One very nice feature of Klein’s paper was that she nicely showed how Spinoza could have become a hero of those that practice ideology critique and the hermeneutics of suspicion (and why he should be thought of as one of the founders (alongside Lippmann) of the study of public opinion). And yet, for all his historicism and materialism, even dialectical conception of history, there is a robust strain in our philosopher of freedom, Spinoza, that resists assimilation to the revolutionary tradition. At heart he is averse to glorifying revolutionary violence. The package of views is unusual to us. Many of Spinoza’s methods read ‘Left,’ many of his political instincts read ‘Right.’

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With that in place, let me quote the passage anew before I discuss it.

If human nature were so constituted that men desired most what is most useful, there’d be no need of skill to produce concord and loyalty [nulla esset opus arte ad concordiam ed fidem]. But it’s evident that human nature isn’t at all like that. As a result, it’s been necessary to set up a state, so that everyone—both those who rule and those who are ruled—does what’s for the common well-being, whether they want to or not. That is, it’s been necessary to set it up so that everyone is compelled to live according to the prescription of reason, whether of his own accord, or by force, or by necessity.—Spinoza PT 6.3. Curley’s translation modestly changed.1

So, here Spinoza suggests that it is human imperfection that generates the art of government. It is important to Spinoza’s general outlook that humans are not angels. We should not theorize as if perfect compliance with the principles of justice were humanly possible. And the very first passages of the Political Treatise involve a very Machiavellian polemic against the philosophers. And he clearly wants the reader to think of Plato and More as exemplary of what he rejects.

Crucially for what follows, Spinoza treats the art of government as co-eval with the state. And here he very strongly seems to anticipate Mandeville (and echo the ancient tradition of wise legislators) that the art of government is required in all the founding or constitutional moments of political life.

As an aside, as regular readers know, I have aligned myself with Rousseau (and Smith), and behind them, I think Plato, who suggest that the art of government is quite downstream in the development of a state generated by the advanced division of labor and the invention of bureaucracy2 So, while the nature of human nature is not irrelevant to the art of government, on the view of Rousseau (et al.) the art of government is tracking and is constituted by epistemic challenges/limitations of rulers. Whereas for Spinoza the art of government is constituted by a naturalized version of original sin or human dangerousness. (But see below for an interesting qualification.)

So, what jumped out at me in the quoted passage is that the state is first and foremost a means to bind and limit the powerful. (This evokes Glaucon’s social contract in the Republic.) They, as much as everyone else, will be compelled to serve the public good.

Now, there are two important thoughts lurking here. The first is related to what we may call mechanism/institutional design. Under what structure can even a violent leader serve the public interest? I think Spinoza’s significance to the history of mechanism design, not the least in its public choice variant is, while underappreciated, rather important. But since I have published on it (here), I will leave it aside now.

The second is that in a well-ordered monarchy, the state institutions constrain the ruler and his clique. My use of ‘clique’ is deliberate; that Spinoza thinks of the well-ordered monarchy as a kind of aristocracy is made explicit shortly thereafter:

the power of one man is quite unequal to bearing such a burden. That’s why, when a multitude has chosen a King, he seeks Commanders or Counselors or friends, to whom he commits his own well- being and that of everyone else. So a state thought to be an absolute Monarchy is really, in practice, an Aristocracy. Spinoza (PT 6.5)

As a non-trivial aside: notice that Spinoza here does recognize that the division of labor is an important feature of political rule. But he places its origin not in epistemic considerations but in a more general (ahh) load-management challenges.

But more important for our present purposes is that Spinoza recognizes that the organization and structure of political rule around an elite is key to the very possibility of an ordered monarchy. In fact, I have been using ‘ordered monarchy’ not just to track Spinoza’s contrast between monarchy and tyranny, but also because for Spinoza a proper monarchy is de facto an elective one. (PT 6.13) And so that makes his account somewhat salient to presidential systems; and not the least because (not unlike Machiavelli) he envisions an armed citizenry. (PT 6.10)

That the state institutions constrain the ruler in a well-ordered monarchy becomes clear later in the chapter. And the first way this is so is that ultimately the armed citizenry is a countervailing power. But second, the monarch is embedded into structures of the aristocracy that make him epistemically and in other decision-heavy ways dependent on that aristocracy those elites.3 For, Spinoza advocates a separation of functions (some juridical, some executive, some educative) that the monarch cannot control without other elites.

So, one way to think about how Spinoza is describing a well-ordered monarchy is as a political form in which elites are domesticated. And what’s striking about how he presents the monarchy, the elites constrain each other in a complex web. This complex web is characterized by institutions and norms and rules of interaction among these elites. Interestingly, this turns the state (and notice that TP 6.3 is quite general) from the rule of the most successfully violent into something more regular.

Now, in the stadial theory of North, Wallis, Weingast that is somewhat common ground among ‘state capacity liberals,’ (recall here) what Spinoza points to in TP 6.3 is a crucial moment. Let me quote Billy Christmas (out of context): It’s when a “limited access state becomes “mature,” and therefore at the doorstep of transitioning into an open-access order that is self-constrained, when the elite coalition devise impersonal ways of negotiating and renegotiating.” (2026: p. 17) To put my point in jargon, Spinoza recognizes what in this literature has become known as the mature ‘limited access’ state as the ideal type of monarchy, which is — somewhat more controversially — the ideal type of presidential system.

Let me be clear what I am not saying: Spinoza is not being assimilated here to the liberal tradition or being presented as a theorist of open access states. In fact, for him in an ordered monarchy access to the elite(s) is quite constrained. While Spinoza offers an elite theory in which the aristocracy of birth is displaced by a natural aristocracy, access to this elite is regulated by education, age, international experience, and a number of other qualifications. (PT6.16) But once in the elite it, in turn, is self-constrained because Spinoza has institutions engage in most of the mutual political interactions.

One final thought. That the rulers, even elected presidents for life, are subject to compulsion in the service of the public good strikes me as good a foundational claim of state capacity liberalism as any. So in that sense Spinoza is part of a wider domestication/transformation of Machiavelli that prepares the way (on my somewhat idiosyncratic views) for the foundational moments of liberalism in the late eighteenth century. But to what degree such compulsion of the rulers can be thought of and even be endorsed as rational is worth its own separate treatment.

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I heard, then, that at Naucratis, in Egypt, was one of the ancient gods of that country, the one whose sacred bird is called the ibis, and the name of the god himself was Theuth. He it was who invented numbers and arithmetic and geometry and astronomy, also draughts and dice, and, most important of all, letters. Now the king of all Egypt at that time was the god Thamus, who lived in the great city of the upper region, which the Greeks call the Egyptian Thebes, and they call the god himself Ammon. To him came Theuth to show his inventions, saying that they ought to be imparted to the other Egyptians. But Thamus asked what use there was in each, and as Theuth enumerated their uses, expressed praise or blame, according as he approved or disapproved. The story goes that Thamus said many things to Theuth in praise or blame of the various arts, which it would take too long to repeat; but when they came to the letters, “This invention, O king,” said Theuth, “will make the Egyptians wiser and will improve their memories; for it is an elixir of memory and wisdom that I have discovered.” But Thamus replied, “Most ingenious Theuth, one man has the ability to beget arts, but the ability to judge of their usefulness or harmfulness to their users belongs to another; and now you, who are the father of letters, have been led by your affection to ascribe to them a power the opposite of that which they really possess. For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise.—Phaedrus, 274-275, translated by Harold N. Fowler.

Sometimes people that know and like each other, and that would never employ snark with each other, can still talk entirely past each other online. wrote a fruitful and prudent sub-stack post (here) on the ‘longstanding debate on AI and deskilling.’ As he notes it was prompted by my Kvetching about a 2 June announcement by The University of Chicago’s President that it has a contract with Anthropic to give all of its students, and all of its staff and faculty, full access to Claude Enterprise.

Now, I viewed that announcement by Paul Alivisatos (the University President) the way I interpret many of that university’s public announcements during the last two decades: as a cynical, branding ploy aiming to keep the university in the eyes of parents who might pay full tuition for their kids. In my view, in its public communication, the UofC has stopped trying to be the academy for would-be-academics and those closely adjacent to it. The fate of skill was far from my mind. I viewed the UofC as vice-signaling its path away from all that is noble and beautiful about higher education. (I will explain that near the end of this post.)

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I was never an undergraduate at UofC. But on my second day of graduate school there, I remember walking in the undergraduate library (yes, there was an undergrad library!) surrounded by kids who clearly had pulled an all-nighter (mostly with Homer, but a smattering of other thick books—some were asleep with the books on the desks others were engaged in intense discussions with each other. The most popular T-Shirt in my time there, was ‘Where Fun Goes to Die’ (and closely followed ‘Hell Freezes Over.’) The place had an ethos centered on its undergraduate core that involved reading, discussion, and writing and that permeated it. (Graduate students often taught in The Core so it wasn’t just for the kidz.)

While I was contemplating a response to Carlo’s essay, I decided to do what countless Substack essayists have done while confronting the significance of LLMs: I went back to a familiar passage (quoted above this post) in the Phaedrus. I read it with fresh eyes.1

Naucratis was a commercial port on the Nile that in Socrates’ time had, somewhat unusually, been populated, as Herodotus attests, by Greeks for several generations. So, it is fascinating that Socrates makes the God of the Underworld, and patron of scribes, Thoth/Theuth dwell there in that cosmopolitan port. One is made to wonder whether this God didn’t pick up the use of letters from some travelers (say Phoenicians), or invented it to mediate or judge a commercial dispute.

As an aside, I would be amazed if Socrates (or Plato) were not alluding to Herodotus in this narrative. For, according to Herodotus, Cadmus brought the Phoenician alphabet to Greece and founded Boeotian Thebes. And the fact that there are two Thebes means one must presuppose a wider world to keep them apart. That is to be distinguished, of course, from entities with multiple names.

Now, while it is tempting to rush ahead to the part of the story where deskilling is discussed, I want to pause for a second at the division of labor between Theuth and Thamus/Ammon. Theuth invents, but Ammon is the regulator who decides whether an invention can be circulated and to what extent. Wisely, these ancient Egyptians don’t let the inventor himself decide on issues of public safety and public utility. This part of the myth is usually skipped because governance is nowhere near as sexy as debating the possible deskilling effects of a new technology. Carlo’s piece nicely illustrates this, all the hard social and political challenges get solved magically in it.2

What is most notable about Ammon in his dealing with Theuth is that he focuses on two features of an invention before he gives permission to circulate it: first, its practical use. And here he is quite clearly guided by the inventor’s views. And, second, the potential harms (or, let’s be cheeky, inductive risks) involved. And notably, when it comes to foreseeing harms Ammon’s own views are more decisive than any inventors not even a God. And the reason for this is explicitly spelled out: would be inventors tend to misperceive the true nature of their inventions, primarily seeing the benefits only. I return to this below.

Obviously, Socrates is simplifying the division of labor a bit by using Ammon. Most kings may (if they know their Hobbes) wish to overawe all the citizens in a godlike fashion, but they will not be in the same epistemically advantageous decision siruation as (let’s stipulate) Ammon. So, how they will judge the possible harms of new technology will be, in fact, a rather challenging governance question.

My point is not that Socrates presents us with the right governance model. But importantly, he presents with such a model. In fact, lurking here is a more important point: that an art of governance is itself the effect of the invention of the very writing-technology that we are discussing here. For writing makes bureaucracy possible. And this raises new problems. As Socrates alerts us.

Conveniently enough (for my new debate with Carlo), the harms Ammon is alert to in the invention of writing do involve, alongside the acquisition of a new skill (writing), some de-skilling, including the art of memory. Now, one might have thought that Ammon would have made a simple cost-benefit analysis to the individual or to the population of the gaining of one skill (writing) and the loss of another (worse memory). Is writing more efficient than relying on memory?

But what’s interesting about Ammon’s diagnosis is that he diagnoses an externality, actually two externalities, that are especially important to a King-Ruler. And the externality has everything to do, I think, with the fact that writing is the tool of bureaucracy. As a close reader of Plato, Rousseau (recall here), reminds us (in the Third Discourse) bureaucracies are invented when the domain to be managed cannot be surveilled by single person or family. A bureaucracy is a division of labor that is spatially and temporarily extended, and relies on proper record-keeping to manage socially complex affairs.

But in this bureaucratic managing there is also a useful fiction: that the recorded ‘data’ convey the facts, and that the person reading the report on the data understands what they signify. Writing makes a form of impersonal acquaintance possible. But the risk that Ammon (correctly) identifies is that the bureaucrats and those they serve (governors like Ammon himself) will “read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant.” The reader of the report will end up with knowledge of the reported reality, but not (without further instruction) with its connection to the underlying facts. And if they forget this distinction, as the written world takes on its own reality, they will seem wise when they may not be so. How to manage a bureaucracy that systematically generates this kind of vulnerability, is a central problem in the art of governance. When things remain on the rails, this challenge is usually invisible to most. But when it goes off the rails — public infrastructure is not repaired, corruption goes unpunished, etc. — it is often too late for minor fixes (not the least in circumstances of emergency that Carlo acknowledges).

The written word, when used as a technology of governance, inevitably creates legibility (of the population and society) and simultaneously all kinds of new opacities. As I have noted before (recall here), this is a feature of modern LLMs, whose internal architecture and the process by way which they convey content, remains largely opaque to end-users. This is especially important because the error rates of LLMs remains non-trivial. This output externality is only visible if you look, and care.

I could stop here. But I promised a second externality as noted by Ammon. And this is a more important social externality. The users of a new technology will feel more confident. And, let’s stipulate, their own confidence is not misplaced. Like Carlo’s ‘off-loaders’ they get more important things done in less time. Unfortunately, human nature being what it is, it will encourage boasting and self-aggrandizement. And, even if this self-satisfaction were fully merited, as Ammon recognizes this is a dynamic that predictably generates social instability. Not the least because off-loading boasters refuse to be bothered by the real challenges new technology introduces. The ethos of a polity may change for the worse with new technology—and it doesn’t take much imagination to discern that Ammon is worried about new idols and new modes. This may be inevitable, even if we are often willing to pay the price.

Now, Carlo treats the university as a site of skill-transference, and in which Claude is one tool of many. And this is no surprise, because if you return to the press release of Alivisatos’ statement, you will see that the key word in it is ‘tool.’ Tools are used. And that’s part of the way Alivisatos sells his message.

But he doesn’t convey at all that he has evaluated the risks (a word he does not use which is notable for a modern executive) and externalities a new tool predictably generates for the ‘community’ (his word) he has been charged to lead. All he notes are the “astonishing and inspiring ways” of the new tool.

In fairness, to Alivisatos: when you read the full press release, he is setting up a quite elaborate governance structure for new AI. So, it is quite possible that he has assimilated the first lesson I wished to derive from Socrates’ myth. (And he could have been told it if he had asked to relate his policy plans to the myth of Theuth to a desktop AI.) But I don’t think a fair reading of his text suggests he is signaling concern over or apt care about what might be lost in the process.

Even so, I used the language of governance throughout this post, because I was most struck by his message to his students:

To our students: Many of you already are reflecting on how a skeptical, ethical, and ambitious approach to AI applies to your education. Your faculty and instructors are developing practices in the classroom within a philosophical framework to support you in opening and sharpening your mind during your journey here. That framework will prepare you well to meet the opportunities of a changing world. You can understand more about how your faculty are thinking about helping you to learn by reading about a recent series of workshops sponsored by the Center for Teaching and Learning. Policies vary by course, and you are required to follow them closely; but the sum across your full curriculum will give you diverse learning experiences with and without AI assistance. Instructors at all levels are navigating a fast-evolving landscape, and the University has a duty of care to ensure that the education offered to you is responsive to these technological developments by teaching you how to think with machines, how to think without them, and how to think about them.

There are a lot of action words in this paragraph (reflecting, developing, reading, navigating, and teaching not to least how to think) and a few technocratic terms (framework, opportunities, policies, diverse learning experiences, landscape)), including a few commands (required). What’s notably absent in this message are reading, interpretation, and (most notably) discussion. That’s not just a matter of vocabulary. Something has gone off the rails here, and by this I don’t mean the total absence of reference to the world of books and intellectual culture in his message.

