November 2, 2011
CALL FOR PAPERS
Oikonomia, Economy and War: 2012 Cambridge Graduate Conference in Political Thought and Intellectual History
University of Cambridge
19-20 March 2012
Paper proposals are invited for the fifth Cambridge Graduate Conference in Political Thought and Intellectual History, to be held on 19-20 March 2012 at the University of Cambridge. The theme of the 2012 conference will be “Oikonomia, Economy and War”, and papers dealing with any period and tradition in the history of political thought from antiquity to the present will be considered. Papers which bring an historical perspective to bear on problems of contemporary political theory are welcome. A keynote address will be given by Professor Andrew Gamble of the Cambridge Department of Politics and International Studies
The conference theme should be interpreted broadly; papers relating to any aspect of “oikonomia” “economy” or “war” will be considered. Up to eight papers will be accepted. Panels will be led by a discussant from Cambridge, who will offer comments on each paper before general discussion with Cambridge faculty and conference participants. The aim of the conference is to provide an opportunity for outstanding graduate students to present and discuss their work in a collegial and supportive atmosphere. Accommodation will be provided for speakers from outside Cambridge.
Abstracts of up to 500 words are requested by 5 December 2011, with accepted papers to follow in full by 5 March 2012. Please submit abstracts, along with your name and a brief academic C.V., to ptihconf@hermes.cam.ac.uk.
Registration will close on 27 February 2012; those wishing to attend the conference without presenting a paper should write to the above address with their name and institutional affiliation before that date.
2012 Conference committee:
Jared Holley
Dom O’Mahony
Paul Sagar
Tara-Jane Westover
Waseem Yaqoob
February 6, 2011
Notice to Serve
If there’s one thing more boring than blogging, it’s blogging about blogging. Nonetheless, I will try and say something interesting.
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My self-imposed blogging sabbatical is not entirely due to a lack of time. I’ve been busy in the past, and that has never stopped me before. There are two, more fundamental reasons I’ve opted to cut back – or perhaps, two facets of one more fundamental problem.
Firstly, blogging about politics – for that is what this website has been dedicated to for over two years – increasingly bores me. At one level, this is because daily politics – and the bulk of blogging reaction to it – is boring.
Each day and week brings a superficially fresh piece of outrage perpetrated by the Conservative Party/the DailyMail/some idiot celebrity/the Government/some idiot rightwing blogger or commentator/the police/whatever [substitute leftwing alternatives to suit preference]. On the surface at least, the issue prompting comment is usually in some way different to whatever happened the week before (“selling off the woodlands”/ “destroying the NHS”/ “being a horrible bigot” / “lying and abusing positions of power”). But the game of political blogging is tiresomely repetitive.
The predictable daily reaction is to get into an outraged indignant lather of denunciation. Or to sarcastically mock with varying degrees of cynicism. Or to dissect at tedious length in predictable detail why The Enemy is wrong (and usually evil). All these reactions share a common feature: total practical impotence and wider irrelevance. No doubt, for a couple of years this has sustained me, and I’ve found it interesting to watch others do the same. Increasingly I feel I’m living in electronic groundhog day.
What I’m really complaining about is quite simply most political bloggers’ hobby. People go on and on, expressing the same outrage and indignation at the Daily Mail/Tory Party/Richard Liddle-Phillips [substitute left-wing alternatives to suite preference] day-in-day out, because they enjoy it. Rather like many people enjoy campaigning for a political party, or going to big political conferences. It’s about tribalism, and the fun of political group-think and purported engagement. But it bores me more and more with each passing day.
Quite self-consciously, this blog has attempted to do something a bit different for at least the past 18 months. Namely, to analyse political events through the filter of an academic training I’m lucky enough to still be receiving. For a while this has served at least two purposes. One, it helped me get clearer on my own ideas by applying them. Two, I liked to think of it as public-service pedagogy; the dissemination of interesting ideas for those who might be interested in them but who lack my privileged background.
But I only have so much in my repertoire, and the last few months have seen me falling into the trap of repetition. This bores me, to the point whereby it outweighs the appeal of offering any free pedagogical service. Not least because I have to question the extent to which this is really about sharing interesting ideas. Or about wanting people to think I’m clever, whilst advancing my career in various ways.
Which brings me to the second set of general considerations.
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I’ve also decided to cut back blogging because it has begun to feel like a duty, an obligation. Rather than writing just for pleasure, or to share ideas, or seek critical reaction, I increasingly write to secure my “status”, as an ever-more-popular blogger [see the sidebar]. That, and because I’ve been trying to build this blog as a personal tool of complementary professional development for so long that to abandon it feels like a major wasted investment.
And I really don’t like this situation. I am extremely adverse to the role of duty and obligation in most human life, in what philosophers narrowly define as “moral theory” and beyond. For most of the good outcomes secured by imposing duties on people can be achieved by alternative means: for example, by encouraging dispositions in people such that they want to do some action from their own volition, rather than feeling they must do so because they are beholden to some external power, sanction, condemnation or failure.
