John Stuart Mill Illustrates Charles Mills' Racial Contract

Here is John Stuart Mill stating a principle that sounds noble, and then immediately making a strange caveat.

"The object of this Essay is to assert one very simple principle, as entitled to govern absolutely the dealings of society with the individual in the way of compulsion and control, whether the means used be physical force in the form of legal penalties, or the moral coercion of public opinion. That principle is, that the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection. That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant. He cannot rightfully be compelled to do or forbear because it will be better for him to do so, because it will make him happier, because, in the opinions of others, to do so would be wise, or even right. These are good reasons for remonstrating with him, or reasoning with him, or persuading him or entreating him, but not for compelling him, or visiting him with any evil, in case he do other wise. To justify that, the conduct from which it is desired to deter him must be calculated to produce evil to some one else. The only part of the conduct of any one, for which he is amenable to society, is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.

It is, perhaps, hardly necessary to say that this doctrine is meant to apply only to human beings in the maturity of their faculties. We are not speaking of children, or of young persons below the age which the law may fix as that of manhood or womanhood. Those who are still in a state to require being taken care of by others, must be protected against their own actions as well as against external injury. For the same reason, we may leave out of consideration those backward states of society in which the race itself may be considered as in its nonage. The early difficulties in the way of spontaneous progress are so great, that there is seldom any choice of means for overcoming them; and a ruler full of the spirit of improvement is warranted in the use of any expedients that will attain an end, perhaps otherwise unattainable. Despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians, provided the end be their improvement, and the means justified by actually effecting that end. Liberty, as a principle, has no application to any state of things anterior to the time when mankind have become capable of being improved by free and equal discussion. Until then, there is nothing for them but implicit obedience to an Akbar or a Charlemagne, if they are so fortunate as to find one. But as soon as mankind have attained the capacity of being guided to their own improvement by conviction or persuasion (a period long since reached in all nations with whom we need here concern ourselves), compulsion, either in the direct form or in that of pains and penalties for non-compliance, is no longer admissible as a means to their own good, and justifiable only for the security of others."

-- J. S. Mill, On Liberty

The second paragraph in that quotation above is no abstract theoretical observation. As I understand it, Mill, following his father, had a day job in the East India Company, eventually becoming Chief Examiner of Correspondence. I gather that that was a fairly prominent position.

Mill, in On Liberty is not writing about a social contract, unlike Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, for example. But this book is a classic of liberal political philosophy that, when looked at from a subaltern position, has a dark racial underside. A reader of Charles Mills might be sensitized to see this.

Reference

• John Stuart Mill. 1859. On Liberty
• Charles Mills. 1997. The Racial Contract. Cornell University Press

How To Defend Capitalism?

1.0 Summary of Defense

Last month, Mike Munger purports to "summarize the basic argument for capitalism" (emphasis added). He acknowledges his argument is superficial. I find it excessively so. Munger argues that capitalism:

• Supports the division of labor
• Provides price signals so as to direct production appropriately
• Promotes economies to scale

Ultimately, this defense is that capitalism delivers the goods. Here's a well-expressed, simple defense that, partially, argues along these lines:

It is possible to defend our economic system on the ground that, patched up with Keynesian correctives, it is, as he put it, the 'best in sight'. Or at any rate that it is not too bad, and change is painful. In short, that our system is the best system that we have got.

Or it is possible to take the tough-minded line that Schumpeter derived from Marx. The system is cruel, unjust, turbulent, but it does deliver the goods, and, damn it all, it's the goods that you want.

Or, conceding its defects, to defend it on political grounds - that democracy as we know it could not have grown up under any other system and cannot survive without it.

What is not possible, at this time of day, is to defend it, in the neoclassical style, as a delicate self-regulating mechanism, that has only to be left to itself to produce the greatest satisfaction for all.

But none of the alternative defences really sound very well. Nowadays, to support the status quo, the best course is just to leave all these awkward problems alone." -- Joan Robinson (1962). Economic Philosophy, p. 130

2.0 Division of Labor and Efficiencies of Scale

I am not sure that Munger has three principles. I think of the division of labor and efficiencies of scale as closely related. But are either specific to capitalism, as opposed to any society with large scale production? In some sense, Munger is not necessarily attacking a strawperson. Here's an expression of a wish for a post-capitalist society that is arguably not consistent with large-scale production:

"...in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic." -- Karl Marx, The German Ideology.

But, maybe with enough automation, such a society would be possible.

I find it of interest that Marx, in The Communist Manifesto and in Capital describes how capitalism brought about a remarkable increase in productivity. I find Marx, on the division of labor, much more concrete and extensive than Adam Smith, even though he is writing about the abstraction of capital in general. How much has been written about what Marx took from Charles Babbage's On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures? This book has a lot to say about what would now be called Command, Control, Communications, and Intelligence (C3I)?

Anyways, questions arise when a defense of capitalism echoes capitalism's greatest critic.

3.0 Price Signals Consistent with Market Socialism

Munger's second principle, about price signals, draws, I assume, on Friedrich Hayek. I do not see how this is a defense of capitalism, as opposed to markets. Whatever you think of it, a large literature on market socialism exists. Private ownership of capitalist enterprises is not necessary for the existence of price signals. I suppose one could argue about incentives in this context, which I do not think Munger does.

4.0 Other Arguments

I think interesting that Munger does not say anything about the efficient static allocation of resources or the first and second welfare theorems. In some sense, he is correct to put these ideas aside, since a good apologetic argument for capitalism cannot be fashioned in these terms.

