Political Theory/Political Philosophy

I will be brief. Straussianism is a set of interpretative practices along the following lines, as best as I understand it. The great philosophers and thinkers may have a specific private belief – let’s call it x. But they may not be able to say exactly what they want to say, especially when times are bad, and they risk making enemies. Hence, they need to write indirectly. This means that when a thinker is saying not-x, we should sometimes understand that they really mean to say x. They are communicating ambiguously – but the Truly Wise can grasp their real meaning.

The relationship between this esoteric tradition – Straussianism – and Leo Strauss is a little complicated. I’ve seen recent arguments that Straussianism has taken on a life of its own – has become vulgar, if you like, however much of a contradiction in terms Vulgar Straussianism might seem to be.

The obvious objection to Straussianism  is the standard one. If you help yourself to the claim that when this or that Great Man is saying x, they may actually mean not-x or x, depending, you are making it harder to reach a shared understanding of the truth. If you further contend that only those who grok your particular hidden lore can distinguish sincerity from dissimulation, you can redefine the history of thought to mean whatever you want it to mean.

But there is a second – and perhaps more serious – objection. Straussianism – especially in its vulgar form – may present even more pernicious temptations to the writer than the reader.

If you conceive of yourself as a Straussian, and find yourself caught between the desires of different audiences with directly contradictory desires over what you write, you may adopt the following protocol. Write x to please Audience One, while throwing out subtle hints that actually you agree with Audience Two, and secretly believe, and are secretly arguing, not-x.

The dilemmas of this style of communication are the major theme of Kurt Vonnegut’s novel, Mother Night. Is Howard Campbell Jr, the American turncoat and Nazi propagandist, actually a secret anti-Nazi, who only boosts the arguments of evil people so that he can convey hidden messages that help the forces of good? Or is he a sincere Nazi, who sends coded messages as an aside or a failsafe? Nobody really knows, not even Howard Campbell Jr. He ends up in a horrible mess.

One could state the broader problem in game theoretic language. Straussianism makes it more difficult to reach a separating equilibrium in the communications game, which would allow you to clearly distinguish Nazis from anti-Nazis. And as with game theory more generally, you may also find yourself in infinite regress. Are communications about Straussianism themselves Straussian or non-Straussian? Is there any way to navigate the wilderness of beliefs, meta-beliefs and meta-meta-beliefs, except by assumption, so that expectations might actually converge on some shared truth? But since I think the problem of enacted Straussianism is practical, not abstract-theoretic, I’ll leave it at that, and say nothing further.

If the current Supreme Court had held comparable office in Weimar Germany, that is, its opinion in Trump v. United States would have rendered the judgment in this post’s headline. Never mind that the Weimar Constitution was different from the U.S. Constitution (importantly, in granting emergency powers to the President to rule by decree under Article 48). For, as Justice Sotomayor rightly observes in her blistering dissent, the majority’s decision that the President enjoys absolute immunity for his official acts has “no firm grounding in constitutional text, history, or precedent” (quoting Alito’s characterization of Roe v. Wade in Dobbs).

So let us set aside the law, which has nothing to do with how the Court majority arrived at its opinion. I am here to explore the majority’s mindset, which leads it down the path to utter lawlessness, and opens the door to dictatorship. Justice Roberts disparages this worry as overblown, much as Hindenburg imagined that Hitler was a mere blowhard, no real danger to the Republic. Never mind that Trump, like Hitler, habitually announces his malign intentions in advance–that he will not honor any election that does not place him in office, that he will abuse the powers of the President to wreak vengeance on his enemies, that he will rule as a dictator (on “day one,”–but now the Court has granted him a license for at least a 4-year term). Such announcements are the only times when it is prudent to take Trump at his word.

Roberts, like everyone else on the Court, knows that Trump conspired to overthrow the results of the 2020 election and stay in power by inciting a mob to shut down Congress’s counting of electoral votes. What could make him imagine that Trump’s actions were, if not lawful, then beyond the reach of any controlling law?

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This is a post that will mainly be of interest to academic political philosophers, as it concerns what happened to The Journal of Political Philosophy, and I’m assuming readers know what happened to that journal recently (if you don’t, you can read first this, and then this piece on Daily Nous).

