Political Theory/Political Philosophy

A couple of years ago, I edited a volume on pluralizing political philosophy, in particular in relation to economic and ecological inequalities. It was put together under the Covid-pandemic, so we had to swap the authors-conference for online meetings, with the authors spread out from China to Argentina. Sometimes the people in the most unfavorable timezones joined us literally in the middle of the night. I have always been very grateful to the contributors for running the extra mile under those circumstances, and some of the contributors gave the book what I am suspecting have been their darlings – papers on which they either had been working for a long time, or else papers that contained really original ideas. The book also includes a separate part with discussions of the main papers.

Against that background, I felt a little sad that (to the extent that I have been able to find out) the book hasn’t been picked up much. The first and so far only book review (in the Erasmus Journal of Economics and Philosophy) came out last week. But now one of the contributors, Krushil Watene, wrote to say that she has been teaching a course on the book, which is wonderful. If her students read this, they are very welcome to let us know their comments and impressions of the various chapters, including whether they think the book works for teaching (my assumption has been that it should be really useful for teaching, since it basically has all these different perspectives and arguments on why to pluralize political philosophy and how to do so, also if one is still on square one. But, as always, the proof of the pudding is in the eating.) And the book can still be downloaded for free.

I’m not a Rawlsian, though I would admit to certain affinities, and, indeed, I’ve used the device associated with Rawls (though not invented by him) of the veil of ignorance in my own work. But when I disagree with Rawls, I hope I at least take the trouble to get him right. Sadly, one can’t say the same of the former Cambridge academic, political theorist and professional podcaster David Runciman. To be fair to him, Runciman’s podcasts are usually informative and entertaining and I’ve discovered things through them that I wouldn’t otherwise have come across. He also often has some really good guests. That’s usually enough to make up for the annoying tics that litter his output, most notably his habit of telling us that “X was rather like Y, but also the complete opposite of Y”, as a way of introducing some thinker or other.

My patience has been somewhat tested, though, by his latest series on What is Wrong with Political Philosophy?, a series of conversations with the King’s London political theorist and historian of political thought Paul Sagar on Aristotle, Adam Smith, Max Weber, Bernard Williams and Judith Shklar (I’ve not yet listened to the one dealing with the last two). Now I don’t have much complaint about the positive exposition of these figures by Runciman and Sagar, and that’s a useful public service. Nor do I much mind, even though I disagree, with their view that political philosophy ought to be about something like giving useful guidance to those engaged in politics. But this view, and its associated claim that politicians need to draw more on history and psychology to develop their practical wisdom is set up via an opposition to a caricature of normative political philosophy.
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If you want to know more about how the current form of capitalism is undermining (a thick conception of) democracy, and what can be done about this, then you should read Lisa Herzog’s latest book The Democratic Marketplace. The book is written for a broad audience, and I suspect that anyone who regularly reads this blog will enjoy Lisa’s book and learn something new; and it will also provoke debate and discussion on important questions regarding the state of our economic system, our democracies, and how these two are related.

Lisa argues that genuine democracy (which is much more demanding than merely elections/counting votes) requires that democratic values be embedded in all public spheres of life. And therefore we should democratize the economy. This requires, among other things, workplace democracy, reducing economic inequality, shifting our focus from economic growth to the functions of the economy, and adopting a different policy of time that allows citizens to do the much-needed democratic work.

This Thursday 20 November, between 14:00 and 16:00 hours CET, the Visions for the Future Project is organizing an online discussion of Lisa’s book. Julie Rose and Tom Parr will kick off with comments. The online book workshop will take place via MS Teams. To get the link (which you will get within the next working day after registering), you can register via the link on the bottom of the event’s announcement page. Enjoy the reading, and enjoy becoming inspired to take (more) civic action by reading (and discussing) Lisa’s book!