Back in the day (and I amplified with some twists), Agnes Callard suggested that “A university is a place devoted to the problem of how to make serious use of free time.” It would be wrong to suggest that the proper use of intellectual tools has no place in this vision of the academy. But as Callard notes such a university presupposes what she calls ‘inquisitive leadership.’ Alivisatos’ rhetoric is very far from it. He leads not by teaching and learning here, but by cheerleading and commanding.3 And this is why I called it vice-signaling.

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So, with that in place, David Hume first explicitly introduces Samuel Clarke in the (1739) Treatise in the context of Hume’s criticism of the “general maxim in philosophy, that whatever begins to exist, must have a cause of existence.” (T 1.3.3.1) Hume allows that this maxim is usually taken for granted. But he also recognizes that there have been explicit arguments in support of the maxim.

Now, the maxim matters, especially, in the context of the cosmological argument. In that argument a contingent series of causes (or, say, motions) originates in an ultimate (or necessary) cause, like God. And in the generation before Hume quite a number of people had articulated variants of the cosmological argument in response to Spinoza and Spinozism.

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In Treatise 1.3.3, Clarke is identified as the source of the “second argument” in favor of the general maxim that Hume aims to refute. The argument attributed by Hume to Clarke is this: “Every thing…must have a cause; for if any thing wanted a cause, it wou’d produce itself; that is, exist before it existed; which is impossible.” (T 1.3.3.5)

Before we go to Hume’s refutation of the argument attributed to Clarke it is worth noting six things. First, to the best of my knowledge this is a paraphrase of Clarke’s reasoning in the (1704) Demonstration. There Clarke appeals to this ‘argument’ throughout his defense of the cosmological argument. Second, what’s very striking about Hume’s paraphrase of Clarke is that in defending a kind of causal principle, Clarke is made out to deny a causa-sui (“produce itself’') on modal-ontological grounds (it is impossible to exist before one exists). So, on Hume’s reconstruction of Clarke’s defense of the general maxim, Spinozism (in so far as it embraces causa-sui) is one of Clarke’s targets. Now, that Spinoza and Spinozist “followers” are one of Clarke’s targets is made explicit in the sub-title of the Demonstration: “More particularly in Answer to Mr. Hobbs, Spinoza, and their Followers.” In the Demonstration it becomes clear that Toland, especially, is the follower in Clarke’s sight.

Fourth, that Clarke is critical of Spinoza and Spinozists would not have surprised a reader of Hume familiar with Clarke. But it is a bit unnecessary to Hume’s official point in Treatise 1.3.3 to include that in his own argument. Having said that, fifth, it is unclear to what degree Hume recognizes that Spinoza himself also holds a version of the causal principle, but if Hume attributes to Spinoza a version of the PSR or some causal principle, then this passage is evidence for Hume recognizing that Clarke’s disagreement with Spinozism involves rather fine-grained distinctions over the scope and nature of causal principles. (I am pretty sure that Hume is fully aware of the salient disagreements because (i) Clarke is very explicit about these matters and (ii) the salient material in Spinoza was widely commented on by others familiar to Hume —see my various papers collected in Newton’s Metaphysics: Essays.)

As an aside, in my chapter on “Newton’s Modal Metaphysics and Polemics with Spinozism in the “General Scholium,” I engage with Clarke’s “Sixth Letter to a Gentleman” published in 1738 (so just before Hume published the Treatise). In this exchange Clarke embraced a causal principle for the existence of God in order to deny causa-sui. For Clarke, God has something like a formal cause and that cause is necessity (and this helps explain why there is only one God according to Clarke). In my view, then, Treatise 1.3.3 is going after a number of Clarke’s arguments associated with his anti-spinozistic cosmological argument.

Now, sixth, Hume quite clearly treats the general maxim as an endorsement of what he calls ‘the necessity of a cause.’ By which Hume means that if one posits the existence of a cause for an effect, one must assume that this cause is always and everywhere the cause for that effect. But interestingly enough the two arguments in defense of the general maxim (in addition to the one just attributed to Clarke, Hume mentions one he attributes to Hobbes) are both arguments about the origin or beginning of some entity. And in both arguments uncaused or unconditioned origins are taken as violations of the general maxim. This is why I claim the spectre of the cosmological argument hovers over Hume’s treatment of the general maxim.

It is kind of amusing that Hume paraphrases an argument by Clarke to introduce the specter of Spinoza and Spinozism. Because the earlier argument in the same section that Hume explicitly attributes to Hobbes in defense of the general maxim goes like this: “All the points of time and place, say some philosophers, in which we can suppose any object to begin to exist, are in themselves equal; and unless there be some cause, which is peculiar to one time and to one place, and which by that means determines and fixes the existence, it must remain in eternal suspence; and the object can never begin to be, for want of something to fix its beginning.” And while one can try to reconstruct a version of this argument from Hobbes’ De Corpore, it is pretty clear that Hume is again paraphrasing Clarke (now from Clarke’s Third letter to Butler published in 1716 as an appendix to Clarke’s Discourse). (Rather than being directed at Hobbes, as Hume claims, Anscombe thought plausibly that this was a response to Leibniz in Hume; but (recall here) I have argued that Clarke is the more likely target.) And if we trace out Clarke’s references to his own work, we learn that Toland’s doctrine that motion is essential to matter is the target of Clarke’s argument. So, here, too, Spinozism is hovering over the material.

In the section (1.3.3) of the Treatise, Hume’s strategy in refuting the arguments in favor of the general maxim is pretty much the same in all cases. He claims that what is presupposed in them is precisely what needs to be shown. Hume uses this criticism not to undercut the general maxim, but to deny that it is founded on either “demonstrative or intuitive” certainty. (T. 1.3.3.8) Rather for Hume it is founded on a kind of moral certainty. (Cassirer notes that Hume here is echoing ‘s Gravesande; and that if we think through the nature of such moral certainty, it presupposes something like the ongoing existence of society. Hume’s critique of Clarke is that the principles we find in the cosmological argument are good enough for social life, but not powerful enough for a metaphysics-theology that is logically prior to social life.)

That Clarke and Clarke’s criticisms of Spinoza’s critique of the cosmological argument are central to the status of the denial of the solidity of the general maxim is reiterated a few years later. For, this material seems to have gotten Hume in trouble. Because in “A LETTER FROM A GENTLEMAN TO His Friend in Edinburgh: containing Some OBSERVATIONS on A Specimen of the Principles concerning RELIGION and MORALITY, said to be maintain’d in a Book lately publish’d, intituled, A Treatise of Human Nature, &c.,” he notes that “The Author [of the Treatise] is charged with Opinions leading to downright Atheism, chiefly by denying this Principle, That whatever begins to exist must have a Cause of Existence.” [L.26]

Now, in his response to the charge, Hume reiterates that all he had denied was that the demonstrative or intuitive certainty of the general maxim, not that he denies that it rests on “moral Evidence, and is followed by a Conviction of the same Kind with these Truths, That all Men must die, and that the Sun will rise To-morrow.” [L.26] In his letter Hume then goes on to grant that “even the metaphysical Arguments for [the existence of] a Deity are not affected by a Denial of the Proposition above-mentioned. It is only Dr. Clark’s Argument which can be supposed to be any way concerned.” [L.28, emphasis added.] That Hume claims “only Clark" [sic] is targeted is textually a bit odd; in context (T. 1.3.3) Hume had mentioned Hobbes and Locke as sources of argument in support of the general maxim. But I think it reveals Hume’s real point: we should not be fooled by the mention of Hobbes or Locke—Clarke’s defense of the cosmological argument, and his attempted refutation of Toland’s Spinozism is the real target of Treatise 1.3.3.

The next passage I want to discuss is from a footnote to chapter 7 in the first Enquiry (1748). The passage echoes a paragraph in the earlier (1745) “Letter from a Gentleman to his Friend” in Edinburg that I will quote in the accompanying note. Here's the bit from EHU:

When we call this a vis inertiæ, we only mark these facts, without pretending to have any idea of the inert power; in the same manner as, when we talk of gravity, we mean certain effects, without comprehending that active power. It was never the meaning of Sir Isaac Newton to rob second causes of all force or energy; though some of his followers have endeavoured to establish that theory upon his authority. On the contrary, that great philosopher had recourse to an etherial active fluid to explain his universal attraction; though he was so cautious and modest as to allow, that it was a mere hypothesis, not to be insisted on, without more experiments. I must confess, that there is something in the fate of opinions a little extraordinary. Des Cartes insinuated that doctrine of the universal and sole efficacy of the Deity, without insisting on it. Malebranche and other Cartesians made it the foundation of all their philosophy. It had, however, no authority in England. Locke, Clarke, and Cudworth, never so much as take notice of it, but suppose all along, that matter has a real, though subordinate and derived power. By what means has it become so prevalent among our modern metaphysicians? (EHU 7.26 note.)1

Here Clarke is used to deny the prevalence of occasionalism about matter in England prior to Berkeley (presumably one of ‘our modern metaphysicians’ mentioned in the last sentence; perhaps Dudgeon is the other as I first learned from Paul Russell).

Now, it is widely agreed in the current secondary literature (also by me) that Clarke held that matter is passive. But in returning to the literature I realized that Hume’s interpretation of Clarke — as denying occasionalism about body-body interaction — is decidedly in the minority now. To put my cards on the table: I am the minority who agrees with Hume’s interpretation of Clarke. Clarke’s position was quite mainstream in his own age: following Descartes, lots of natural philosophers thought passivity of matter did not prevent bodies from transmitting cause and effects to each other. All they thought was that some other agent (god, angels, humans) had to be the source of new motions or accelerations

In contrast to Hume’s interpretation of Clarke, the majority of scholars today reads Clarke’s insistence on the passivity of matter as Clark’s embrace of an occasionalism about bodies. For example, Andrea Sangiacomo (2018), “Samuel Clarke on Agent Causation, Voluntarism, and Occasionalism,” attributes such occasionalism about matter to Clarke. And, even more strikingly, he also claims that “Clarke argues that matter by itself is incapable of obeying any laws.” (p. 444) Sangiacomo’s is the majority reading of Clarke [it’s been called ““body-body occasionalism” (Ablondi 2013), “partial occasionalism” (Sangiacomo 2018), and “semi-occasionalism” (Yenter 2022)” see SEP].

My reservations about the majority reading may be worth some elaboration (not the least because I would vindicate Hume.) To simplify: I don’t think it makes sense to read Clarke’s (1704) Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God (Demonstration). as occasionalist about body-body interaction. I do agree that Clarke’s (1705) Discourse Concerning the Unalterable Obligations of Natural Religion (hereafter: Discourse) is more inviting of such a reading, although I agree with Hume that it is not needed to make sense of Clarke. (These texts are Boyle lectures one year apart.)

I think the natural reading of Clarke’s Demonstration is as Hume implies in the Enquiry. For there Clarke seems to presuppose that bodies both obey the laws and can communicate impressed forces.2 For example in section/chapter XI, Clarke mentions a whole number of modern explanations in astronomy (that have eliminated the need for ancient ad hoc hypotheses) and among these he includes, the “Nicety of the Adjustment of the Primary Velocity and Original Direction of the Annual Motion of the Planets, with their Distance from the Central Body and their force of Gravitation towards it” alongside “The Exquisite Regularity of all the Planets Motions, without Epicycles, Stations, Retrogradations, or any other Deviation or Confusion whatsoever.”3

Now, in his article, Sangiacomo purports to have another argument based on the Demonstration:

According to Clarke, inertia is not the only negative power of matter. In fact, all features usually attributed to matter count in the same way as negative powers. As he writes: “figure, divisibility, mobility, and other such like qualities of matter, are not real, proper, distinct, and positive powers, but only negative qualities, deficiencies, or imperfections” (Demonstration VIII, 41). None of these features, in Clarke’s eyes, mean that matter acts as a genuinely efficacious cause which is able to initiate new courses of action. In this way, Clarke endorses the widespread claim at the time that matter is utterly passive. (p. 444)

But what Sangiacomo does not make clear is that in (the context of) the passage that he quotes here from the Demonstration Clarke never talks of inertia as a negative power at all. (As I grant below he does do so in the Discourse.) The passage Sangiocomo quotes does not license the thought that inertia is a ‘like quality of matter’ as ‘figure, divisibility, mobility.’ The named latter are the qualities that mechanical philosophers have attributed to matter, especially in the context of their distinctions between primary and secondary qualities. In context of the passage quoted by Sangiacomo, Clarke is not discussing inherent force of matter at all, but the capacity of “perception or intelligence.” And Clarke is refuting the claim that perception or intelligence must have been inherent in matter from the start of the universe.4

So, while I agree with Sangiacomo that Clarke denies that matter is capable of initiating new courses of action and that for Clarke matter is passive in the sense of not being the source of power of motions, Sangiacomo and the scholarly majority are wrong to imply that for Clarke matter’s passivity ranges all the way to not being able to communicate — as causes and effects — impressed motions to each other.5

I do allow that early in the Discourse there is a passage where Clarke seems to to go all in as an occasionalist on matter.6 It is offered in the context of the denial of a clearly Spinozistic argument denying miracles:

All things that are done in the world are done either immediately by God himself, or by created intelligent beings; matter being evidently not at all capable of any laws or powers whatsoever, any more than it is capable of intelligence, excepting only this one negative power, that every part of it will, of itself, always and necessarily continue in that state, whether of rest or motion, wherein it at present is; so that all those things which we commonly say are the effects of the natural powers of matter and laws of motion, of gravitation, attraction, or the like, are indeed (if we will speak strictly and properly) the effects of God’s acting upon matter continually and every moment, either immediately by himself, or mediately by some created intelligent beings.

Here the negative power — vis inertia — is ascribed to matter. And unlike Sangiacomo, I don’t think we can conflate a negative quality with a negative power. But I do agree that the point Clarke endorses is that matter has no agency. But that’s different from denying that matter is not a a site of body-body causal transmission. What he is denying is the existence of natural powers of matter, except the power to persist in one’s state/motion (vis inertia). Here Clarke’s position is basically Cartesian. (Clarke is quite far from Newton’s natural philosophy in all of this.) So, when created intelligent beings use a stick to push a puck, then Clarke is not denying the causal efficacy between the puck and the stick.

In fact, even the passage from Clarke’s Discourse that Sangiacomo thinks is “evidence of God being the only immediate cause of natural effects in the physical realm”" (p. 445 emphasis added by me) is thinner than he recognizes. Let me quote:

[A]ll the great motions in in the world are caused by some immaterial power, not having originally impressed a certain quantity of motion upon matter, but perpetually and actually exerting itself every moment in every part of the world. Which preserving and governing power, whether it be immediately the power and action of the same supreme cause that created the world, of him without whom not a sparrow falls to the ground, and with whom the very hairs of our head are all numbered; or whether it be the action of some subordinate instruments appointed by him to direct and preside respectively over certain parts thereof; does either way equally give us a very noble idea of providence. (Discourse, emphasis added)

So, I read this as affirming God as the preserving and governing power, but not as denying to use Descartes’ terminology the reality of secondary causes in the world. Obviously the question is how hyper-active God’s governing power is. In fact, Clarke explicitly endorses the possibility of the agency of subordinate beings. These secondary, “subordinate instruments,” may well be angels or humans (as Sangiacomo also recognizes), but equally likely these may well be the laws of motion. All Clarke wants to deny is that the laws of motion or our agency subsists or exist without God’s action or attention. Not that “a Billiard Ball did not move another by its Impulse, but was only the Occasion why the Deity, in pursuance of general Laws, bestowed Motion on the second Ball.” (Hume L32) So, on my view Hume is right and modern scholarship wrong in its reading of Clarke.7 But I do suspect Hume’s reading is based on the Demonstration and not on the Discourse.

Okay, let’s turn to the final mention of Clarke in Hume’s corpus. In the Dialogues, Cleanthes explicitly introduces Clarke in response to Demea’s conclusion that “We must, therefore, have recourse to a necessarily-existent Being, who carries the REASON of his existence in himself; and who cannot be supposed not to exist without an express contradiction. There is consequently such a Being, that is, there is a Deity.” (D9.3) That argument by Demea had appealed to a causal principle, again.

Cleanthes then moves to pointing out that Demea’s argument and principles could have implied the conclusion that “the material universe be the necessarily-existent Being, according to this pretended explication of necessity.” That is, Cleanthes notes that Demea’s views may well end up in Spinozism! (This is supposed to be funny because Demea is a somewhat dogmatic and intolerant theologian.) Cleanthes then adds the following:

I find only one argument employed to prove, that the material world is not the necessarily-existent Being; and this argument is derived from the contingency both of the matter and the form of the world. Any particle of matter, ‘tis said, may be conceived to be annihilated; and any form may be conceived to be altered. Such an annihilation or alteration, therefore, is not impossible. (D9.7.n)

Cleanthes here is explicitly echoing Clarke. And in the background, again, Clarke’s defense of the cosmological argument is at stake.