Duty is an unhealthy concept to be beholden to, a sort of moral pathology. Things should be done because they are in themselves good things to do, not because they are your “duty”. The concept and experience of duty creates and fosters a psyche of meekness, dependency, constraint and subjection to overbearing command. It also opens the door for the extraction of fulfilment. This can be done by others: those who perceive your failure of “duty” and coercively extract compliance, or inflict “justified” punishment. Or it can be done by your own self: the mechanisms of repression, guilt and self-loathing so easily generated in complex human animals. Nietzsche saw something very profound when he noted that Kant’s categorical imperative “stinks of cruelty”.
Morality and life is, of course, about other people. But morality and life is also about yourself. The criterion of how to live might be primarily ordered around the question “what is good for others?” – but the question “what is healthy for me?” should never leave the picture. And if we can secure the first by healthier means with regard to the second, then that ought to be done. It may be a fact about us that we cannot do without duty entirely. But that is no reason not to do without duty as much as possible.
To retreat from philosophy and come back to the manner at hand; for this blog – which started as a source of pleasure and enjoyment – to transmutate into a source of duty and obligation is something I’ve decided not to continue tolerating. Perhaps this will mean I’ve wasted two years of investment. But as they say to smokers, it’s never too late to quit.
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Not, actually, that I’m going to stop blogging. For despite the above, regular writing has a particularly important function in my life: it is a form of exercise.
I’ve decided I’m going to try and live off of my brain. And being ambitious, I’ve decided I’m going to go as far as that can possibly take me. So my brain needs exercise. You wouldn’t try and become a top athlete without regular training; the same goes for anyone serious about thinking.
Of course, most serious thinkers simply keep their written thoughts to themselves. And there’s much to be said for that – not least the face it saves. But I enjoy and benefit from (some of) the critical engagement frequent public writing receives. I also think there’s something interesting in the possibility of a fairly open and visible process of intellectual development, insofar as not many people have tried (or for contingent historical reasons, been able to try) this. And anyway, my amour propre outweighs my sense of shame; so why not see what happens?
What I need is a change of direction. If blogging about politics – or at least, blogging about politics in the way I and many others have been doing for the past couple of years – bores me, then I should blog about something else, or in a different way. Obviously, I won’t stop writing about politics tout court. But it’s time to see what else I can do.
The new status badges added to the side of this website indicate a statement of intent. I’ll mostly be trying to read things in those three domains, and to write accordingly. Of course, I wasn’t lying when I said I was busy. And I’m still on sabbatical for the foreseeable future. But let’s just see what happens, even if that turns out to be a healthy nothing.
January 25, 2011
Drugs, Religion and the Usefulness of History
There’s currently a rather silly series airing on BBC3. How Drugs Work ostensibly “combines real life stories and computer graphics to explore inside the brain and the body” to find out, er, how drugs work.
Yet the cannabis episode is interesting, if only for one minor reason: the show’s repeated attempts to inject a sense of justification for marijuana’s prohibition. Despite being mostly an hour-long demonstration that illegality is largely pointless and unnecessary, deference to the norm of social prohibition has to be maintained. So we’re breathlessly told that after smoking a joint your chances of a heart attack increase by 50% - without it being noted that because most people are not at risk of having imminent heart attacks, this is largely irrelevant.* And so forth.
Those – like me – who favour moves to drug decriminalisation, and eventually controlled legalisation, often despair at the apparent impossibility of change. After all, the long-haired hippies of the swinging sixties grew up with drugs all around them…and proceeded to cut their hair, before become MPs, journalists and voters who largely favour continued criminalisation.
Yet social attitudes do change, and far bigger things than drug prohibition bear testament to this. Consider the case of Thomas Aikenhead, who on January 8th 1697 was executed for blasphemy in Edinburgh, after allegedly railing against the Holy Trinity. His was the last execution in Britain for this “crime”, and he was indicted as follows:
“That … the prisoner had repeatedly maintained, in conversation, that theology was a rhapsody of ill-invented nonsense, patched up partly of the moral doctrines of philosophers, and partly of poetical fictions and extravagant chimeras: That he ridiculed the holy scriptures, calling the Old Testament Ezra’s fables, in profane allusion to Esop’s Fables; That he railed on Christ, saying, he had learned magick in Egypt, which enabled him to perform those pranks which were called miracles: That he called the New Testament the history of the imposter Christ; That he said Moses was the better artist and the better politician; and he preferred Mahomet to Christ: That the Holy Scriptures were stuffed with such madness, nonsense, and contradictions, that he admired the stupidity of the world in being so long deluded by them: That he rejected the mystery of the Trinity as unworthy of refutation; and scoffed at the incarnation of Christ.”
By merely reproducing this text and stating that I heartily approve of Aikenhead’s antics, I thereby demonstrate that British society has changed profoundly. Yet before the 18th century, not only was blasphemy a capital crime, but the proposition that a society of atheists was even possible was treated by many as plainly ridiculous.