On the other hand, Munger avoids all of the issues that John Quiggin brings up in his recent Economics in Two Lessons. Issues with unregulated capitalism include externalities, the assignment and distribution of property rights, and periodic bouts of widespread unemployment. (I find unpersuasive talk of "government failure" as a response to the demonstration that unregulated capitalism is bound to misallocate resources. Is a claim being made that anybody can calculate a closed-form optimal allocation at any point in time?)

5.0 What is Capitalism?

I suspect that Munger supports a fairly hierarchical version of capitalism, with widespread private, brutal, and authoritarian institutions (for example, corporations). Inspired by Chapter 9, "Security and Freedom", of Hayek's The Road to Serfdom, I would ask what is compatible with Munger's apologetics for capitalism? Widespread co-operative, syndicates, and and factory councils? Co-determination, in which union representatives are on corpation boards? Sovereign Wealth Funds, Employee Stock Ownership Plans, Universal basic income, government insurance, and social security?

So Munger's three principles do not seem to rule out either an extensive social democracy or even democratic socialism.

Scholars on Neoliberalism

The literature on neoliberalism is large. Here are some scholarly books on this subject or on related matters:

• The power of market fundamentalism: Karl Polanyi's critique, by Fred Block & Margaret R. Somers (2016).
• Undoing the demos: Neoliberalism's stealth revolution, by Wendy Brown (2015).
• The great persuasion: Reinventing free markets since the Depression, by Angus Burgin (2015).
• The strange non-death of neoliberalism, by Colin Crouch (2013).
• The birth of biopolitics: lectures at the Collège de France, 1978 - 1979, by Michel Foucault (2010).
• The illusion of free markets: Punishment and the myths of natural order, by Bernard E. Harcourt (2012). (I haven't read this one.)
• A brief history of neoliberalism, by David Harvey (2007).
• Masters of the universe: Hayek, Friedman, and the birth of neoliberal politics, by Daniel Stedman Jones (2014).
• Neoliberalism's demons: On the political theory of late capital, by Adam Kotsko (2018). (I haven't read this. Here is an interview with the author.)
• Democracy in chains: The deep history of the radical right's stealth plan for America, by Nancy MacLean (2017). (I haven't read this one. Here is Marshall Steinbaum's review.)
• Never left a serious crisis go to waste: How neoliberalism survived the financial meltdown, by Philip Mirowski (2013). (This is the most recent Mirowski book I have read. Here is a more recent paper by him.)
• Invisible hands: The businessmen's crusade against the new deal, by Kim Phillips-Fein (2010). (I haven't read this.)
• Globalists: The end of empire and the birth of neoliberalism, by Quinn Slobodian (2018).
• Rationality and the ideology of disconnection, by Michael Taylor (2010). (I haven't read this; it seems more narrowly focused on economic theory.)
• Crashed: How a decade of financial crises changed the world, by Adam Tooze (2018). (I haven't read this one.)

I think this literature has some common themes:

• Neoliberalism was always a global project. (Is there a whole literature on Latin America I am missing?)
• Markets are not natural, but a society organized around such must be created by a system of laws, along with instilling a "common sense" in the population so governed.
• Neoliberalism must be accompanied by control on or limitations of democracy.
• The development of neoliberalism was funded by extremely wealthy individuals around the world, who sought to prevent their project from receiving public scrutiny.
• Those academics funded to develop apologetics and guidance were always interdisciplinary, including those specializing in law and international relations, as well as in economics.

The literature also contains disagreements, including what institutions, groups, and individuals to emphasize in telling the story of the project of imposing neoliberalism on the world.

Some Resources on Neoliberalism

Here are three:

• Anthony Giddens, in The Third Way: The Renewal of Social Democracy (1999), advocates a renewed social democracy. He contrasts what he is advocating with neoliberalism, which he summarizes as, basically, Margaret Thatcher's approach. Giddens recognizes that more flexible labor markets will not bring full employment and argues that unregulated globalism, including unregulated international financial markets, is a danger that must be addressed. He stresses the importance of environmental issues, on all levels from the personal to international. I wish he had something to say about labor unions, which I thought had an institutionalized role in the Labour Party, before Blair and Brown's "new labour" movement.
• Charles Peters had a A Neo-Liberal's Manifesto in 1982. (See also 1983 piece in Washington Monthly.) This was directed to the Democratic Party in the USA. It argues that they should reject the approach of the New Deal and the Great Society. Rather, they should put greater reliance on market solutions for progressive ends. I do not think Peters was aware that the term "neoliberalism" was already taken. Contrasting and comparing other uses with Peters' could occupy much time.
• I have not got very far in reading Michel Foucault. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-1979. Foucault focuses on German ordoliberalism and the Chicago school of economics.

Anyways, neoliberalism is something more specific than any centrist political philosophy, between socialist central planning and reactionary ethnic nationalism. George Monbiot has some short, popular accounts. Read Noah Smith if you want confusion, incoherence, and ignorance, including ignorance of the literature.

Conservatism According to Corey Robin

I have been re-reading Corey Robin's The Reactionary Mind. According to this book, defending arbitrary hierarchies is the first priority among conservatives. They believe:

• Workers should obey their masters.
• Wives should obey their husbands.
• Downtrodden ethnic groups should obey socially privileged ethnic groups.
• The laity should obey priests.
• The non-affluent should show proper deference towards those with great wealth (who could never be malefactors).

These hierarchies have implications for daily lives, not just political rule. For the right, liberty is liberty for the rulers to do as they will, not for those who suffer what they must.

I deliberately do not write about slavery. According to Robin, conservatism is literally reactionary. Conservatives defend hierarchies that are currently threatened or recently overthrown. They focus on restoring what was recently lost. Maybe this has something to do with widespread fear and resentment on the right.

