Did Bob Dahl Really Say That? (Updated)

It could become one of the quotes intoned at the beginning and end of Criminal Minds.

Kind of surprising, imo, that the NYT made this mistake. A lot of people could have told them that the ‘authoritative allocation of values’ line is David Easton’s — it’s a famous definition and it’s always attributed to Easton whenever I’ve seen it mentioned.

LFC, Nietzsche was preoccupied with the creation and promulgation, distribution if you will, of values.

But I would have guessed the Easton line was sloppy socialese for “things of value.” No?

Thanks for the responses.

5:The gap between the first and second paragraphs express my confusion. I followed the links and visited a dictionary, but “values” as “things” is pretty rare. So is really meant that politics is the authoritative allocation of greed, caritas, familial love, loyalty, patriotism, industriousness…so much here, more for that section, a little less for a special individual? That’s…interesting. And I am not sure how Nietzschean, who talks more about hierarchies of values rather than distributions, though I suppose they are related.

Also, of course, use-value, exchange-value, and Value. But the third value-form is hard.

bob mcmanus @ 9

But the third value-form is hard.

Harder in theory than in practice, I think. When I look at values in that sense, it seems to me that for most people, in most situations, they’re like Topsy, they jes grew. No doubt theories get embedded in our values/practices at points along the way, but I’m not sure that even when one can identify a point of crystallization — Paul with Christianity, say, or Lenin with Communism — the practice isn’t richer, and older, than the theories we use to describe it.

There’s an old movie The Wind and the Lion, in which a Berber chieftain, played by Sean Connery, as I remember, condemns as cowards the Western generals opposing him, because they employ guns which fire promiscuously, and at a distance. Today, a century later, one hears similar complaints, from roughly the same regions of the world, about U.S. drones. How do we adequately unpack that fact without leavening our economics with a sizeable dollop of philosophy?

Wow, we were just talking about (and roundly critiquing) his conception of power in my political soc seminar.

Tom: I would guess that Easton’s using “allocation” to refer to political processes and their results (e.g. elections, debates, legislation, and material outcomes) and “values” to refer to socially-mediated evaluation. So in this reading he would be referring to politics as the taxon for processes whereby, for instance, it is formally decided that the wealthy deserve tax cuts while the poor deserve to have their SNAP benefits cut, and the desert of those two things necessarily involves evaluation both of the money that would be retained or lost by the government and of the character of the groups affected. I’m guessing he probably wasn’t thinking of things like prices. If that’s true, I guess one could argue that this is circular, since outcomes could seem to be determining value even while evaluation would be implicated in causing outcomes. This might be countered by pointing out that social processes are inherently iterative.

“Allocation” seems like a pretty bizarre verb (you get some dignity, you get some autonomy; a little social solidarity for you, a little individual responsibility for you). But the definition to me just suggests something like, ‘are we going to emphasize rehabilitation or retribution; liberty or equality? Sovereign sez…. Now make it so, with laws and stuff.’

Past tense @4 perhaps inapt: acc. to Wiki, Easton is still alive.

“Easton’s general outlook, afaik, was positivist and he was into systems theory. ”

There is a pretty direct line from Nietzsche to systems theory, via Weber and Parsons – Weberian notion of value-rationality is appropriated from Nietzsche and then taken, in turn, by Parsons to develop his theory of socio-cultural integration.

Eaton’s definition doesn’t sound Nietzschean at all to me. It seems like some combination of liberalism and positivism. “Values” are criteria for individual choices, (which purportedly give “values” their value), and the contests between individualistic “values” determine political “allocations”, (assuming political processes determine such allocations “authoritatively”).

My own view is that it is better to distinguish between types or modes of activity/action, than to bounded domains, whether academic or “real”. Hence political action/activity is concerned with the resolution of social conflicts and the securement of authoritatively binding agreements, whereas economic action/activity is concerned with the seeking out, realization and distribution of more-or-less material surpluses. Obviously, political activities permeate economic organization and economic conflicts absorb much of the political domain. Without either mode being quite reducible to the other.

But it is the issue of “authority” that is key, (often titled “legitimation”), since, not only is it “pragmatically” necessary or inevitable, but it is without any prior foundation, whether in authoritarian appeals to traditions, (which have long since lost their binding “force” in modernity), or in appeals to some form of theory. Many years ago, Gregory Bateson remarked that there is always both a report/command aspect to any statement. That is in many ways an inadequate formulation, but the basic intuition is correct. (And one can find the same sort of thing in Heidegger, read in a certain way). Our language and communication are riddled with imperatives, multiple, perhaps contradictory, or even sometimes paradoxical, without being derivable from any prior or natural conditions. So “authority” is as much an “internal” as an “external” requirement, even though both are equally groundless, “an-archic”. Given human finitude in a material world, all norms that we might arrive at and “legitimate”, whether cognitive or ethical, are solely a collective human responsibility. But political-economy, “power”, runs through all the issues we might face.

“Authoritative allocation of values” does seem to be a solecism. As jch says @23, “value” usually means “criterion for individual choice”; or as the dictionary says, “utility,” “merit,” “worth,” “usefulness,” “importance.” “Allocate” means “distribute according to a plan.” How do you allocate (much less “authoritatively” allocate) importance/usefulness/worth/criteria for individual choice?

Wow. Dahl is an important critic of American political institutions and how they fail to live up to democratic ideals and norms. I would have thought that merited more discussion on CT (though the OP, with all due respect, channeled the discussion in a particular direction).