During the 18th century, the spectre of atheism and non-conformity gradually dwindled, as coerced adherence to approved religious dogma faded from the forefront of social anxiety. (If you want to understand some of this fascinating story from an intellectual history perspective, read this excellent book.)
Indeed, my hero David Hume is a case in point here. Born in 1711, he notoriously “cut off the nobler parts” of his 1739 magnum opus A Treatise of Human Nature, partly for fear that his irreligious positions might earn him Aikenhead’s fate. Yet by 1748, Hume instigated a devastating attack on natural religion in his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. And although it was ultimately published only posthumously, his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion put the nail in the coffin of a host of religious arguments, without its publisher being indicted.
In less than a hundred years, British official public attitudes to the necessity of some level of religious conformity altered dramatically. Sadly, the reasons for this are far too complicated to expound here. Though it has something to do with the end of feudalism, the development of what we would now call capitalism, and the emergence of the modern coercive state apparatus. Plus the sheer variety of forms of religion and dissent growing ever exponentially after the protestant reformation, and the continued need in Britain to discover a via media between competing faiths (not least Catholicism) so as to avoid social breakdown.
If you think that attitudes towards the need for drug criminalisation today are deeply entrenched, they are as nothing compared to the importance of basic tenets of shared religion in early modern societies. After all, questions of religion reach into questions about the very nature, being and purpose of human existence, as well as the more pressing question of the ability of human beings to live together in peace.
What this nicely goes to show, therefore, is how history can help us gain some perspective. What may look to us, here and now, as necessary and fixed, may in fact prove to be contingent and transitory. A knowledge of the past thus has unexpected and indirect uses in the present, even if only to improve self-awareness.
Of course, philistine dunderheads fail to see this, usually whilst maintaining that only market-recognised “practical skills” have true value. On which point I note that the study of history is coming under the Coalition axe, as 80% cuts to University arts and humanities teaching budgets take effect. A well-known aphorism goes: those who don’t learn history’s mistakes are doomed to repeat them. More generally, I would say: those who don’t value the past are quite likely to fuck up the future.
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* My favourite example of silly TV science about drugs was broadcast a few years ago. “Scientists” got some mice high on marijuana, and compared how long it took them to get out of a bowl of water vis-à-vis more sober mice. The glaring flaw in this “experiment”, however, is surely that it had no way of controlling for whether stoned mice just really love swimming.
January 19, 2011
Book Review: Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature – An Introduction
Book Review – Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature An Introduction by John P. Wright, pp. 316, Cambridge, £16.99
This is a noteworthy book from a noteworthy author, to mutually reinforcing effect. John P. Wright is that rare thing: a scholar with a sophisticated grasp of the complexity of philosophical argument who is also a serious historian of philosophy (with an emphasis on “historian”). These two things have here combined to produce a beginner’s guide which doubles as a valuable scholarly contribution for more advanced readers.
Wright has succeeded in capturing the complexity of Hume’s arguments in the Treatise whilst maintaining a prose style which makes the material accessible, without disguising that readers must work hard to keep up. Particularly pleasing is the seriousness with which Wright treats Hume’s positions. Whereas many “introductions” give-in to the temptation to pass (usually dismissive) judgement on Hume’s arguments, Wright instead notes common objections before providing the more sophisticated Humean response, leaving readers to decide where to go from there. He is also scrupulously honest in making clear when he is taking sides in any interpretative debate (and in Hume scholarship, this is no infrequent thing). This is best exemplified in his meticulous discussion of Hume’s account of causation in the Treatise.
Wright correctly notes that the bulk of the “problem” of causation for Hume is epistemological – the issue of how we can come to “know” of causal connections in the external world. Providing an admirably thorough and accurate exposition, Wright follows Hume’s argument to the letter. Illustrating the powerful nature of the sophisticated epistemological scepticism in play, Wright explains the sheer intellectual force of the reasoning which leads Hume to suppose that our only basis for a belief in causal necessity resides in our own minds. Yet Wright notes that there is also an outstanding corollary debate in this area: that whilst Hume was intractably sceptical as to our ability to “know” of mind-independent causal connections, there remains the issue of whether he nonetheless thought causal connections obtained “out there” in an underlying reality, to which we do not actually have access.
On this “ontological” question Wright’s commitments are “realist”. That Hume believed there are necessary causal connections built into the fabric of existence, even if we can’t have direct access to them. Personally, this is far too quasi-Kantian a conclusion to deduce for my liking. My preferred reading is that Hume is thoroughly sceptical here, too: that whilst there might be causal necessity built into the fabric of existence, equally there might not. As we don’t know (and will never have any way of knowing), the correct position is not ontological “realism”, but simple, healthy, sceptical agnosticism. Wright, however, is quite open about his own commitments and the alternatives available, and his footnotes provide ready ammunition for opponents.
