Quote of the day

Prompted by this (h/t), a quotation from Marshall Sahlins's Islands of History, p.153, explaining why the distinction between "structure" and "event" is, in his view, "pernicious":

[A]ll structure or system is, phenomenally, evenemential. As a set of meaningful relations between categories, the cultural order is only virtual. It exists in potentia merely. So the meaning of any specific cultural form is all its possible uses in the community as a whole. But this meaning is realized, in presentia, only as events of speech and action.... The converse proposition, that all events are culturally systematic, is more significant.... "Events are not just there and happen," as Max Weber said, "but they have a meaning and happen because of that meaning." Or in other words, an event is not just a happening in the world; it is a relation between a certain happening and a given symbolic system.... The event is a happening interpreted -- and interpretations vary.  

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.     

'Big-picture' historical sociology: still rolling

Just discovered (thanks to this post) that M. Mann has published the third volume of The Sources of Social Power and the fourth volume will be coming out in Jan. 2013. Meanwhile, I. Wallerstein published the fourth volume of The Modern World-System in 2011.

Onuf and 'heteronomy'

Yesterday afternoon I drove to Baltimore and went to a couple of sessions at the ISA-NE conference (the program is here [pdf]). One of the sessions I attended was a roundtable on Nicholas Onuf's work.

At the roundtable Onuf made a reference or two to "heteronomous" orders. I couldn't recall how he used the word in his recently reissued 1989 book World of Our Making (it had been a long time since I'd looked at it), so earlier today I pulled my copy off the shelf and briefly perused ch.6, where the idea is discussed. To simplify, for Onuf "heteronomy" is a form (or "category") of rule (the other two being hierarchy and hegemony) in which exploitative social relations are disguised under a mantle of formal equality and the ruled (including workers dependent on the sale of their labor-power) in effect participate in their own oppression, under the illusion that they are exercising some sort of self-determination. Though the word "heteronomy" is taken from Kant, Onuf's description of a 'heteronomous' order (or form of rule) owes a good deal to Marx, as he acknowledges. 

As far as I'm aware, however, Onuf's use of 'heteronomy' has not been adopted, even by those who might agree with his analysis. Nor did the papers or subsequent discussion at the roundtable directly address this aspect of World of Our Making. Onuf sees exploitation as inevitable, as he makes clear at the end of the book, so perhaps it's not too surprising that, embedded as it is in a quite pessimistic worldview, the word 'heteronomy' as he uses it has not (again, as far I'm aware) caught on with those who might have been its natural constituency, namely Marxists (of one sort or another) and critical theorists. I stand open to correction in comments, as I'm not an expert on critical IR theory (or all the strands of constructivism, etc.).

P.s. I was not at the conference today, where there was a follow-on session "Whither Constructivism?" I hear that the debate was lively and I understand that ProfPTJ will be posting a recording of the session, which I will link to when it's available.

Update: PTJ has now posted the audio here. I'm planning to listen to it soon.

'Human nature' is back

Reader [hereafter R] : What do you mean, "human nature is back"? Has it been on vacation?

LFC: Yes and no. For a while, it was not cricket in parts of the social sciences to talk about human nature, and to some extent this is still true. Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, two evolutionary psychologists (who happen also to be married, to each other, I mean) got so perturbed about this some years ago that they began referring to the Standard Social Science Model (SSSM), by which they meant, among other things, a model that neglected 'human nature'. E.O. Wilson picked up the cudgel, taking much of social science to task in his book Consilience and predicting that eventually social science would disappear, would be absorbed into the natural sciences, and we'd be left with only the natural sciences and the humanities.

R: I shudder to think how that would go down with all the political scientists who are tearing their hair out at The Monkey Cage about the possible cutoff in National Science Foundation support for political science.

LFC: Quite. But that doesn't mean Wilson was right. I think he went somewhat overboard in Consilience myself.

R: Back to the main topic, please, whatever it is.

LFC: Ah yes. Well, Cosmides & Tooby should take a peek at what's happening in some corners of International Relations (IR) theory. It's not for the most part evo psych, to be sure, but in recent years there's been a lot of work on emotions and IR. And the latest issue of Int'l Studies Review has an article by Ty Solomon, "Human Nature and the Limits of the Self: Hans Morgenthau on Love and Power," which harks back to a piece Morgenthau wrote for Commentary in the early '60s in which he argued that love and power are both efforts to escape "existential loneliness." Morgenthau's "underexplored thoughts on these issues," according to Solomon, "are crucial for more fully comprehending his seminal critique of the modern liberal, rational subject." (p.215)

R: But how does all that fit in with the Morgenthau of the later 1960s, the opponent of the Vietnam War, advocate of civil rights, and speaker of truth to power? Don't M's political writings from later in the decade presuppose that "the modern liberal, rational subject," despite its/his/her limits, is capable at least of responding to appeals to reason and acting to improve the world, in however partial a way?

LFC: Good questions. But I want to stay with the human nature point. Solomon mentions Robert Schuett's 2010 book on Freud and realism (Political Realism, Freud, and Human Nature in International Relations), which is also reviewed later in the same issue of the journal. The subtitle of Schuett's book is "The Resurrection of the Realist Man."

R: Hmm. This sounds somewhat reactionary, doesn't it? Realist Man [sic]? Have we just tossed several decades of IR feminist theory out the window?

LFC: I had to read some Freud many years ago, and I tend to the view that Freud's work is weakest when it's most speculative and when he's most openly doing social theory. I remember a casual conversation in which, fresh from writing an intemperate undergraduate paper on Civilization and Its Discontents, I denounced it as a terrible book. My interlocutor, a grad student, said cuttingly "you wish you could have written it." Well, I would not make such a sophomoric (and I was in fact a sophomore at the time) remark today. Still, Civilization and Its Discontents is not high on my list of subtle, nuanced works.

