Albert Hirschman on "the intended but unrealized effects of social decisions"

Note: I altered the title of this post slightly on 4/2/21. It's otherwise unchanged.

The death of Albert Hirschman prompts me to interrupt the break to quote a couple of passages from his The Passions and the Interests. First, from p.117:

In an old and well-known Jewish story, the rabbi of Krakow interrupted his prayers one day with a wail to announce that he had just seen the death of the rabbi of Warsaw two hundred miles away. The Krakow congregation, though saddened, was of course much impressed with the visionary powers of their rabbi. A few days later some Jews from Krakow traveled to Warsaw and, to their surprise, saw the old rabbi there officiate in what seemed to be tolerable health. Upon their return they confided the news to the faithful and there was incipient snickering. Then a few undaunted disciples came to the defense of their rabbi; admitting that he may have been wrong on the specifics, they exclaimed: "Nevertheless, what vision!"

Ostensibly this story pours ridicule on the human ability to rationalize belief in the face of contrary evidence. But at a deeper level it defends and celebrates visionary and speculative thought no matter if such thought goes astray. It is this interpretation that makes the story so pertinent to the episode in intellectual history that has been related here. The Montesquieu-Steuart speculations about the salutary political consequences of economic expansion were a feat of imagination in the realm of political economy, a feat that remains magnificent even though history may have proven wrong the substance of those speculations.

I wish I could quote the ensuing discussion in toto. There is a bit on pp.130-31, however, that is too good not to quote. Here Hirschman contrasts the "unintended effects of human actions," for which social scientists are often on the lookout, with intended effects that never occur:

Curiously, the intended but unrealized effects of social decisions stand in need of being discovered even more than those effects that were unintended but turn out to be all too real: the latter are at least there, whereas the intended but unrealized effects are only to be found in the expressed expectations of social actors at a certain, often fleeting, moment of time.

What's more, the original expectations that are not borne out are 

likely to be not only forgotten but actively repressed. This is...essential if the succeeding power holders are to be assured of the legitimacy of the new order: what social order could long survive the dual awareness that it was adopted with the firm expectation that it would solve certain problems, and that it clearly and abysmally fails to do so?

And there is a further consideration here. Writing in 1977*, Hirschman noted that "no twentieth-century observer" (p. 118) could maintain that the Montesquieu-Steuart view -- i.e., that commerce would have a peace-inducing, "gentling" effect on politics within and among nation-states, a view by the way that Marx (predictably) ridiculed (see p.62) -- had been vindicated by events, although Hirschman added that "the failure of the [Montesquieu-Steuart] vision may well have been less than total" (p.118). Fast forward to 2012. How does the Montesquieu-Steuart position look now? Perhaps somewhat better than it did thirty-five years ago? Or perhaps not.
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*[note added 12/15/12, edited 1/26/16]: The book was published in '77 so the words were actually written earlier, and in the acknowledgments Hirschman says he wrote a first draft of the book in 1972-73. But nothing of consequence turns on precisely when in the 1970s the passages were composed, at least as far as this post is concerned.     

Bumper sticker of the day

Honk If You Believe the Reimann Hypothesis

(spotted in a parking lot this afternoon)

Meeting of Minds

From Marjorie Garber, "Historical Correctness: The Use and Abuse of History for Literature," in A Manifesto for Literary Studies (2003), p.52 (footnotes omitted):