Of particular interest to more historically-minded readers will be both Wright’s lengthy and detailed introduction, and his constant endeavour to situate Hume’s arguments against a background of contemporary debate. Whereas many beginner’s guides simply regurgitate basic biographical platitudes, Wright has taken the trouble not only to provide a detailed over-view of Hume’s early life but also to stress the possible connections between the young man and the later philosophy (if only slight later: Hume finished the Treatise when he was just 27 years old).
Of particular interest here is Wright’s suggestion that Hume’s early psychological breakdown – before his new “scene of thought” which inspired the penning of his masterpiece – was induced by a rigorous attempt to conform his life to the stoic moral teachings of Francis Hutcheson and Lord Shaftesbury, two extremely prominent moral theorists of the early 18th century. Basing this claim not in idle speculation but in Hume’s correspondence, Wright thus makes an important historical contention about the possible motivations for – and our interpretations of – Hume’s repudiation of the stoic “moral sense” theories in favour of an epicureanism that placed pleasure-seeking and pain-avoidance at the centre of human psychology. For those who wish to combine philosophy with history to good effect, Wright’s is no trivial suggestion.
Indeed historical sensitivity is one of the most pleasing things about this volume, where intellectual context of Hume’s arguments is always sketched. This is not only interesting in itself, but also helps both to illustrate Hume’s own rival commitments as well as guiding the reader towards interpretations that avoid retrospective conceptual anachronism. This is particularly important when Wright comes to discuss Hume’s moral and political commitments in the final sections of the book.
On one level, by locating Hume’s intervention as a complex response to (amongst others) Hutcheson, Shaftesbury, Bernard Mandeville, John Locke and Samuel Clarke, this book happily avoids the trap of becoming a narrow, tired discussion of Hume’s arguments against ethical rationalism to the exclusion of all else. Whilst handling Hume’s rejection of any moral realism derived from a faculty of reason with aplomb, Wright is also wholly alive to the fact that Hume’s real targets in the Treatise were the “moral sense” realisms of Hutcheson and Shaftesbury, and the non-naturalistic sceptical moral irrealism of Bernard Mandeville. Accordingly, it is the responses to these authors which command the bulk of Wright’s treatment – which is exactly how it should be, for that is how it is in Hume.
In doing so, however, Wright also makes a subtle yet important scholarly intervention as to the extent of influence upon Hume. The great student of Hume’s thought, Norman Kemp Smith, famously claimed that Hume entered philosophy through the “gateway of morals” and that his moral and political thought were essentially an extension of Hutcheson’s. This interpretation has been followed in recent years by David Fate-Norton in particular, but Wright here aligns himself with scholars such as James Moore and Luigi Turco who emphasise the radical discontinuity between Hume and Hutcheson, with the Treatise constituting a thorough-going repudiation of the Glasgow professor. For what it’s worth, Wright further convinces me that the Kemp Smith interpretation must indeed be rejected.
Insofar as a beginner’s guide can be a tour de force, it is fair to describe Wright’s volume as such. It is, to my knowledge, the best introduction to Hume’s Treatise – and by extension, Hume’s thought – on the market. If you teach a course on Hume, or 18th century philosophy, or ethics, it should be on your reading list. For those just looking for a helpful place to start exploring one of the greatest works of genius ever produced, here it is. This is a book for all, and it deserves attention.
January 12, 2011
“Alarm Clock Britain” vs. The Enemy
A lot of very good, very venerable political philosophy focuses upon the importance of consensus. This is quite clear in what usually goes by the name of the Social Contract tradition, where shared agreement underpins the basis for political society.* Much democratic (and democratic-friendly) thought emphasises that even if individuals in the demos disagree about specific issues, those disagreements can be accepted as resting upon a more basic consensual agreement on how to make decisions. The 20th century’s most impressive attempt to articulate a single political theory – John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice – put the (rational) consensus of free and equal persons absolutely centre stage.
In general the motivation for working within and towards consensus is well-grounded. Politics often means using force to control human lives. Force is generally nasty, and the more of it that gets nakedly deployed the worse people’s lives tend to go. The more consensus that can be established, the less force – and violence – we are likely to see. Furthermore, it will be much easier to justify any remaining necessary violence, insofar as it is founded in some sort of basis of consent amongst those variously subjected to it. (Though such attempts at justification will, of course, vary in success.)
It can be slightly troubling, therefore, to look at what we might call the anthropology of politics as practiced in modern societies and find significant instances of anti-consensual practice, which operate explicitly by exploiting insider/outsider dichotomies.
Take, for example, Nick Clegg’s rather distasteful sop to readers of The Sun. Attacking “scroungers” is, of course, a tried and tested ploy of the right. What attracts my attention is Clegg’s explicit drawing of an “us vs. them” dichotomy. On the one hand there is valiant “Alarm Clock Britain”, the decent folk like you, who get up every morning and go to work. On the other is the enemy within; the workshy scrounging layabouts stealing your taxes.