Earlier today I attended a meeting that Wiley organised at the Eastern Philosophical Association meeting, and want to share my impression as well as share the three conclusions that I draw from this session. [click to continue…]

Geopolitics of knowledge is a fact. Only few (conservative) colleagues would contend otherwise. Ingrid Robeyns wrote an entry for this blog dealing with this problem. There, Ingrid dealt mostly with the absence of non-Anglophone colleagues in political philosophy books and journals from the Anglophone centre. I want to stress that this is not a problem of language, for there are other centres from which we, philosophers from the “Global South” working in the “Global South”, are excluded. In political philosophy, the centre is composed of the Anglophone world and three European countries: Italy, France, and Germany. From my own experience, the rest of us do not qualify as political philosophers, for we are, it seems, unable to speak in universal terms. We are, at best, providers of particular cases and data for Europeans and Anglophones to study and produce their own philosophical and universal theories. I think most of you who are reading are already familiar with the concept of epistemic extractivism, of which this phenomenon is a case. (If not, you should; in case you don’t read Spanish, there is this).

Critical political philosophy is one of the fields where the unequal distribution of epistemic authority is more striking. I say “striking” because it would seem, prima facie, that political philosophers with a critical inclination (Marxists, feminists, anti-imperialists, etc.) are people more prone to recognising injustice than people from other disciplines and tendencies. But no one lives outside a system of injustice and no one is a priori completely exempt from reproducing patterns of silencing. Not even ourselves, living and working in the “Global Southern” places of the world. Many political philosophers working and living in Latin America don’t even bother to read and cite their own colleagues. This is, to be sure, a shame, but there is a rationale behind this self-destructive practice. Latin American scholars know that their papers have even lesser chances of being sent to a reviewing process (we are usually desk-rejected) if they cite “too many” pieces in Spanish and by authors working outside of the academic centre. [click to continue…]

In my academic job, I’ve just started a new 5-year project called ‘Visions for the future‘. In the first year of the project, I’ll tackle some methodological questions, including working out the discussion we had here some years ago on normative audits, and the question what ‘synthetic political philosophy’ is (on which Eric also has, and is further developing, views).

For the subsequent 3 years, I want to experiment with, and also develop the idea of ‘team philosophy’ (and I will hire three postdocs to be part of this). But what is ‘team philosophy’?
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Over the last year, I’ve been working on a trade book on limitarianism (USA, UK, NL), on an edited volume on pluralism in political philosophy by bringing various (including ‘non-western’) perspectives together around questions of economic and ecological inequalities (forthcoming with OUP but not quite there yet), and on an edited academic volume with political philosophy papers on limitarianism.

Perhaps not surprisingly, I strongly advice anyone not to follow that example: one book to work on is already more than enough to concentrate on. The circumstances that created this situation in which I found myself editing two books and writing a third one are probably rather rare – trying to deliver outcomes promised in a grant application against the background of a pandemic, combined with some significant professional disruptions beyond my control etc. But while I felt like a juggler for some time, the good news is that the first and the third are now done (though the trade book is not out in English before February 1st), and I’m happy to share with you the link to the open access, hence free to download, book with academic philosophical papers on limitarianism. It’s a combination of reprints and new material, and the essays generally assume some background knowledge in contemporary normative political philosophy. I’m hoping this will be interesting for students and scholars of the philosophy of distributive justice, and related areas. Also, the entire volume is currently being translated into Spanish, and will also be published Open Access before too long. The trade book – although very broadly on the same topic, is a very different beast, about which more some other time.

It’s over a week since the Economist put up my and Cosma Shalizi’s piece on shoggoths and machine learning, so I think it’s fair game to provide an extended remix of the argument (which also repurposes some of the longer essay that the Economist article boiled down). [click to continue…]

A few weeks ago, Daniel Dennett published an alarmist essay (“Creating counterfeit digital people risks destroying our civilization”) in The Atlantic that amplified concerns Yuval Noah Harari expressed in the Economist.+ (If you are in a rush, feel free to skip to the next paragraph because what follows are three quasi-sociological remarks.) First, Dennett’s piece is (sociologically) notable because in it he is scathing of the “AI community” (many of whom are his fanbase) and its leading corporations (“Google, OpenAI, and others”). Dennett’s philosophy has not been known for leading one to a left-critical political economy, and neither has Harari’s. In addition, Dennett’s piece is psychologically notable because it goes against his rather sunny disposition — he is a former teacher and sufficiently regular acquaintance — and the rather optimistic persona he has sketched of himself in his writings (recall this recent post); alarmism just isn’t Dennett’s shtick. Third, despite their prominence neither Harari nor Dennett’s pieces really reshaped the public discussion (in so far as there (still) is a public). And that’s because it competes with the ‘AGI induced extinction’ meme, which, despite being a lot more far-fetched, is scarier (human extinction > fall of our civilization) and is much better funded and supported by powerful (rent-seeking) interests.