Conservatives often do not have admiration for the rulers of the ancient regime. If those rulers were willing to do what needed to be done to preserve their power, the threats would never have gotten so far, and losses would not have been suffered. The conservative, unlike his popular and complimentary image, is willing to make radical changes so as to reconstruct society as it once was. This seems to go along with the awareness of some contemporary neoliberals that market societies are not natural formations, but must be constructed and maintained by state power. But is this aping of the left consistent with the conservative's encouragement of anti-intellectualism and stupidity? Perhaps the idea is that only an elite need understand the goal, while widespread ignorance among the masses can only help the cause.

The hierarchies that conservatives seek to defend or restore are not meritocracies, in the sense that those on top are expected to have superior intellect, wisdom, or morals. Rulers should demonstrate their fitness to rule by seizing what they can, in war or business. Maybe this has something to do with why many conservatives endorse the supposed "free market", without worrying about externalities, information asymmetries, transaction costs, or market power. One can also see here an echo of Friedrich Nietzsche's overman.

Much of the above comes from the introduction and first couple of chapters of Robin's book. Much of the rest consists of case studies of particular thinkers and polemicists.

Reference

• Corey Robin (2013). The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin, Oxford University Press.

Obscure Postmodern Language

I try here to outline certain postmodern¹ doctrines that, in a full development, might result in one using obscure terminology. None of this is to say that every postmodern writer using polysyllabic terminology is expressing complicated ideas in the most effective way. Nor do I want to argue that it is impossible to ever write clearly² about (some subset) of these ideas.

People have a tendency towards reification³, towards talking as if certain abstract ideas are concrete realities. For example, they might tend to confuse relationships between people with relationships between things⁴. And people tend to think dualistically, or at least to categorize things into pre-existing categories. And with dividing things into two categories, one may tend to elevate one over the other, or to define the inferior in terms of the negation of the properties of the superior⁵. One might think that these confusions become embedded in our language⁶. It is not as if we have access to a language appropriate for a "view from nowhere", where nature is carved at its joints⁷.

Furthermore, current classifications and fundamental ideas embodied in current language have a history; our current language does not reflect how people always thought. In looking at past patterns of language and governance, one should try not to read our current way of thinking into the past⁸.

One might also think current classifications have a functional relationship to class structure, hegemonic⁹ ethnicities, patriarchal relationships, or whatever¹⁰.

I have deliberately been abstract here. But, I suppose, I might mention some examples. In economics, I think one is confused if one looks at capitalism as catallaxy, that is, purely in terms of market relationships, in which all parties are free. Furthermore, many things have been said to be socially constructed. I think here of money¹¹, race¹², gender¹³, and sex¹⁴.

In fully trying to explicate these ideas, one can be expected to struggle with bewitchments brought about by language. One might look for multivocalities in past texts. How have current suppositions been read into them? How might they be read from a subaltern position? How might language be expanded so as not to deny normalcy to currently marginalized groups? So reasons exist why academics thinking along postmodern trends might express themselves obscurely.

The above is not to say that these ideas cannot be criticized¹⁵.

Update (21 December 2015):

• Am I agreeing or disaggreeing with what Robert Paul Wolff says here?
• Noah Smith has a knee-jerk reaction to postmodernism.
• The blogger with the pseudonym "Lord Keynes" has often complained about left-leaning postmoderns.

Footnotes

1. For purposes of this post, I do not distinguish between deconstruction, post structuralism, various trends in the social studies of science, etc.
2. Richard Rorty is an example of a postmodern philosopher known for clear - but not necessarily easy - writing.
3. The popularity of the term "reification", in postmodern discourse, comes from Georg Lukás.
4. This is how Marx defined commodity fetishism.
5. I am thinking of how Simone de Beauvoir, early in The Second Sex, describes women being defined as the Other.
6. Here I point to Ludwig Wittgenstein's later work, unpublished in his lifetime.
7. I guess this relates to Jacques Derrida's claim, "There is no outside the text."
8. Michel Foucault, in particular, offers provocative studies of changing European thought in the classical age, between the Renaissance and the nineteenth century.
9. The popularity of the term "hegemony", in postmodern discourse, comes from Antonio Gramsci.
10. As Marx said, "The ruling ideas are the ideas of the ruling classes."
11. This is an example of how something can both be socially constructed and real. Obviously, money has quite real effects in modern societies.
12. Think of the use of the words "Black" and "Colored" in South Africa and in the USA. In the former, they are not synonyms, while among older Americans of a certain sort, they are.
13. I gather Judith Butler originated the concept of gender as performative.
14. Judith Butler also questions whether sex is necessarily a biological division. People might be classified based on chromosomes, hormones, genitalia, and secondary sex characteristics. More than two categories exist in many of these classifications, and they do not always line up. Philip Mirowski observes somewhere that, for the International Olympic Committee (and the International Association of Athletics Federations), these classifications are a quite practical issue. After all, they are structured to find exceptional humans.
15. For explicit references below, I only give critiques. I am sympathetic to the idea that the popularity of postmodernism among academics was connected to an inability to successfully improve material conditions for many.

References

• Samir Amin (1998). Spectres of Capitalism: A Critique of Current Intellectual Fashions, Monthly Review Press.
• Terry Eagleton (1996). The Illusions of Postmodernism, Blackwell.