The efficacy of Clegg’s gutter strategy lies precisely in creating an “us vs. them” opposition. He casts himself on the side of the Good, who are in turn invited to cast aspersions on the Bad. In the process, the target audience will (hopefully) see Clegg as One Of Them. In turn, any anger at Government policy will (so the strategy goes) be redirected towards the common enemy.
This is a staple ploy of effective demagoguery – but my suspicion is that the causality is uncomfortable here. I doubt that such dichotomies are created and effective because politicians somehow invent them. Rather, I suspect politicians find the use of such dichotomies effective because people already have a deep disposition towards employing them – whether that disposition be innate, or the product of deep social forces (as, say, Marxists would contend).
Furthermore, the desire and urge to form “us vs. them” dichotomies isn’t manifested only in straightforward politics. Look at the hysteria over paedophilia in recent years, or in the past (or contemporary America) over child snatchers. Or further back, fear and hatred of witches. The enemy within – the terrifying monster to be rooted out and destroyed – is hardly a new phenomenon. And neither, of course, is the perennial enemy without: the French, the Russians, and now the Muslims of the Middle East.
My worry, however, is that if a tendency to structure group organisation – and particularly, successful political practice – around insider/outsider dichotomies is pervasive and recurring, then it is quite likely that such dichotomies exist because they successfully fulfil some sort of purpose. For example, it may be that organising around an us/them opposition is what allows the people within the “us” to co-operate and put aside their own differences, in light of the threat posed by rivals (whether real or imaginary). This need not be at the level of crude resource competition, but of complex psychological accommodation. Accordingly, we must entertain the possibility that human society is only viable to the extent that opposition is found – or if necessary, constructed – between insiders and outsiders.
And if that is indeed the case, it is surely troubling for any politics which seeks to be built upon and/or broadly uphold consensus. Because it indicates that the prospects of consensus are inherently limited, insofar as human society – and in turn, much successful politics – transpires to be inherently and fundamentally oppositional. Which is not to say that we shouldn’t seek political consensus when possible; for the reasons noted above, consensus is generally very desirable. But nonetheless, we may have to set our goals rather lower than we would like, and grit our teeth rather harder than is pleasant.
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*Personally, I’m increasingly suspicious that this is an unhelpful label, lumping together very diverse thinkers. But no time for that today.
January 7, 2011
The Leviathan vs. The Bankers
Despite lots of tough talk from The Coalition, UK-based banks are planning to pay-out billions in bonuses:
“The government is resigned to UK banks paying out billions of pounds in bonuses this year, despite its calls to curb the payments, the BBC has learned.
The best the coalition can hope for is a declaration from the banks that they will pay out less than they would have without government intervention, said BBC business editor Robert Peston.”
At times like these, I like to sit in a quiet space and ask myself a profound question, seeking guidance from One who once walked amongst us. What Would Hobbes Do?*
The answer, it turns out, is pretty clear:
“Seventhly, is annexed to the sovereignty the whole power of prescribing the rules whereby every man may know what goods he may enjoy, and what actions he may do, without being molested by any of his fellow subjects: and this is it men call propriety. For before constitution of sovereign power, as hath already been shown, all men had right to all things, which necessarily causeth war: and therefore this propriety, being necessary to peace, and depending on sovereign power, is the act of that power, in order to the public peace.”
Which basically means: without an absolute sovereign power, nobody’s stuff is secure from being snatched by others. So the concept of “property” only has meaningful content when there exists an absolute sovereign power. Accordingly, that absolute sovereign power gets to make the rules about who gets what stuff, when they get to keep it, and what they’re allowed to do with it. And that absolute sovereign power’s decisions is final.
From which follows:
“Further, seeing it is not enough to the sustentation of a Commonwealth that every man have a propriety in a portion of land, or in some few commodities, or a natural property in some useful art, and there is no art in the world but is necessary either for the being or well-being almost of every particular man; it is necessary that men distribute that which they can spare, and transfer their propriety therein mutually one to another by exchange and mutual contract. And therefore it belonged to the Commonwealth (that is to say, to the sovereign) to appoint in what manner all kinds of contract between subjects (as buying, selling, exchanging, borrowing, lending, letting, and taking to hire) are to be made, and by what words and words and sign they shall be understood for valid.”
Which basically means: the Leviathan is boss, and the bankers have no special right to go around setting bonuses willy nilly. If the Leviathan says “no bonuses, bankers”, then it’s no bonuses, bankers. And if the bankers decide to pay out bonuses anyway, then the bankers are for the chop. And they have no right of redress or remonstrance. ‘Dems the Leviathan’s rules, and only the Leviathan can say otherwise.
Why am I telling you this? Because in my area of academic interest, a lot of effort is put into showing (I think, rather plausibly), that the modern state is conceptually ordered in a way heavily influenced by Hobbes’s view of an ultimate sovereign power which calls the shots, and above which there is no right of redress in the final instance. (Nice fluffy modern states may institute checks and balances to prevent the worst excesses of power and suffering – but behind those checks and balances nonetheless stands the brooding Leviathan).