A memorable instance of this once-popular genre [i.e., dialogues of the dead] was offered by comedian Steve Allen's television show Meeting of Minds, which ran for four years on the American Public Broadcasting System. On one occasion Aristotle, Sun Yat-Sen, Niccolò Machiavelli, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning debated; on another a lively argument developed among Theodore Roosevelt, Thomas Aquinas, Cleopatra, and Thomas Paine; a third panel featured Florence Nightingale, Plato, Voltaire, and Martin Luther; a fourth, Attila the Hun, Emily Dickinson, Galileo, and Charles Darwin. (Steve Allen to Galileo: "You know, it's most interesting. You sir, Miss Dickinson, and Dr. Darwin all had difficulty with domineering fathers." Attila: "My father, too, was no bargain." Or Karl Marx to Marie Antoinette, from a panel discussion with Ulysses S. Grant, Marie Antoinette, Thomas More, and Marx: "Did it ever enter your mind, Your Majesty, that...empty rituals and customs would in time destroy the people's respect for the monarchy?" Marie: "Nonsense, Dr. Marx, the people adored the rituals and customs!" Thomas More: "Yes, Dr. Marx,...rituals and manners aided the people to express their respect for royalty. I understand that in today's Marxist nations [sic] there is still room for pomp and circumstance.") These were not séances; actors played the parts. Allen's wife Jayne Meadows performed almost all the female roles.

I never saw Meeting of Minds. It's sounds mildly amusing, though I'm not sure where Steve Allen would have gotten the idea that Marx might think that rituals and customs destroyed respect for the monarchy of the ancien regime. His view of the French Revolution was a bit more insightful than that.

Which is it, guys?

Spotted in the same bookstore section, easily within spitting distance of each other: Fred Kaplan's 1959: The Year Everything Changed and Rob Kirkpatrick's 1969: The Year Everything Changed.

P.S. I get first dibs on 1979 (Iranian revolution, Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Three Mile Island, hostage crisis, comedy of errors over Soviet brigade in Cuba...) An advance in the higher five figures will do nicely. Call my agent.

We've got class, baby (and the classics)

Just discovered: the blog of the right-wing artsy, lit-crit-y, bellettristic (take your pick) The New Criterion is called Armavirumque. As in Arma virumque cano. As in 'of arms and a man I sing'. As in the Aeneid.

Now I did not have a classical education (cough, choke), but my mother attended Girls' Latin School, and as a kid/teenager/youth/young adult the one and only line of Latin I can recall hearing her utter was Arma virumque cano. I never read the Aeneid in English, one of many gaps in my supposedly (supposedly) first-class secondary and college education. And it was not until a bit later on that it dawned on me that vir means "man". As in "virility". As in virtú. As in Machiavelli. (Oh yeah, right....)

P.s. I am reliably informed by Wikipedia that Girls' Latin is now called Boston Latin Academy, and it probably has been for a long time (I'm too lazy to actually read the entry right now). O tempora O mores. Whatever.

Voltaire and coffee

A recent comment thread on Crooked Timber about the new Texas curriculum guidelines led me (once again inwardly bemoaning certain deficiencies in my education) to glance at the long-ish Wikipedia entry on Voltaire. At the end of the section headed "Legacy," there is this: "Voltaire was also known to have been an advocate for coffee, as he was purported to have drunk the beverage at least 30 times per day. It has been suggested that high amounts of caffeine acted as a mental stimulant to his creativity" (citing a 2005 Washington Monthly review of a book on the history of coffee).

Thirty times a day? Yikes. I drink one cup of coffee in the morning -- and not even every morning, sometimes forgoing it in favor of tea. But then, I'm no Voltaire (chorus: Boy, you can say that again!).

Those revolutionary Brillo boxes

I happened to pick up a copy of Arthur Danto's new book on Andy Warhol (called, surprisingly enough, Andy Warhol) in my local public library. Although it's a short book, I didn't and don't have the time or inclination to read it from cover to cover. I did dip into it, however.

For those who don't know, Danto is a philosopher and art critic who has written about the philosophy of art, among other things (see Louis Menand's piece in the current New Yorker). In a nutshell, Danto thinks Warhol was a revolutionary artist because he threw into question the definition of art more sharply than previous artists (such as Duchamp) had. If Warhol's Brillo Boxes, which consists of stacks of Brillo boxes, is art, the definition of art must involve something extra-visual or non-visual, since there is no significant difference between Warhol's Brillo Boxes and Brillo boxes that could have been found on any grocery store shelf. "What makes something art must accordingly be invisible to the eye" (Danto, Andy Warhol, p.65).

