Tag: Political Philosophy

Factory exploitation and mutual advantage

In 1970, The Individualist ran an article called The Factory Exploitation Myth by Rod Marris. This article not only sought to correct some widespread misconceptions about the conditions of factory workers in 19th century England but also mentions the role the declining English aristocracy played in disseminating incomplete information about working conditions in the factories and about the standard of living:

A review of the political struggles of the times offers an important insight into why the aristocracy was eagerly spreading the myth of factory oppression. At the time the factory-owning middle class was vigorously opposing the Corn Laws which worked to the advantage of the land-owning aristocracy.

He also mentions the rise of the Romantic movement as a contributing factor.

Critics of unfettered free markets may acknowledge some of Marris’s points but could still claim that factory workers were exploited in 19th century England because the workers were in an “unfair” bargaining position. In essence, such a claim boils down to the opinion that mutual advantage is neither a necessary, nor a sufficient condition for justice.

In his book Darwinian Politics: The Evolutionary Origin of Freedom , the economist Paul H. Rubin writes:

there is no reason to expect that an innate module to measure gains from trade has evolved. Rather, we are each selected to try to be sure that we gain from trade; gains to our trading partners are irrelevant. Moreover, mental mechanisms work against this recognition of mutual benefit.  Even in mutually beneficial trades, an aspect of competition is found.  Both sides want to engross for themselves as much as is possible of the gains…These modules focus on the zero-sum aspect of trade – that aspect dealing with the terms of the bargain, rather than with the gains.

As a consequence, the topic of “distributive justice” gets excessive attention in political philosophy. To many contemporary political philosophers, justice does not refer to conventions that incorporate mutual advantage but a set of principles that can be discovered by (impartial) reason and enforced by the State to alter the terms of agreements and to redistribute income. An excellent collection of articles about the widespread habit of treating justice as “something else” (fairness, equality, or moral intuition) is Anthony de Jasay’s Justice And Its Surroundings.

Albert Jay Nock on the origin of the state

In his article “Anarchist’s Progress” the writer Albert Jay Nock dryly observes that many authors have speculated about the origins and legitimacy of the State but that few of them actually bothered to investigate how states come into being and survive.

So I set about finding out what I could about the origin of the State, to see whether its mechanism was ever really meant to work in any other direction; and here I came upon a very odd fact. All the current popular assumptions about the origin of the State rest upon sheer guesswork; none of them upon actual investigation. The treatises and textbooks that came into my hands were also based, finally, upon guesswork. Some authorities guessed that the State was originally formed by this-or-that mode of social agreement; others, by a kind of muddling empiricism; others, by the will of God; and so on. Apparently none of these, however, had taken the plain course of going back upon the record as far as possible to ascertain how it actually had been formed, and for what purpose. It seemed that enough information must be available; the formation of the State in America, for example, was a matter of relatively recent history, and one must be able to find out a great deal about it. Consequently I began to look around to see whether anyone had ever anywhere made any such investigation, and if so, what it amounted to.

I then discovered that the matter had, indeed, been investigated by scientific methods, and that all the scholars of the Continent knew about it, not as something new or startling, but as a sheer commonplace. The State did not originate in any form of social agreement, or with any disinterested view of promoting order and justice. Far otherwise. The State originated in conquest and confiscation, as a device for maintaining the stratification of society permanently into two classes — an owning and exploiting class, relatively small, and a propertyless dependent class. Such measures of order and justice as it established were incidental and ancillary to this purpose; it was not interested in any that did not serve this purpose; and it resisted the establishment of any that were contrary to it. No State known to history originated in any other manner, or for any other purpose than to enable the continuous economic exploitation of one class by another.

Nock’s observation still applies to much of what we call political philosophy. There is no shortage of ideas about what the State should do but there is little interest in what it actually does and how that might constrain what we can reasonably expect from it. Such an attitude would strike us as an odd approach in science but when the topic involves human interaction strange assumptions about the malleability of humans and institutions guide the mind.

Nock’s complete article is available here.

Classical liberalism without philosophy

In a blog post for the New Republic Alan Wolfe writes: “What my critics call modern liberalism is instead the logical and sociological outcome of classical liberalism.” He further writes in another blog post that “A liberal society, I believe, is one that allows room for free markets, but also allows room for many other kinds of social institutions, some based on love, others on obligation, others on solidarity.”