Locke's Caveats To His Labor Theory Of Property

1.0 Introduction

A couple of months ago, I read John Locke's Second Treatise of Government. He has a caveat on his theory of property I did not expect, as well as one I did. The caveat I did not expect involves the unjustness of acquiring more than you can use and wasting it. But Locke thought it allowable to have more than you can use, as long as you did not waste it. Ultimately, he justifies such superfluous property by claiming it will lead to economic development and benefit the community as a whole.

I suppose one can read Locke as a defense of British and American conquest of the autochthonous peoples in the Americas. They held the land in common, but were not using it well, as least from a bourgeois perspective.

I prefer to draw an analogy to socialism. Property in possessions more than used in everyday living is justified by thinking of that property as held for the benefit of the commonwealth, so to speak. (For the purpose of this post, I put aside any qualms I have about Robinsonades.)

2.0 The Labor Theory of Property

I suppose this is the most famous statement of justification of ownership on the basis of a right to the fruits of one's labor:

Sect 27. Though the earth, and all inferior creatures, be common to all men, yet every man has a property in his own person: this no body has any right to but himself. The labour of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the state that nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property.

Locke begins talking about the ownership of food gained through hunting and gathering. Land is held in common. "Thus in the beginning all the world was America" (Sect. 49). Locke then transitions to ownership of land. He argues that in such a more complex society, one can trace back commodities to dated labor embodied over many activities in the past. The labor embodied in bread includes the labor of the baker, the miller, the farmer, the manufacturer of tools for the use of the farmer, etc. This view of embodied labor (in Sections 42 and 43) was later echoed in the labor theory of value.

3.0 First Caveat: "Enough, and as Good Left"

From secondary literature, I knew that Locke justified the enclosure of common lands into private property only if what was left still was as good as before:

Sect. 33. Nor was this appropriation of any parcel of land, by improving it, any prejudice to any other man, since there was still enough, and as good left; and more than the yet unprovided could use. So that, in effect, there was never the less left for others because of his enclosure for himself.

He writes about, for example, the unjustness of denying somebody a drink from a river when the river would still flow on undiminished.

4.0 Second Caveat: No Waste of Superfluity

I was not previously aware that, in justifying private property, Locke condemned wasting more than your share:

Sect. 31. It will perhaps be objected to this, that if gathering the acorns, or other fruits of the earth, &tc. makes a right to them, then any one may ingross as much as he will. To which I answer, Not so. The same law of nature, that does by this means give us property, does also bound that property too. God has given all things richly, 1 Tim. vi. 12. is the voice of reason confirmed by inspiration. But how far has he given it us? To enjoy as much as any one can make use of to any advantage of life before it spoils, so much he may by his labour fix a property in: whatever is beyond this, is more than his share and belongs to others. Nothing was made by God for man to spoil or destroy.

And again:

Sect. 37. ...Before the appropriation of land, he who gathered as much as the wild fruit, killed, caught, or tamed, as many of the beasts, as he could; he that so imployed his pains about any of the spontaneous products of nature, as any way to alter them from the state which nature put them in, by placing any of his labour on them, did thereby acquire a property in them: but if they perished, in his possession, without their due use; if the fruits rotted, or the venison putrified, before he could spend it, he offend against the common law of nature, and was liable to be punished; he invaded his neighbor's share, for he had no right, farther than his use called for any of them, and they might serve to afford him conveniences of life.

This is obviously not a position to end at if you are justifying property rights in the rising bourgeois society. Locke caveats his caveat by arguing that you are not wasting more than your share if you hold the extra in goods that do not waste away quickly, whether they be useful or pretty baubles:

Sect. 46. ...He was only to look, that he used them before they spoiled, else he took more than his share, and robbed others. And indeed it was a foolish thing, as well as dishonest, to hoard up more than he could make use of. If he gave away a part to any body else, so that it perished not uselessly in his possession, these also he made use of. And if he also bartered away plums, that would have rotted in a week, for nuts that would last good for his eating a whole year, he did not injury; he wasted not the common stock; destroyed no part of the portion of goods that belonged to others, so long as nothing perished uselessly in his hands. Again, if he would give his nuts for a piece of metal, pleased with its colour; or exchange his sheep for shells, or wool for a sparkling pebble or a diamond, and keep those by him all his life he invaded not the right of others, he might heap up as much of these durable things as he pleased; the exceeding of the bounds of his just property not lying in the largeness of his possession, but the perishing of any thing uselessly in at it.

Locke argues that the ability to accumulate money through commerce leads to owners developing their property:

Sect. 48. And as different degrees of industry were apt to give men possessions in different proportions, so this invention of money gave them the opportunity to continue and enlarge them: for supposing an island, separate from all possible commerce with the rest of the world, wherein there were but an hundred families, but there were sheep, horses and cows, with other useful animals, wholesome fruits, and land enough for corn for a hundred thousand times as many, but nothing in the island, either because of its commonness or perishableness, fit to supply the place of money; what reason could any one there to enlarge his possessions beyond the use of his family, and a plentiful supply to its consumption, either in what their own industry produced, or they could barter for the perishable, useful commodities, with others? Where there is not some thing, both lasting and scarce, and so valuable to be hoarded up, there men will not be apt to enlarge their possessions of land, were it never so rich, never so free for them to take: for I ask, what would a man value ten thousand, or an hundred thousand acres of excellent land, ready cultivated, and well stocked too with cattle, in the middle of the inland parts of America, where he had no hopes of commerce with other parts of the world, to draw money to him by the sale of the product?