Here’s Dennett’s core claim(s):

Money has existed for several thousand years, and from the outset counterfeiting was recognized to be a very serious crime, one that in many cases calls for capital punishment because it undermines the trust on which society depends. Today, for the first time in history, thanks to artificial intelligence, it is possible for anybody to make counterfeit people who can pass for real in many of the new digital environments we have created… 

Another pandemic is coming, this time attacking the fragile control systems in our brains—namely, our capacity to reason with one another—that we have used so effectively to keep ourselves relatively safe in recent centuries.

You may ask, ‘What does this have to do with the intentional stance?’ For Dennett goes on to write, “Our natural inclination to treat anything that seems to talk sensibly with us as a person—adopting what I have called the “intentional stance”—turns out to be easy to invoke and almost impossible to resist, even for experts. We’re all going to be sitting ducks in the immediate future.” This is a kind of (or at least partial) road to serfdom thesis produced by our disposition to take up the intentional stance. In what follows I show how these concepts come together by the threat posed by AIs designed to fake personhood.

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Richard Bourke’s (2018) “What is conservatism? History, ideology, party” critically discusses (inter alia) Samuel P. Huntington’s (1957) “Conservatism as an Ideology.” Yes, that Huntington (1927–2008). What follows is not about the clash of civilizations, promise.

Bourke claims that “the conservatism of Oakeshott and Huntington, like the liberalism of Hayek and Rawls, reflects an effort to fabricate an ideal, to stake out territory – to label in order to legitimise a particular system of values.” (Sadly, Bourke is unfamiliar with my own work on philosophical prophecy.) In particular, Bourke treats Huntington as a kind of modern Humean who, first, thinks that liberty presupposes authority. And, second, “that a conservative programme was necessary for the survival of the tradition of liberal politics in America.” On this reading, Huntington, then, criticizes those (like Russell Kirk) who understand themselves as ‘conservative,’ but who in their lack of understanding of American political culture end up in reactionary places. The role of Burke is, following Strauss’ reading of Burke (according to Bourke), to legitimise “existing institutions without prescribing for them any particular content.” Fair enough.

Now, if we go back to Huntington’s essay, he distinguishes among three ways of understanding conservatism as “a system of ideas concerned with the distribution of political and social values and acquiesced in by a significant social group:” first, as an aristocratic response to the French revolution. Second, as “an autonomous system of ideas which are generally valid. It is defined in terms of universal values such as justice, order, balance, moderation.” In fact, those political agents that adhere to this second way of understanding conservatism may well understand it as a “preferable political philosophy under any historical circumstances.” (emphasis added) And third, a situationist one in which a “recurring type of historical situation in which a fundamental challenge is directed at established institutions and in which the supporters of those institutions employ the conservative ideology in their defense.” (emphasis added.) Notice that, one can accept this three-fold taxonomy even if one is not a conservative. One can even think, as a dispassionate scholar, that one of these kinds of notions best describes conservatism in history while not endorsing it as a political agent or from a normative perspective. As Huntington observes the three kinds of conservatism posited by this taxonomy only differ analytically in relation “to the historical process.”

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Hélène Landemore enthusiastically shared a piece, “The Inflation of Concepts,” published at Aeon by John Tasioulas (who she describes as her “Oxford colleague”). Appealing to the work of Jürgen Habermas and John Rawls, Tasioulas focuses on a “threat to the quality of public reason” (which he claims) “tends to go unnoticed. This is the degradation of the core ideas mobilised in exercises of public reason.” And, in particular, what he has in mind is ‘conceptual overreach’. This “occurs when a particular concept undergoes a process of expansion or inflation in which it absorbs ideas and demands that are foreign to it.”