R: I don't care what you said in a college dining hall in 1977. You haven't answered the question about Morgenthau. You haven't answered the question about feminist theory.

LFC: What am I, an answer machine? This is a blog, not a PhD seminar. Go figure out your own answers.

R: ***!***#!!

LFC: Well, at least I gave you the last word. Sort of.

Theorists and others have at OWS

In a column at the Foreign Affairs site (h/t The Monkey Cage), Sidney Tarrow compares Occupy Wall St. to the women's movement of the '70s, calling it a "we are here" movement whose aim is to dramatize that something is wrong in the "system of economic relations" rather than specifically to "target" capitalism. (Not sure if this is a convincing distinction.) Tarrow is a leading theorist and scholar of "social movements and contentious politics" (to quote the subtitle of one of his books) but I can't say this particular analysis bowled me over.

Btw at the same site you can find a piece by Hardt and Negri, which I haven't read. And then, if masochistic, you can go to Wash. Post and read George Will's silly column on OWS today, which I raced through and figuratively consigned to the dustbin. (Maybe even the dustbin of history.)

Update: Via here: Mayor Bloomberg is apparently planning to clear Zuccotti Park tomorrow at 7 a.m. There is a petition (see the link) that can be signed, though I doubt it will prevent Bloomberg from doing whatever he's planning to do.
Further update: The 'clean-up' has been postponed.

The dignity of labor

The 150th anniversary of the start of the Civil War, which occurred last month, has occasioned much reflection about the war’s legacy. While many of the specific antebellum debates about slavery may seem somewhat remote, the persistence of race and racial inequality as issues in American life means that the collective ear is still primed, from time to time, to pick up certain echoes of those debates. Many other echoes, however, have grown very faint; for instance, few non-historians today recall the antebellum controversy over ‘free labor’ versus slavery.

Some southern apologists for slavery argued, among other things, that free labor in the North amounted to ‘wage slavery’ and that northern factory workers and hired hands were actually worse off than African-American slaves in the South. In this respect these defenders of slavery, notably George Fitzhugh, "seemed to speak in Marxist accents," as Dennis Wrong notes.[1] But other defenders of slavery evinced a very un-Marxist contempt for manual labor in general. James McPherson draws attention to some revealing quotations (italics in original):

"The great evil of Northern free society," insisted a South Carolina journal, "is that it is burdened with a servile class of mechanics and laborers, unfit for self-government, yet clothed with the attributes and powers of citizens." A Georgia newspaper was even more emphatic in its distaste. "Free Society! We sicken at the name. What is it but a conglomeration of greasy mechanics, filthy operatives, small-fisted farmers, and moon-struck theorists?... The prevailing class one meets with [in the North] is that of mechanics struggling to be genteel, and small farmers who do their own drudgery, and yet are hardly fit for association with a Southern gentleman’s body servant." [2]

Abraham Lincoln and the new Republican Party of the time responded with a vigorous defense of free labor. However, as Eric Foner observes, Lincoln saw wage labor as a stepping stone that young men would take en route to becoming independent artisans, shopkeepers or entrepreneurs, rather than as a permanent feature of the American economy, though it was already becoming that in many cities in the mid-19th century, a process that would intensify after the Civil War.[3] The notion that work has an inherent dignity and overarching societal purpose–that, as William Seward said, "the free-labor system…brings into the highest possible activity all the physical, moral and social energies of the whole State"[4] – fit most comfortably with the world of Lincoln’s youth and young adulthood. It was more difficult to reconcile that notion with the working conditions and standardized production methods of mass manufacturing.

What of the dignity-of-labor ideal in ‘post-industrial’ societies? In an economy dominated by services in which a relatively small proportion of the population is engaged in direct production of tangible goods, it is still possible to speak of people taking pride in their work, irrespective of its nature, even irrespective of whether it is remunerated. But the ideal of the dignity of labor has slipped out of public discussion. Competitiveness is the lodestar of contemporary political-economic discussion in the U.S., along with debt and deficits. Attention is paid to the high unemployment rate, but as much for electoral considerations as any others. An attack by a right-wing governor on the right to collective bargaining sent thousands of people into the streets in Wisconsin, but that action was framed (quite understandably) as a defense of rights rather than primarily as a defense of the dignity of labor. And all sides use the discourse of rights. Thus laws restricting the prerogatives of unions are called right-to-work laws, and states where they are in force are known as right-to-work states -- as if the primary motive of such laws were to guarantee rights rather than to weaken unions. Ultimately, the meaning of 'rights' is determined by political struggles. As Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis put it: "Elements of a political lexicon – such as the discourse of rights – do not…have essential meanings…. Making history is often a matter of making language. But discourses are more often borrowed or stolen than created de novo. Faced with a restricted political vocabulary, political actors appropriate and transform tools that even hostile forces have labored to develop." [5]

Once slavery ceased to exist in the U.S., free labor had no polar antithesis to give it luster by comparison, and it tended to become, at best, just a fact rather than something to be widely celebrated. Critics of wage labor as exploitation could pursue their critique, secure in the knowledge that the surface similarities of their position to that of a George Fitzhugh probably would no longer be flung in their faces. This liberation, so to speak, of the critics of industrial capitalism arguably counts as one of the Civil War’s less-noticed consequences.

P.s. I had intended this post to have a broader, less U.S.-centric focus, but that proved beyond my capacities at the moment.