Locke's defense of private property reminds me of Jesus's parable of the talents (Matthew 25). You should use your property for the benefit of humankind:

Sect. 37. ...To which let me add, that he who appropriates land to himself by his labour, does not lessen, but increase the common stock of mankind: for the provisions serving to the support of human life, produced by one acre of increased and cultivated land, are (to speak much within compass) ten times more than those which are yielded by an acre of land of an equal richness lying waste in common. And therefore he that incloses land, and has a greater plenty of the conveniences of life from ten acres, than he could have from an hundred left to nature, may truly be said to give ninety acres to mankind: for his labour now supplies him with provisions out of ten acres, which were but the product of an hundred lying in common...

5.0 Other Subjects in Locke's Tract

All of the above quotes are from Chapter 5 of Locke's Second Treatise. This book contains nineteen chapters, and treats many other topics. These include a recap of the first treatise, which presumably refutes the claims of Sir Robert Filmer that:

• God gave Adam property in all the earth.
• And current monarchs own their countries through their descent from Adam.

Locke praises William III, the victor of the Glorious Revolution. He also treats of the state of nature, in which humans are free. And they give up that freedom in a social contract so as to end the war of all against all. But, if rulers:

become destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish [the government], and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. (America's Declaration of Independence)

I find the start of Chapter 13, as well as other passages (e.g., Sect. 225) echoed in the declaration. Other topics include natural rights, war, slavery, and parental rights.

References

• John Locke, Second Treatise of Government (1690).

Political Philosophers On How To Read The Bible

Some time ago, I read Hobbes's Leviathan, a classic argument for the existence of a social contract. I recently became aware of the existence of Spinoza's Treatise, which argues for freedom of thought, speech, and religion. I was surprised to discover a common theme in these early modern works of political philosophy, which I did not expect. I knew from second-hand literature that both contain rational arguments about what powers secular authorities should and should not be recognized to possess.

But I was surprised to find both philosophers engaged in interpreting the bible. Both Hobbes and Spinoza quote passages warning about false prophets. Spinoza gives naturalistic principles of reading. For example, he thinks philosophical doctrines in the bible should be read with the understanding that the authors were writing to engage the understanding of the common people of the day. I did not expect that Spinoza would cite the Israelites under Moses as the canonical example of a social contract. Spinoza, kicked out of their community by the Amsterdam Jews, writes quite a bit about the New Testament. I guess this excommunication may have had something to do with more than his identification of God with the cosmos, the Creator with the creation. (I tried to read the Ethics, with its geometric proofs, long ago.)

Hobbes and Spinoza have another commonality. They spend quite a bit of time cataloging, explaining, and analyzing human sensations, emotions, and qualities. I resist the idea that certain perspectives on human nature map directly to political positions. Mayhaps, this sort of analysis of the human psyche was part of a naturalizing Enlightenment project.

I suppose addressing the topic of religion makes sense in these books. The political authorities of the day were often claiming to rule in the name of God, I gather. I do not know much about, for example, the Spanish Inquisition, but, from what I understand, the Jewish community in Amsterdam contained many families that had fled Spain. The political situation in England often saw an entanglement of religion and politics, what with the beheading of Charles I, the rule of the puritan Oliver Cromwell, the English Revolution, and so on. So if you are going to write on politics, you might want to explain how the reader need not accept the unargued proclamations of supposed authorities. You might want to explain, also, how your ideas are consistent with religion, rightly understood.

As far as I know, many later writers arguing for liberalism in thought and speech did not feel the need to argue about what secular authority can and cannot be deduced from the Bible. As examples, I do not recall any such themes in either Rousseau or Mill.

Caveat: writers on general philosophy will include matters of epistemology and ethics. How can we come to know what ethical principles to follow, if we can? I gather that Hume is an example of such an argument. I do not know if his characters take authority from Bible verses.

References

• Thomas Hobbes (1651). Leviathan Or The Matter, Forme, & Power Of A Common-Wealth Ecclesiastical and Civill.
• David Hume (1779). Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion [TO READ].
• John Locke (1689). A Letter Concerning Toleration. [TO READ].
• John Stuart Mill (1859). On Liberty.
• Jean Jacques Rousseau (1755). A Discourse on the Origin of Inequality.
• Jean Jacques Rousseau (1762). The Social Contract.
• Benedict de Spinoza (16669-1670). Theological-Political Treatise.

Gramsci: Laissez Faire As State Regulation

I am of the opinion that talk of more or less government intervention in markets is incoherent in, for example, the United States today. It is not as if some configuration of property rights, contract law independent of the state, corporations with limited liability, and markets of various types are all natural constructs, existing prior to all human interventions. I have gone on about this before. I might also note Philip Mirowski's view that sophisticated neoliberals recognize that a capitalist market order must be constructed; it does not come about naturally. I do not know that he would now think that all those in, for example, think tanks inhabiting the outer layers of the russian doll structures that neoliberals have build for propagandizing would recognize the role of government in constructing a market order.

Anyways, I have recently stumbled on Antonio Gramsci making a closely related point:

"The ideas of the Free Trade movement are based on a theoretical error whose practical origin is not hard to identify; they are based on a distinction between political society and civil society, which is made into and presented as an organic one, whereas in fact it is merely methodological. Thus it is asserted that economic activity belongs to civil society, and that the State must not intervene to regulate it. But since in actual reality civil society and State are one and the same, it must be made clear that laissez-faire too is a form of state 'regulation', introduced and maintained by legislative and coercive means. It is a deliberate policy, conscious of its own ends, and not the spontaneous, automatic expression of economic facts. Consequently, laissez-faire liberalism is a political programme, designed to change - in so far as it is victorious - a State's leading personnel, and to change the economic programme of the State itself - in other words the distribution of the national income." -- Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, "The Modern Prince", Some Theoretical and Practical Aspects of 'Economism'

Given the current conjuncture in, say, the United States, that bit about income distribution is of contemporary relevance. I think a study comparing and contrasting the ideas of Michel Foucault and Antonio Gramsci on how ideas become dominant in society would be interesting to read.