But the bankers appear to be challenging this hegemony.
Of coure, it could just be that George, Nick, Vince and Dave don’t want to push the bankers very hard. That they’ve considered extending the long arm of the coercive state – but have decided on balance they’d prefer not to. In which case, the Leviathan is being indulgent. (Perhaps because of cognitive biases – or confusions – about the nature of power on these individuals’ behalf.)
But what if the underlying truth is that the Leviathan can’t enforce its will against the bankers? That if it tries, they will collectively act so as to undermine, counter and possibly overpower the Leviathan. Or alternatively, move their operations elsewhere in such a manner that the economic impact is such that threat of doing so is tantamount to coercion?
Indeed, that the latter possibility is at the very least in the minds of political decision-makers, surely indicates that the terms of trade (excuse the pun) have at the very least changed. The Leviathan is clearly no longer master of all it surveys within its domains – even if only because the people who currently operate its jaws do not believe it to be so.
Which, of course, is another way of putting the oft-heard worry: that global capitalism has bred megacorporations that are bigger – and more powerful – than sovereign nation states. But it’s also a way for me to express that I think there may be a significant (though by no means complete) truth in this worry, and at a serious intellectual level.
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* Or as the bracelet I wear simply states, WWHD? Which of course nicely doubles up for “What Would Hume Do?”, for when I’m in a different frame of mind. I accept this may be funny only to people either religiously schooled, or who were exposed at an impressionable age to the activities of bonkers Christian organisations.
January 3, 2011
Why are we all democrats now?
I don’t see eye to eye with Norm on a fair few things, politics-wise. But his recent piece on the self-serving abuse of the word (and concept) “democracy” amongst much of the left is basically spot-on:
“… what is worst here is something captured not by any single quotation, but by a kind of miasmic subtext. This is that there exists somewhere underneath the deficiencies of ‘electoral democracy’ an already formed will of the people, a will in support of what Gopal and other meshuggeneh-leftist spokespeople want, but which is blocked by the distorting mechanisms of the non-real democracy they lament. This extraordinary assumption, supported by no empirical evidence, never seems sufficiently to agitate those who hold it into trying to explain why no party or movement standing on the kind of political programme [they] would want to see has been able to come even half way close to winning an electoral majority.”
That there is a “real” democratic will of “The People”, lying behind what is currently actually being expressed by the people, is not a particularly new thought. It also has a fairly long and somewhat ignoble history. (Les Jacobins, anyone?)
In the rush to equate “democracy” with whatever particular value or outcome political leftists favour, the complexity of that concept is almost always overlooked. (Ditto when smearing any opposed position as “undemocratic”.) Yet democracy refers to at least two things. Firstly, a process by which decisions are made. Secondly, a value about the ordering of political systems and activities.
Indeed, the word “democratic” is now thoroughly loaded with positive value-connotations, whilst “undemocratic” is an unambiguous political slur. Yet this is actually a quite remarkable fact. Because until roughly the 20th Century, no sane person ever thought democracy was a good idea. Rule by the people? Power in the hands of the mob? You’d have to be stark raving crackers to want that.
The only place it was ever tried was a slave-owning Greek city two and a half thousand years ago, where the adult male citizenry of just 40,000 was given direct decision-making power. The experiment lasted about 100 years, in which time a devastating war was lost to neighbouring Sparta, before Macedonian conquerors put a stop to it all.
For the next two millennia “democracy” was a term of denigration; a synonym for anarchy. So how did a very different modern take (i.e. electoral representation) on an ancient Greek idea about processes of decision-making undergo such reversal of fortunes? How did “democracy” become the only legitimate form of politics admissible on the world stage today, and in turn the cardinal political value in the West?
One very interesting answer is offered by the political theorist John Dunn.* That at some level, it basically comes down to the rise of American power.
Despite its federalist political system having been originally sold as republican (and as explicitly not democratic), by the 20th century America found itself an ascendant global super-power. As well as having just contributed to the defeat of Fascist Germany and Imperial Japan, the USA was facing down the world’s other global superpower: Soviet Russia. Which of course claimed to be a workers’ paradise, run by and for The People.
After the defeat of Fascism in Europe and in the face of Communism in Russia, American-style representative electoral democracy was enthusiastically promoted by that Superpower (and its allies) as the only legitimate form of rule. And by the mid-20th Century, that form of rule was now universally known (for reasons that would take too long to explain) in the West as “democracy” – despite looking nothing like the original Greek experiment.
To keep cutting a long story short, America won the Cold War. If this didn’t quite bring The End of History, it did do an awful lot to finalise the ubiquity of “democracy” as the only legitimate form of political organisation, and its inauguration as the cardinal political value. In a Europe where only 75 years ago significant sections of both left and right would have pooh-pooh’d “democracy” as either fraudulent or undesirable, we’re suddenly all democrats now.