But here there’s a new twist. Strikingly Cleanthes of all people goes on to note that a similar argument that undercuts the necessity of a particle’s existence “extends equally to the Deity.” (D8) For Hume’s/Cleanthes’ Clarke, God’s own existence cannot be demonstrated to be necessary. And while this undercuts the force of the cosmological argument (which is supposed to culminate in a necessary being), this strikes me as perceptive reading of Clarke’s own unusual reliance of using the PSR to deny that God is a causa-sui, but the effect of necessity (as he explains in a Sixth Letter to a Gentleman.”)

So let me sum up. First, Hume generally introduces Clarke either in the context of debates over causal principles in order to remind the reader that Clarke is disagreeing with Spinozist views over the cosmological argument, or over the status of occasionalism.

In the latter case, Clarke is used as evidence for the limited popularity of occasionalist views before Berkeley (and, perhaps, Dudgeon). All these latter cases show for our purposes here is that Hume is presupposing familiarity with Clarke.

In the former case it is pretty clear that Hume has Clarke’s Demonstration in mind, and especially the material in which Clarke is disagreeing with Toland. This matters actually because Toland’s Spinozism is sometimes subtly different from Spinoza’s own views. (Hume only mentions Toland, in passing, in the History.) But Hume also seems familiar with views that Clarke articulated in his correspondence with Butler and Clarke’s Discourse (published jointly). But rather than being really interested in Clarke’s own positive views, Hume is only interested in undermining the status of Clarke’s purported refutations of Spinoza and Spinozism. And as Hume notes in a Letter to his friend in Edinburgh, the point of that need not be to open the door to Spinozism, but rather to note that the intellectual edifice that does so is weaker than it might seem. In fact, that edifice rests on principles about the nature of causation that Hume is thoroughgoingly critical of. It’s another question to what degree Hume’s views on causation vindicate Spinoza’s in any sense. About that some other time.

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Now, before I continue, two preliminary comments: first, by Christmas’ lights, your noble blogger is also associated with State Capacity Liberalism (hereafter: SCL) because of two papers I co-authored with Nick Cowen. Nick and his more frequent co-author, Aris Trantidis, and myself identify as the ‘Lincoln School’ which has non-trivial, but only partial overlap with SCL. So don’t attribute all the claims about SCL to (the members of) the Lincoln School. I will make one such difference between SCL and the Lincoln School clear below.

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Second, what makes Christmas’ paper on SCL important is that he quite nicely articulates the historically and institutionally sensitive political economy that ties SCL together. Whatever differences I have with Christmas are orthogonal to his treatment of it.

Okay with that in place, let me now quote the key passages that characterizes SCL according to Christmas:

[SCLs] hold…normative political ideals, but are non idealistic about regime-types. …What counts as a good political arrangement depends entirely on its contingent outputs. [SCLs] will hold individual liberty to be a normative value, as well equality of status, and understand these through the institutional lens of individual negative rights, both private rights (rights of private property, freedom of contract and expression, protection from torts, etc.) and procedural rights (right to a fair trial, right to non-self-incrimination, etc.). We might say that state capacity liberals have an ideal of society – of cultural diversity and toleration and of economic freedom and prosperity, without an ideal of the political conditions that are necessary to sustain them. So, they have a broadly neo-classical liberal view of commutative justice; that is, of the juridical relations between persons qua members of society. The only normative demand of politics is that it yields or supports such a liberal social order. Whatever political order is contingently necessary, is instrumentally valued to that extent. In this sense, they combine moralism with realism…They are moralists about what counts as a just social order. They are realists about what political arrangements are necessary to bring around the former. Whilst this means that [SCLs] are teleological about political institutions, they might be deontological or consequentialist (or somewhere in between) about social institutions. It is not the normative ethic within which liberal values are derived that defines state capacity liberalism, but rather the relationship between those liberal values, however derived, and the political system that sustains them. Methodologically speaking, then, SCLs subscribe to a functionalist theory of political legitimacy… Whatever arrangement gets us a liberal social order is thereby legitimate because a liberal order is just or otherwise morally best. SCLs may apply functionalist justification in a granular manner. (p. 2)

So, what’s immediately noticeable is that the various forms of political contestation (and the representative institutions that usually are associated with it) are not written into the expected characterization of SCL. Rather, in Christmas’ survey, work by the Lincoln school is used to defend the claim (as a kind of empirical, a posteriori result) that “economic and political openness are sustained by competition, and [economic and political] competition sustains openness.” (p. 23)1

As an aside, the absence in Christmas’ argument of Scharpf’s notion of ‘output legitimacy’ tells you that the terms and concepts of European political science have not traveled across the great Atlantic lake. (Scharpf’s concept was developed to characterize the manner by which the EU’s technocratic decision-making could still generate a functionalist political legitimacy.)

Be that as its may, Christmas draws a useful contrast between neoliberalism and SCL: “neoliberalism is a theory that looks at politics and civil society through the lense of economic processes (N. Cowen, 2021), whilst SCL looks at civil society and economic processes through the lense of political processes. That is to say, as outcomes of the ways in which violence is managed.” (p. 8) Okay, let’s stipulate that Christmas’ characterization of SCL is adequate.

In his paper, SCL also points to historical antecedents to SCL. And that is my present interest. Christmas quite rightly notes the following:

The extant school of thought that most readily coincides with SCL is ordoliberalism which was a school of German legal and economic thought that favoured liberal economic and social order, and regarded a strong state as essential to the maintenance of such and order…It is often contrasted with neoliberalism insofar as it sees an essential role for the state as being the maintenance of civil society as well as the market (rather than seeing the former as collapsable into the latter). (p. 8)2

But at various points he also mentions Hobbes, Kant, and Constant as partial antecedents to SCL. Interestingly and quirkily enough, he especially draws on Franz Oppenheimer (with special mention of The State: Its History and Development Viewed Sociologically),3 and notes that Oppenheimer’s work predates the material in North, Wallis, and Weingast that has shaped modern SCL (p. 10 & 14).

As it happens, Oppenheimer helped introduced the ‘new liberalism’ associated with Hobhouse and Hobson into Germany. In fact, Christmas is not a regular reader of this blog (recall) because he doesn’t seem to realize, as I first learned from Stefan Kolev and Ekkehard A. Köhler (recall), that Oppenheimer was one the social liberal teachers of the Ordoliberals, including one of the most important ordoliberals: Ludwig Erhard. So, the relationship between Oppenheimer and SCL is not wholly contingent.

Now, it is a bit of a shame that while Christmas cites my (2021) paper with Cowen at a key point in his argument, he didn’t explore the (modest) historical narrative we provide in it. In that narrative we foregrounded Lippmann, but also pointed to the significance of Adam Smith and Mill & Taylor. Because in many ways SCL just is a revival of the vision of Lippmann’s The Good Society (which is, in part, a critical response to the failures of 19th century laissez-faire and in part a rejection of Dewey’s democratic project.)

And this gets me to the ulterior motive of today’s post. For, I cannot praise enough a new paper, “Modern State Capacity in The Wealth of Nations,” by Glory Liu and , which just appeared (here) in History of Political Economy. This paper provides lots of indirect evidence that SCL has its roots in the vision of Book V of Wealth of Nations.

And I want to close with a few big picture thoughts on their paper. First, from a scholarly point of view it finally advances our understanding beyond Nathan Rosenberg’s classic papers on the significance of institutions to Wealth of Nations.

Second, it invites more research into how Smith promoted what came to be known as open access order (North, Wallis, Weingast) and that, as Christmas notes, is central to contemporary SCL. Like NWW, I think young Gladstone is the key person, but I have argued (recall here) that he almost certainly draws on Smith’s Wealth of Nations, Book V. (To be continued.)

Third, Liu & Weingast cites this (2014) paper by Hanley, this (2021) important paper by Alexandra Oprea and my own (2021) work on Smith’s and political leadership quite generously (here), but the link to Smith’s account of politics and leadership is not yet synthesized in their work. In fact, this is also a notable absence in Christmas’ account of SCL (which focuses primarily on elite coalitions, but not the agency of particular elites within them).

Finally, I know Weingast is circulating a much wider ms, and so this is now a super-exciting time in scholarship on Adam Smith’s political philosophy/social theory, in part, because it helps provide the foundation (or philosophic prophecy) of State Capacity Liberalism. But I would say that.

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The critique of this speech is introduced as follows: “Mr Bright, who has a foot in both worlds, the world of middle-class liberalism and the world of democracy, but who brings most of his ideas from the world of middle-class liberalism in which he was bred, always inclines to inculcate that faith in machinery to which, as we have seen, Englishmen are so prone, and which has been the bane of middle-class liberalism.” (p. 48) Now middle-class liberalism is philistine in character according to Arnold. (Arnold self-identifies as a liberal who wishes to correct this with culture, by which he means the perfection of man.) In general, when Arnold uses ‘machinery’ to criticize Bright and his liberalism he means (recall) something akin to ‘social practices that get valorized excessively (especially by liberals) even though they lack inner worth.’

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Arnold then turns to his criticism while quoting Bright:

Or else [Bright cries out to the democracy, —‘the men,’ as he calls them, ‘upon whose shoulders the greatness of England rests,’—he cries out to them: ‘See what you have done! I look over this country and see the cities you have built, the railroads you have made, the manufactures you have produced, the cargoes which freight the ships of the greatest mercantile navy the world has ever seen! I see that you have converted by your labours what was once a wilderness, these islands, into a fruitful garden; I know that you have created this wealth, and are a nation whose name is a word of power throughout all the world.’ Why, this is just the very style of laudation with which Mr Roebuck or Mr Lowe debauch the minds of the middle classes, and make such Philistines of them. It is the same fashion of teaching a man to value himself not on what he is, not on his progress in sweetness and light, but on the number of the railroads he has constructed, or the bigness of the Tabernacle he has built. Only the middle classes are told they have done it all with their energy, self-reliance, and capital, and the democracy are told they have done it all with their hands and sinews. But teaching the democracy to put its trust in achievements of this kind is merely training them to be Philistines to take the place of the Philistines whom they are superseding; and they too, like the middle class, will be encouraged to sit down at the banquet of the future without having on a wedding garment, and nothing excellent can then come from them.—pp. 49-50, chapter 1.)

Lurking here is Arnold’s political claim that Bright is, by advocating for the expansion of the franchise, leading the working classes to displace the middle-classes in political power and by transforming the natural aptitude of the working class (for sympathy) into philistinism.

Now, in wider context, the part that Arnold quotes is from a part of the speech where Bright insists that the ancient constitution held that every freeman who paid local rates was entitled to a voice in the government. (One interesting effect of his interpretation is that some of the eighteenth and nineteenth century reforms had actually moved away from these original rights.) It’s hard to say whether he fully believed this view, but it is a fine polemical point against the Tories.

The immediate context of the quoted passage (‘shoulders of England’) is introduced by Btight to refute the charge that expansion of the franchise will generate an empowerment of the lower classes that will create a “violation of public peace” and general disorder. And that’s because on Bright’s view, the lower classes have ordered and civilized England (“converted by your labours what was once a wilderness, these islands, into a fruitful garden” etc.) The echoes to Genesis (and perhaps Shakespeare) are deliberate.1

The very same passage from the speech at Leeds is quoted later in Culture and Anarchy:

It is obvious that that part of the working-class which, working diligently by the light of Mrs Gooch’s Golden Rule, looks forward to the happy day when it will sit on thrones with Mr Bazley and other middle-class potentates, to survey, as Mr Bright beautifully says, ‘the cities it has built, the railroads it has made, the manufactures it has produced, the cargoes which freight the ships of the greatest mercantile navy the world has ever seen,’—it is obvious, I say, that this part of the working-class is, or is in a fair way to be, one in spirit with the industrial middle-class. It is notorious that our middle-class liberals have long looked forward to this consummation, when the working-class shall join forces with them, aid them heartily to carry forward their great works, go in a body to their tea-meetings, and, in short, enable them to bring about their millennium. (p. 77, chapter 3)

What’s interesting about this is that Arnold diagnoses that liberals like Bright appeal to what Marxists call, the ‘labor aristocracy.’ And, in fact, Bright’s speech is, in context, directed against some liberals who worry about this very possibility. (And I wouldn’t be surprised if we found a letter from Marx to Engels in which Bright is mocked for the very same reasons.)

The third allusion to the speech at Leeds occurs near the end of Culture and Anarchy in Chapter VI. The very same passage is summarized. Bright is not quoted, But Arnold’s reader is assumed to know that Bright had been once the great leader of the free trade movement (alongside Cobden). Here’s Arnold:

so it seems clearly right that the poor man should eat untaxed bread, and, generally, that restrictions and regulations which, for the supposed benefit of some particular person or class of persons, make the price of things artificially high here, or artificially low there, and interfere with the natural flow of trade and commerce, should be done away with. But in the policy of our Liberal friends free-trade means more than this, and is specially valued as a stimulant to the production of wealth, as they call it, and to the increase of the trade, business, and population of the country. We have already seen how these things, —trade, business, and population,—are mechanic- ally pursued by us as ends precious in themselves, and are worshipped as what we call fetishes; and Mr Bright, I have already said, when he wishes to give the working-class a true sense of what makes glory and greatness, tells it to look at the cities it has built, the railroads it has made, the manufactures it has produced. So to this idea of glory and greatness the free-trade which our Liberal friends extol so solemnly and devoutly has served,—to the increase of trade, business, and population; and for this it is prized. Therefore, the untaxing of the poor man’s bread has, with this view of national happiness, been used, not so much to make the existing poor man’s bread cheaper or more abundant, but rather to create more poor men to eat it; so that we cannot precisely say that we have fewer poor men than we had before free-trade, but we can say with truth that we have many more centres of industry, as they are called, and much more business, population, and manufactures. And if we are sometimes a little troubled by our multitude of poor men, yet we know the increase of manufactures and population to be such a salutary thing in itself, and our free-trade policy begets such an admirable movement, creating fresh centres of industry and fresh poor men here, while we were thinking about our poor men there, that we are quite dazzled and borne away, and more and more industrial movement is called for, and our social progress seems to become one triumphant and enjoy- able course of what is sometimes called, vulgarly, outrunning the constable. (pp. 136-137, chapter VI)

Now, what’s interesting about this passage is that Arnold now charges Bright with a different error: he offers the middle and working classes a false account of “glory and greatness.” It is especially striking that Arnold does this for three reasons. First, in context Bright does not use this terminology. Arnold is probably evoking familiarity with Bright’s speech at Birmingham 27 august 1868 (that was printed alongside the speech at Leeds in Bright’s Speeches on Parliamentary reform—a pamphlet Bright helped revise). Now, in context in the Birmingham speech, Bright describes the expanded franchises in continental Europe, and notes that there “neither emperor, king, nor noble believes that his authority or his interests, or the greatness or happiness of any one of those countries will be jeopardised by the free admission of the people to constitutional rights.”

Second, Bright’s wording, “greatness or happiness” evokes what Adam Smith implies (against the false glory of the Mercantilists) is the true glory of the nation which lies “the happiness…of their subjects.” (WN 5.1.e.26, p. 752) This is not a one-off in Smith because it is evoked in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, where Smith uses Machiavellian language to comment the re-founder of a polity: “He may re-establish and improve the constitution, and from the very doubtful and ambiguous character of the leader of a party, he may assume the greatest and noblest of all characters, that of the reformer and legislator of a great state; and, by the wisdom of his institutions, secure the internal tranquillity and happiness of his fellow citizens for many succeeding generations.” (TMS 6.2.2.14, 232)

Third, in these parliamentary reform speeches, Bright never mentions the growth of population that Arnold explicitly attributes to him in the quoted passage. But Smith does, not the least in the famous invisible hand passage of TMS! (viz: “without intending it, without knowing it, advance the interest of the society, and afford means to the multiplication of species")

So, to pull some threads together. By appealing to the ancient constitution for expansion of the franchise, Bright purports to be re-establishing while simultaneously improving the constitution. Bright evokes Smith at his most neo-Machiavellian. (Of course, Smith is also Machiavellian in re-defining the nature of true glory, as Machiavelli did himself with Christian glory, even though Smith’s version of true glory is not Machiavelli’s or the older Christian view!) I am not sure whether Arnold recognized the connection with Smith or Machiavelli (although the emphasis on free trade makes it not impossible). But it would be surprising if he didn’t, especially because Arnold presents Bright as more Smithian than he explicitly is in these lectures. (In general, Bright is very Smithian, but that’s for another time.)