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Notes

1. Dennis H. Wrong, The Problem of Order (1994), p.32.
2. James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom (1988), p.197.
3. Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial (2010), pp.115-16.
4. Quoted in McPherson, p.198.
5. Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Democracy and Capitalism (1986), pp.161-62.
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See also two books by Jonathan A. Glickstein: American Exceptionalism, American Anxiety: Wages, Competition, and Degraded Labor in the Antebellum United States (2002) and Concepts of Free Labor in Antebellum America (1991).

Sciences of the mind -- and of society

One can still find Freudians in the ranks of American psychiatrists, but you wouldn't know it from reading Eli Zaretsky's review (in Perspectives on Politics, Sept. 2010, pp. 940-41) of Kurt Jacobsen's Freud's Foes: Psychoanalysis, Science and Resistance (2009).

Zaretsky, author of Secrets of the Soul: A Social and Cultural History of Psychoanalysis (2004), manages both to tell a story and to make an argument, which is quite a feat for a two-page book review. The story is this: Once upon a time, there was psychoanalysis, "an intervention in the long-standing modern project of understanding the human mind." It drew on nineteenth-century brain neurology, but also Enlightenment philosophy, literature, and Darwin, among other sources. Psychoanalysis, Zaretsky says, was "a genuinely new, unified, and brilliant theory":

This theory was scientific -- a new science -- but a science of a particular character, one that studied the mind not as one studies chemical or geological phenomena, that is from the outside, but rather from within, as part of a process of self-study.... [P]sychoanalysis was a critical theory, a Wissenschaft, and not a natural science per se, although it contained natural science elements.

Psychoanalysis lost "its critical dimensions" in the U.S. when it "became part of psychiatry, and in that way became part of an official system of power/knowledge...." Then came the assault on American psychoanalysis that began in the 1970s and was carried on by an odd alliance of big drug companies, feminists, and the gay rights movement. The "decimation of psychoanalysis" can be seen as "a vanguard maneuver, initiating a long period of corporate rationalization in every area of the economy." Needless to say, the result, according to Zaretsky, was not good:

The destruction of a supposedly malevolent past was accompanied by the creation of a set of new gods, new ways of thinking about the mind. These, however, lacked the element of self-reflection that had been critical to psychoanalysis. According to the new worldview, we can know the mind objectively by understanding the chemistry, neurology, and physiology of the brain.... If we have a disturbing thought or a strange dream, we could speculate that it's a wrinkle in the amygdala or a bit of protein imbalance in the hypothalamus, but we really don't have to because a doctor can adjust the chemical mix for us; self-reflection ("navel gazing") belongs to a previous epoch. What drops out of the new dispensation is not only self-reflection, but any general approach to the problem of human motivation, that is, to a dynamic theory of the psyche, the very quality that had distinguished psychoanalysis from the brain psychiatries that preceded it.

OK. Deep breath. What is my problem with this? It's not about Freud. I'm willing to stipulate that Freud was a brilliant thinker (he made some rather weird forays into speculative social theory, but that's another story). No, the problem is not Zaretsky's positive view of Freud; the problem is that he is determined to link the quarrel between psychoanalysis and its critics to the broader question of how to do 'science' and to "the need to restore the line...between the kinds of questions that can be answered in a causal and deterministic manner, and the kind that require self-reflection, democratic deliberation and cultural exploration." So intent is he on making this argument that Zaretsky neglects to mention that some people who suffer from serious mental illness actually have been helped by drugs (or pharmacological therapies, if you prefer). Has there been misuse and overuse of drugs? Undoubtedly, but that doesn't undermine the point.

Zaretsky's review poses, implicitly if not explicitly, a false choice: either pharmacology or psychoanalysis; and, by extension, either science from the outside or science from the inside. But we do not have to choose, and we should not choose. We can have both drug therapies and talking therapies; both a science of causal explanation and a science of interpretive understanding. (Max Weber's definition of sociology encompassed both.) Each approach has its place, whether we're talking about the sciences of the mind or the sciences of society. The trick (easier said than done!) is knowing what that place is, and what each is good for.

Re-reading Barrington Moore

Barrington Moore's Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, published in 1966, is a modern classic of historical sociology that has been assigned to generations of students. I read large parts of it in college and again in grad school, but it was not until the other day, when I had occasion to take it down from the shelf and look at the first chapter, that it fully dawned on me why the book is so famous. At the same time, I realized that the kind of social-scientific writing on display in Social Origins is an endangered species.

The first chapter, "England and the Contributions of Violence to Gradualism," shows Moore's remarkable ability to outline a centuries-spanning argument in less than 40 pages, and to do it in prose of such clarity and directness that it can be understood by virtually any interested reader. The chapter's main question is why England/Britain's route to capitalist modernity culminated in parliamentary democracy (as opposed to dictatorship of right or left) and why it took the relatively peaceful and gradualist form that it did from the eighteenth century on. Compressed into a few sentences, the basic argument runs as follows: The key social-political development in early modern England was the destruction of the peasantry. This was the result of the enclosure (i.e., the seizure for private use) of common lands by landlords and their richer tenants. The enclosures were under way in the sixteenth century but accelerated in the seventeenth century, after the Civil War severely weakened the power of the monarchy, which had served as a brake on enclosing landlords and a protection for the peasants. The destruction of the peasantry effectively removed from "the historical agenda" two possibilities: the reactionary/conservative route to capitalist modernity (as in Germany, e.g.) and the social-revolutionary route (as in Russia and China). (p.30) There's a whole lot more there, but in highly oversimplified form that is the core of the argument in the first chapter.

