Political Theory/Political Philosophy

We’ll be hosting one of our book events on Erik Olin Wright’s new book, Envisioning Real Utopias (UK) in the Fall (probably late September), so I thought I’d let people know that the book is out (and excellent) so you can get hold of it and read it in time, if you want to.

Erik has spent a long time working on the book, and even longer on the ideas (I remember a meeting in 1994, in which he announced his decision to name the broader project of which this is a part the “Real Utopias Project” — predating, I think, Rawls’s use of the phrase “realistic utopianism”). At the core of the RUP (more details here), and of the book, is a recognition that the anti-capitalist left has been strong on critique of capitalism, but weak on the presentation of feasible alternatives, and in particular on providing the kind of detail about those alternatives that demonstrates both how they would realize egalitarian values and makes them open to scrutiny and critique. Envisioning Real Utopias is both a manifesto and a guidebook, if you like: an argument for taking institutional design seriously, and a guide to how to do that. Its a book that sociologists will want to read, but also, frankly, that everyone in political theory and philosophy should be reading too (even if they do not think of themselves as egalitarians). To be honest, I’ve been living close to the book so long that it I realize my endorsement may not be unbiased. Here, then, is what Swift says about it on the back cover:

Hugely rich and stimulating, Envisioning Real Utopias is may books in one: an incisive diagnosis of the harms done by capitalism; a masterful synthesis of the best work in political sociology and political economy over the past thirty years; and innovative theoretical framework for conceptualizing both the goals of progressive change and the strategies for their achievement; and inspiring story of actually existing challenges to capitalism that have arisen within capitalism itself; and a compelling essay on the relation between the desirable, the viable and the achievable. Anyone interested in the future of leftist politics has to read this book.

I agree.

And here is Erik introducing the book:

Envisioning Real Utopias from West Coast Poverty Center on Vimeo.

David Williams writes at The Daily Texan:

bq. On May 22, the State Board of Education voted 9-5 to reform its secondary-school social studies curriculum, emphasizing that the content of these guidelines serves to enable students to “appreciate the basic democratic values of our state and nation.” While these reforms have been broadly condemned by liberals across the country, it is important that both liberals and conservatives together become more broadly familiar with the texts now firmly in the curriculum. Specifically, we should take a closer look at Charles de Montesquieu, Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Thomas Aquinas. …

Read the whole thing, as they say.

Andrew McCarthy’s book is apparently selling well! We’ll get to that.

But first: a couple weeks ago Jonah Goldberg did one of those diavlog thingies with David Frum. The occasion was Frum making accusations of ‘epistemic closure’ and Goldberg protesting that it’s all nonsense. The Jim Manzi/Mark Levin thing. The section we will be concerned with is this one. Only 9 minutes long, so you can watch it yourself. I’ve transcribed some highlights. (If anyone listens and notices I’ve mistranscribed or misleadingly paraphrased, please say so in comments.) [click to continue…]

I know, a second successive post linking to Stuart White at Next Left, but his analysis of “Orange Book” liberalism and its distance from egalitarian liberalism is deadly accurate, especially regarding David Laws (Chief Secretary to the Treasury and former VP at JP Morgan). Laws may not be a libertarian, but he may be the closest thing to it in the British political mainstream: certainly more Hayek than Hobhouse:

bq. Reading someone like David Laws, for example, there is at times a clear sense that the free market produces a distribution of income and wealth which is a kind of natural or moral baseline. It is departures from the baseline that have to be justified. Laws and other Orange Bookers are of course not libertarians, so they are prepared to allow that some departures – some tax-transfers/tax-service arrangements – can be justified. (This is the sense in which they remain social liberals, albeit not egalitarian ones.) But the presumption, for Laws, is clearly for ‘leaving money in people’s pockets’. This presumption runs completely counter to one of the basic claims of contemporary liberalism as developed in the work of such as Rawls, Dworkin and Ackerman.

White is quite right to say, of course, that egalitarian liberals also have serious difficulties with Labour on account of its dreadful record on civil liberties. But my sense is that quite a lot (though not all) of that record was the result of channeling the permanent agenda of the Home Office (note the way in which the Tories, in power advocated ID cards with Labour opposed, with the position reversing some time after 1997).

Conor Friedersdorf showed up promptly in comments to my last post, which was a response to his post, which was welcome. Dialogue! Unfortunately, we weren’t prompt in welcoming him. I think he got stuck in the queue for the longest time. Either that or I just missed him sitting up there at the top. Anyway, his response deserved something better than a 100-comments-late comment afterthought from me, when at last it came to my attention. So here goes. [click to continue…]

The Lib Dems (for it was their policy and not the Tories’) have axed the Child Trust Fund, which, as Stuart White points out over at Next Left, was one of those rare policies directly inspired by the egalitarian liberal theorizing of the past forty years. (h/t Virtual Stoa). (To discuss, head over to Next Left).