Now, that’s set up. Because there is another final set of twists lurking here. Early in Culture and Anarchy, after conceding that Benjamin Franklin is not all bad, Arnold turns to Bentham (who is, of course, very influential among certain nineteenth century liberals). Here’s what he writes:

So, after hearing Bentham cried loudly up as the renovator of modern society, and Bentham’s mind and ideas proposed as the rulers of our future, I open the Deontology. There I read: ‘While Xenophon was writing his history and Euclid teaching geometry, Socrates and Plato were talking nonsense under pretence of talking wisdom and morality. This morality of theirs consisted in words; this wisdom of theirs was the denial of matters known to every man’s experience.’ From the moment of reading that, I am delivered from the bondage of Bentham! the fanaticism of his adherents can touch me no longer; I feel the inadequacy of his mind and ideas for being the rule of human society, for perfection. Culture tends always thus to deal with the men of a system, of disciples, of a school; with men like Comte, or the late Mr Buckle, or Mr Mill. (p. 51, Chapter I)

So, Bentham is castigated here for three obvious reasons: first, he rejects the wisdom of Socrates and Plato; second he is an intellectual cult-leader (‘fanaticism of his adherents’); third he is a ‘man of system.’ Now, this very use of ‘man of system’ evokes Smith’s TMS 6.2.1-2. (A passage that Hayek would also frequently evoke.)

Now, on the third of these, Arnold is not original here. For in 1846, Henry Peter Brougham (1778 – 1868), a British Whig politician, who was instrumental in the abolition of British slavery, published the Lives of Men of Letters and Science, who flourished in the time of George the Third. This includes a book-length essay on Adam Smith Brougham writes, “How well has [Smith] painted the man of system, and how many features of this portrait have we recognised in Mr. Bentham, and others of our day!” And this also shows that Arnold probably knew he was evoking Smith here.

But there is a further fun twist lurking here. For in his speech at Leeds that irritated Arnold so much that he keeps mentioning it in Culture and Anarchy, Bright makes a fun rhetorical move. The move I have in mind is right at the start.

I find that some writers, criticising the observations I made a fortnight ago in Manchester, complain that I said very much the thing that I had said at Birmingham. I believe that a charge of this nature was brought, more than two thousand years ago, against one of the wisest of the ancients. They said that he was always saying the same thing about the same thing and he asked them in return whether they expected him to say a different thing about the same thing. I have another answer to make to these critics, and it is this: When they have answered what I have already said about this thing, then I will try to tell them something new.

Here, Bright is comparing himself to Socrates, who he calls one of the ‘wisest of the ancients’ And he is evoking a famous anecdote in Xenophon’s depiction of Socrates (that I quote below). It must have been galling to Arnold because not only does he admire Socrates, he holds that Xenophon’s account is the true one. And, in fact, on Arnold’s account Socrates anticipates his own view of culture: “The best man is he who most tries to perfect himself [that is the point of Arnold’s account of culture], and the happiest man is he who most feels that he is perfecting himself,’—this account of the matter by Socrates, the true Socrates of the Memorabilia, has something so simple, spontaneous, and unsophisticated about it, that it seems to fill us with clearness and hope when we hear it.” (p. 99, chapter IV). Note that aiming at true perfection generates true happiness.

All I can say here is that the last thing I expected to find is that the great debate between Matthew Arnold and John Bright over the soul of nineteenth century liberalism centers on what true glory and true happiness are (in ways that suggest Adam Smith is lurking in the background), and that they would both claim to be Xenophon’s Socrates’ true heir. But perhaps this will lead us to welcome a more interesting history of nineteenth century liberalism.

Oh yes, I still owe you the quote from Xenophon:

Hippias, catching the words, exclaimed in a bantering tone: What! still repeating the same old talk, Socrates, which I used to hear from you long ago?

Yes (answered Socrates), and what is still more strange, Hippias, it is not only the same old talk but about the same old subjects. Now you, I daresay, through versatility of knowledge, never say the same thing twice over on the same subject?—Xenophon, Memorabilia IV.4

Before I get to the significance of Sidgwick’s essay on Tocqueville, it may be worth mentioning that even a cursory glance of Miscellaneous Essays and Addresses reveals that Sidgwick had a life-long engagement with Arnold. But that’s for another time.

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Sidgwick’s essay on Tocqueville’s Memoir is primarily important for the glimpses it reveals of Sidgwick’s views on the nature of parliamentary democracy and the rise of Bonapartism. But my interest today is an extended aside (of two longs paragraphs) near the end of the review. This aside is relevant for the pre-history of proto-Kuhnian philosophy of that developed at Cambridge (and also by Austrian economists) within political economy at the end of the nineteenth century. In many ways these ideas revive features of Adam Smith’s philosophy of social science before these got displaced by Whewell and (say) Mill.

Cambridge matters to the story because Sidgwick, J.N. Keynes (the father of the more famous economist) and Marshall helped shape the initial textbooks and professionalization of twentieth century economics. And they did so with a kind of Kuhnian philosophy of social science. Crucially their views also help explain the early and quick reception of Kuhn’s work by Chicago economists (especially Stigler, but also a few others). I have told the different elements of that story in two different places (here; and here).

Okay, with that in place, let me turn to Sidgwick’s first paragraph in which Tocqueville is presented as a pioneering political scientist. The term ‘political scientist’ had begin to circulate in the 1840s. And Tocqueville himself had invited the application because in the (1831) Introduction to Democracy In America, he had written “A new science of politics is indispensable to a new world.” Sidgwick notes,

The writings of Tocqueville mark an era in the study of political science. Hitherto writers on this subject have laboured under defects of two different kinds. Their science was only struggling into birth, and their own insight was rarely clear from the mists of partiality. For a long time, it is true, the study of man will lag far behind the study of nature, but Tocqueville’s books indicate a transition to a better phase. The pioneers in the van of all sciences will be men rather of a strong imagination than a sober reason; they have need of the former to fight the various obstacles that an unknown country presents. Consequently, their view will be wide and indefinite; their assertions confused, yet violent; they will not be content to trace the development of a few principles out of many, but they will make their own poverty the measure of Nature’s variety, and group all the facts they meet with round the few principles they have strongly grasped. Such men are necessary to make the first move in any science, but they must pass away and give place to others. The early Greek physicists, the founders of science, bear, of course, this character. In the study of external nature we have now attained to a learned modesty which smiles at their ignorant rashness; but in the more difficult study of man we are still taught by thinkers who, for hastiness of generalisation and audacity of assertion, may be compared to the wellk-nown Greek philosopher, who held that “ all things were made of water.” (p. 368)

Crucially, for our present purposes, Sidgwick distinguishes between a (ahh) pre-natal science and a developing science. Not unlike Hume in the introduction to the Treatise, Sidgwick assumes that the speed of scientific progress within the natural sciences runs ahead of that in the sciences of man. (It’s notable that Sidgwick here still uses the old-fashioned term ‘science of man’ of and not the already more widespread ‘social science.) And the reason for this is that the science of man is more difficult than the science of nature. Unfortunately, we are not told why Sidgwick thinks is more difficult.

Be that as it may, Sidgwick thinks that the “pioneers” — what we may call the first ‘scientific legislators’ or the ‘midwives’ that shape the birth of a science — must (“necessary”) have a character that is poetic, even prophetic. Mere problem-solvers and prudent reasoners do not birth a science. Rather early science is speculative and bold (“audacity of assertion”) in character. So, the actual development of science produces more timid men with “learned modesty.” The clear implication is that the disciplining of the human mind through the development of science (with its many potential benefits to society) reduces variance within the field and pushes the would-be-great-souled men out.1 Here there is no evidence that Sidgwick is troubled by this trade-off. But as I noted the fact that Sidgwick repeatedly returned to engaging with Arnold’s essay suggests he was not unaware to the loss at stake.

An impatient reader may well feel I am ignoring the most important claim in the paragraph. Namely that the absence of impartiality hindered the original growth of science. And that the difficulty of obtaining it is the source of why the human sciences are more difficult and lag behind the natural science. Lurking in Sidgwick is the (most Baconian) thought that it is not the subject matter that makes the science of man more difficult than the natural sciences, but the near impossibility of overcoming of our interests and partisanship. And this theme is developed at the start of the subsequent, longer paragraph on the topic:

But what has most hampered political thinkers in all ages is the little free play that has been allowed to their intellects, by passion, prejudice, and interest. These have warped unconsciously the speculations of the nobler souls, and consciously those of the ignobler. Not that the slavery has been complete; but the extraneous influence has fixed in the field of inquiry impassable limits and unassailable posts. Where men have overcome the promptings of selfishness, they have been unable to throw off early beliefs, cramped by the narrowness of a caste: or they have fallen into the equally fatal bondage of a violent reaction from these beliefs. In the latter case, however, where the restraints have been merely negative, where the reason of men has been free to choose anything except certain received opinions, the philosophy of politics has always made greater progress. This was the case with the French philosophers who preceded ‘89. The natural wildness of awakening speculation was enhanced by their negative position, their sweeping antagonism to an effete system. This extravagance, however, will always be gradually corrected, either by the bitter teachings of experience, or less painfully by the progress of science, and the bloodless contests of the pen. The first half-discoverer of a truth is apt to shout out arrogantly his half-discovery; his successor, to equal enthusiasm, joins greater modesty of assertion. Not that the cast-off chimeras fall immediately to the ground; but they are taken up by men of inferior intellect, and with smaller following. In freedom, however, from the defects I have noticed, Tocqueville has outstripped his age, and his works will long remain models both in style and matter. They are not made to strike or startle, but they powerfully absorb the attention and convince the reason. Their excellence often conceals their originality; the perfect arrangement of facts makes the conclusions drawn from them appear to lie on the surface; the ideas are so carefully explained, defined, and disentangled, the arguments are strained so clear, that we are cheated into the belief that we should have thought the same ourselves if we had happened to develop our views on the subject. Thus conviction steals in unawares, and it is only by carefully comparing our views before and after perusal that we find how much we have gained. (368-368)

Crucially, Sidgwick identifies here, in passing, another more foundational obstacle to the birth of the science of man: “received opinion.” And somewhat surprising then, the man that would become the apogee of a scientific utilitarianism is fully aware of the way in which the birth of science instantiates the problem of how philosophic thought is really possible in a polity where the doxa (δόξα) shapes life. In his own voice, Sidgwick treats the convulsion of the French revolution as both an effect of the collision of some truth with received opinion and as a means to correct some of the intellectual mistakes of eighteenth century would-be-political-science, which he labels ‘philosophy of politics.’

Interestingly enough, on Sidgwick’s account Tocqueville is both a beneficiary of that convulsion and himself the grounds of surpassing it. And somewhat amazingly — and again this suggests that I have often misjudged Sidgwick’s rhetoric — his diagnosis of what allows Tocqueville to escape the predicament of true philosophy’s antagonistic relationship to its own times is primarily rhetorical in character.

Now, I don’t want to claim that Sidgwick diagnoses in Tocqueville esoteric techniques. That would be not quite wholly right. But I do want to claim that for Sidgwick, Tocqueville’s fundamental achievement is to express dangerous (to established ways of doing things) novelty in ways that seem wholly innocuous: “not made to strike or startle…conceals their originality…appear to lie on the surface…we are cheated into the belief…conviction steals in unawares…”

There are two really crucial further claims I want to make here. First, Sidgwick is explicit that Tocqueville’s achievement ought to be exemplary to other would-be-scientific midwives in rhetoric and content: “remain models both in style and matter.” Sidgwick mentions style first.

My second claim involves a somewhat more controversial background comment. Now it is uncontroversial that analytic philosophy as a school or movement was partially birthed in the generation succeeding Sidgwick in Cambridge. As regular readers know, I think this is fully visible to Ernest Nagel when he visits in the mid 1930s, and then also helps baptize ‘analytic philosophy’ for the movement. But I often reflect on Ronald de Sousa’s or, perhaps it was, Tom Hurka’s thought that, in fact, Sidgwick himself should be counted as the founder of analytic philosophy. I don’t know if Ronald or Tom has ever put it in print, but I know it has been mentioned on blogs, and I believe I first heard it mentioned in Hólar, Iceland, while we sharing an excellent malt whiskey in a memorable Hume Society event (almost two decades ago). For my purposes it doesn’t matter whether Sidgwick ought to be thought the founder of analytic philosophy or merely an important teacher to some of its founders.

And, second, that part of the skill of Tocqueville’s rhetoric is the clarity of the arguments (“arguments are strained so clear”). And what is fascinating about Sidgwick’s point here is that clear arguments of a certain sort can change opinion without calling attention the fact that one is doing so. Sidgwick repeats the point in the last two sentences of the quoted paragraph. Somewhat amazingly then, clarity is not defended, as Susan Stebbing would do in the 1930s, as a feature to make public deliberation possible, but as a technique of rhetorical persuasion when one is aiming to fly under the radar. (According to Sidgwick, at also obscures the hard work one must do to line up the steps of the argument, etc.)

Of course, this essay is very early Sidgwick. And I cannot begin to claim that this is a founding insight that helps explain the original political self-understanding of analytic philosophy as scientific philosophy. There would be just too many suppositional steps in the way. But as it happens we do know (well I have argued) that in the 1880s, when he first published Principles of Political Economy, Sidgwick still promoted a kind of proto-Kuhnian philosophy of science in which the aim of a science was to produce consensus among specialist practitioners who could advise a statesman.

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When it comes to the philosophers’ philosophers I tend to fall in line with the authority of the discipline. So it is a modest source of embarrassment that when it comes to Sidgwick I tend to have eye only for his limitations. These are legion, alas, not the least that he is often an embarrassingly bad historian of philosophy.

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Luckily, I don’t find Sidgwick especially irritating. I find him a dull writer, and I usually get away just ignoring him and his influence. Yet, in world-historical terms Sidgwick is undoubtedly more important than (say) Timothy Williamson and more damaging to the issues in philosophy I care about, and yet in more than fifteen years of blogging (and so thousands of blog posts) I have railed against Williamson more frequently and more intensely.

Last week I read Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy in an Oxford Classics version edited by Jane Garnett, whose very useful endnotes are incredibly helpful. The page-numbers below refer to this edition. This edition includes an appendix that is a (1867) review of Arnold’s ‘Culture and its Enemies’ by Sidgwick published in MacMillan’s Magazine. I think the original title of Sidgwick’s piece is “The Prophet of Culture.” I believe this because it’s that title I found attached to it in an early American reprint of Sidgwick’s paper in a magazine called, The Eclectic Magazine. This piece has changed my perception of Sidgwick. And I want to show how he did it.

According to Garnett, ‘Culture and its Enemies’ originates as a lecture that Arnold delivered at Oxford in 1867, and then published as an article in Cornhill Magazine in that same year. It became the first chapter of Culture and Anarchy, in part, it seems, prompted by the many responses (including Sidgwick’s) to ‘Culture and its Enemies.’ I have not gone back to ‘Culture and its Enemies’ in order to compare it to the first chapter of Culture and Anarchy.

Culture and Anarchy includes a few responses to Sidgwick’s paper, but somewhat oddly, the main conceptual problem that Sidgwick diagnoses in Arnold’s argument in the earlier lecture is still present in the book. Sidgwick shows nicely that Arnold tends to conflate culture as a regulative ideal with actually existing culture throughout his argument. I doubt Sidgwick’s criticism undercuts Arnold’s position because for Arnold the ideal is always immanently present in the actual. Sometimes I can be so intellectually petty that as I was reading Sidgwick’s criticism of Arnold, I saw in this initially a confirmation of my views of Sidgwick as a fine pedant who uses his conceptual clarity to make wholly trivial and irrelevant debating points.

To be sure, Sidgwick also makes a more important point about the tensions in the implied Hegelian political philosophy in Arnold. And this material in Sidgwick’s essay made me wonder to what degree T.H. Green’s views had developed at Oxford and if they would have been familiar to Sidgwick already (perhaps through his brothers). But that’s for another time, perhaps.