For the moment I'm not interested in how much validity this argument has; to be blunt, I don't care whether it's right or not, at least not here. I'm certain it's been challenged and debated many times since Social Origins was published (and indeed, several of Moore's students produced major works bearing on the themes of the book). Rather, what I want to emphasize is the lucid way the argument is presented and Moore's mastery in handling multiple strands without ever losing sight of the central thread. Moreover, I don't think this clarity is entirely accidental (it's no accident, as a Marxist would say).

Although Social Origins (SO) was published in 1966, Moore began working on it years earlier, before the so-called behavioral revolution in the social sciences became so influential that even some Marxists felt they had to wrap their writing in the language of variables and falsifiability. As Theda Skocpol observed in a critical review-essay on SO published in 1973, the book "is not organized or written in the style of a scientist trying to elaborate clearly and minutely justify a falsifiable theory of comparative modernization. It is, rather, like a giant mural painted in words, in which a man who has contemplated the modern histories of eight major nations seeks to convey in broad strokes the moral and factual discoveries that he personally has made, about the various routes to the 'world of modern industry' traveled by his 'subject' countries, about the role of landed upper classes and peasantries in the politics of that transformation, and about the consequences of each route for human freedom and societal rationality." (T. Skocpol, Review of SO, reprinted in her Social Revolutions in the Modern World [1994], p.26)

That SO is not written "in the style of a scientist" is no doubt one of the reasons I was struck so forcefully by the lucidity of the opening chapter when I looked at it the other day. My reaction, at a gut level, was something like: "My God, they're not writing like this anymore, are they?" In other words, Moore stands in contrast, it seems to me, to much of the historically-oriented social science being published today, which tends to be preoccupied with methodology, weighed down with references to 'causal mechanisms' and the like, and generally no fun to read. Perhaps that is academic 'progress'. Perhaps there has been a gain in scientific precision and cumulative knowledge. Indeed, as I have written in earlier posts, I think causal explanation is an entirely legitimate goal of social science.

Nonetheless, a growing methodological and theoretical sophistication has come at a cost. With one or two possible exceptions, I know of no work of historically-oriented social science (not history, but social science) published in the last 20 years that I could put into the hands of an intelligent, curious high school student and say: "Here, you will enjoy this and find it fascinating and your life will be changed and you will see the historical sweep of human sufferings and occasional triumphs and you will want to become a historical sociologist." No. Uh-huh. Not happening.

Well, look on the bright side: Social Origins is still in print.

P.S. (added 1/5): If you think the reference to methodological sophistication in this post is a throwaway, track down the Fall 2010 issue of the newsletter of the Am.Pol.Sci.Assn. Section for Qualitative and Multi-Method Research and look at the essays published under the heading "Symposium: Causal Mechanisms, Process Tracing, and Causal Inference."

Tocqueville on 'the military spirit'

Last month’s repeal of the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell law has met with widespread and justified approval. Some voices, however, have issued reminders that military culture continues to be 'gendered' (see, for instance, here). Whether or not you agree with this, and whether or not you are troubled by it, it's perhaps worth reflecting on the degree to which attitudes on this bundle of issues have changed over time. Alexis de Tocqueville – not usually considered a militaristic thinker – wrote in this respect a revealing note to Volume Two of Democracy in America (which I quote below).

As Alan Ryan recently observed (“Tocqueville’s Lesson,” New York Review of Books, Dec. 9, 2010), Tocqueville in Volume Two of Democracy was concerned with "the dangers of ‘soft despotism,’ a condition in which the population were reduced to a sheep-like dependency on a state that made them comfortable, saved them the necessity of thought, and destroyed their will by enervation rather than oppression."

In the note to Volume Two to which I’ve referred, Tocqueville ruminated on what the taste for comfort might do to "the military spirit":

If the love of physical pleasures and the taste for well-being which are naturally prompted by equality [i.e., some social mobility and absence of a quasi-feudal class structure--LFC] should get such a hold on a democratic people that they should come to absorb it altogether, national mores would become so antipathetic to the military spirit that even the army, in spite of the professional interest leading soldiers to desire war, would come to love peace. Living in such a soft society, soldiers would come to think that slow but convenient and effortless promotion in peacetime was better than a more rapid rise in rank paid for by all the toils and privations of the battlefield. In such a mood, the army would take up arms without eagerness and use them without energy.... The remedy against such dangers does not lie in the army, but in the country. A democratic people which has kept its manly mores will always find courageous soldiers when it needs them.[1]

Today, this explicit equation of courage with 'manliness' would sound jarring to many people (though admittedly not to everyone). Which is an indication of, for lack of a better word, progress.

P.S. An interesting question is: when would this have started to sound jarring? Possibly not until quite late in the twentieth century. Note for instance that William James, writing almost a hundred years after Tocqueville, shared his general view of 'manliness' and concern about 'softness': "A permanently successful peace-economy cannot be a simple pleasure-economy.... Martial virtues must be the enduring cement; intrepidity, contempt of softness, surrender of private interest, obedience to command, must still remain the rock upon which states are built -- unless, indeed, we wish for dangerous reactions against commonwealths fit only for contempt, and liable to invite attack whenever a center of crystallization for military-minded enterprise gets formed anywhere in their neighborhood." [2]

Afterthought (added Jan.2): "A permanently successful peace-economy cannot be a simple pleasure-economy": sounds like something that might have been said by a revolutionary who's just come to power and is trying to prepare the people for an extended period of hardship and adversity. Did Fidel ever read "The Moral Equivalent of War"?

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1. A. de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. G. Lawrence, ed. J.P. Mayer (Anchor Books, 1969 [and subsequent editions]), p. 734.