These statements are far from illuminating. For example, what does it mean to say that modern liberalism is the “logical,” let alone the “sociological,” outcome of classical liberalism? It surely cannot mean that interventionist government is logically implied by minimal government. Perhaps one could argue that in reality modern liberalism is an inevitable consequence of classical liberalism in the sense that as soon as people authorize a government to maintain peace and order, such powers will invariably be used to (further) distribute income, which in turn will generate a subsequent need to produce political philosophical legitimacy for these practices.

There is a sense in which “classical” and “modern” liberalism may be closely related and that is the shared preoccupation with “rights,” “equality,” and “democracy.” Although different liberals offer different interpretations of these concepts, the practice of seeking a society that is guided by these values is shared by most advocates of both  liberalisms. From this perspective both classical and modern liberalism, and even democratic socialism, reflect a tradition in political thinking that attributes values to humans as such and endeavors to move society as close as possible to the realization of these values.

There is an alternative liberalism, however, that cannot be reduced to this kind of reasoning. In this form of (classical) liberalism people do not have “rights” (or deserve respect for their “autonomy”) because there is a philosophical reason for this but because a real world bargain between self-interested individuals produces arrangements that more or less resemble a society that is characterized by respect for individual choice and private property. But such a Hobbesian account of the possibility of liberalism is far removed from the philosopher’s liberalism  that emphasizes values, human rights, and collective choice. It would be the “logical” outcome of practical reason applied to human interaction.

Considering our (evolved) tendency to moralize about the fate of society as a whole, and the widespread obsession with democracy and practical politics, the prospects for this kind of liberalism are even more remote than for either of the two liberalisms that currently compete for attention.


Karl Popper’s authoritarian social technologies

Karl Popper is known for his influential contributions to the philosophy of science and critical rationalism.  Unfortunately, his attempt to apply critical rationalism to political philosophy produced writings of a more impatient and dubious nature. For example, in 1960 Popper wrote:

..the empiricist’s questions ‘How do you know? What is the source of your assertion?’ are wrongly put. They are not formulated in an inexact or slovenly manner, but they are entirely misconceived; they are questions that beg for an authoritarian answer…They can be compared with that traditional question of political authority, ‘Who should rule’, which begs for an authoritarian answer such as ‘the best’, ‘or ‘the wisest’, or ‘the people’, or ‘the majority’…This political question is wrongly put and the answers which it elicits are paradoxical. It should be replaced by a completely different question such as ‘How can we organize our political institutions so that bad or incompetent rulers…cannot do too much damage?’ I believe that only by changing our question in this way can we hope to proceed towards a reasonable theory of political institutions.

Popper’s reformulated question simply takes for granted that we need a mechanism of collective choice  to revolve conflicts between people and produce public goods.  Not only that, as a social democrat he did not just restrict government to such a role but expected it to fight “evil” and “suffering:”

We must construct social institutions, enforced by the power of the state, for the protection of the economically weak from the economically strong. The state must see to it that nobody need enter into an inequitable arrangement… (in: The Open Society and Its Enemies, 1962)

As a hardline political consequentialist, Popper proposed his idea of  “piecemeal social engineering”  to generate a “social technology” to improve the world we live in. As such, he places himself in a long tradition of activist philosophers who take a look at society, conclude that it can be “improved”, and advocate collective choice mechanisms to discover and implement such changes. Fortunately, Popper’s political views have been subjected to a rigorous critical dissection by the social philosopher Anthony de Jasay in his article The Twistable is not Testable: Reflections on the Political Thought of Karl Popper (reprinted in Against Politics).

Popper’s question about “organizing our political institutions” should be replaced with questions that do not assume that the issue of government has been settled. Such questions  may include ‘Can conflicts about scarce resources be resolved without resorting to non-unanimous decision making’ or ‘Can public goods be provided without coercion?’ One attempt to reconcile Popper’s anti-justificatory critical rationalism and anarchism is Jan Lester’s book Escape From Leviathan: Liberty, Welfare, and Anarchy Reconciled.

Beyond politics

In the introduction to his collection of writings, Socratic Puzzles, Robert Nozick writes that  he never responded to the sizable literature on Anarchy, State and Utopia. His natural inclination would be to defend his views. As Nozick notes, “How could I learn that my views were mistaken if I thought about them always with defensive juices flowing.” Nozick’s confession raises a more general question for an individual as he thinks about society and his place in it. How can one pursue reason and virtue when “defensive juices” are continuously being triggered by politics and ideology?