Be that as it may, there is one passage that stopped me in my tracks, and I quote it to you. It occurs about two thirds into the essay. And it is introduced by Sidgwick as follows, “I wish it to be distinctly understood that it is as judged by his own rules and principles that I venture to condemn Mr. Arnold’s treatment of our actual religions.” (p. 164; p. 494 in the reprint of Sidgwick’s essay here.) So, Sidgwick announces he will provide what we would call an immanent critique to Arnold. The very best immanent critique doesn’t just undermine the theory targeted, but provides a better understanding of it. Sidgwick surpasses that demand.

As an important aside, Sidgwick also makes clear in wider context, that he is not especially interested in vindicating actual religions as such. It may be worth adding, that if you have read either Arnold or Sidgwick you will understand that with ‘our actual religions’ they both mean here the dissenting, non-conformists protestant minority religions. They do not mean Irish or English Catholicism (which is, in fact, politically important in the background given the Liberal plans of disestablishing the Irish [Anglican] Church). They also do not mean contemporary Judaism, despite the importance Arnold attaches to ancient Jews and their legacy, as Hebraism to modern civilization.

So, Sidgwick’s point is that Arnold misses something important about the character of dissenting religions that he should have grasped by his own lights. The way Sidgwick puts Arnold’s failure in the long paragraph I quote below is as follows, ‘to judge of religious organizations as a dog judges of human beings, chiefly by scent.’ I just love that line. It nicely captures, for example, the way the greying bulldogs of the passing generation of analytic philosophers treat the other humanities. Okay, here’s Sigdwick’s full paragraph:

He has said that culture in its most limited phase is curiosity, and I quite sympathize in his effort to vindicate for this word the more exalted meaning that the French give to it. Even of the ideal culture he considers curiosity (if I understand him rightly) to be the most essential, though not the noblest, element. Well, then, I complain that in regard to some of the most important elements of social life he has so little curiosity; and therefore so thin and superficial an appreciation of them. I do not mean that every cultivated man ought to have formed for himself a theory of religion. “Non omnia possumus omnes,” and a man must, to some extent, select the subjects that suit his special faculties. But every man of deep culture ought to have a conception of the importance and intricacy of the religious problem, a sense of the kind and amount of study that is required for it, a tact to discriminate worthy and unworthy treatment of it, an instinct which, if he has to touch on it, will guide him round the lacune of apprehension that the limits of his nature and leisure have rendered inevitable. Now this cultivated tact, sense, instinct (Mr. Arnold could express my meaning for me much more felicitously than I can for myself) he seems to me altogether to want on this topic. He seems to me (if so humble a simile may be pardoned) to judge of religious organizations as a dog judges of human beings, chiefly by scent. One admires in either case the exquisite development of the organ, but feels that the use of it for this particular object implies a curious, an almost ludicrous, limitation of sympathy. When these popular religions are brought before Mr. Arnold, he is content to detect their strong odors of Philistinism and vulgarity: he will not stoop down and look into them; he is not sufficiently interested in their dynamical importance; he does not care to penetrate the secret of their fire and strength, and learn the sources and effects of these; much less does he consider how sweetness and light may be added without any loss of fire and strength. pp. 164-165; (p. 494)

Now, the “secret” Sidgwick diagnoses that Arnold misses is what eighteenth century philosophers would have called their ‘enthusiasm.’ For example, after stipulating that enthusiasm is a false religion, Hume characterizes enthusiasm as derived from the the mental state that accompanies "unaccountable elevation and presumption, arising from prosperous success, from luxuriant health, from strong spirits, or from a bold and confident disposition.” At its most energetic enthusiasm, characterized by a species of intellectual confusion, produces joyful “raptures, transports, and surprising flights of fancy.” And it is precisely that term that Sidgwick repeatedly uses on the next page (p. 166) to describe what he has in mind. Enthusiasm is what gives dissenting religions “dynamical importance.” (“Of Enthusiasm and Superstition”)

Now, for Sidgwick’s immanent critique it’s most important that Arnold overlooks the role of enthusiasm in culture. Sidgwick makes two points: first, culture presupposes enthusiasm in its own best activity. Second, in its aversion to enthusiasm, culture tends to cultivate a back-ward looking good taste only and so misses the significance of the present. Sidgwick’s aesthetic point is devastating:

If it had larger and healthier sympathies, it might see beauty in the stage of becoming (if I may use a German phrase), in much rough and violent work at which it now shudders. In pure art, culture is always erring on the side of antiquity much more in its sympathy with the actual life of men and society. (p. 167)

And lurking here is Sidgwick’s correct diagnosis that Arnold’s aesthetic temperament also leads to political failure in its lack of sympathy with the actual life of men and society. Sidgwick recognizes that while Arnold wishes to elevate and thereby emancipate (and so is not a counter-revolutionary), Arnold is unwilling to discriminate between rough and violent work that may lead to anarchy and the rough and violent work that may be the experiment in living that leads to genuine aesthetic and social progress. Sidgwick, then, defends Mill quite ably against Arnold’s contemptuous treatment of (1859) On Liberty.

But, Sidgwick’s point is more subtle. Arnold ought to recognize by his own lights that the enthusiasm of dissenting religions has “dynamical importance” to the development of culture he himself endorses. Now, lurking in Sidgwick’s reconstruction of Arnold’s position is the prosaic point that the building blocks of sweetness and light may themselves may be ugly.

But the more subtle point is that a flourishing culture necessarily presupposes the enthusiasm of true believers (or as Hume would say ‘fanatics’). As Sidgwick realizes, Arnold’s recoiling from such fanaticism is itself a sign of decay, of loss of intellectual vitality—as Machiavelli would put it, the corruption of modes. A high culture that is more than mere refinement, presupposes sectarian true believers. Not because of what they believe in but in the manner in which they energize it as small groups of the likeminded in which they can nourish each other’s feelings. (It’s crucial to Sidgwick’s implied model that they are not the hegemon.) The local enthusiasm of religious sects is what blocks the general spread of cynicism—in which position on the ladder and strategic signaling undermine the vitality of culture (and destroy the spiritual authority of its professors and clerisy).

Here’s how Sidgwick puts it:

Religions have been propagated by the sword; but culture cannot be propagated by the sword, nor by the pen sharpened and wielded like an offensive weapon. Culture, like all spiritual gifts, can only be propagated by enthusiasm; and by enthusiasm that has got rid of asperity, that has become sympathetic; that has got rid of Pharisaism, and become humble.

Cold, calculating Sidgwick grasps here the inner truth of what Arnold aimed to convey, and could not. And since there is something noble worth re-animating in Arnold’s project, I am grateful to Sidgwick for his helping hand.

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[G]eneral intelligence, as Monsieur Renan calls it, or, in our own words, a reference of all our operating to a firm intelligible law of things, was just what we were without, and that we were without it because we worshipped our machinery. —Matthew Arnold Culture and Anarchy, ‘preface’ (p. 15)

One of my posts (recall here in early April) that touched a nerve, judging by the number of notes I received from otherwise quiet lurkers behind these Digressions, was a post organized around gift-giving practices in the scholarly life (promoted by a manuscript shared with me by Glory Liu). But it was part of larger set of Impressions on a distinctive cold war vocabulary (recall also this post here; ) prompted by my reading (recall here; here; here; and here) of Samuel Moyn’s (2023) Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times (Yale University Press).

One of the ‘cold war’ terms I had focused on was the use of ‘anarchy’ and its cognates. I left that series of posts wondering to what degree Carl Schmitt of all people had invented the fairly close verbal association between liberalism and (Enlightenment) anarchy which I had come to discern as characteristic of cold war thought (as well as the rejection of ‘romanticism’).1 But as I noted, in passing, Schmitt himself may just be echoing Arnold’s (1869) Culture and Anarchy. While reading Moyn’s book, I made a mental note to find time to read Culture and Anarchy, which is important to his chapter on Trilling, after I was done grading exams and papers.

This past week, I read Culture and Anarchy in an Oxford Classics version edited by Jane Garnett, whose very useful endnotes are incredibly helpful. The page-numbers below refer to this edition. I have seen no evidence that Schmitt was familiar with Arnold. But we know Schmitt read Laski and Cole, so there may be indirect transmission—that’s for another time.

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Now, the first time in Culture and Anarchy, Arnold uses ‘anarchy’ is worth quoting in full. It occurs at the start of chapter II, which Arnold in a later edition called “Doing as One Likes.” Here it is:

Our familiar praise of the British Constitution under which we live, is that it is a system of checks,—a system which stops and paralyses any power in interfering with the free action of individuals. To this effect Mr. Bright, who loves to walk in the old ways of the Constitution, said forcibly in one of his great speeches, what many other people are every day saying less forcibly, that the central idea of English life and politics is the assertion of personal liberty. Evidently this is so; but evidently, also, as feudalism, which with its ideas and habits of subordination was for many centuries silently behind the British Constitution, dies out, and we are left with nothing but our system of checks, and our notion of its being the great right and happiness of an Englishman to do as far as possible what he likes, we are in danger of drifting towards anarchy. (p. 55)

The state of ‘anarchism’ is treated by Arnold as a natural reductio of an Englishman’s living, as far as possible [quantum in se est], by ‘doing what he likes.’ And this idea of ‘personal liberty’ is associated with liberalism’s great orator and organizer, John Bright.

Before I return to the significance of Bright, it is worth noting that even in the quoted passage, the main problem of the Englishman’s focusing on doing what he likes is not the renewed danger of re-opening a permanent state of violence. Shortly after the quoted passage, Arnold does go on (p. 59) to make this charge against liberalism by associating doing as one likes with the (1866) Hyde Park riot(s) (which Bright used as a political cudgel). On the whole Arnold is not so concerned with a return to the Hobbesian state of nature as a consequence of the uptake of liberal ideals (although he mentions this fear more than once).

Rather, Arnold makes two important, related criticisms of personal liberty as an ideal: first, that doing what one pleases is only vindicated in light of the ends one pursues. For Arnold personal freedom is an instrumental good. This is, in fact, the immediate context of the passage that I quoted above. Here’s how Arnold introduces this line of argument:

When I began to speak of culture, I insisted on our bondage to machinery, on our proneness to value machinery as an end in itself, without looking beyond it to the end for which alone, in truth, it is valuable. Freedom, I said, was one of those things which we thus worshipped in itself, without enough regarding the ends for which freedom is to be desired. In our common notions and talk about freedom, we eminently show our idolatry of machinery. (p. 55)

Now, it is worth noting that Arnold’s point is a qualified one (viz. “without enough regarding.”) Arnold recognizes that personal liberty is a qualified good that is the product of English government worth praising. From the point of view of the individual this is indeed something worth having (and celebrating). But in excess it also signals our bondage to what Arnold calls ‘machinery.’

Now, ‘machinery’ is used by Arnold to pick out lots of social practices. When Arnold uses the term descriptively (which is the rarer case) he means to refer to what we may call ‘social tools.’ In general, Arnold uses the term pejoratively (as in ‘idolatry of machinery’) by which he means something like, ‘social practices that get valorized excessively (especially by liberals) even though they lack inner worth.’ But sometimes he uses ‘machinery’ in a purportedly descriptive, but actually appraisal sense in order to praise social practices that are properly and disinterestedly subordinated to culture.

Here’s a useful passage from the “preface” of Culture and Anarchy in which both the pejorative and descriptive uses are visible:

But now, as we have shown the disinterestedness which culture enjoins, and its obedience not to likings or dislikings, but to the aim of perfection, let us show its flexibility,—its independence of machinery. That other and greater prophet of intelligence, and reason, and the simple natural truth of things,—Mr. Bright,—means by these, as we have seen, a certain set of measures which suit the special ends of Liberal and Nonconformist partisans. For instance, reason and justice towards Ireland mean the abolishment of the iniquitous Protestant ascendency in such a particular way as to suit the Nonconformists' antipathy to establishments. Reason and justice pursued in a different way, by distributing among the three main Churches of Ireland,—the Roman Catholic, the Anglican, and the Presbyterian,—the church property of Ireland, would immediately cease, for Mr. Bright and the Nonconformists, to be reason and justice at all, and would become, as Mr. Spurgeon says, "a setting up of the Roman image." Thus we see that the sort of intelligence reached by culture is more disinterested than the sort of intelligence reached by belonging to the Liberal party in the great towns, and taking a commendable interest in politics. But still more striking is the difference between the two views of intelligence, when we see that culture not only makes a quite disinterested choice of the machinery proper to carry us towards sweetness and light, and to make reason and the will of God prevail, but by even this machinery does not hold stiffly and blindly, and easily passes on beyond it to that for the sake of which it chose it. (pp. 25-26)

Again, notice how John Bright’s liberalism (and his support of nonconformist Christianity) is Arnold’s main target. This liberalism exhibits a lesser form of social intelligence that is the product of culture (which Arnold advocates).

The second main criticism of the liberal’s defense of the Englishman’s doing as he pleases is that it is an instance of and ruling exemplification of what Arnold calls ‘Hebraism.’ By which he means a one-sided, fanatical moralism (that Arnold traces back to Puritanism in English life). The analysis of Hebraism is introduced by Arnold at the start of the “preface” in his discussion of nonconformists, who fall short of “harmonious perfection” because “they have developed one side of their humanity at the expense of all others, and have become incomplete and mutilated men in consequence.” (p. 9)

As an aside, some other time I may return to how Arnold (and Burke) uses ‘Hebraic’ as a term of opprobrium, even if the significance of ‘Jerusalem’ to culture worth having cannot be denied. For Arnold, ‘Hebraism’ is the energy in its faith in an ideal that each living culture requires. (p. 29) We may say, in Machiavellian terms, that for Arnold that Hebraism so conceived is a necessary ingredient of any uncorrupted political order.

Be that as it may, the two criticisms of the mid-nineteenth century liberal as exemplified by the speeches of Bright focus on doing as one pleases together suggest that for Arnold the elevation of personal liberty to ruling ideal is a kind of mistake. The mistake occurs when a necessary condition, an instrument, of the good life is erronously treated as a proper end of society and then treated as the only such end worth having and defending. It is important to recognize that this two-fold critique is offered as immanent to liberalism. For, while Arnold’s remarks of Bright are uniformly mocking and satirical, he presents himself repeatedly as a “friend” toward many (especially younger) liberals. And at the end of his “introduction,” he self-describes as ‘liberal.” He writes, “In short, although, like Mr. Bright and Mr. Frederic Harrison, and the editor of the Daily Telegraph, and a large body of valued friends of mine, I am a liberal, yet I am a liberal tempered by experience, reflection, and renouncement, and I am, above all, a believer in culture.” (p. 32; the end of this passage is quoted by Moyn in his chapter on Trilling)2

Now, some other time I return to Arnold’s defense of culture as the perfection of human nature. And the role it may play in the revival of liberalism today. And to what degree liberalism should take this criticism on board. But I want to close on a broader, historiographic point.

I have remarked before that by the middle of the twentieth century, Cobden and Bright, the two giants of liberalism as a social movement and political project of nineteenth century England (alongside Gladstone), were reduced, if they were mentioned at all, to the cold and calculating ‘Manchester’ liberalism purportedly excessively focused on free-trade and lower wages. I long assumed this was primarily the impact of critics from the Left (see, for example, Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation and also many Marxist pamphlets). That Cobden and Bright were courageously anti-imperialist and central (in the case of Bright) to the expansion of the democratic franchise (not to mention religious emancipation) gets forgotten. But I now see that the trope that ‘Manchester liberalism’ is cold and calculating resonates with Arnold’s association of Bright with ‘machinery.’

As an aside, more recently, I have come to realize that during the establishment of the cold-war curriculum (which is the curriculum of modern political philosophy), Cobden and Bright’s anti-imperialism was very inconvenient. I don’t think it’s a total coincidence that during Pax Americana, Locke and Mill (alongside Tocqueville) became the standard bearers of an emancipatory global and imperialism-friendly, ‘liberalism.’ By contrast, in his (1853) pamphlet How Wars are got up in India: The Origins of the Burmese War, Cobden (recall this post) invites the “hope that the national conscience, which has before averted from England, by timely atonement and reparation, the punishment due for imperial crimes, will be roused ere it be too late from its lethargy, and put an end to the deeds of violence and injustice which have marked every step of our progress in India.” Atonement and reparation was not welcome during the Cold War. (Recall also my post on Louis Hartz’ The Liberal Tradition in America: An interpretation of American political thought since the Revolution (1955); and this post on Berlin’s “Two Concepts”.)