Similarly, Warhol's 1964 movie Empire, consisting of "an uninterrupted view" of the Empire State Building and running for "just over eight hours" (p.77), throws into question the definition of a movie. Empire "showed...that in a moving picture, nothing in the picture has to move" (p.79).

Danto's book also contains some humor. This R-rated passage (pp.76-77) is an example:

"In none of the silent, so-called minimalist films is there anything much to see, not even in the 1964 Blow Job, which shows the face of an attractive if anonymous young man who is being fellated off-screen. So the title seems like false or at least misleading advertising. It [i.e., the film] was too long, however short a time it lasted, and nearly caused a riot when shown at Columbia University...in 1966. The students were impatient and filled the air with boos, hisses, and jokey singing of 'He shall never come.' ... Andy was in the audience, planning to say a few words after the screening, but he left quietly when the furor started."

James Bond meets Heidegger

The Thrownness of Being: Shaken Not Stirred. (A new book currently flying off the shelves.)

"The sheriff at the gates"

From The Boston Globe's site: how the Bard might have seen the Incident on Ware Street.

Here's a taste:

CROWLEY: Back speaks no man to the Sheriff; I arrest thee!

GATES: Knowest thou who I am? That I am coy with the Daily Beastmistress, Milady Tina? That I am most down with Lady Oprah, the Queen of afternoon tele-dalliances? That I am sworn liege to Dr. Faust, of whom Marlowe wrote? That I unravelest literary mysteries at the Greatest University Known to Man?

CROWLEY: Of Tufts you speak? Even so, thou art under arrest.

[Hat tip: Lee Sigelman at The Monkey Cage]

An artifact from the early 1960s: The Duke's Men of Yale on the New Frontier

Some time ago, a friend who is an alumnus of two Yale a capella groups, the Duke’s Men and the Whiffenpoofs, gave me a multi-CD compilation that he had produced of recordings by “Da Doox” going back to the early 1950s. One of the songs on the first disc is “New Frontier,” which pokes fun at JFK, Camelot, and (of course) Harvard, and which the Duke’s Men first recorded in 1963. The song is interrupted by a monologue in which one member of the group does a more-than-passable Kennedy imitation. Although the flavor of the song cannot be captured entirely by the lyrics alone -- indeed, the music and the lyrics are very well matched -- I thought the lyrics in themselves were clever and evocative of the period. And in light of what happened in November 1963, the last lines take on a certain poignancy. So here are the lyrics.

New Frontier
First recorded by the Duke’s Men of Yale in 1963
Music and lyrics by
Carl Kaestle and Gurney Williams
(Lyrics reproduced by permission)

We sing of the pioneers of old
Who ventured forth so brave and bold
Far from their rightful homes so dear
They slept beneath the stars on the old frontier
And the rocky campground’s peaceful glow
Cheered the hearts and souls of the men below.

But the old frontier is dying
The old frontier is gone.
Yet behold the low clouds passing
To hail another dawn.
Yes it’s a new frontier
Put your money on the sunny boy from Hyannis
Hail to the sod where Kennedy trod
A hunter on the new frontier.

Oh we love the walls of ivy
That surround the new frontier
[JFK monologue]
Jack is the king of the new frontier
Jack is the fellow who makes folks cheer
Massachusetts' favorite son
Hah-vad moved to Wa-shing-ton.
And though he began as the un-der-dog
Now he's considered a vi-tal cog.
Let John Harvard fade a-way
Jack Harvard's here to stay.
It’s young Jack Harvard so shout hoo-ray Hooray-hoo_eee.

Lingeman and Disch's 'St. Nicholas: A Textual Scandal'

Prefatory note: In going through some papers recently at the home of my late aunt and late uncle, I came across an envelope containing a copy of “St. Nicholas: A Textual Scandal,” which I had mailed to my uncle.