2. "The Moral Equivalent of War" (1910), in William James: The Essential Writings, ed. B. W. Wilshire (State Univ. of N.Y. Press, 1984), pp. 357-58.

Let them eat dark chocolate

A recent issue of Perspectives on Politics (vol. 8, no. 1, March 2010) carries a symposium on Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2009), by Douglass North, John J. Wallis, and Barry Weingast (NW&W).

The first review in the symposium is by Jack Snyder, who writes that NW&W "aim at nothing less than explaining democracy, economic development, and domestic social peace, which, they say, tend to go together for reasons that have heretofore eluded explanation by social science. The 'omitted factor' that they say causes these good outcomes is the 'open access' pattern of social relationships, based on impersonal rules that provide universal access to the benefits of political and economic organizations (p.13)."

Snyder hastens to assure us that this is more than "an all-too-familiar paean to the benign efficiency of democratic and market institutions, which," he notes with considerable understatement, "might be off-putting to some readers in the wake of the global financial meltdown." Rather, NW&W's distinction between open-access societies and limited-access societies (which they call "natural states") has, according to Snyder, "profound implications for efforts to engineer democratic and economic development."

"Like recent research on red wine and dark chocolate, everything you thought was bad for you turns out to be good, and vice versa. Orderly corruption and electoral manipulation turn out to be good in natural states, because they preserve social peace and allow the gradual development of rule-governed relations among elites [except, one might think, in places where civil wars are already ongoing, but never mind that--LFC]. Natural states advance toward impersonal social relations by partial steps as they mature. Instead of making an unsustainable leap to create encompassing impersonal categories like 'citizen,' they create semi-impersonal categories that treat all individuals of a given status -- nobles, clerics, whites, party members -- as juridical equals. Once rule of law and impersonal forms of organization are established among elites in this way, such practices can be extended to the entire population, if an elite faction sees an advantage in it."

Snyder observes that this supports "the view that successful democratic transitions need to be carried out in a sequence," starting with the construction of administrative and legal institutions and only then moving to "unfettered mass electoral politics."

Fair enough, I suppose -- but it seems to me that the stuff about natural states advancing gradually rather than "leap[ing] to create encompassing impersonal categories like 'citizen'" fails to capture certain important events in "recorded human history" -- such as, say, the French Revolution. Since I've only read the review, not the book itself, I hesitate to be too critical. Still, it does give one pause.

France and the veil

Wearing the full veil has become a hot-button issue in France, but the reasons may not be immediately obvious to many of those who don't live there. If countries can be said to have ideas of themselves, then assimilationism, the notion that Frenchness is a matter primarily of culture rather than birth, is an element of France's idea of itself. And "culture" here implies acceptance of certain substantive principles. Note, in the BBC article linked above, the French immigration minister's reference to "the principles of secularism and equality between men and women," acceptance of which is considered, at least in this official view, part of what it means to be French.

I recently had a conversation with the sociologist Rogers Brubaker (ah, the pleasures of name-dropping), and afterward I took a quick re-look at his book Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany (1992), which I had read a long time ago. The book brings out, among other things, what Brubaker calls "the weakness of the ethnic moment and the correlative strength of the assimilationist moment in French self-understanding" and the way in which Frenchness has been defined "in social and political rather than ethnic terms, as a matter of social becoming rather than intrinsic being" (p.112). For his bio and more recent books, click here.

P.s. Two relevant blog posts: here (from last July) and here.

Riding to the rescue of the L-word

A review of:
Alan Wolfe, The Future of Liberalism (Knopf, 2009)

Apart from having the same first name, what do William Kristol and William Wordsworth have in common? If this riddle appeals to you, you may like Alan Wolfe’s The Future of Liberalism. An effort to restate liberalism’s tenets for a non-specialist audience and to show that liberalism remains superior to competing “isms” in its ability to cope with modernity, the book is best approached as a series of connected essays in persuasion, to borrow a phrase from John Maynard Keynes. However, even readers who are not fully persuaded will likely pick up some bits of new knowledge along the way.

So what about the two Williams, the poet and the neocon? According to Wolfe, Kristol and his fellow neoconservatives have a romantic sensibility that denigrates caution, realism, and common sense in favor of grandiose dreams of democratic triumphalism. Like Wordsworth -- who heaped scorn on “mere safety” in his pamphlet attacking the 1807 Convention of Cintra (which allowed Napoleon’s defeated army to withdraw from the Iberian peninsula) -- Kristol et al. have a dangerously “heroic” view of the world which substitutes wishful thinking for an analysis of inconvenient realities. The flaws in this worldview became all too evident in the immediate aftermath of the invasion of Iraq. In drawing a connection between nineteenth-century romanticism and present-day neoconservatism, Wolfe may be on to something. It’s true that Wordsworth celebrated the French Revolution (“bliss was it then to be alive, but to be young was very heaven”), and it’s hard to imagine Bill Kristol, had he been around in 1789, saying that -- but no parallel is going to be a perfect fit. As the book proceeds, Wolfe detects the malign hand of romanticism in other places, from the writings of the liberal Paul Berman to Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire.

The Future of Liberalism revolves around several reiterated contrasts. Liberalism à la Wolfe sides with “interests” not “passions”; culture not nature; empiricism not “ideology” (a bad word in Wolfe’s lexicon). Wolfe’s liberalism is hopeful but cool, generous but ironic, committed unapologetically to its values but not in an overexcited, “ideological” way. This message is illustrated by various excursions into the history of ideas, featuring heroes (e.g., T.H. Green, Benjamin Constant, Lionel Trilling, John Dewey, Kant) and non-heroes (e.g., Carl Schmitt, Johann Gottfried von Herder, Marx, Rousseau, and, yes, Wordsworth). These excursions are generally well executed but they necessarily involve compression, and compression has its pitfalls. For example, anyone who wants to understand Max Weber’s famous distinction between an ethic of responsibility and an ethic of ultimate ends would be well advised not to rely too heavily on Wolfe’s brief summary of Weber’s “Politics as a Vocation.”