The Rand Paul vs. Civil Rights Act business has been fascinating.

I have particularly enjoyed attempts by Paul defenders to brush off the significance of his initial comments as ‘merely philosophical’ – as college bull-session irrelevancy, for which he is being unfairly held accountable. When, of course, the whole Tea Party point of Rand Paul’s candidacy is his libertarian-conservative philosophy, and his promise to stay true to the implications of it, as a legislator. (So the whole thing has been like this American Elf strip, but substitute ‘philosophy’ for ‘costume’.)

In walking this stuff back – in saying he would have voted for the Civil Rights Act, after all – Paul is walking back his longstanding, core philosophical commitments. So now we know: he is willing to vote for things things that, by his own lights, go against the Constitution and reduce individual liberty, in the most essential sense (freedom = unencumbered enjoyment of private property rights). This retreat really ought to be worse than out-and-out liberalism, again by Paul’s own lights, because liberals at least have the decency to be confused about what the Constitution says, having hallucinated commerce clause penumbrae that make it all ok. And liberals don’t value freedom all that highly, supposedly, so it’s not surprising that they are perfectly willing to chuck liberty into the fiery maw of the Moloch of ‘social justice’. At least there’s a failed god of socialism that they are doing it for. What’s Paul’s philosophical excuse? Why aren’t conservative-libertarians up in arms, complaining about this cowardly betrayal of Paul’s whole philosophy, after he got the nomination on the strength of his philosophy? Is no one willing to shout from the rooftops that Jim Crow – privately and informally enforced! – is the price we should be willing to pay for freedom? What’s the point of equating liberty with private property rights if you aren’t going to equate liberty with private property rights? Why are Paul’s defenders scrambling to make out how, plausibly, libertarianism should eliminate informal/social Jim Crow, once you clear away all legal, institutional, governmental forms of it? The essential point should be: even if it doesn’t, that’s not so important, because it’s not unjust. (Why would you be a propertarian sort of libertarian if you didn’t think so?)

Indeed, isn’t all this what Jonah Goldberg derides as ‘sherpa conservatism‘ – that is, the canard that conservatism is only acceptable as a more sure-footed means to liberal ends? So libertarian-conservatism is only acceptable if it conduces to a ‘nice’, racially-harmonious, integrated, multi-culti, ‘socially just’ society? When will libertarian-conservatives finally be willing to stand up for what their principles imply? Healthy civil society is based on bedrock respect for individual property rights. Period. [UPDATE: And formally equal political rights, true. But that doesn’t really change the equation.] It’s invidious to insinuate that a ‘nice’, integrated, racially harmonious, multi-culti, ‘socially just’ society must be our sole model of healthy civil society. (Yes, all that’s fine. But it’s not required, in principle, so you shouldn’t sacrifice principle for the sake of it. Sheesh. Barry Goldwater is spinning in his grave.)

Let’s consider David Bernstein’s latest post. [click to continue…]

There are two upcoming events in memory of G.A. (Jerry) Cohen, who died last year. The Philosophy Department at University College London, where Jerry taught from 1964 to the mid-1980s, is holding a reception at 5pm on Thursday 17 June at 19 Gordon Square (“details”:http://www.ucl.ac.uk/philosophy/ ) and two days later, on Saturday 19th June, there will be a memorial service at at All Souls College Oxford, where Jerry spent the remainder of his career ( 2.15pm in the Codrington Library). Myles Burnyeat, John Roemer, T. M. Scanlon, and Philippe Van Parijs will be
speaking at the All Souls memorial.

I’m grateful to commenters Lemuel Pitkin and Bill Gardner, who pointed me towards Rodrik’s trilemma the other day. In his latest Project Syndicate piece, Rodrik represents the trilemma thus:

bq. economic globalization, political democracy, and the nation-state are mutually irreconcilable. We can have at most two at one time. Democracy is compatible with national sovereignty only if we restrict globalization. If we push for globalization while retaining the nation-state, we must jettison democracy. And if we want democracy along with globalization, we must shove the nation-state aside and strive for greater international governance.