Many thanks to Hannah for her beautiful post on George Eliot’s Silas Marner and the evacuation of moral purpose from the Protestant work ethic. That resonates with Hijacked, my latest book, which traces the history of the work ethic from 17th century Puritan theologians, through the economic theory and policy debates of the 18th and 19th centuries, to today. I argue that the work ethic split into two versions during the Industrial Revolution. One–the version Max Weber analyzed–expressed the ideological perspective and interests of capitalists, and ultimately led to what we call neoliberalism–or, in a less institutionally articulated form, a version of libertarianism. The other mostly forgotten version expressed the perspective and interests of workers, and ultimately led to social democracy.

Americans inherited the UK’s capitalist work ethic in colonial times, and (not for the first time) put it on steroids from the mid-1970s to today. Scratch an American libertarian, and most likely you’ll find a believer in the capitalist work ethic underneath. However much libertarians talk about universal freedom, at heart they are advancing a deeply authoritarian doctrine tied to capitalist rule. To see this, it’s helpful to relate current policy proposals to 19th century ones, when capitalist proponents of the work ethic were more open about their aims.

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Over the last years, I have edited a volume of papers on the question how to make analytical political philosophy more inclusive, with a particular focus on the debates on economic and ecological inequalities. The starting point was the observation that analytical political philosophy has for a long time been criticised for marginalizing (to a greater or lesser extent) certain voices and perspectives. Some of these voices and perspectives are internal critics of the liberal tradition – think of the feminist critiques or the critiques by care ethicists. But there have also been external perspectives that have been largely ignored, in particular perspectives from outside the western traditions. While there are well-developed specialist literatures on all of these traditions, they tend to be studied mainly by specialists. Non-western political philosophy and the internal critiques of liberal political philosophy are still too often overlooked in the field. My own estimation is that things are getting better – but very slowly, and hence I wanted to edit a book to make another small contribution to these collective effects to make political philosophy more pluralistic. [click to continue…]

One of the things that’s becoming clear is the determination of the Trump administration to divide humans living in the United States into two groups (to whom Wilhoit’s Law applies), citizens and immigrants. Actually it is a bit more complicated than that, because some of the legal citizens are, in reality, at best some sort of semi-citizen,¹ but let’s keep things simple for now. What I want to focus on is how incompatible this is with the notion of a free society, indeed with a free society even as those on the political right have historically seen it.

The Trumpists think they have a discretionary right to deport immigrants for wrongthink and wrongspeech, for taking part in a pro-Palestine demonstration, but also for writing a newspaper article, making a social media post, sharing a social media post, even liking one. They think that such people have no right not to be snatched off the street by goon squads. And they think that when immigrants face deportation for wrongthink they should have no right to contest the decisions made about them. The US courts may yet disagree with the Trumpists about these matters, but we’ll see.

Immigrants are people. Sorry for insisting on a truism, but I say it not just to argue that they have rights as humans, but also to make a point about their behaviour. US citizens are people too. And as people do, individuals in these two groups will barter and truck, fuck, form romantic ties, break bread, get drunk together, study together, worship together, share and dispute ideals, like and dislike books, operas, tv shows. Et cetera. You can’t monitor and control the activities of the individuals in one of these groups without monitoring and controlling the activities of the people in the other group who are in millions of cases the counterparties to their transactions and attachments.²

One of the marks of a free society, at least as many liberals and conservatives have insisted, is that it is composed of smaller societies through which much of its life is conducted.³ Associations, clubs, universities, schools, families, and so forth. Those societies have a life of their own and the wider society of which they form a part loses its own freedom and vitality when the state subordinates their inner life to its own purposes. Not that all such regulation is bad: some is necessary for justice and equality and even child protection (cf Brighouse and Swift)⁴. But overdo it and you create not a free society but a totalitarian one. Though immigrants may not be full legal and political members of the big society, they are often full and equal participants in the smaller ones and, as such, they need to be able to argue, express, consent, dissent, voice and exit just as the other members do. The smaller societies can’t function properly if they are composed of some people with rights and some people without them. Every member needs to hear what other members say and when some people can’t express themselves for fear of the consequences that not only destroys the inner life of society but also leaves individuals open to blackmail and exploitation.