Wolfe’s liberalism has something in common with the tradition of political realism and its emphasis on the responsible exercise of power. “It takes ideological politicians to bring out the true virtues of realistic ones,” he writes (p.125), and he characterizes “a liberal global order” as one “in which as many governments as possible avoid romantic dreams, shun unrealistic expectations, and dampen religious and ideological enthusiasms.” (p.106) He says kind things about realists like Reinhold Niebuhr although the appropriation is partial: Niebuhr’s stress on responsibility is highlighted but not his view of the fallen nature of humanity. Wolfe’s preferred ground is Arthur Schlesinger’s vital center, “a place obviously distinct from the totalitarian right, but at the same time marked off from what Schlesinger [in 1948] called ‘doughfaced progressivism,’ which believes in ‘the more subtle sensations of the perfect syllogism, the lost cause, the permanent minority, where life can be safe from the exacting job of trying to work out wise policies in an imperfect world.’ ” (p.118)

This “exacting job,” however, is not one that Wolfe seems especially eager to take on. Admittedly his book is not intended to be a programmatic manifesto; he believes that liberalism’s philosophical basis is more in need of reviving than its programmatic ideas. But sometimes philosophical and programmatic considerations intertwine, and in these cases the book is less than satisfying.

The clearest example is Wolfe’s approach to the issue of equality. At the outset he writes: “How much actual equality there is in a society will vary from one to another, and one can imagine different kinds of liberal societies with different degrees of it. But any society that closes off opportunities for people to achieve their full human capacities, or that allows persistent inequalities to stifle the desire on the part of its least fortunate members to develop them, would not be a liberal one.” (p.12) This simultaneously suggests and evades a significant question: When do “persistent inequalities” become so persistent and deep-rooted that they stop being merely blemishes on a liberal society and start undermining its foundations? Consider the contemporary United States with its large underclass, astoundingly high incarceration rates, high levels of income and wealth inequality, and an educational system that relegates many children, especially poorer ones, to inferior schools from which only the unusually determined and lucky emerge with a decent education – at some point it becomes difficult to claim that such a society is giving a majority of its citizens opportunities “to achieve their full human capacities.” Wolfe endorses Michael Walzer’s view that there should be “a series of dams that prevent inequalities in some spheres of life from spilling over into others where they do not belong.” (p.82) Walzer’s Spheres of Justice divides the world into various domains – work, wealth, office, love, divine grace, and so on – and argues that different principles of just distribution apply in each. That’s fine in some ways, but it’s not much help in determining how much inequality in life chances is too much.

Wolfe says repeatedly that liberals want to maximize individuals’ ability to control their destinies, but the devil is in the details of how this principle is put into practice. Take welfare reform. Wolfe praises Bill Clinton’s abolition of Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) inasmuch as it represented a blow against dependency and the perpetuation of a “permanent welfare class” (p.248). On the other hand, “whether or not forcing mothers of young children into the workforce was the appropriate way to do this can and should be questioned, but the notion of overcoming dependency should not be.” (p.248) You can’t have it both ways: either ending AFDC was justifiable or it wasn’t. Wolfe’s discussion of equality and inequality would have benefited from a more thorough engagement with the tradition of democratic socialism, for which his occasional references to R.H. Tawney are not an adequate substitute. And when it comes to the transnational or global dimensions of inequality, Wolfe does not have much to say, apart from some fairly brief remarks on immigration and globalization toward the end of the book.

The Future of Liberalism has a thoughtful chapter on religion, which argues that liberalism properly understood is not hostile to religion and that freedom of religion is a meaningful principle worth defending. Here Wolfe’s hero is John Leland, a nineteenth-century “itinerant Baptist preacher from Massachusetts” and "the most important American never to have been the subject of a full-length biography" (p.165) who strongly supported separation of church and state and favored keeping organized religion out of politics, a position that Leland’s contemporary heirs in the Southern Baptist Convention have abandoned. In this chapter and elsewhere, Wolfe criticizes certain contemporary foes of liberalism, such as Stanley Fish, who, under the influence of postmodernism-poststructuralism, charge liberalism’s Enlightenment values with incoherence. He scores points against the postmodernists, which is useful if not especially novel. As already mentioned, however, socialist critiques of liberalism are either neglected in this book or treated summarily.

The book ends with a ringing plea for liberals to have the courage of their convictions and to recapture the spirit that animated the liberal accomplishments of the past. Wolfe’s decision to conclude in this way highlights what is perhaps the book’s most striking omission: its failure to acknowledge fully that liberalism’s problems of the last forty years have not been simply the result of liberals’ cowardice and complacency. The massive alterations in the operations of capitalism on both domestic and global levels, the weakening of organized labor in the advanced industrial countries (notably but not exclusively the U.S.), and reaction to the impact (real and perceived) of the movements of the '60s all had as much if not more to do with the electoral victories of Reagan, Thatcher, and some of their successors as did the timidity and miscalculation of their liberal opponents. Ideas don’t float freely, as Wolfe is well aware, and the best ideas don’t always win in the ideological marketplace; ideas exist in a context shaped by underlying economic and social forces, and a rigorous analysis of those forces is largely missing here.

Nonetheless and to end on a positive note, The Future of Liberalism makes me want to re-acquaint myself with the classics of the liberal tradition, and for that I thank the author.