For several months in the late 1980s (probably ’87 and/or ’88, though without checking I can’t be sure), the letters column of the New York Review of Books carried a series of rather vitriolic exchanges about a revised/new edition of Joyce’s Ulysses. The antagonists were the project’s main editor, Hans Walter Gabler, and, if I recall correctly, several scholars who were critical of his edition (whose names I can’t remember).

In its issue of January 2, 1989, which subscribers probably would have received just around Christmas, The Nation published an elaborate spoof of the Ulysses exchange. Written by Richard Lingeman and the late Thomas Disch, “St. Nicholas: A Textual Scandal” debates which version of the poem commonly known as “’Twas the Night Before Christmas” is more authoritative and definitive: a version written on a cocktail napkin while the author, Clement Moore, was in his cups, or a version Moore wrote the next day (“the so-called Morning-After Holograph”). The antagonists in this debate are Dr. Sebastian Ramsforth and Dr. Hartvig Ludendorff, editor of “A Visit from St. Nicholas”: A New Definitive Synoptic Corrected Edition Collated From Original and Collateral Sources, published by Kansas Institute of Mining and Science Press.

The exchange opens with Ramsforth’s attack on the Ludendorff edition of the poem. Selective quotation cannot convey how clever Lingeman and Disch were here, but I will quote an excerpt to give an indication of the flavor:

“…Ludendorff and his drones have concocted an entirely spurious version of the poem, riddled with erroneous emendations. This saturnalia of textual deviation takes as its provenance the controversial holograph indited by Moore on a cocktail napkin from the Fraunces Tavern. (Footnote: Now in the Howard Hughes Collection, University of Las Vegas. It measures 4 by 6 inches and is imprinted with, in addition to the establishment’s name, silhouttes of a wine glass emitting bubbles and several scantily clad females, and the words ‘George Washington Made Whoopee Here.’ ”) Considerable scholarly debate has been expended on the authenticity of this paper most foul…. [which] could not be the authoritative text. Take for instance the lines:

With a little old driver, so lively and quick,
I knew in a moment it must be St. Nick.

In the Fraunces version, which Ludendorff et al. have now enshrined as the ‘final’ and ‘authentic’ text, we see:

With a red-suited Jehu, so droll and ridiculous,
I knew at once it must be St. Nicholas.

Never mind that the first line does not scan, and forget the Victorian cliché ‘Jehu’ for driver. Consider instead how the word ‘ridiculous’ alters the point of view of the poem, which is otherwise reverential toward the scarlet-clad saint. Worse, we lose the religious double-entendre of ‘St. Nick’ (as in Old Nick – Scratch, the devil).”

And here is an excerpt from Ludendorff’s reply:

“I am shocked that the editors of this once-distinguished journal should have seen fit to lend their pages to the scurrilous insinuations and pseudo-philological maunderings of Dr. (sic) Sebastian Ramsforth….

[Ramsforth] has gone so far as to project his own fevered imagining on the Rorshach-like wine stain on the recto side of the Frances Holograph, in which he pretends to see a ‘wine glass’ and ‘scantily clad females.’ No doubt it was this disposition to sniff out pornographic implications in the most innocent images that prompted Ramsforth to maintain in his notorious farrago of errors that disgraced the pages of Elsewhere that Moore’s beautiful and chaste lines,

The moon on the crest of the new-fallen snow
Lent a semblance of sunlight to th’icy tableau

should ‘properly’ take the form familiar to us from the later, corrupt editions of the work:

The moon on the breast of the new-fallen snow
Gave a lustre of midday to objects below.

Can Ramsforth really suppose that a man of such delicate sensibilities that he always scrupled to speak of ‘white meat’ and ‘dark meat’ when he dined on poultry would have wantonly endowed snow with breasts and rimed the entire landscape of his poem with a lubricious ‘lustre’? Of course not! Only the Satanic dipsomaniac of ‘Doc’ Ramsforth’s obsessed imagination could have conspired to introduce such immodesties into the innocent bowers of American childhood.”