As the United States slides into totalitarianism, there’s not much that anyone can say in a blog post that will prevent the worst. But if it is, at least, to stand as a warning to other societies that want to retain such freedom as they have, then we had better notice that the casual assumption that a neat quasi-natural divide can be drawn between citizens and immigrants isn’t limited to the US, it is the routine unthinking blather of politicians in Europe and elswhere, and not just on the extreme right. And if and when the bad times come and the immigrants get targeted, that will harm not just the direct objects of xenophobic policies but also all of the individuals who live lives entwined with theirs, some of whom will doubtless find their own status reclassified.

(Hi all, wonderful to become part of this great blog! But now, directly on to some content!)

Imagine that you have a toothache, and a visit at the dentist reveals that a major operation is needed. You phone your health insurance. You listen to the voice of the chatbot, press the buttons to go through the menu. And then you hear: “We have evaluated your profile based on the data you have agreed to share with us. Your dental health behavior scores 6 out of 10. The suggested treatment plan therefore requires a co-payment of [insert some large sum of money here].”

This may sound like science fiction. But many other insurances, e.g. car insurances, already build on automated data being shared with them. If they were allowed, health insurers would certainly like to access our data as well – not only those from smart toothbrushes, but also credit card data, behavioral data (e.g. from step counting apps), or genetic data. If they were allowed to use them, they could move towards segmented insurance plans for specific target groups. As two commentators, on whose research I come back below, recently wrote about health insurance: “Today, public plans and nondiscrimination clauses, not lack of information, are what stands between integration and segmentation.”

If, like me, you’re interested in the relation between knowledge and institutional design, insurance is a fascinating topic. The basic idea of insurance is centuries old – here is a brief summary (skip a few paragraphs if you know this stuff). Because we cannot know what might happen to us in the future, but we can know that on an aggregate level, things will happen to people, it can make sense to enter an insurance contract, creating a pool that a group jointly contributes to. Those for whom the risks in question materialize get support from the pool. Those for whom it does not materialize may go through life without receiving any money, but they still know that they could get support if something happened to them. As such, insurance combines solidarity within a group with individual pre-caution.

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Now that the U.S. faces the return of a fascist President to power, we must consider the connections among plutocracy, misogyny, and fascism. In 2016, many pundits attributed Trump’s election to the rightward shift of white working-class voters in response to economic anxieties inflicted by neoliberal globalization. Political scientists quickly refuted this theory, pointing to polling and other data indicating that Trump supporters were driven by racial anxieties spurred by immigration. Trump’s appeal lay in his fascist politics of racial nostalgia–his then-implicit promise to restore whites to a dominant position in society. There is a lot of truth to this story. However, its narrow focus on working-class voters lets racist plutocrats and small business owners off the hook. It also fails to account for the misogynistic gender politics of fascist movements like Trump’s. Here I want to unpack the gender politics of plutocracy, which locates primary responsibility for fascism at the top of the class hierarchy.

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Citizens’ assemblies are a hot topic these days in democratic theory. Hélène Landemore gave her Tanner Lecture at University of Michigan last semester, describing her experience on the governance committee of the French Citizens’ Convention on the End of Life. Her account of how ordinary citizens could not only deliberate seriously about a contentious issue, but even come to love one another despite their disagreements, was moving and inspirational. I agree with her that citizens’ assemblies offer a promising way to revitalize democracy and reduce the alienation of ordinary people from government–an alienation that factors into the cynicism, nihilism, and “shake things up” populist authoritarianism that is endangering many democracies today.

Here I want to add to her argument a more specific claim, which is the pivotal role citizens can play in directly strengthening the democratic structure of representative government. This can be seen in Michigan’s Independent Citizens’ Redistricting Commission. Unlike the many experiments in citizens’ assemblies that have only an advisory role, MICRC has genuine legislative power. It is charged with drawing fair (not gerrymandered) districts for the state legislature and Michigan’s seats in the U.S. House of Representatives, without interference by politicians. [click to continue…]

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).

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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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