In reading Arnold, it’s clear that the real enduring criticism of ‘Manchester’ originates not from the Left, but what came to be known as the Right. And, in fact, it cannot be emphasized enough that for Arnold John Bright is the main polemical target in Culture and Anarchy. (Sometimes Arnold uses Jacob Bright, John’s brother, as a proxy.) In fact, often Arnold presupposes knowledge of Bright’s speeches. The significance of this will pre-occupy me in future posts.

But here I want to close on the historiographic issue I alluded to just now. When, for example, Judith Shklar discusses Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy in Moyn’s key text of his treatment of cold war liberalism, After Utopia, she treats Arnold with contempt; Arnold is treated as “insipid” and “simpering” (p. 91), and, crucially for our purposes, she decouples his social analysis of culture from his critique of liberalism (and Bright in particular). In Trilling’s Liberal Imagination, Arnold is mentioned but also never associated with his particular criticisms of liberalism. (Early Trilling engaged at length with Arnold, but that’s for another time.)3 To the best of my knowledge, Berlin never engages explicitly at length with Arnold (although I notice that he mentions him in some interviews.)

By the middle of the twentieth century, the significance of Culture and Anarchy was left to American conservatives like Irving Babbitt and Russell Kirk, and to early cultural studies. The sidelining of Arnold — either as part of the liberal self-understanding or as a useful critic to engage with — by liberals also meant that it became much easier to forget Bright altogether.

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During my visit to Roosevelt, Stuart and I had a few inspiring conversations. But in one of these he casually mentioned that there was no philosophical work in English on Montesquieu before the middle of twentieth century. The claim seemed entirely plausible to me, but I knew George Sabine had discussed Montesquieu in A History of Political Theory, first published in 1937. That work is usually (and fairly) treated as the foundational text for the institutional distinctness of American political theory.1

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But I knew Sabine (1880 – 1961) was once a pillar of Cornell’s philosophy department (he and Rawls even overlapped there). Sabine even thanks Rawls for “comments on his paper” in his late (1956) essay "Justice and equality." Ethics 67.1 (1956): 10 n. 9. And I have long wondered what his role was in Cornell’s relative retreat from following his mentor, Creighton, in training women philosophy PhDs.

During the past year, I had spent some time with Sabine’s History because I was interested in (and have used) how he treats Locke and Adam Smith. After I returned from Chicago, I had occasion to look at Sabine’s History some more, and I decided to check his discussion of Montesquieu. In what follows, I refer to/quote from the second (1949) edition, reprinted in 1955 by Henry Holt.

In Sabine’s History, Montesquieu is first introduced in the chapter on Plato’s Statesman and Laws in the section on the ‘Mixed State’ (in the Laws). Sabine attributes to Plato the discovery of the “principle” that “stability is thus a resultant of opposite political strains.” He then adds, “This principle is the ancestor of the famous separation of powers which Montesquieu was to rediscover centuries later as the essence of political wisdom embodied in the English constitution.” (p. 77) In a footnote Sabine acknowledges that Aristotle’s Politics suggests there were anticipations of Plato’s ‘discovery.’

It’s worth noting that in The Spirit of the Laws, stability is surprisingly absent as a ruling political idea. But the main exception to the rule is Lycurgus’ mixed constitution for Sparta, which is said to have been inspired by Crete’s laws, and to have inspired Plato’s. (p. 36, part 1, bk 4, ch. 6 in Cohler et al.) In wider context it is clear that here Montesquieu has The Republic not Laws in mind.

The actual principle that Sabine attributes to Plato is the ancestor of a number of important political principles: including what we may call (after Burnham) the principle of ‘Machiavellian liberty’ or ‘Machiavellian republicanism,’ that is, the idea that countervailing powers or social forces maintain freedom.

Anyway, the next mention of Montesquieu occurs in Chapter VIII (“The Law of Nature”) in a section entitled “The Revision of Stoicism,” as follows, “Polybius thus gave to mixed government the form of a system of checks and balances, the form in which it passed to Montesquieu and the founders of the American constitution.” (p. 155) Somewhat frustratingly, Sabine does not discuss here the relationship, if any, among his idea of a ‘separation of powers’ with a ‘mixed government’ that has the ‘form of system of checks and balances.’

Later, in chapter 25 (“The Republicans”) in the context of the discussion of James Harrington’s Oceana (in a section “The Structure of the Commonwealth”), Sabine notes, “in constructing a free government [Harrington] thought it essential to secure a separation of powers. Harrington’s division of political powers, however, did not correspond precisely to that later made familiar by Montesquieu but followed a line suggested by his study of the city-state.” (pp. 504-505). So, somewhat frustratingly, Sabine explains there are different kinds of ‘separation of powers,’ which he treats as synonymous with a ‘division of political powers’ (which presumably also come in different forms), but without explaining or noting what the differences are.

Be that as it may, if we return to Sabine’s discussion of Polybius, Sabine then adds the following:

So far as historical accuracy is concerned, Polybius’s analysis of the Roman constitution was not more penetrating than Montesquieu’s analysis of the English constitution. The tribunes of the people — the most important of all the magistracies in later constitutional development — do not fit into his scheme at all. Like Montesquieu he grasped only a passing phase of the constitution he was examining. Indeed, the theory of the mixed government had only temporary importance in the transference of Stoic ideas to Rome. (P. 77, emphasis added.)

So, Sabine sets the reader up for a rather critical discussion of Montesquieu. This gets confirmed later in one of the main sections on Montesquieu: “Probably few important political theorists were more addicted to hasty generalizations or less inclined to distinguish between exact inference and the impulsion of prior convictions.” (p. 557; see also the judgment on p. 573.)

The next mention of Montesquieu occurs in the context of the twentieth chapter on Jean Bodin in a section, “the well ordered state.” In context, Sabine discusses what we may call Bodin’s commitment to the environmental hypothesis, that is “the relation of physical environment to national characteristics.” (p. 412) He then notes, as an aside, “This portion of Bodin’s work formed an integral part of his whole political philosophy and suggested the later speculations of Montesquieu on the subject, but he made no attempt to bring it into logical relation with his theory of sovereignty.” (p. 412)

Montesquieu is mentioned in the next, twenty-first chapter (“The Modernized Theory of Natural Law”) in the section, “Moral Axioms and Demonstrations,” in the context of a discussion of how for Grotius “some relationships” are “necessary” within law (pp. 427-428). By the latter is meant that “neither will nor authority can change them.” (p. 428) Sabine then adds:

While they leave a considerable range within which positive law may vary, they definitely rule out certain combinations. Some such conception as this with respect to natural and positive law was generally accepted. More than a century later it was still a commonplace, witness the words with which Montesquieu opened the Spirit of the Laws:

Laws, in their most general signification, are the necessary relations arising from the nature of things. (p. 428; see p 3 in Cohler et al.)

This opening line of Spirit of the Laws is quoted again on p. 553 in the second main section devoted to Montesquieu. This includes a very critical discussion of Montesquieu’s treatment of the nature of things.

In chapter 27 (“France: The Decadence of Natural Law”), Montesquieu is first mentioned thrice to help contextualize other French thinkers: first, “a poet like Voltaire or a novelist like Rousseau, a scientist like Diderot or D’Alembert, a civil servant like Turgot, and a metaphysician like Holbach produced political theory as naturally as a sociologist like Montesquieu wrote satire.” (p. 544.) Since Sabine’s book is on the history of political theory, I read this as a devaluation of Montesquieu. Later we learn that Sabine has Persian Letters in mind; he treats it as a “social satire on the condition of France.” (p. 552)

The second, which discusses the conjoined uptake of Newton and Locke in France, is rather important for the overall narrative:

In political thought such a result was a foregone conclusion after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes made religious toleration a major part of any reforming philosophy with the residence of Voltaire in England between 1726 and 1729, and of Montesquieu ten years later, the philosophy of Locke became the foundation of French enlightenment, and the admiration of English government became the keynote of French liberalism. (546)

I would not wish to claim that Sabine wholly invents here the idea that liberalism originates in Locke’s embrace of toleration. I do think his version of the argument is rather important to subsequent twentieth century political historiography and liberalism’s self-understanding. (My regular readers know I reject this account.)

The third is in the context of a section on the discussion of the “reception of Locke.” The passage is notable because it is the only mention of Fénelon in the long book. This is a good place to note that Mandeville is never mentioned! I quote:

Criticism of autocracy itself came in the first instance in the name of the ancient institutions of France which the crown had crushed. This idea was developed speculatively by Fénelon in the romance Télémaque and more positively in his occasional writings. Independent local governments and provincial assemblies, the restoration of the States General, the revival of the power and influence of the nobility, and the independence of the parlements were sought as correctives of absolutism and defended as a return to the ancient constitution of the country. Such a dream persisted, especially among the nobility, even down to the Revolution; traces of it may be seen in the Spirit of the Laws. But it was only a dream. (p. 545)

Here The Spirit of the Laws is associated with a purported ancient constitution. This makes sense, but not explained much.

Chapter 27 also includes the three main sections focused on Montesquieu: (i) “Montesquieu: sociology and liberty;” (ii) “law and environment;” and (iii) “separation of powers.” In total nearly ten pages (pp. 551-560) The second of these includes Sabine’s critical discussion of what above I called Montesquieu’s ‘physical hypothesis,’ which Sabine traces back to Aristotle and Bodin (p. 554) However, for Sabine he can go beyond them because “Montesquieu was intrigued by the great body of travel-literature which had grown up in the seventeenth century, dealing with the aborigines of the Americas and Africa and with the exotic civilizations of Asia.” (p. 555) The third of these sections is devoted to the “famous eleventh book” of The Spirit of the Laws (p. 558)

The discussion in these three sections focuses nearly exclusively on The Spirit of the Laws. Here’s the main remark on Persian Letters: “in the Persian Letters he already thought that the best government is that which “leads men in the way best suitet do their disposition,” and his discussion of the causes of depopulation showed a flair for sociological speculation.” (p. 553, quoting letter 80. The other main remark is on the Persian Letters’ debt to the travel-literature on p. 555.) I have found no mention of Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and Their Decline or other works by Montesquieu.

The discussion of Montesquieu is introduced with the following somewhat ambivalent and deflationary remarks:

Of all French political philosophers in the eighteenth century (other than Rousseau) the most important was Montesquieu. Of them all he had perhaps the clearest conception of the complexities of a social philosophy, and yet he too was guilty of extreme oversimplification…Montesquieu presents at once the best scientific aspirations of his age and its unavoidable confusions. (pp. 551)

Immediately thereafter, The Spirit of the Laws is castigated for lacking “any arrangement,” which “has been saved from the fate suffered by Bodin’s Republic mainly by superior style.” (p. 551) Sabine treats the book as having two main, wholly disconnected points: first, “to develop a sociological theory of government and law by showing that these depend for their structure and functioning upon the circumstances in which a people lives.” (p. 552) And, second, the haunted “fear that the absolute monarchy had so undermined the traditional constitution of France that liberty had become forever impossible.” (p. 552) The main “practical object — and much the most influential part of his work —” is summarized as follows, “was to analyze the constitutional conditions upon which freedom depends and so to discover the means of restoring the ancient liberties of Frenchmen.” (p. 552) Interestingly enough, Sabine then suggests that these two points and objects are unified in Persian Letters. He then notes,

The thought behind the criticism was the same conception of despotism developed in the Spirit of the Laws— a government in which all intermediate powers between the king and the people have been crushed and law has been made identical with the sovereign’s will. It was this interpretation of despotism that gave importance to the separation of powers, which he believed he had found in the English constitution. Yet in the Persian Letters he already thought that the best government is that which “leads men in the way best suited to their disposition,” and his discussion of the causes of depopulation showed a flair for sociological speculation. (p. 552-553, quoting Letter 80)

So, it turns out Persian Letters is rather important. Yet no further discussion of it is offered. And the reader is left wondering what the relationship between intermediate powers and separation of powers (in the English constitution) is supposed to be.

At the start of the third section on Montesquieu, Sabine returns to the issue. He writes, “the separation of the legislative, executive, and judicial powers, and to the balancing of these powers against each other, set up these doctrines as dogmas of liberal constitution-making.” (p. 558) Sabine then immediate adds the following:

The extent of Montesquieu’s influence in this respect is unquestionable and may be read at large in the bills of rights of American and French constitutions.

This idea was, of course, one of the most ancient in political theory. The idea of the mixed state was as old as Plato’s Laws and had been utilized by Polybius to explain the supposed stability of Roman government. (p. 558)

The reader may well wonder what the intrinsic relationship between a separation of powers and a bill of rights is. And between either and the “mixed state.” The reader’s puzzlement is confirmed after a quick mention of Harrington and Locke by Sabine:

But in truth the idea of mixed government had never had a very definite meaning. It had connoted in part a participation and a balancing of social and economic interests and classes, in part a sharing of power by corporations such as communes or municipalities, and only in a small degree a constitutional organization of legal powers. Perhaps its greatest use had been as a makeweight against extreme centralization and as a reminder that no political organization will work unless it can assume comity and fair dealing between its various parts.

So far as Montesquieu modified the ancient doctrine it was by making the separation of powers into a system of legal checks and balances between the parts of a constitution. He was not in fact very precise. (p. 559, emphases added.)

Sabine literally leaves his reader no wiser than he claims his sources were (and only more confused after quoting Bolingbroke’s influence on Montesquieu).

After these three sections devoted to Montesquieu, Sabine turns to Voltaire, by summarizing the significance of The Spirit of the Laws as follows:

Apart from its analysis of the English constitution, the Spirit of the Laws was not in its implications characteristic of political thought in the eighteenth century. The book at least suggested a dependence of political institutions upon physical and social causes, and a consequent relativism of political values, which was contrary to the view that commonly prevailed. (p. 560)

This makes it sound as if the environmental hypothesis is most distinctive in the work. This is then used to offer a contrast with Voltaire, “On this foundation he erected what may be called a psychological theory of culture opposed to Montesquieu’s theory that it is directly influenced by climate and the like, and implying a denial of the influence of race.” (p. 566) And thereby implying (misleadingly) that Montesquieu was a race-theorist.

On the issue of complete relativism, Sabine had noted a few pages before, that “this was certainly never Montesquieu’s position.” (p. 557) But the reader is left with doubt how much relativism Montesquieu entails. Later in the book Sabine hints at Montesquieu’s influence on the latter parts of Rousseau’s The Social Contract (p. 587), on late Burke’s rhetorical use of Montesquieu (p. 608), and on Hegel’s debts to Montesquieu’s “interpretation of the law of nature” (p. 629) without elaboration.

Okay, let me sum up. I was only half right when I corrected Stuart Warner. Yes, Sabine (a philosopher) discusses Montesquieu at some length. But in re-reading the details, I wouldn’t call it much of a philosophical analysis. In fact, one often gets the sense that Sabine presupposes familiarity with the impact and significance of the The Spirit of the Laws on the American founding rather than aims to explain or trace it. But because Sabine actually does not discuss the Federalist Papers and never mentions Madison or Hamilton it’s all left to the reader, including what a separation of powers really amounts to. Montesquieu himself is treated throughout as basically a confused sociological thinker and social satirist, whose main subsequent importance is to transmit to posteriority and amplify a Lockean liberalism of toleration.

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It is well known, among students of Smith’s economics, that his account of wages is rather fine-grained. He identifies five main factors that enter into relative wage-levels: “The five following are the principal circumstances which, so far as I have been able to observe, make up for a small pecuniary gain in some employments, and counter-balance a great one in others: first, the agreeableness or disagreeableness of the employments themselves; secondly, the easiness and cheapness, or the difficulty and expence of learning them; thirdly, the constancy or inconstancy of employment in them; fourthly, the small or great trust which must be reposed in those who exercise them; and, fiftly [sic], the probability or improbability of success in them.” (WN 1.x.b.1, 116-117) In what follows my interest is in the fifth of these.