Possibly for pedantic reasons, I’m not all that happy with this formulation. After all, national sovereignty is pre-eminently a legal concept and democracy might be defined merely in procedural terms, and it isn’t at all obvious why regular elections, legal sovereignty and globalization would be incompatible in the way Rodrik suggests. However, there’s a more careful version in his 2000 paper “How far will international economic integration go?” (J. Econ Perspectives 14:1) where the trilemma is expressed as being between international economic integration, the nation state, and “mass politics”, where the latter refers to

bq. political systems where: a) the franchise is unrestricted; b) there is a high degree of political mobilization; and c) political institutions are responsive to moblized groups. (p.180)

In the 2000 article, Rodrik discusses Friedman’s “Golden Straitjacket” where “mass politics” is the disappearing bit:

bq. the shrinkage of politics would get reflected in the insulation of economic policy-making bodies (central banks, fiscal authorities, and so on) from political participation and debate …. (p. 183)

Cue Stephanie Flanders on the UK’s new Office for Budget Responsibility.

One problem with the recent discussion of epistemic closure or, in my preferred terminology, agnotology, ( that is, the manufacture and maintenance of ignorance) on the US[1] political right is that a lot of it has been discussed in fairly abstract terms. However, there is a fair bit of agreement that climate change is both a key example, and that the rightwing construction of a counternarrative to mainstream science on this issue marks both an important example, and a major step in the journey towards a completely closed parallel universe of discourse.

Climate change as a whole is too big and complicated to be useful in understanding what is going on, so it is useful to focus on one particular example, which does not require any special knowledge of climate science or statistics. The Oregon Petition, commonly quoted as showing that “31000 scientists reject global warming” not only fits the bill perfectly but was raised by Jim Manzi in his critique of Mark Levin.

So, it provides a useful test case for understanding the agnotology of the right.

[click to continue…]

[UPDATE: One of the CAP authors, John Halpin, showed up in comments to complain – very reasonably – that I linked to the wrong part of their three part series, and failed to make clear it was part of a series. (I copied it from Goldberg, in composing the post! Why would I assume that anything he does is right?) Anyway, here is Halprin’s response to my post, with links. Halprin also argues that he and his co-author handled some of the stuff I wanted included in part 3. I admit that I had only read parts 1 & 2 before writing the post – I though part 3 was still forthcoming – but it doesn’t seem to me that the material from part 3 he quotes is quite forceful or extensive enough to do the job, even given that it must be done briefly.]

Jonah Goldberg links, approvingly, to a Damon Root post at Reason, complaining about a new Center For American Progress paper entitled “The Progressive Intellectual Tradition In America” (PDF). Root’s complaint is fair, but only up to a point. Here’s the fair bit: the CAP paper is a feel-good affair. Nothing about uglier aspects or excesses of American Progressivism: specifically, racism and sexism, hence eugenics. (And imperialism, but let’s just stick with eugenics for this post.) Of course the obvious objection to that is that there was nothing distinctively Progressive about racism and sexism. It’s just that we are talking about the late 19th/early 20th Centuries here. Still, if you combine eugenics – even if it’s only average for the era – with political philosophy and policy you sure can get bad results. There’s no reason whatsoever to paste this ugly history on every single contemporary formulation of progressive political philosophy. If Barack Obama is giving a stump speech, and he delivers some applause line about progressive ideals, there is no reason for him to pause and add a pedantic footnote about eugenics and how some Progressives, and some people some Progressives admired as scientific authorities, believed ugly stuff a hundred years ago. But if you are writing a history, the presumption is that you want people to learn from history, and some of the major lessons of the Progressive Era are cautionary ones, philosophically and in terms of policy. I doubt the authors of these papers would deny this, so including a ‘cautionary lessons’ subsection would have been a better scheme. (If I had to guess, they’re thinking tactically. ‘If we mention this stuff, being careful to get all the necessary nuance in, someone like Jonah Goldberg will find it and quote it, carving out the nuance, and it will sound like even CAP admits that Progressivism = Eugenics.’ Still, if you are damned if you do, damned if you don’t, you should do the right thing and be damned.)

Now we get to the unfair bit. Root and Goldberg seem to think that if you are advocating progressivism today – rather than writing history – there is some vital need to self-lacerate, early and often, over the whole eugenics-a-hundred-years-ago business. The Goldberg rule seems to be this: if some Progressive believed in eugenics – or if some really major, central figure of the Progressive movement admired someone who was a major proponent of eugenics – then Progressives have to “own up” to this. Goldberg (from the post linked above): [click to continue…]

OK, I’m going to try to raise the philosophical tone of this whole libertarian thing. It’s the least I can do. Snarking is a base motive, after all.