If Dunn’s answer is broadly right, however, it leads us to noticing a certain irony. Much of the unreflective left, which brands all its values as synonymous with “democracy”, trades precisely on the ubiquity of democracy as the cardinal political value in order to advance its aims. Yet much of that same left typically rails against American hegemony and “imperialism” – without considering that it may be the rise of American power itself which largely explains their felt need to equate all approved political values with “democracy”.
Of course, there may be no significant practical consequences to this; ironies need not have any applied pay-out. Then again, one might believe that a touch of (historical) self-awareness helps to breed more considered self-reflection, and perhaps better political judgement. Or at the very least, the penning of marginally less banal political polemics.
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*See his Setting the People Free (by far the most accessible of his work, though this theme is pursued in his other writings).
November 23, 2010
CFP
*** CALL FOR PAPERS ***
Politics, Order, Law:
2011 Cambridge Graduate Conference in Political Thought and Intellectual History
University of Cambridge
21-22 March 2011
Paper proposals are invited for the fourth Cambridge Graduate Conference in Political Thought and Intellectual History, to be held on 21-22 March 2011 at the University of Cambridge. The theme of the 2011 conference will be “Politics, Order, Law”, and papers dealing with any period and tradition in the history of political thought from antiquity to the present will be considered. Papers which bring an historical perspective to bear on problems of contemporary political theory are welcome. A keynote address will be given by a senior member of the Cambridge Faculty of History. In previous years keynote addresses have been delivered by Quentin Skinner, Raymond Geuss and Gareth Stedman Jones.
The conference theme should be interpreted broadly, to cover the various senses of “law”—including civil, natural and scientific—as well as differing conceptions of order in politics. Up to eight papers will be accepted. Panels will be led by a discussant from Cambridge, who will offer comments on each paper before general discussion with Cambridge faculty and conference participants. The aim of the conference is to provide an opportunity for outstanding graduate students to present and discuss their work in a collegial and supportive atmosphere. Accommodation will be provided for speakers from outside Cambridge.
Abstracts of up to 500 words are requested by 6 December 2010, with accepted papers to follow in full by 7 March 2011. Please submit abstracts, along with your name and a brief C.V., to ptihconf@hermes.cam.ac.uk.
Registration will close on 25 February 2011; those wishing to attend the conference without presenting a paper should write to the above address with their name and institutional affiliation before that date.
2011 Conference committee:
Teresa Bejan
Dom O’Mahony
Tom Parry-Jones
Paul Sagar
Diana Siclovan
Sophie Smith
Waseem Yaqoob
November 16, 2010
Domination and Welfare Reform
Over the past two decades, philosopher Phillip Pettit and historian Quentin Skinner have led a revival of interest in how freedom can be compromised when people lose their independence. Rather than freedom being lost only when a person’s actions are interfered with, Pettit and Skinner argue that freedom can also be lost if one is “dominated”, i.e. if one lives under the arbitrary power of another. As Stuart White helpfully put it:
“It is about not being subject to another’s power to intervene in one’s life at their discretion. Freedom is, in this sense, independence – the power to refuse dependency on others and their uncertain goodwill.”
Although Skinner and Pettit have tried to present this conception as a radical (and now somewhat lost) alternative to a “liberal” view of freedom, the historical story is rather complicated. In particular, theorists in the 18th century were very much alive to the threat that arbitrary domination posed to freedom – in the form of the power of rulers over subjects. Thus, Montesquieu made as a central pillar of his weighty treatise The Spirit of the Laws the claim that the state must be ordered by legal structures which constrained the actions of rulers just as much as of subjects, precisely to ensure the freedom of the latter from the dominating despotic ambitions of the former. (This vision has now come to be known as that of a “Rechtsstaat” – the state as ordered by law, not the whims of political rulers).
This view of liberty in modern mass-society was developed by French liberal Benjamin Constant, with his famous distinction between the liberty of the “ancients” (living in small, militarised, republican city-states) and that of the “moderns” who must appreciate the new and previously unknown conditions within which freedom could be practically and conceptually realised. Like Montesquieu, Constant saw legal structures as paramount: “[modern liberty] is the right to be subject only to the laws, such that one cannot be arrested, detained, executed, or mistreated in any way by virtue of the arbitrary will of one or more individuals”.
Indeed contemporary theorists are likewise alive to the changed conditions of freedom for “moderns”. Chris Brooke has specifically urged Pettit and Skinner to realise this point:
“[I]nsofar as we are egalitarian citizens today, or consider that perhaps we have a serious prospect of becoming such…this may owe a great deal to the “awesome” power (that is, quite straightforwardly, the power to keep us in awe) of the more or less Hobbesian social institutions that we have constructed for ourselves since Hobbes’s time; in particular, to the bureaucratic welfare state that is able, among other things, to humble the proud, to enforce the law, and to deliver a uniform mass education.”
But equally, we must remember that the “bureaucratic welfare state” may offer not only the potential for escaping or ameliorating domination, but also become a source of domination in its own right. And given the literally awesome power of the modern state, that domination can be profound and extremely serious – even if actualised in what may appear to be petty and minor ways.