Knowledge/Power

Figure 1: Paul Krugman And Bill O'Reilly Talk To Tim Russert

"My problem was ... to pose the question, 'How is it that at certain moments and in certain orders of knowledge, there are these sudden take-offs, these hastenings of evolution, these transformations which fail to correspond to the calm, continuist image that is normally accredited?' But the important thing here is not that such changes can be rapid and extensive or, rather, it is that this extent and rapidity are only the sign of something else - a modification in the rules of formation of statements which are accepted as scientifically true. Thus, it is not a change of content (refutation of old errors, recovery of old truths), nor is it a change of theoretical form (renewal of a paradigm, modification of systematic ensembles). It is a question of what governs statements, and the way in which they govern each other so as to constitute a set of propositions that are scientifically acceptable and, hence, capable of being verified or falsified by scientific procedures. In short, there is a problem of the regime, the politics of the scientific statement. At this level, it's not so much a matter of knowing what external power imposes itself on science as of what effects of power circulate among scientific statements, what constitutes, as it were, their internal regime of power, and how and why at certain moments that regime undergoes a global modification.

It was these different regimes that I tried to identify in The Order of Things, all the while making it clear that I wasn't trying for the moment to explain them, and that it would be necessary to try to do this in a subsequent work. But what was lacking here was the problem of the 'discursive regime', of the effects of power peculiar to the play of statements. I confused this too much with systematicity, theoretical form, or something like a paradigm. This same central problem of power, which at that time I had not yet properly isolated, emerges in two very different aspects at the point of junction of Madness and Civilization and The Order of Things." -- Michel Foucault, "Truth and Power", reprinted in The Chomsky-Foucault Debate: On Human Nature, The New Press (2006), pp. 144-145.

I do not know that I understand Michel Foucault, and I have not read much that he wrote towards the end of his life. I had thought Foucault's discursive formations were to be grouped with Thomas Kuhn's paradigms and Imre Lakatos's scientific research program. To me, economics is like medicine, psychiatry, and penology. It fits in well with the disciplines that Foucault analyses. Superficially, the epistemic status of these disciplines is more questionable than a hard science. And they have been used to help nation states categorize, partition, and rule their subjects since, say, the eighteenth century. But I want to drop talk of science for now. I look at a concrete example to help me understand what Foucault might mean when he talks about government, power, the political economy of the sign, a discursive regime, and politics. Doubtless, I will miss many, many nuances here.

You can see many commentators and supposed experts in the media, although, for many, I am none too clear in what area they are expert. (I have in mind such people as Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, and even Wolf Blitzer and Thomas Friedman.) Many write best-selling books. A book store will classify them, when they come out, in a section labeled "current events". I suppose libraries will put them somewhere in social sciences. People with the sort of media presence I have in mind can be said to benefit from a sort of power for their statements. From an analytical point of view, you might know a drunk at the end of your local bar who is more worth listening to. Yet these commentators react to one another, take each other seriously, and end up having effects on laws that are passed. At least one kind of power circulates among their statements, a power that is not easily available to those taking their own way at your local.

Foucault also writes about power being productive, not solely a matter of prohibitions. How does the above clip illustrate this theme? Those who have power circulating their statements can sometimes dismiss others as living in a "fantasy world". But I think the power we see in right wing commentators in America extends to individuals in communities across the country. You can find many who think they keep informed by watching TV news. And they will have conversations with one another, maybe conversations that you could not participate in without being seen as rude, dismissive, and condescending. Some of these people might even participate in governing your community by participating in, say, the school board, the city council, or state government. Within such groups, you might find an intellectual who has read, for example, Hayek's Road to Serfdom on Glenn Beck's recommendation. So this power I am vaguely pointing at helps form local communities, as well as national discourse.

I consider Krugman to be at a different level of seriousness than the other two people in the above clip. Still these questions arise for him. What power gets his statements listened to and to circulate widely? It would be a mistake to classify his statements solely as part of the academic discipline of economics. For example, his newspaper columns about the Iraq war do not have much to do with economics. And a regime in which he occupies the acceptable left wing of the public face of economics seems quite limiting to me. When Krugman debates Keen through their blogs, it seems clear who is doing the other more of a favor to acknowledge the existence of the other's work, whatever you make think of the outcome of that debate.

I trust that one can see that in merely acknowledging the existence of political power that allows Krugman's statements to circulate, I am not thereby criticizing their content or what Krugman does with this non-personal power. In fact, I think Krugman has quite often acknowledged the power of his platforms and talked about how that influences his topics. As far as I know, he does not read Foucault. (Has not Brad DeLong written a bit on Foucault?) I am not sure what Krugman has said about his willingness to participate in the sort of hurlyburly babble seen in the above clip, other than that he sometimes has a book to promote. I suppose the bit where he leans back and rolls his eyes at the ceiling is comment enough on his particular antagonist there. I think Krugman would even be receptive to claims about the lack of agency of the author. He is rarely as forthright as in the above clip about calling a lie, "a lie". And he knows that his conventions do not allow him to comment on nonsense spouted by his fellow columnists, except very elliptically.

By the way, the video clip above is not directly from a major network. Apparently, it was put on YouTube with annotations added by Jim Gilliam. And, of course, I do not claim the power of those you might see babbling on your television.

Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia

1.0 Overview
Propertarianism, misleadingly called "libertarianism" by its fans, is a political philosophy. Do any supposedly rigorous arguments exist for this philosophy? Some cite Robert Nozick's 1974 tome, Anarchy, State, and Utopia as a demonstration that this question can be answered in the affirmative.

The book has three main parts. In the first part, Nozick argues that a state can emerge from an anarchistic state of nature without violating anybody's rights. The state, according to Nozick, evolves from a private protection agency; its clients become citizens. In the second part, Nozick argues that a state that tries be to more than a minimal state will violate somebody's rights, especially their right to property. For the distribution of property to be just, according to Nozick, three conditions must be met:

• The original acquisition of property must not have violated anybody's rights.
• The transfer of holdings must be likewise just.
• Whatever injustices may nevertheless have arisen in original acquisition or transfer must be rectified justly.

In the last part, Nozick provides a recipe for cookbooks of the future. He describe an association of voluntary communities, where people are free to join whichever commune they like. Only some of these communities may initially be propertarian.

This obvious decomposition of the book explains the three-word title. Despite Nozick's pretense to be presenting an analytic argument, I did not find nearly as much structure at a lower level. The first part seems to beg how people in an original anarchy would behave. Nozick postulates bourgeois contract-making; I think feudalism would more likely result. He continually brings up objections and needed refinements, pursues the argument to an arbitrary level, and then declares the resolution of these details beyond his scope since he is not writing a work of psychology or epistemology or whatever. So I find it difficult to summarize much more of the book.

2.0 Popular Bits
I think Nozick originated many sayings now popular among propertarians. Maybe some he reformulated or re-emphasized.

Nozick's calls his version of Descartes' demon "The Experience Machine". His story is a science fiction story with technology, tanks to float in, and computers. It raises the question, "What else can matter to us, other than how our lives feel from the inside?"

Nozick comes fairly close to saying that there is no such thing as society:

"But there is no social entity with a good that undergoes some sacrifice for its own good. There are only individual people, different individual people, with their own individual lives."

Nozick formulates a non-aggression principle, now called the No-Initiation-of-Force principle in propertarian polemics:

"An underlying notion sufficiently powerful to support moral side constraints against the powerful intuitive force of the end-state maximizing view will suffice to derive a libertarian constraint on aggression against another."

Nozick creates a well-known example with Wilt Chamberlain. Wilt Chamberlain's contract with a basketball team gives him a share of the gate. People "cheerfully attend his team's game". Nozick's imagines that when they buy their tickets, part of the price is that each person "drops" 25 cents "of their admission price into a special box with Chamberlain's name on it." What can be wrong with all of these voluntary transactions making Chamberlin rich? In the course of this exposition, he comes up with a clever turn of phrase:

"The socialist society would have to forbid capitalist acts between consenting adults." (my emphasis)

3.0 Some Absurdities
Nozick's book is a work of political philosophy containing much economic reasoning. But Nozick makes many mistakes in economics, and ignores what seems to me some major problems in political philosophy.

For example, I think a major question in political philosophy is how people with different ideas of good and evil can live together. Nozick acknowledges he doesn't address this question:

"I have proceeded in this essay (as much as possible) without questioning or focusing upon the assumption common to much utopian and anarchist theorizing, that there is some set of principles obvious enough to be accepted by all men of good will, precise enough to give unambiguous guidance on particular situations, clear enough so that all will realize its dictates, and complete enough to cover all problems that actually will arise. To have rested the case for the state on the denial of such an assumption would have left the hope that the future progress of humanity (and moral philosophy) might yield such agreement, and so might undercut the rationale for the state.

... the day seem[s] distant when all men of good will shall agree to libertarian principles... People who prefer peace to the enforcement of their view of right will unite together in one state."

In contrast to my opinion, Nozick thinks Marxian exploitation is a normative idea¹:

"One traditional socialist view is that workers are entitled to the product and full fruits of their labor; they have earned it; a distribution is unjust if it does not give the workers what they are entitled to."

Nozick doesn't understand marginal productivity. He incorrectly thinks that it is a theory of distribution:

"Almost every suggested principle of distributive justice is patterned: to each according to his moral merit, or needs, or marginal product, or how hard he tries, or..."

I could cite many more instances in which Nozick makes this mistake.

Nozick erroneously ignores the possibilities of multiple equilibria and of path dependence:

"Let us suppose that we know from economic theory that under the standard assumptions defining a competitive market economy, income and wealth will be distributed in an efficient way, and that the particular efficient distribution which results in any period of time is determined by the initial distribution of assets, that is, by the initial distribution of income and wealth, and of natural talents and abilities. With each initial distribution, a definite efficient outcome is arrived at."

Also, Nozick begs the question of the definition of property rights, of how a society determines what can be a commodity and what cannot. I could cite even more examples of Nozick getting economics wrong.

Nozick has a definite view on the always burning question of whether or not slavery is compatible with propertarianism. He thinks it is:

"Perhaps no persons completely sell themselves into slavery... Since this very extensive domination of some persons by others arises by a series of legimate steps, via voluntary exchanges, from an initial situation that is not unjust, it itself is not unjust."

And again:

"The comparable question about an individual is whether a free system will allow him to sell himself into slavery. I believe that it would."

4.0 Conclusion
I do not find Nozick's book convincing². You might want to read it to understand some context for certain debates in political philosophy. Nozick treats Rawls in the second part of his book. Before having read Nozick, I already knew about some of the popular bits from having read Alan Haworth. Nozick tends to be cited by many soi-disant libertarians - I suspect by more than have actually read him.