Jacob Levy has earnestly maintained in comments that it is unfair to judge libertarianism by the standard of Bryan Caplan‘s attempts to turn the Gilded Age into a Golden Age of ladyfreedom, and I would just like to say that, in a sense, Jacob is perfectly correct. Let me make this first point briefly (because lord knows this post is going to be long enough). Sometimes people distinguish ‘thin’ and ‘thick’. ‘Thin’ is the kind of ‘propertarian’ libertarian that Caplan can’t be because the whole inability to make contracts/own your own property thing is a straight-up deal-breaker. ‘Thick’ is the kind of libertarian Caplan can’t be because of all the Mill stuff in my previous post: can’t let society play the tyrant. It’s perfectly reasonable for Jacob to maintain that if you are going to pillory libertarianism, in a theoretical sense, you should pick one or the other of these two sorts – or both. But Caplan is neither, in his arguments about women’s freedom under coverture. What is Caplan really? I dunno. I suppose he’s a momentarily strayed ‘propertarian’, although I’m happy for him to speak for himself on this point.

But Brad DeLong and others fire back that it’s reasonable to hold libertarianism to account for the bad company that keeps it. Well, I dunno. I agree that it calls for diagnosis, but you still want to keep the theoretical point separate. Maybe that will even help with the diagnosis. [click to continue…]

Having made one non-libertarian-related post, I can now say, with a good conscience, that Bryan Caplan has responded to his critics. It is a wonder to behold.

I will make two notes. (No doubt you yourself will come to have your own favorite moments.) First, a lot of the trouble here obviously rotates around the issue of systematic social oppression. Caplan barrels straight through like so: “there’s a fundamental human right to non-violently pressure and refuse to associate with others.” That hardly speaks to real concerns about violence. But beyond that Caplan doesn’t notice that, even if he’s right about this fundamental human right, he’s no longer even defending the proposition that women were more free in the 1880’s, never mind successfully defending it. He’s defending the proposition that there is a fundamental right, which can be exercised, systematically, to make women much less free, that was better protected in the 1880’s. So if women value this libertarian right more than freedom, they might rationally prefer that sort of society. But even so, they should hardly regard themselves as more free, for enjoying this right. Rather, they should regard themselves as (rationally) sacrificing liberty, a lesser value, for love of libertarianism, a higher value and separate jar of pickles altogether

J.S. Mill had some things to say on the subject. From On Liberty:

Like other tyrannies, the tyranny of the majority was at first, and is still vulgarly, held in dread, chiefly as operating through the acts of the public authorities. But reflecting persons perceived that when society is itself the tyrant – society collectively, over the separate individuals who compose it – its means of tyrannizing are not restricted to the acts which it may do by the hands of its political functionaries. Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practises a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself. Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough; there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling; against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them; to fetter the development, and, if possible, prevent the formation, of any individuality not in harmony with its ways, and compel all characters to fashion themselves upon the model of its own. There is a limit to the legitimate interference of collective opinion with individual independence; and to find that limit, and maintain it against encroachment, is as indispensable to a good condition of human affairs, as protection against political despotism.

It is possible to object – I take it Caplan would – that limiting people’s rights to ‘act the tyrant’ in a collective, social sense, is illegitimate. But that is not to say that Mill is wrong about the ‘fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply’ bits. He obviously isn’t.

Now of course Caplan does dispute the ‘fewer means of escape’ bit, and in the most delightful way. “Market forces have a strong tendency to weed out discrimination.” It’s like the old cartoon with the two economists. “Hey look, $20.” “If that were really there, someone would have found it by now.” In this case: “Hey look, oppressed women in 1880.” Post title writes itself. As a method of doing empirical history, this leaves a lot to be desired, I should think.

Leaping heroically into the Golden Age of the 1880’s fray, Bryan Caplan now has a post up on EconLog arguing that … well, I’ll just quote the final paragraph:

I know that my qualified defense of coverture isn’t going to make libertarians more popular with modern audiences. Still, truth comes first. Women of the Gilded Age were very poor compared to women today. But from a libertarian standpoint, they were freer than they are on Sex and the City.

I cannot honestly say that the author provides any serious defense of this proposition.

UPDATE: pending a better explanation, heur wins the thread:

Caplan has a friend, also a libertarian, who said something stupid to his wife concerning the 1880s, and is now in a great deal of trouble. Caplan owes his friend a very large favor, and so now makes good on his debt by writing this post, intended to make his friend appear less stupid (and therefore less offensive to his wife). Since Caplan’s marriage is stronger, contractually, he is better able to bear the brunt of his wife’s annoyance. Thus what appeared at first to be ideological obstinance turns out to be an interesting application of the concept of comparative advantage, and an illustration of the bonds that can be formed between persons even in the absence of coercive state power.