Which brings me to my point. Amidst the new “get tough” reforms to welfare being pushed through by the coalition, there’s something that’s been widely overlooked:
“But unemployed people who persistently fail to turn up, or turned down and refused to apply for jobs, will lose their £65-a-week job seeker’s allowance for up to three years.
The allowance will be removed for three months on a first offence, six months the second time and three years on the third breach of the new rules – with no right of appeal.”
If that final caveat – that there will be no right of appeal – for those who have their benefits withdrawn is true, it is very worrying. Such reforms will put an enormous amount of arbitrary power into the hands of (presumably) administrators at Job Centres. As somebody who has had (albeit mercifully brief) experience of claiming unemployment benefit, the prospect of being made dependent upon the whim – and just as importantly, the mistakes – of Job Centre staff would fill me with dread.
For amongst the hard-working and well-intentioned, there are also the petty tyrants, the plain vindictive, and those who see everybody sat in the chair in front of them as a work-shy scrounging layabout – as well as the plain incompetent. To put the power of what is almost literally life and death – for what else is withdrawing the final safety net of meagre state support? – into the hands of individual petty bureaucrats, and not even enshrine a right of appeal, is a dangerous and profoundly troubling move. Not just for the welfare of individual claimants, but for their freedom from the arbitrary abuses of power by those placed over them, and their freedom in the independence they receive from having the guarantee of even the meagre bare minimum currently provided by the state.
The potential for individuals to become subject to domination is precisely what the modern welfare state should be trying to eradicate. The coalition is moving in exactly the wrong direction.
November 11, 2010
In Praise of Riots
“I say that those who condemn the tumults between the nobles and the plebs, appear to me to blame those things that were the chief causes for keeping Rome free, and that they paid more attention to the noises and shouts that arose in those tumults than to the good effects they brought forth…And if the tumults were the cause of creation of Tribunes, they merit the highest praise, for in addition to giving the people a part in administration, they were established for guarding Roman liberty.”
So wrote Niccolò Machiavelli in his Discorsi, perhaps the first great work of modern political theory.
It would be misleading to extrapolate too much from Machiavelli’s concerns about the governing of a 16th century Italian city state. But regardless, like Machiavelli I have no inherent problem with “tumults” – or as we would now call them, riots.
Machiavelli’s core point is that rioting safe-guarded freedom. It was because the Roman plebs took arms against the nobles that the latter remembered not to push things too far. That made rioting a useful corrective, and a check against the abuses of the powerful.
It’s not clear that anything has changed today. If a party is elected to government on a series of manifesto pledges, and then reneges on them systematically, it may be no bad thing if the betrayed express their discontent via physical public unrest.
Indeed, Machiavelli also held a connected and crucially important view:
“If the object of the Nobles and the People is considered, it will be seen that the former have a great desire to dominate, and the latter a desire not to be dominated and consequently a greater desire to live free…so that the People placed in charge to guard the liberty of anyone, reasonably will take better care of it; for not being able to take it away themselves, they do not permit others to take it away”
Those in positions of power will seek to dominate the weaker. To defend freedom of the (city-)state, the ruled must possess the ability to strike back at the rulers.
You can see where this is going, even if it needs updating by 500 years.
If the NUS organises a 50,000-strong rally in London, and sections of the protest attack physical property owned by the powerful Conservative Party, then forcibly confront the police, this is not an inherently bad thing – and especially if nobody is seriously hurt.
Of course, the usual suspects sitting in their usual swamps have already spouted the tired old clichés about “a few troublemakers” and the importance of “peaceful protest”. But I disagree when the implication is that rioting can never be justified. There is no fail-safe reason why the populi cannot, at times of extreme discontent, employ physical force against the mechanisms of an authority which is committing violence against them.
And I do mean violence. Because when a government decides that (for example) the seriously diabetic are not “really” disabled, and can thus have their disability allowances halved over-night, rendering many unable to meet the rent – that is a form of violence.
When generations of young people suffer government policies rendering higher education more exclusive whilst reducing employment prospects for the millions already out of work – that is a form of violence.
When the unemployed are to be compelled into slave-like forced employment schemes (or rather, ultra-expensive hypocritical gimmicks aimed at a tiny minority of tabloid hate-figures) – that is a form of violence.
In short: if government systematically attacks the interests and well-being of citizens, this constitutes a form of violence. That such violence is achieved by bureaucratic mandate and the mechanisms of officialdom is irrelevant. The policies of the current Coalition Government are attacks of violence upon the fabric of British society, and the British people themselves.
Yesterday, tens of thousands of students gathered in London. Some of them fought the police, and attempted to damage the property of both the state and the Conservative party. Good. British citizens should do it again and again, until our lords and masters understand.
If rioting secured the liberty of Rome, perhaps it can salvage the welfare state of Britain. After all, who else is going to bring this radical and destructive juggernaut to a halt? Not Nick Clegg, that’s for sure.