Footnotes
¹Nozick does foreshadow John Roemer's game-theoretic definition of exploitation:

"An individual benefits from the wider system of extensive cooperation between the better and the worse endowed to the extent of his incremental gain from this wider cooperation; namely, the amount by which his share under a scheme of general cooperation is greater than it would be under one of limited intra-group (but not cross-group) cooperation."

Nozick formulates "a condition of stable associations" much like this in the third part of his book.

²This is probably not surprising, given my preconceptions.

And The Life Of Man, Solitary, Poore, Nasty, Brutish, And Short

I am hostile to the notion of logically deriving an ideal society from first principles. Ideal norms can only be understood by us humans in a context that will evolve over time, not from some timeless, interest-free view from nowhere. Humans, in arguing about society, invariably base themselves on some partial perspective or faction. And to understand how to apply some principle articulated from some interest, one will have to draw on empirical results. (Is this an institutionalist, pragmatic view?)

Perhaps, nevertheless, some (not necessarily inconsistent) norms can be stated in keeping with these ideas. I suggest the following:

• Human society should be able to reproduce itself (Karl Marx).
• Unnecessary suffering should be alleviated (Karl Popper).
• Everybody should have the freedom to develop their capabilities to the best of their abilities (Aristotle, Marx).

Other norms don't seem to be compatible with my views on how to think about political philosophy. "People should be able to keep what they make" is a meaningless norm, maybe common among current intellectually and ethically impoverished mainstream economists.

Robert Nozick, as I understand him, begs a definition of natural rights. And then he argues for the following principles on that basis:

• A person who acquires a holding in accordance with the principle of justice in acquisition is entitled to that holding.
• A person who acquires a holding in accordance with the principle of justice in transfer, from someone else entitled to the holding, is entitled to the holding.
• Unjust acquisitions or transfer should be rectified

He ends up arguing for a more-or-less night-watchman state.

Perhaps these sorry days are ripe for an immanent critique of the idea of equality of opportunity.

I did not manage to mention above the Austrian-school economist Israel Kirzner's defense of returns to entrepeneurship with what he calls a "finders keepers" ethic. I have not read John Rawls.

Libertarianism Versus "Libertarianism"

One might meet, in certain precincts of the Internet, soi-disant libertarians. As far as I am concerned, "libertarians" of this stripe are victims of commodity fetishim, and they have stolen the label. Traditionally, a libertarian is an anarchist, that is a kind of socialist. For example, Maureen Stapleton plays a libertarian in Warren Beatty's movie Reds. Anarchists, generally, do not have Ludwig Von Mises in their pantheon of heroes.

"...readers should take ... particular warning that I am absolutely not against freedom. On the contrary, I am for it. Libertarians ... think they are for freedom but they don't know what freedom is. In reality, their doctrine is so contrary to freedom that it ought to be entitled 'anti-libertarianism'. The thief comes in innocent disguise, but the beautiful garment is stolen. (The Right are good at that sort of thing.) So, if you want to make your copy of this book read more accurately, you should delete 'libertarian' and 'libertarianism' throughout, substituting 'anti-libertarian' and 'anti-libertarianism' as you go. For 'anti-libertarianism', etc., you should substitute 'anti-anti-libertarianism'. Unfortunately, this would make the book cumbersome to read, so I haven't followed the advice myself except in my choice of title, where my subject is named according to its true nature." -- Alan Haworth, Anti-Libertarianism: Markets, Philosophy, and Myth, Routledge, 1994: 5

Haworth does have more substantial points. Warning: this is political philosophy for those who think "If a lion could speak, we would not understand him" is a thesis worth discussing and who are comfortable with thought experiments which might lead one to be willing to say that a rock feels pain. Nevertheless Haworth is quite readable. (As an example of unreadable philosophy strongly following the later Wittgenstein, I cite John Wisdom's Other Minds.) I realize that those interested in political philosophy and "Libertarianism" should also read Robert Nozick.

Capitalism Seen As Unfree In Its Infancy

A charactistic transaction under capitalism is the selling of labor power for money wages. How was this transaction perceived in capitalism's early days? Consider:

"[the commonwealth] consisteth only of freemen... Day labourers ... have no voice nor authority in our commonwealth, and no account is made of them but only to be ruled ... [those who] be hired for wages ... be called servants." -- Thomas Smith (1565)

"If the common people have no more freedom in England but only to live among their elder brothers and work for them for hire, what freedom have they in England more than we have in Turkey or France? ... The poor that have no land are left still in the straits of beggary, and they are shut out of all livelihood but what they shall pick out of sore bondage, by working for others as masters over them." -- G. Winstanley (1649)

"Rather than go with cap in hand and bended knee to gentlemen and farmers, begging and entreating to work with them for 8d. or 10d. a day, which doth give them an occasion to tyrannize over poor people (which are their fellow-creatures), if poor man would not go in such a slavish posture..." -- R. Coster (1649)

"[The relations of employer and wage labourer] approach much nearer to that of a planter and slave in our American colonies than might be expected in such a country as England." -- Josiah Tucker (1757)

"...the ingenuity and dexterity of [England's] working artists and manufacturers, which have heretofore given credit and reputation to British wares in general [whose skill was] owing to that freedom and liberty they enjoy to divert themselves in their own way... Were they obliged to toil the year round, the whole six days in the week, in a repetition of the same work, might it not blunt their ingenuity and render them stupid instead of alert and dexterous?" -- M. Postlethwayt (1774)

All quotes are secondhand from:

• Christopher Hill (1967). "Pottage for Freeborn Englishmen: Attitudes to Wage Labour in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries," Socialism, Capitalism, & Economic Growth: Essays Presented to Maurice Dobb, Cambridge University Press.