At this point I kind of expected Tasioulas to suggest as an example ‘democracy’ but he initially focuses on “human rights or the rule of law” [he is a legal philosopher] which “is taken to offer a comprehensive political ideology, as opposed to picking out one among many elements upon which our political thinking needs to draw and hold in balance when arriving at justified responses to the problems of our time.” Near the end of his essay he does focus on democracy (which he thinks of as a more “contestable” example!) and while drawing on the excellent work of Joshua Ober, he complains that some people mistakenly use ‘democracy’ and ‘liberal democracy’ interchangeably. (Our reading habits are clearly different because most of the conflations I see involve ‘democracy’ and whatever views a theorist expects/wishes to see approved by their imaginary demos.)

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Hugo Mercier, Melissa Schwartzberg and I have two closely related publications on what we’ve been calling “No-Bullshit Democracy.” One is aimed at academics – it’s a very short piece that has just been officially published in American Political Science Review. The other just came out in Democracy. It’s aimed at a broader audience, and is undoubtedly livelier. An excerpt of the Democracy piece follows – if you want to read it, click on this link. The APSR academic letter (which can be republished under a Creative Commons license) is under the fold. Which one you might want to read depends on whether you value footnotes more than fisticuffs, or vice versa …

The New Libertarian Elitists

What might be called “no-bullshit democracy” would be a new way of structuring democratic disagreement that would use human argumentativeness as a rapid-growth fertilizer. … But first we need to sluice away the bullshit that is being liberally spread around by anti-democratic thinkers. … . Experts, including Brennan and Caplan (and for that matter ourselves), can be at least as enthusiastic as ordinary citizens to grab at ideologically convenient factoids and ignore or explain away inconvenient evidence. That, unfortunately, is why Brennan and Caplan’s books do a better job displaying the faults of human reasoning than explaining them.

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Earlier today,  after I tweeted out that “Proposals to mint $1tn platinum coin are designed to circumvent the US constitution’s “The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts,” I got lectured by Nathan Tankus for “not grasping the most elementary legal issues in the topic you’re pontificating on.” This turns on the interpretation on the authority granted by Section 31 U.S. Code § 5112. Advocates of the platinum coin naturally like to quote the plain meaning of the text: “(k) The Secretary may mint and issue bullion and proof platinum coins in accordance with such specifications, designs, varieties, quantities, denominations, and inscriptions as the Secretary, in the Secretary’s discretion, may prescribe from time to time.” The plain meaning interpretation of (k) has been supported by Philip N. Diehl, former director of the United States Mint, who helped write the bill. But Diehl was not in Congress (and in virtue of his former office has obvious incentives to exaggerate its power and his former achievements).

However, the official author of the original bill, Representative Michael Castle, denied this interpretation, and suggested (quite plausibly in my opinion) that the provision was intended to cover collectibles (and not to provide the Treasure with the power to do an end run around any debt limits). I would be amazed if the original legislative record suggested otherwise. The law as we have it was inserted as a provisions into H.R. 3610, the Omnibus Consolidated Appropriations Act for 1997. It would be interesting if the congressional leadership recorded any views on the matter at the time (and that would change my view!) But the revisionary (‘plain meaning interpretation’) wasn’t voiced until May 2010. Even Diehl has admitted at one point that (the ‘plain meaning interpretation’) would constitute an “unintended consequence” of the bill. [Quoted in Grey (2020) op. cit, p. 261.] So, I don’t think this is really in doubt.

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After Stagflation during the 1970s, many markets were liberalized and, over time, central banks made a lot more independent in lots of places. In addition, some countries in Europe embraced the EURO (and founded the ECB), and barriers between regulated banking and shadow-banking (including by investment banks) were removed.

The intended aim, and in certain respects the successful effect, of central bank independence was to de-politicize central banks in three senses: first, to remove the temptation for politicians to use interest rates to benefit their own electoral prospects (which was thought to be the cause behind persistent inflation). Second, to prevent the use of central banks as a piggy bank for well-connected interest groups. Third, to turn monetary policy over to technocratic experts and, thereby, remove it as an electoral issue.

Over time one unintended effect of the third kind of de-politization is to dumb down our political class, which need not show any interest in monetary policy because it can always pass the buck to central bankers, and even delegate the execution of other policies to them. Arguably this state of affairs also made political debates more focused on cultural issues and less on the complex trade-offs involving monetary (and so-called fiscal) issues. In addition, as central banking was removed from the political arena, and so able to move with great rapidity, central bankers were actually nudged into taking on a whole range of crisis management tasks.

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