bizarre, Kant is clear enough about property rights, the division of powers, the danger of unrestrained majoritarianism, the role of commerce. Why should Mises and the Neo-Marxists want to agree on reading Kant this way? Kant who thought labourers should be be excluded from the franchise? It suited Mises to turn against anything which shows Classical Liberalism gave value to the political sphere, that Classical Liberalism overlaps with Republicanism. It suits the Po-Mo left (in between mangling Foucault) to find a thinker about the political sphere against a liberalism they have parodied as Mises type anti-political libertarianism. An extraordinary alliance.

Maybe the phrase Libertarian Republicanism could provide a better approach.

What's Wrong with Republican Political Theory Today? Force, Conflict and the Moment of Decision

Growth of Republican Theory
There has been a recent growth in Republican political theory, though the earliest aspect of it in J.G.A. Pocock goes back some way now. Pocock worked on Civic Humanism in Renaissance Italy and Early Modern Atlantic Republicanism. In the former field, he worked particularly on Machiavelli; and in the latter on James Harrington and the continuation of Machiavelli. Machiavelli's line of influence obviously goes up to Rousseau, after which the idea of a direct Republican line of influence is harder to maintain.

Kinds of Liberty
More recent work on Republicanism has included Phillip Pettit's work of normative (analytic) political philosophy of that name, Quentin Skinner's work on Roman Freedom/Liberty and Machiavelli, and Samuel Fleischer on a third liberty, between the negative and positive liberty I discussed in a recent post, 'Negative and Positive Liberty: A Short History'. That idea of the third liberty corresponds to the idea of 'non-domination' in Pettit. In a comparable manner, Skinner opposes 'Roman Liberty' to 'Liberalism' which he defines a pure negative liberty, on utilitarian grounds.

Tocqueville and Egalitarian Liberalism
Here I am continuing themes in a recent post on Tocqueville on Republican Politics and the Tyranny of Small Communities, where I suggested that Republicanism recently has been a form of social democracy, a development out of Rawlsian egalitarian liberalism. The recnet Republicans continue Rawls' theme of defining harm resulting from inequality very broadly, and defining necessary compensation very broadly. For Tocqueville Republicanism is more about maintaining institutions that prevent those with lower incomes from seeking to compensate themselves through limiting the property rights of those with property. That goes along with the wish for institutions that prevent a temporary majority from undermining liberty through any kind of attack on unpopular minorities. Tocqueville's version of Republicanism has clear precedents in Montesquieu, Locke, and Aristotle. Considering that Tocqueville was inspired by the emergence of democracy as we know it now, in the USA, we could say that this kind of anti-egalitarian Republicanism is at the heart of modern liberal, or representative, democracy. The issue is somewhat more ambiguous than that. Though Tocqueville was against strong egalitarian social measures, he recognised that modern liberty was democratic in the sense that a broad equality of conditions was emerging between citizens of all classes.

State Force
There is another question here. We can place Tocqueville in the context of more egalitarian style liberalism, but we would still need to notice something else about Republicanism, it does not just uphold moral community action, it upholds the state and the authority of the state as something that rests on force as well as consent. That is the dimension that Lockean liberal republicanism and Rousseauesque egalitarian republicanism are overlooking. The state has a an active role in establishing and maintaining republican beliefs, and it uses force against those who threaten those beliefs. Centralised force is necessary to restrain the conformist force which can build up to an irresistable intensity at the local level. as Spinoza suggests, democracy rests on the force of the majority of the people.

Elites and Aristocracy
The point of Machiavelli's Republicanism is not not just the moral advantage of a community of citizens. While it is important to avoid the still prevalent image of 'evil Machiavelli', we should not ignore that recognition of force and coercion in Machiavelli, which does sometimes have a gleeful edge to it. It can be like Nietzsche' enjoyment of wickedness, which is certainly not an enjoyment of evil for its own sake though. Nietzsche expresses admiration for those states which institute a great political aristocracy, or elite. Tocqueville considered the formation of a modern democratic substitute for aristocracy as necessary in order to maintain liberty under democracy.

Natural and Positive Law
Republicanism in Aristotle is the idea that the political community is a natural good in its own right beyond the aggregation of individual interests. Republicanism in Machiavelli adds the recogniiton that state power is not 'natural' and must be instituted, and maintained by force. Tocqueville's own thought is rooted in Pascal who emphasised that law is based on force in a godless unjust world, as Derrida also emphasises. Pascal finds positive law (law created by institutions, by the sovereign) is not rooted in natural law (objective moral order outside individual interests and historical constructions).

From Mill to Machiavelli
In John Stuart Mill, liberalism retains some elitist-aristocratic aspects, but is on the way to being a doctrine of politics based on consent, discussion and rationality which has difficulty with discussing what makes such activities possible. It is the sociologist Max Weber, who was more able to deal with this because he saw politics in terms of a 'realist' theory of pursuing power. Though current Republicanism emphasises politics as a human activity and goal, it lacks any sense of power and the foundations of the state in force. Despite Skinner's references to 'Roman liberty', it lacks a sense of the absolute devotion of the classical citizen to the sovereignty of the state and its laws. They push the more realist 'wicked' aspects of Machiavelli aside as they see Machiavelli in rather Rawlsian terms. Machiavelli did not see politics in those terms, he thought that interests permanently clash and not in the sense of constant dialogue, just as Tocqueville thought that politics must be rooted in human pride and the necessary conflicts in pursuing pride. There is something Realist in Machiavelli and Tocqueville, and there is something 'decisionistic', that is politics refers to the moment of decision which is never completely justified and is never completely rational.