More on reification -- and some other matters

“Let us remember Mr. Justice Holmes’s dictum: ‘I always say that the chief end of man is to form general propositions,’ and let us not altogether forget what he added: ‘And no generalization is worth a damn.’”

-- George C. Homans, The Nature of Social Science (Harcourt Brace & World, 1967), pp. 9-10.

“Reification” (see this earlier post and comments) features in an article published last fall which I recently read: Mark Bevir and Asaf Kedar, “Concept Formation in Political Science: An Anti-Naturalist Critique of Qualitative Methodology,” Perspectives on Politics 6:3 (September 2008), pp.503-517. (Here is a link to a PDF version of the article. Note, however, that the page numbers in this post refer to the article as published in Perspectives, not the PDF version.)

Although the public may not generally realize it, social scientists (as well as philosophers) have been quarelling for over a century about what social science is and how it should be done. Are the social sciences immature cousins of the natural sciences, disciplines that can be expected eventually to produce a comparable body of cumulative knowledge? Or does the subject matter of the social sciences, namely human action, make them different in kind from the natural sciences, orienting them toward “understanding” rather than prediction, causal explanation, and control? Or is there a viable middle ground between these two views, one that sees very significant differences between the social and the natural sciences but holds that “general propositions” are not entirely beyond the reach of social science?

The authors of the article in question have a clear position on these issues. Bevir, a political science professor at Berkeley, and Kedar, a graduate student there, are critics of “naturalism,” the notion that the social sciences “should strive to develop predictive and causal explanations akin to those found in the natural sciences” (p.504). In their view, this aim ignores that human action “is meaningful and historically contingent” (p.505), and always rooted in particular contexts. Human conduct is inherently subject to choice and chance, hence inherently unpredictable by general laws – thus the argument runs.

So where does reification come in? Bevir and Kedar (hereafter B&K) argue that the work of political scientists Giovanni Sartori and David Collier on concept formation reflects flawed “naturalist” premises. Specifically, this work, according to the authors, is marred by “reification, essentialism, and an instrumentalist view of language” (p.507). For B&K, “reification” equals insufficient attention to the “meaningfulness” of human action.[1] Here’s the nub of what they say on it:

“Anti-naturalism implies that many – perhaps even all – social science concepts denote objects that are composed at least in part of meanings or intentional states. Reification occurs whenever these concepts are defined either in ways that neglect relevant meanings entirely or in ways that neglect the holistic character of meanings, thereby likening human action to meaning-less ‘things’…. Reification occurs whenever the attributes of a social science concept are regarded as reducible to causal laws, probabilities, or fixed norms. For example, the concept of ‘social class’ is reified insofar as it is understood in terms of supposedly objective socio-economic criteria such as relation to the means of production or income level, without taking into account how the members of a given social class themselves construe and experience their social situation.” (p.507)

As it turns out, what bothers me about this article is not so much the way the authors define “reification” as their conviction that reification (as they define it) is always bad or unwarranted. Take the notion of social class. As noted above, B&K condemn any treatment of class that defines it ‘objectively’ (e.g., in terms of income level or relation to the means of production) without also considering “how the members of a given social class themselves construe and experience their social situation.” However, there are times when a “reified” definition of social class is defensible, especially if one accepts (as B&K do not) the possibility of trans-historical generalizations. If, for example, you're interested in the role played by peasant revolts in social revolutions (or in the conditions under which such revolts have occurred), you may be more concerned with the institutional character of agriculture – e.g., are there mostly large estates or mostly small holdings? – than with the ways in which a particular group of poor farmers has construed its own situation. Moreover, the latter type of information may be difficult or impossible to assemble, since peasants have often been largely or entirely illiterate (thus leaving behind few written records in their own words), and since you can’t interview people who are dead. It’s not always possible, in short, to arrive at concepts “through a kind of dialogue with the social actors being studied” (p.508), desirable as that might often be. Although they do not say this explicitly, B&K’s position would discard such modern classics of historical sociology as Skocpol’s States and Social Revolutions, Wallerstein’s The Modern World-System, Tilly’s Coercion, Capital, and European States, and many others.

This all points to a more basic issue: Is there only one correct, philosophically defensible way to do social science? Some scholars believe that only an approach aimed at causal explanation is valid. B&K take the opposite side but adhere to an equivalent exclusiveness. The implication of their position seems quite clear: only one kind of social science will pass muster.

B&K are opposed to, or at least highly skeptical of, any effort at explanatory generalization. They admit the possibility of generalization but deny that generalizations explain anything: “[W]e can say that X, Y, and Z are all democracies but that does not explain any other feature they might have in common” (p.506). Not only do B&K posit, as some other writers have, a sharp dichotomy between “understanding” and “explaining”; they hold that only understanding is legitimate, since explaining is tied to a “discredited” naturalist perspective.[2] Although their article is subtitled “a critique of qualitative methodology,” it is actually a broader critique. While I’m sympathetic to certain of their points and while I certainly do not believe that all good social science must involve causal explanation, B&K have not persuaded me of the illegitimacy of any social science that aspires, however tentatively and imperfectly, to discern causes of social phenomena.

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1. B&K observe that Collier defines reification as neglect of contingency and historical flux, whereas they define reification as neglect of “the meaningful or intentional nature of action” (p.511). They argue that their definition “better reflects the source of the concept in Hegelian and Marxist contexts where reification is the process whereby external objects are detached from their relation to (and origin in) human consciousness” (note 82, p.515).

2. There is disagreement in the literature about what counts as “explanation.” I won’t go into this here. See B&K’s note 24, p.514.