The prospect of a de-politicized society seems remote. When individuals frame their interests as a function of collective choice, perpetual strife and division is born with it. The habit to look at society as a set of problems to be solved (whether through “piecemeal engineering” and tinkering or fanatical pursuit of grandiose ideas) instead of seeing it as “a cooperative venture for mutual advantage” (as John Rawls phrased it), cultivates and reinforces the political consequentialism that permeates contemporary opinion.  Far from being the defining element of modern liberalism, this teleological perspective on society unites most modern political thinking as expressed in appeals to “Fairness,” “Growth,” “Freedom” as values that should guide public policy.

It seems counterintuitive for (classical) liberal thought not to propose the pursuit of liberty as a goal for society. But as Anthony de Jasay points out in Before Resorting to Politics,

The question of whether freedom is valuable or a free society is good ought not to enter at all into a properly thought-out political doctrine, liberal or other. It should be resolutely ignored. Whichever way the question were answered would, it seems to me, inevitably steer us in a teleological direction, and undermine the foundations on which the society that we could consider free might stand and survive.

In his book Natural Rights and History, the philosopher Leo Strauss identified Thomas Hobbes as a thinker within the Epicurean tradition that perceived man as an a-political animal. But according to Strauss, Hobbes

…gives that a-political view a political meaning. He tries to instill the spirit of political idealism into the hedonistic tradition. He thus became the creator of political hedonism, a doctrine which has revolutionized human life everywhere on a scale never yet approached by any other teaching.

But instead of following Strauss in his rejection of Hobbes’ mechanistic worldview, we only reject his “political hedonism” and restore Hobbes to its a-political Epicurean tradition by rejecting his identification of individual choice with collective choice.

The German philosopher of science Regard Radnitzky notes that “there is a striking analogy between (a) the dilemma of contractarianism in political philosophy and (b) the “justificationist” dilemma in German epistemology.” Whereas the traditional Hobbesian argument for the state does not come off the ground because of the lack of an enforcer to enforce the contract to create Leviathan, the quest for certainty leads to descriptive statements without ground or an infinite regress of arguments. If rational choice does not require political choice and the search for objective values to inform public policy will be recognized as an occult endeavor, the Aristotelian image of man as a political animal will collapse and Epicurean withdrawal from politics may take its place.

At the 2005 Austrian Scholars Conference, Martin Masse spoke favorably of Epicurus as a forerunner of libertarian philosophy:

Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, were all statists to various degrees, glorified political involvement, and devised political programs for their audiences of rich and well-connected aristocrats. Epicurus focused on the individual search for happiness, counseled not to get involved in politics because of the personal trouble it brings, and thought that politics was irrelevant….He had no political program to offer and one can find no concept of collective virtues or order or justice in his teachings….

The Epicurean wise man will keep the covenant and not harm others not because he wishes to comply with some moral injunction being imposed from above, but simply because that’s the best way to pursue his happiness and keep his tranquility of mind.

Epicurus believed that tranquility of mind could not be found in political involvement, that we can choose life without fearing death, and rejected superstition in favor of empiricism. His contractarian theory of justice anticipated a philosophical tradition that looks for the source of morals in agreement (”neither to harm nor be harmed”), but that treats politics with skepticism.

The 20th century witnessed a progressive decomposition of liberal thought and the celebration of a politicized society. No person, or according to some people, no atom, should be exempt from the special plans that are being made for this world. Although the 2008 financial meltdown could have given pause to those that see society as a means to an end, the emerging wisdom is that the current problems were caused by a lack of control instead of a lack of restraint.

During the final years of his life the reactionary thinker Julius Evola had to face the question of how a  radical traditionalist was to act in a world that had evolved into the opposite of what he stood for. Evola recommended a detached life, or as the wisdom goes, “to be in the world, but not of it.” He advocated  apolitea, the withdrawal from contemporary politics and abandonment of political activism.  Instead of fighting the current age he recommended to “ride the tiger” until the tiger is exhausted.  One does not have to follow Evola in his obscurantist philosophies to appreciate this perspective.

This is part 3 in a 3 part series on voting, elections and politics.

Part 1: The calculus of voting
Part 2: The addiction to politics