And so on. The whole thing is available from The Nation’s archives (though not for free).

Stand-up comedy and our reptile brains

Note: HC wrote this guest post; LFC furnished the title. The post contains some language that certain readers may find offensive.
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Bro (that’s me) and LFC went to a comedy club (actually a cinema-'n-draft-house doubling as a comedy club) on Saturday night. We originally set out to see a movie but got lost in Arlington (Va.) because I had jotted down the Google directions without looking at the Google map (always a mistake); so, in a decision that would have made André Breton proud, we gave up hope of making the movie (Doubt) and pulled up at a random movie house whose marquis advertised something starting at exactly the time it then was (9:45).

Turned out the thing advertised, Doug Benson, was not a movie at all but a stand-up comic best known for his jokes about pot and his movie about smoking too much of it (Super High Me). We had traded Doubt for Doug, exchanged a highbrow film with some capital-a acting for jokes about jacking off and gays. Whee! Plus everyone was smoking (cigarettes), there was no noticeable ventilation, and it was one of those bars where they had the contract with Heineken not Becks, which is almost as bad as Pepsi not Coke.

Doug himself was highbrow compared to the warm-up acts, which I don’t really remember, but I’ll try. Each guy had his schtick. The black guy talked about sex. Funniest bit was about getting old, which was not affecting his sex drive but was affecting his drive to do the stuff it took to get sex. First white guy talked about sex too, starting off with a joke designed to trigger/allay the anxieties of the guys in the audience. (Does size matter? Of course it does. You gals need to stay small and tight. I don’t want to be f---ing an open car door.) He also made jokes about his weight even though he was not really fat, just as the black guy was not really old. Second white guy did physical comedy about how he was a yellow belt in karate and how those karate moves (like the palm strike) were so gay.

Then came third white guy and main act of the evening, Doug, who seemed smart enough to know the audience, for the most part, probably wasn’t. He acted high, shuffling around the stage and reading jokes from napkins, then putting them either in the right (“yes”) pocket or the left (“no”) pocket of his vinyl windbreaker depending on crowd reaction. He had a patrician manner and occasionally used some big words and even made one joke about politics: McDonald's is a democracy because you get a choice of bacon or sausage on your McGriddles, unlike Florida and Michigan, where you don’t have a vote.

Doug was a method actor inhabiting a role. He probably rubbed his eyes a lot just to make them look bloodshot. Probably not that far from Philip Seymour Hoffmann in Doubt after all. The role allowed Doug to get away with some sophisticated stuff, because among your average kids today (by “kids” I mean anyone under 40 taking a date to a comedy club) being stoned seems to excuse all kinds of things, like word play and caring about politics, that would otherwise just be gay.

All in all it was pretty depressing but I admire any kind of public performance and I also admired the way the comics stood in the lobby afterward next to their CDs and t-shirts (their “merch” as Doug said) while the crowd avoided eye contact and filed by into the drizzly night.

Postscript. Did you see the piece in the NY Times the other day about how it’s hard to remember puns because the act of getting them resolves them so thoroughly that they are wiped out of our memory banks? I wonder if that’s true for jokes in general. Which would mean that comedians are bards, keeping alive an oral tradition that we can’t lodge in our heads. (Have you heard the one about x? Maybe, but tell us again, we can’t remember.) To put it another way, comedians are the collective memory of our reptile brains. Another Heineken please. I like the red star on the label.

-- HC

Is there a "blogging community"?

I was in a bookstore the other day and happened to look at the jacket flap of Matthew Yglesias' book, which touts his prominence in the Washington, D.C. "blogging community." I know there are a number of bloggers in and around Washington, D.C., but do they/we form a community?

Maybe there's a secret, sinister listserv that I'm not on.

Tell it, man

In a rather wild blog post (well, maybe all his posts are like this, I don't know), David Rothkopf at FP reports on a British medical study which concludes that rapid economic transitions (e.g., the ex-USSR's transition to its version of post-Communism) can be quite deadly, literally. In the course of this not-short (and, I must admit, occasionally funny) piece, Rothkopf suggests, inter alia, that Obama & Co. have replaced the bust of Churchill with a sculpture of Trotsky. Ha ha.