Buzzwords (1): "Reification"

reify [from the Latin res (thing) + -fy]: to treat (an abstraction) as substantially existing, or as a concrete material object.

As the dictionary suggests, to reify is to thing-ify: to treat what is not a thing as a thing. (This is the sense the word carries in Marx's definition of commodity fetishism: reification of persons, anthropomorphizing of things.) In academic writing, however, "reify" and "reification" have become vague, almost catch-all terms of disapproval, used to indicate disagreement with whatever the author doesn't like.

So many examples of this usage are available that to single out one is unfair, but there is one example that's fresh in my mind. Recently I was glancing through an article that draws on Marxian work in international relations "to recast the socio-historical conditions of emergence and diffusion of the modern national form" (F.G. Dufour, "Social-property Regimes and the Uneven and Combined Development of Nationalist Practices," European Journal of International Relations 13:4 [2007], pp.583-604).

This article says there's a need to "move beyond the reification of a collective domestic identity" (p.588). I'm pulling this phrase out of context, because to supply the context would be rather tedious. But it is illustrative, I think, of the basic procedure: take an abstraction, assert that it's being reified, and you have a criticism that's often difficult if not impossible to refute, because it usually boils down to "I don't like the way scholar X is using this concept."

On the misuse of "pragmatism" and "pragmatic"

Tonight on the PBS NewsHour, a lawyer for utility companies said he was "optimistic" that Obama's energy policy appointees would turn out to be "pragmatic." Translation: not press industry too hard on environmental standards.

A few days ago, Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber pointed out (citing a piece in The Nation) that the use of "pragmatism" to mean "non-ideological" or something equivalent is misguided. Farrell observed that Deweyan pragmatism is not apolitical or non-ideological:

"You simply can’t get the politics out of pragmatist accounts. Furthermore, Dewey’s arguments may carry some quite radical implications. Dewey and other pragmatists lay a very heavy emphasis on the benefits of unforced inquiry as a guide to practice. Yet unforced inquiry is only possible in a society where there aren’t economic or social barriers to free engagement in discussion and deliberation. Thus – to really achieve the benefits of free debate and untrammeled inquiry – you need (where it is feasible) to dismantle barriers that prevent full and unfettered participation in the processes of discussion through which inquiry takes place."

Or, to put roughly the same point differently, you need a marketplace of ideas to which access is relatively equal and in which some voices don't drown out others by virtue of concentrated wealth or other privileges. This is a very old problem (or debate), of course, but one that never seems to go away.

Collective forgetting

In a comment on this earlier post, 'bro' suggested adding a sentence to McCain's line that Americans make history: "And then we run screaming out of the room, get trashed, go to sleep, and wake up with no memory of what happened."

This was meant humorously, of course, but it points to a non-humorous issue, namely the function of collective forgetting, which is perhaps best understood not as literally blotting out certain painful parts of a national past but as agreeing to "bracket" them. More than a century ago, the historian Ernest Renan, in his lecture "What Is a Nation?," observed that "the essence of a nation is that all individuals have many things in common, and also that they have forgotten many things...." More recently, Anthony Marx has put it this way: "Nations drink at the fountain of Lethe, clearing their memories, before their rebirth in the Hades of modernity." (Faith in Nation: Exclusionary Origins of Nationalism [2003], pp.29-30)

History and "history"

"We [Americans] don't hide from history. We make history."
-- John McCain

"A man has nothing to fear, he thought to himself, who understands history."
-- last line of Robert Stone's A Flag for Sunrise (1981)

In these two quotations, "history" is, respectively, a prize and a consolation. In McCain's congratulatory usage, the power to make "history" is what Americans award themselves for being Americans. In Robert Stone's novel, the anthropologist Holliwell, having blundered around in an imaginary Latin American country and helped wreck more than several lives, consoles himself by taking the long view. You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs, or something like that.

When Francis Fukuyama wrote his famous article "The End of History," later expanded into the book The End of History and the Last Man, he was careful to point out that he was not talking about history but about History in the Hegelian sense, the ostensibly progressive development or unfolding of collective human consciousness, or spirit (Geist). Did McCain's speech writer have Fukuyama somewhere at the back of his mind? Maybe. Or maybe not.

Hegelians and Marxists, among others, believe that History has a veiled or hidden logic, one that their theories grasp. History unlocks its secrets to those in possession of the key: Spirit rising to consciousness of itself, or the inevitability of socialist revolution. Marxism is not about "spreading the wealth," contrary to what certain denizens of the right-wing blogosphere said or implied during the just-concluded U.S. election campaign. Marx himself had nothing but contempt for anyone who concentrated on distribution as opposed to the forces and relations of production. He asserted that redistribution was not possible without a change in the mode of production:

"Any distribution whatever of the means of consumption is only a consequence of the distribution of the conditions of production themselves [Marx wrote in Critique of the Gotha Program].... Vulgar socialism...has taken over from the bourgeois economists the consideration and treatment of distribution as independent of the mode of production and hence the presentation of socialism as turning principally on distribution. After the real relation [between distribution and the mode of production] has long been made clear, why retrogress again?"

When certain conservatives charged that Obama was a Marxist, they proved only that they had not read Marx.

This post seems to have wandered away from the rhetorical uses of "history." Perhaps that's just as well. When we get too serious about these things, we can count on Shaw to puncture the balloon. In Shaw's play The Devil's Disciple, set during the American war of independence, the British general Burgoyne, facing defeat at Saratoga, is asked by a horrified subordinate: "What will history say?" Burgoyne's answer: "History, sir, will tell lies, as usual."

P.S. A link to Critique of the Gotha Program.