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Smith elaborates on the fifth as follows in a long paragraph:

The probability that any particular person shall ever be qualified for the employment to which he is educated, is very different in different occupations. In the greater part of mechanick trades, success is almost certain; but very uncertain in the liberal professions. Put your son apprentice to a shoemaker, there is little doubt of his learning to make a pair of shoes: But send him to study the law, it is at least twenty to one if ever he makes such proficiency as will enable him to live by the business. In a perfectly fair lottery, those who draw the prizes ought to gain all that is lost by those who draw the blanks. In a profession where twenty fail for one that succeeds, that one ought to gain all that should have been gained by the unsuccessful twenty, is the counsellor at law who, perhaps, at near forty years of age, begins to make something by his profession, ought to receive the retribution, not only of his own so tedious and expensive education, but of that of more than twenty others who are never likely to make any thing by it. How extravagant soever the fees of counsellors at law may sometimes appear, their real retribution is never equal to this. Compute in any particular place, what is likely to be annually gained, and what is likely to be annually spent, by all the different workmen in any common trade, such as that of shoemakers or weavers, and you will find that the former sum will generally exceed the latter. But make the same computation with regard to all the counsellors and students of law, in all the different inns of court, and you will find that their annual gains bear but a very small proportion to their annual expence, even though you rate the former as high, and the latter as low, as can well be done. The lottery of the law, therefore, is very far from being a perfectly fair lottery; and that, as well as many other liberal and honourable professions, are, in point of pecuniary gain, evidently under-recompenced.—(WN 1.x.b.22, 122-123.)

Smith reminds us that some professions have the character of a lottery. Not all who are qualified in them make it. It’s quite noticeable Smith desists from suggesting these differential outcomes are somehow connected to merit.

As David M. Levy has noted in a famous article back in 1999,1 Smith introduces the idea of a perfectly fair lottery here to alert us to two important points (both made explicit in the next two paragraphs): first, that there is bias in estimating one’s chances (“and, secondly, the natural confidence which every man has more or less, not only in his own abilities, but in his own good fortune”);2 second, that one may have a correct estimation in being paid out in approbation rather than monetized wages (“The publick admiration which attends upon such distinguished abilities, makes always a part of their reward…”). As David Levy also notes, lurking in the background is Smith’s non-trivial claim that spectators often misperceive the odds even more than the agents principally concerned.

Now, the editors of the Glasgow edition, rightly note that Smith was not the first to connect relative wages to a notion of risk. Cantillon, for example, emphasized that relative wages varied not just in light of time and expenses involved in mastering a craft, but also in light of risk. They quote Cantillon, as follows, “The Arts and Crafts which are accompanied by risks and dangers like those of Founders, Mariners, Silver miners, etc. ought to be paid in proportion to the risks. When over and above the dangers skill is needed they ought to be paid still more, e.g. Pilots, Divers, Engineers, etc.” But notice that Cantillon’s idea of ‘risk’ here just literally means danger. It does not mean anything like a probabilistic ‘lottery.’3

I don’t mean to suggest that Smith is very sophisticated in how he thinks about probabilities—most of his remarks suggests he has a kind of rough frequentist sensibility. Nor do I think Smith is the first to think of the relationship between reward relative to costs and to riskiness of the enterprise in probabilistic terms in political economy. (This is especially explicit when Smith discusses entrepreneurship and insurance in Wealth of Nations.) But to frame it in terms of a fair lottery is rather distinctive. (I don’t think you find the notion of a fair lottery connected to employment in Locke, Mandeville, or Hume.)

This is why I was very struck by the following passage in Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws:

Not only can a commerce that produces nothing be useful, but so can even a disadvantageous commerce. I have heard that in Holland whale-hunting generally speaking almost never returns what it costs; but those who have been employed in building the ship, those who have provided the rigging, the gear, and the provisions, are also those who take the principal interest in the hunt. Even if they lose on the hunt, they have come out ahead on the equipage. This commerce is a kind of lottery, and each one is seduced by the hope of a lucky number. Everyone loves to play, and the most sober people willingly enter the play when it does not have the appearance of gambling, with its irregularities, its violence, its dissipation, the loss of time, and even of life. (p. 342; part 4, bk 20, ch. 6 in the Cohler et al. translation.)

In reading this example, I immediately had to think of Nvidia which subsidizes AI companies in order to promote demand for its products.

Now, we know that Smith read with attention The Spirit of the Laws, which he explicitly and implicitly cites throughout Wealth of Nations. I was especially struck by Smith’s echoing Montesquieu’s insistence that people tend to overestimate their own good fortune, even when they do know better (are healthy, etc.) as the whale-hunters do. I often wish our own formal decision-theorists would take this observation more seriously.

The point in Montesquieu is not that commerce is often irrational (cf. Timothy Brennan (2021) “Montesquieu’s Dur-Commerce thesis,” p. 706 n. 37), even if it is that, but rather that commerce is often engaged in because it is thrilling in its own right in virtue of its riskiness. Of course, critics of capitalism, who focus on alienation and exploitation for obvious reasons, tend to miss the nature of this attraction to at least some of the more privileged insiders.

To what degree Montesquieu himself is evoking stock-investing, which was already often associated with a lottery (see the top left corner 1721 Print from Hogarth, “Raffleing for Husbands with Lottery Fortunes in Here,”) is worth further investigation.

In the quoted passage, Montesquieu makes the point that economic life itself is often a form of play with its own reward even if the character of the reward is risky. Smith agrees with Montesquieu that ‘love of play’ is a very powerful motive. But he takes it in a very different direction; for Smith ‘love of play’ and fellowship motivates innovation on the work-floor to create labor-saving devices so that one does not have to do actual work: “One of those boys, who loved to play with his companions, observed that, by tying a string from the handle of the valve, which opened this communication, to another part of the machine, the valve would open and shut without his assistance, and leave him at liberty to divert himself with his play-fellows.” (WN 1.1.8 , p. 20) So, while Smith warmly endorses the significance of play as fellowship, on the whole Smith frowns on play as a speculative economic activity, which he associates with disreputable ‘projecting.’

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As I have heard some say, that Justice is but a word, without substance; and that whatsoever a man can by force, or art, acquire to himselfe, (not onely in the condition of warre, but also in a Common-wealth,) is his own, which I have already shewed to be false: So there be also that maintain, that there are no grounds, nor Principles of Reason, to sustain those essentiall Rights, which make Soveraignty absolute. For if there were, they would have been found out in some place, or other; whereas we see, there has not hitherto been any Common-wealth, where those Rights have been acknowledged, or challenged. Wherein they argue as ill, as if the Savage people of America, should deny there were any grounds, or Principles of Reason, so to build a house, as to last as long as the materials, because they never yet saw any so well built. Time, and Industry, produce every day new knowledge. And as the art of well building, is derived from Principles of Reason, observed by industrious men, that had long studied the nature of materials, and the divers effects of figure, and proportion, long after mankind began (though poorly) to build: So, long time after men have begun to constitute Common-wealths, imperfect, and apt to relapse into disorder, there may, Principles of Reason be found out, by industrious meditation, to make use of them, or be neglected by them, or not, concerneth my particular interest, at this day, very little. But supposing that these of mine are not such Principles of Reason; yet I am sure they are Principles from Authority of Scripture; as I shall make it appear, when I shall come to speak of the Kingdome of God, (administred by Moses,) over the Jewes, his peculiar people by Covenant.—Hobbes, Leviathan Chapter 30, “Objection Of Those That Say There Are No Principles Of Reason For Absolute Soveraignty”

The passage that I quoted in the pull-quote above from the start of chapter 30 of the English version of Leviathan is striking for lots of reasons. In the first quoted sentence Hobbes distances himself from a view like Thrasymachus’ and that one might be strongly tempted to attribute to Hobbes himself. In the last sentence, Hobbes suggests that even if his own views are not supported by reason they are supported by the authority of Scripture, that is, revelation, especially the material pertaining to the (Biblical) Hebrew commonwealth. Both of these claims, which have generated non-trivial scholarly debate, I am going to leave aside in what follows.

Others may be attracted to the rhetorical role that the ‘savage’ Americans play in his argument. And while I am interested in that particular argument, I am going to leave aside the ethnocentric nature of Hobbes’ implied stadial theory here. Rather, I am really interested in and going to focus on the significance of Hobbes’ response to the implied objection.

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The implied objection presupposes, in line with the principles of natural reason/law, that the principles of reason are, like the principles of geometry, both true everywhere and at all times. This is, let's say, the principle of ‘universal application.’ More controversially, but crucially, the basic principles like the prohibitions against murder or theft are also known everywhere. Let’s call this the the principle of ‘universal familiarity.’

In Hobbes’ day implied familiarity with the principles does not entail that one adheres to natural law. That’s de facto the message of, say, Montaigne’s “Of Cannibalism” in which European customs have corrupted their principles of reason.

In his response to the implied objection, Hobbes accepts the principle of universal application, but rejects the principle of universal familiarity. But what would have been striking to his interlocuters is the reason for denying the principle of universal familiarity. Namely, that the content of the principles of reasons that are true everywhere and at all times can evolve. It turns out that for Hobbes, the principles of reason are true and discoverable everywhere.

Hobbes, then, is inscribing a notion of intellectual progress into his principles of reason. Since Hobbes had been Bacon’s amanuensis, and Bacon flirts with all kinds of new notions of progress, I don’t want to claim that Hobbes is especially original here. And one might wish to domesticate the point I appear to be reaching at by suggesting that while natural law is unchanging, natural reason only refers to the cognition used to discover natural law. This is a very natural and common reading of Hobbes, after all.

But my interest is in the way Hobbes has constructed his implied analogy between the art of building homes and the art of constructing commonwealths (both derived from particular principles of reason). In the case of the former, the art evolves in light of ‘Time, and Industry.’ Now, for Hobbes it is pretty much definitional that industry only bears ‘fruit’ once the state of nature and its uncertainty has been left. (See chapter XIII!) So, under the rule of law, when expectations are stabilized and reliable, technological innovation including in home-building is possible. In the pull-quote, Hobbes strongly implies that such innovation in home-building is the effect of the empirical observation of trial and error (hence the significance of time).

When it comes to the advances in the principles of reasons that shape political theory, Hobbes only mentions the need for “industrious meditation”—not trial and error based in political experience. But the rule of law, and so the escape from the condition of the state of nature, is still required to create the framework that makes industrious meditation possible that is not governed by permanent uncertainty of state of nature.

Hobbes, then, acknowledges that the political principles of Leviathan are inaccessible in the state of nature. These are the product of civilization that makes such industrious meditation possible. By contrast, natural man is capable only of “confederacy with others” (chapters 13) and creating the original social contract. (I am not claiming originality here because I don’t claim deep familiarity with the Hobbes literature.)

While I wouldn’t wish to claim that Hobbes thereby historicizes his own anthropology, I do think it suggests that a natural criticism of Hobbes (often attributed to Rousseau, but also to be found in Hume and Smith) that he erroneously projects civilized man back into the state of nature deserves some qualification. Something in the vicinity of the criticism is undoubtedly true, but Hobbes knows he is writing in and inaugurating a new age.

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Before I get to my actual main point, a more general remark. I have been raised on an academic culture in which one does not present work one has already published. (Obviously if the author is asked to speak on a topic this changes the story.) This is frowned upon, and status reducing. In practice, I usually find it a waste of my time if I have actually read the work in question. Since I had recently read and blogged about Liberalism Against Itself, I expected to practice my meditation techniques to forestall boredom and annoyance throughout the lecture.

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But watching (and listening to) how Moyn presented his own book made me see something about the argument that I had not really appreciated before. And I only saw it because in the interest of time, Moyn had compressed one of his main arguments into three bullet points. The significance of one of those bullet points now stood out to me. Let me get to that now.

For Moyn, one of the great changes between the element of nineteenth century liberalism that he likes and the cold war liberalism that he criticizes, is the loss of treating history itself as a site of meaning. This phrase captures actually quite a lot, but what it really amounts to is a conceptualization of political life as progressive and constituted by collective worldmaking. Or, as Moyn puts it, “that history is a forum of opportunity for the acquisition and institutionalization of freedom.” This is what Moyn calls ‘historicism.’

In his book, the reason historicism matters is because, cold war liberalism is treated as denying the “unfolding of collective freedom in historical time.” Moyn illustrates the point with a quote from Furet:

One of the perpetrators in the death of Marxism, the French historian François Furet—effectively Talmon’s most influential disciple in equating democracy and terror and making the French Revolution unsalvageable for liberals—observed wistfully in 1995 that Marxism’s disappearance made “the idea of another society” in the future “almost impossible to conceive[;] no one in the world today is offering any advice on the subject or even trying to formulate a new concept.” He concluded, glumly: “Here we are, condemned to live in the world as it is.”1

The quote from Furet appears in the chapter on Popper. And that’s no coincidence because in the lecture, when Moyn summarizes the three elements of cold war liberalism he is focused on, the second bullet point is the abolition of “meaning in history (Popper).” This was suddenly eye-opening.

Now, usually, when I read critics of ‘neo-liberalism,’ I groan when they claim that one of the ideological features of neo-liberalism as defended by neoliberal theorists themselves is that there is no alternative. (Of course, I grant that politicians like Thatcher might have implied that for rhetorical purposes.) But the passage from Furet really does kind of imply conceptual (ahh) actualism.

So conceived we might say that while the overriding theoretical-political sin of Hegelianism is in treating the actual as rational; the over-riding theoretical-political sin of vulgar neoliberalism [see what I did there?] is in treating the actual as the only possible.2 I put it like that for two reasons: ultimately such neoliberalism rests on a metaphysical thesis. And the thesis is itself a flavor of Spinozism. Here’s how Moyn puts it in the book:

Merleau-Ponty makes for an indispensable contrast to Popper and the other Cold War liberals. By 1950 he had turned his back on Marxism, spending the decade before his early death attempting to rescue historicism —which he never associated with lawlike evolution—from it. As they had done with the Enlightenment, the Cold War liberals proceeded in reverse: accepting the narratives of their enemies and anxious about being outpaced, liberals repudiated root and branch what had once been an essential part of their tradition. They concurred that Marxism was the philosophy of history, and having turned their backs on it, they enthusiastically dug the grave of historicism. Any commitment to the unfolding of collective freedom in historical time now seemed an apology for terror.

As an aside, in 1953, Leo Strauss’s Natural Right and History appeared. This work is also centered on a polemic against historicism. But interestingly enough, Strauss’ main target is not Marx (who is barely mentioned), but Max Weber (and as Richard Velkley convinced me Heidegger).3 In his polemic against historicism, Strauss studiously ignores Popper just as the cold war liberals by and large ignore Strauss. But I suspect Berlin was familiar with Strauss’ argument. Because in a footnote to “Historical Inevitability,” he explicitly exempts from his critique “the great thinkers who founded modern sociology – Marx, Durkheim, Weber – nor of the rational and scrupulous followers and critics whose work they have inspired.”4 Note the inclusion of Marx alongside Weber.

So much for set up.

Nobody would claim that Popper was a kind of crypto metaphysical Spinozist or that Popper rejected progressive, collective worldmaking. Popper actively defended piecemeal engineering. Moyn presents Popper’s view as follows: “The point was not to rule out “an open mind as to the scope of reform” but only those who have “decided beforehand [on] the possibility and necessity of a complete reconstruction.”” (P. 183 in Berlin The Proper Study of Mankind: An Anthology of Essays, ed. Hardy & Hausheer, Pimlico 1998) And, in context, Moyn treats Popper as a polite critic of Hayek.

So, Moyn’s argument is a kind of unintended consequence explanation in which Popper accidentally becomes a world-historical figure in virtue of the uptake of his views: “Karl Popper’s accidental but egregious contribution to Cold War liberalism was to achieve the liquidation of its Hegelian and historicist legacy.”

Moyn discusses the wider processes as follows:

“Popper’s own notorious definition of “historicism” isolated one narrow version of it, the belief that there is a script of social evolution, equivalent to a law of nature, compulsively driving humanity from subjugation to emancipation. He then proceeded to dismantle this idea.

In so doing, Popper’s essential achievement was to persuade liberals to abandon the broad version of historicism, as if his critique of the narrow version disposed of it. Much of nineteenth-century liberalism had been built on the terrain of providentialist optimism about perfectibility and progress. Sometimes liberals, like a far broader group of nineteenth-century thinkers, did indeed hew to the narrow, scientistic view of history Popper denounced. Many more were committed to the broader notion of progress as not inevitable but possible, and of reversals not as contributions to progress but as temporary setbacks to be overcome. The Cold War obscured this indefinitely.