The dubious pleasures of IR theory; or, Why were you up so late last night?

A not-quite-Socratic dialogue between a questioner (Q) and me.

Q: So, why were you up so late last night?

LFC: I was keeping up with my field.

Q: Ahem ... really?

LFC: I should have gone to bed after watching the "Numbers" episode about the fancy computer that supposedly passes the Turing test but turns out to be a fraud. Instead, I turned on my own computer.

Q: Big mistake.

LFC: After looking at a couple of blogs, I wound up at the Cambridge University Press journals site. There's a new journal called International Theory (catchy, huh?), and the whole first issue is free.

Q: Go on.

LFC: I half-read, half-skimmed the lead article, which is called (as best I can remember) "IR and the False Promise of Philosophical Foundations."

Q: Yawn.

LFC: The authors, two graduate students (at least I'm pretty sure they're grad students) at the Univ. of Chicago, argue that IR scholars should recognize that all the philosophy-of-science positions in the field are shaky and accordingly should stop attacking each other's work on philosophy-of-science grounds.

Q: Sounds reasonable enough.

LFC: I think the authors may exaggerate some of the differences between Instrumentalism and Scientific Realism.

Q: Come again?

LFC: Instrumentalists care about whether a theory "works" or is "useful" not whether it's "true," whereas Scientific Realists care about how well a theory corresponds to, or captures, a mind-independent reality.

Q: Hmm.

LFC: But what both positions care about, in practice, is a theory's explanatory power.

Q: Or interpretive fecundity?

LFC: "Fecundity"?

Q: Sorry.

LFC: Also, there's the tiny problem that Instrumentalists don't like arguments based on unobservable phenomena, yet Kenneth Waltz, the ur-Instrumentalist, wrote his entire Theory of International Politics about unobservable phenomena -- namely, states and the state system.

Q: It's not actually that much of a problem. Waltz took the existence of states and the state system as a useful assumption rather than a postulate about the character or nature of an objective reality. In other words, epistemology trumped ontology, which is precisely what the authors say is the case for Instrumentalists.

LFC: Smarty pants.

Q: I'll ignore that. Well, after "IR and the False Promise of Philosophical Foundations" you must have been ready for bed -- either that or a scotch on the rocks.

LFC: Sadly, no. Since I was already at the Cambridge Univ. Press site, I decided to take a quick look at the current issue of World Politics. It's a special issue on unipolarity.

Q: Did someone say "boring"?

LFC: Most of the issue -- including articles by Marty Finnemore, William Wohlforth, and Stephen Walt, among others -- is behind a paywall. However, I glanced at some of the abstracts, then glanced at the introduction (which is free), and looked somewhat more closely at the concluding piece (which is also free), Robert Jervis's "Unipolarity: A Structural Perspective."

Q: And?

LFC: Well, Jervis is always worth reading, and the fact that I was able to read any of it, in my zonked condition at 3 a.m., testifies to his lucidity. Beyond the piece's specific points, which I was mostly too tired to engage with, I thought it had one overriding virtue.

Q: What's that?

LFC: It's not about the philosophy of science.

Time stands still -- but the rhetoric of capitalism is in constant motion

I picked up a chocolate bar after lunch today. This is part of what it says on the back of the package:

"Evening Dream [TM]. The luxuriously deep and velvety 60% cacao dark chocolate in Ghirardelli Evening Dream is infused with a hint of Madagascan vanilla delivering the perfect chocolate intensity. Experience a moment of timeless pleasure as the intense chocolate lingers and time stands still."

Time stands still? This is a chocolate bar, not a moment of aesthetic transport, metaphysical insight, or carnal ecstasy.

I have three questions for Ghirardelli: Who writes this gibberish for you? Are they well paid? If so, how does one apply?