This leaves a bit mysterious why Popper’s more narrow argument had such a wide impact. It would require a collective conceptual blunder in which the scope of an argument is fundamentally misunderstood by people who had been trained in the view that was being attacked. Moyn himself implies that Popper “made it easy to assume that the rejection of the deterministic philosophy of history of some Marxists meant that historicism had never had and could not have some other basis, whether in the past of Hegelianism or in some forms of liberalism.” This phrase points to Moyn’s own explanation for the apparent blunder.

For Moyn, the nineteenth century liberal embrace of Hegel and other forms of providentialism provided the framework for the things he admires in nineteenth century liberalism. And if I understand Moyn correctly the cumulative attack on Hegel simply cut liberalism off from all providentialism (and, as a bonus, ‘positive’ conceptions of freedom),5 and thereby from meaning in history as a condition of possibility to collective worldmaking.

I think this story can’t really be right. And that’s because liberal accounts of providentialism are (as Moyn notes explicitly) also rooted in Christianity and in a variety of Darwinian evolutionary theories (especially if we think of Marshall, Keynes, and Spencer). The latter goes unmentioned in the book. Since Spencerian Darwinian evolutionary theories have been re-packaged in contemporary longtermism (not infrequently with the eugenics that made the early twentieth century versions so sordid), even the decline of commitment to Christianity among intellectuals and social elites of the twentieth of century can’t explain the apparent blunder. Part of of me wonders if this is the same mystery as what really explains the decline of commitment to final causes in the twentieth century.

I recognize that some readers may be left uneasy in that I seem to be positing an efficient market in ideas (somerhing I usually mock). And not to allow that the past didn’t blunder. I acknowledge the objection if that’s what I were doing. But it’s not my strategy; I am positing an efficient market in ideas not as a fact, but as a kind of normative ideal that motivates us to look for the causes of the deviations from apparent rationality.

Interestingly enough, in the book Moyn also points (while drawing on Shklar’s After Utopia) to a different possibility. That centers on the impact of Kierkegaard on “twentieth-century existentialism” with (now quoting Moyn) the “baleful result” a “myth of moral autonomy coupled with horror and incomprehension before collective path-dependency.” (Of course, Kierkegaard is also responding to Hegel.) It’s not obvious why Moyn thinks he has earned the right to call moral autonomy a myth. But that’s for another time.

But why would commitment to moral autonomy displace historicism in the sense collective worldmaking? That’s also not obvious. And why would existentialist embrace of moral autonomy have such an effect? Moyn’s book is unsatisfying in this respect. In the chapter on Berlin there are hints of a better explanation. I quote Moyn:

That helped cut Berlin off from the nineteenth-century liberal desire for a form of politics—call it an ethical state—that, though surely without prejudice to freedom, is required to produce creative agency individually and collectively. Constant and Mill never repudiated Romantic individuality, which they prized most deeply. Berlin did, by defining his Cold War liberalism at the same time he was rescuing Romanticism from Cold War liberalism’s anticanon.

Berlin’s attempted way out, as he became increasingly attached over the years to “pluralism” and historic defenders of it such as the German thinker J. G. Herder, was to denounce ethically perfectionist Romanticism but harvest its pluralistic implications against the state and against monist schemes of putative Enlightenment derivation that the state (read: communism) might impose.

As I have noted in an earlier post (recall), I think Moyn misses the significance of Humboldt to J.S. Mill, Popper, and Berlin in these matters. (This is not to deny how Berlin turns Herder into the fount of pluralism.) More important, Moyn treats Berlin’s embrace of pluralism as kind of idiosyncrasy. But Moyn misses, thereby, the centrality of Weber’s more sociological interpretation of pluralism as a social fact of modern life with its advanced division of labor.6 As regular readers know, I think Weber gets this idea from Adam Smith (where it is foundational to his anti-mercantilist liberalism), but twentieth century liberalism associates it with Weber and more recent discovery of modernity.

As regular readers know, I argue that cold-war liberalism falsely re-constitutes the history of liberalism by treating the invention of liberalism as the answer to dangerous forms of sixteenth and seventeenth century religious pluralism; and by treating ‘toleration’ as a foundational commitment of liberalism. (This, as much as Locke’s defense of property, turns Locke into the founder of liberalism.) That’s because there was an intense felt need to accommodate social pluralism, especially after the rise of the Catholic vote in once protestant countries.

Now, I grant that embracing value-pluralism does not require the rejection of historicism in the sense of collective worldmaking. But these are difficult to combine.7 Somewhat amusingly, some of Moyn’s best allies are those analytic moral monists who, while groping in the dark, are inspired by Parfit to climb a single mountain blindfolded to the richness of moral experience.

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The thing we teach is not in decline. It is in demand — more sharply, more universally, than at any point in my career. We have spent a generation worrying that the world had stopped needing people who can read closely, think clearly, and write well, and we built our defensive crouch around that fear. But look at what is actually happening. We have just built machines that produce fluent, confident, plausible text by the ocean — and in doing so we have made the ability to tell good reasoning from bad, true claims from merely well-phrased ones, the single most valuable cognitive skill a person can have. The world did not stop needing what we teach. The world just discovered, almost overnight, that it needs it everywhere, all the time, from everyone. The bottleneck on this entire technological revolution is human judgment — and human judgment, the careful kind, trained against hard texts and harder questions, is precisely the thing the humanities have always made. @ N. Ángel Pinillos Ph.D “The Honest Case for the Humanities.” HT

Last Friday, my co-blogger at Crookedtimber, Harry Brighouse (Madison), gave a paper in our colloquium in Amsterdam. The main point of the paper was that universities could, and should, teach some skills that are constitutive in citizenship and this might mitigate or ameliorate some of the political crises of the moment. And before you think that Brighouse has had a late-in-life conversion to Cicero, Brighouse does not advocate rhetoric and the art of persuasion as the key skill to be taught. Rather, and what made the argument really interesting, was that Brighouse identified the capacity to listen and respond to reasons and arguments as salient in the art of citizenship that can be taught in the Academy. (I would use ‘considerations’ rather than ‘arguments’ in this context, but I recognize ‘considerations’ don’t roll of the tongue.) What gave Brighouse’s argument punch was that he identified lots of ways universities, not the least us, the humanities, currently fail to teach these particular listening skills.

Brighouse has not circulated the paper, so I won’t be able to do justice to his argument. So, I won’t engage more with his main argument here. And that’s probably for the better. I am not especially sympathetic to the idea that universities should be in the ‘developing skills for citizenship’ mission. Not, I hasten to add, because it does not fit my general understanding of the nature universities. For, on my (somewhat worked out) evolving view, all modern universities ought to be committed to the teaching, preservation, and advancement of knowledge (although they may treat the commitment to each of these components as a matter of emphasis). But each university community can as a corporate entity also pick specific distinct goals as apt for it. And so teaching listening skills that contribute to citizenship could conceivably be part of that.

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Rather, my objection to the idea is rooted in the fact that many prominent universities have claimed that preparing students for active or democratic citizenship as a marketing or branding ploy. Their systemic failure to think through what duties/obligations and requirements that puts on them got unmasked when confronted by student-activism and donor/political pressure. As I have repeatedly argued during the last few years (recall here; and here), this hollowness reveals and contributes to the pervasive cynicism surrounding the modern university.

Keep that in mind. Above is a pull quote from a new substack post by that was written in response to an interview with (by Douthat). Now, I was pleasantly surprised that I agreed with the general argument by (that’s not always the case, and I am usually in agreement with Frey on educational matters). His argument converges nicely (recall here) with my own argument that the widespread adoption of A(G)I will increase the value of genuine expertise. And in fact many of Pinillos’ arguments and evidence would also support Brighouse’s general argument. (I think that’s good.) Go read his very sensible post.

Along the way, Pinillos (Arizona) quite rightly notes that many of the truest arguments in defense of the humanities only work on the already converted. And he nicely shows that the more existential arguments centered on human need and freedom (that I have endorsed after reading Frey in the past recall here; and here) end up not working very well in an already corrupt democracy because they unintentionally sound condescending in the way that got Socrates in trouble in Athens—they imply that many adults are not free or autonomous.1 That’s not an especially helpful argument if you want to public to subsidize you.

So much for set up.

Brighouse framed his own analysis with two general remarks about the university. First, the kinds of activities the modern research university engages in are a bit ad hoc, and the contingent result of all kinds of political and economic decisions. While universities are really very old and enduring institutions, that universities are the sites/instruments and prime beneficiaries of government sponsored research, especially, is a relatively novel phenomenon. And as we are experiencing that may not endure. (This is the kind of thing I also usually say, so let’s leave it aside.)

Second, one of the main social functions of universities is that they are one of the key vectors of privilege in our society. At the apex of the global university system are a relatively small number of universities that distribute privilege most. In our world this largely means ending up in the right social networks from which status, jobs, and wealth follow. They are an integral part of the elite reproduction and production and the elite entry process. This is, of course, one of the reasons why a small number universities get disproportionate (politicized) media attention, why parents are so anxious about ensuring their children’s access to them (including bribery scandals), and so on. It also makes it highly peculiar that democracies spend so many resources in subsidizing universities, while being relatively carefree that the beneficiaries of such largesse are mostly the already privileged. The apex universities also get emulated by lesser ones all over the world.

Now, it is fairly obvious that the research-intensive universities are embedded in sites of privilege production is not news to many folk in the humanities themselves. As I tirelessly remark, the scholarly process in professional philosophy journals and graduate education are not at all fine-tuned toward producing and disseminating knowledge—it is in the prestige-production business. (Recall my jeremiads against the incredibly low acceptance rates in journals, etc.) It’s also why you will never convince me that the distribution of positions in professional philosophy is primarily an intellectual meritocracy—yes it has elements of that, but it is also shaped by class and (ahh) privilege (not to mention luck). I am no Veblen or Bourdieu, but they were onto something.

The tactfully leaving aside of the privilege production function of universities when we think about the ‘crisis of the humanities’ leads to rather odd discussions. For, at the apex institutions the role of the humanities never was or is to generate a set of vocational-specific competencies that could provide people with entry level jobs. (Note: I am not saying there is no truth in the idea that liberal arts graduates have useful skills in the job market.) Rather, the point is that they open doors for you.

What’s interesting and peculiar about our moment in time, then, is that the very people that by and large have benefitted massively from the prestige production process of apex universities are greatly uneasy about their role in our society. (Not to be sure because the have-nots are by and large not well served by apex institutions.) I put it like that because, as usual in any political coalition, the unease reflect different aims. A sub-set of people are just annoyed that they do not control the apex universities or that their political friends do not have more jobs in their humanities (this includes the more cynical ‘viewpoint diversity’ types). And if they can’t get those jobs they may as well burn down the institution.

But the more fascinating point is that those who have benefitted most from universities in the privilege production factor (aka the network they have entered into) also have ended up with the most contempt for them and the Humanities in particular. My evidence for this is indirect. But on the whole, Silicon Valley and Wall Street refuse to speak up for the apex universities and main strait business have not defended their state flagships; that process has been visible long before the encampments. Rather, it’s what gave certain political operators the confidence to attack the universities so frontally.

In addition, Silicon Valley markets AI deliberately to undermine the values that were once embedded in the Humanities; they have explicitly facilitated cheating, and they constantly assert and imply that AI will be able to replace PhDs and artists (etc.). (And again this is not intended to serve society’s have-nots.) The contempt for the Humanities is a feature of modern branding of AI.

Notice that in my argument it is no surprise that apex universities are not beloved in wider society. In their capacity of privilege production they serve the few. If one of the main functions of these institutions in our society is to sort our social elites, then they will be judged, in part, by the quality of elites they produce. Whatever else is true, liberal democracies are run by elites that have had trouble maintaining the confidence of electorates for a few decades now. This is no surprise because the transactional ethos that predominate in our polities has been embraced in our universities who have lost all spiritual authority in society and amongst themselves.

If you think this last point is exaggerated, I note that at one point, in criticizing Frey, Pinillos uses ‘taste’ in a derogatory way (“It comes off as an announcement of taste dressed up as metaphysics.”) Now, privilege production need not coincide with the cultivation of taste. But one of the more edifying features of the role of the humanities within the privilege production process of our civilization was that they also cultivated taste (and erudition) alongside the good judgment that Pinillos actively defends. And that’s a good thing too, because social elites without taste are insufferably boring and stultifying—they actively make our shared spaces uglier, and thereby diminish our political and communal lives. Their crassness and ugliness is, in fact, one of the main problems with Trump’s building projects. (I don’t think taste is as important as mercy and humanity in elites, but that’s for another time.)

Now, if you have followed me this far, you won’t be surprised by the position I land on: if the humanities at apex universities get destroyed, it’s possible that these still remain in the business of privilege production without the humanities. But if the universities continue to show in their unwillingness to defend the humanities or anything associated with the intrinsic value of what seems like ornamental knowledge that they view themselves as bystanders in this process incapable of anything but ‘neutral’ voice, they also signal to their enemies that they are ripe for wider status destruction; and, until they recover their spiritual authority, they would merit it.

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And, yet, David Hume of all people notes in “Of the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences” (1742) that when it comes to belles lettres (which he calls ‘pleasantries’) “the ancients have not left us one piece…that is excellent, (unless one may except the Banquet of Xenophon, and the Dialogues of Lucian).” (Keep the year of publication in mind.) This is especially high praise coming from Hume, who we know read the Dialogues of Lucian on his deathbed (and not unlike Smith) was a great admirer of Lucian.

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To the best of my knowledge, Hume discusses Xenophon’s Symposium in only one other place. I quote nearly the whole paragraph:

property was rendered very precarious by the maxims of ancient government. Xenophon, in the Banquet of Socrates, gives us a natural unaffected description of the tyranny of the Athenian people. “In my poverty,” says Charmides, “I am much more happy than I ever was while possessed of riches: as much as it is happier to be in security than in terrors, free than a slave, to receive than to pay court, to be trusted than suspected. Formerly I was obliged to caress every informer; some imposition was continually laid upon me; and it was never allowed me to travel, or be absent from the city. At present, when I am poor I look big, and threaten others. The rich are afraid of me, and show me every kind of civility and respect; and I am become a kind of tyrant in the city.”—Of the Populousness of Ancient Nations. (1752)

Hume’s main point is that the tax-policies of Athens (in war-time) have impoverished one of its leading citizens (Charmides). This is, in fact, Charmides’ own point just before the passage Hume quotes, “some expense was always assigned to me by the city, and I wasn’t able to travel abroad.” (4.30. Robert Bartlett’s translation).

The wider context of Hume’s argument is a critique of Athens’ war financing and, perhaps, war policies. Charmides himself suggests he has been cut off from his foreign properties (and, thus, investments), and his domestic ones, too.

So, it seems that Hume treats its attitude toward war-financing as one of the main imperfections of Athenian democracy. In particular, Hume strongly implies that the many can vote for war and then then throw its costs onto the wealthy few (“the tyranny of the Athenian people”). What’s especially unusual about Hume’s argument is that the argument is usually reversed (cf. Kant on how aristocracies go to war at the expense of the many).

Now, in light of Charmides’ subsequent career, few of us will feel much sympathy for his plight. As Xenophon’s Hellenica recounts Charmides was one of the Thirty Tyrants. And, in fact, awareness of this makes Hume’s comment on Charmides’ own irony about his reversal of fortune more poignant. Between his own purported tyranny as a suddenly poor man, and his future participation in actual tyranny, Hume interpolates the tyranny of Athenian democracy. For Hume, Athenian democracy exhibits arbitrary power (at least its wartime policies—although there are other places where Hume implies this).

What got me thinking about this material in Hume is a very striking moment in Montesquieu’s (1748) The Spirit of the Laws. As my regular readers know, I am ruminating on the nature of democratic corruption. By ‘corruption’ I mean not just about illegal and legal bribery, but also and even more about the bending of the rules such that when they function properly the public good is structurally undermined.

Now, Montesquieu is quite clear that the leading principle of democracy within a democracy can be corrupted in two ways: “The principle of democracy is corrupted not only when the spirit of equality is lost but also when the spirit of extreme equality is taken up and each one wants to be the equal of those chosen to command.” (p. 112 in the Cohler et al translation; Part 1, Book 8, chapter 2.) Interestingly enough most of Montesquieu’s subsequent discussion involves (and thereby anticipating Tocqueville) the latter. And — you guessed it — he proceeds to offer Xenophon’s Symposium as an exemplary book on the topic and, most striking of all, quotes the very same passage as Hume does:

One sees in Xenophon’s Symposium an artless depiction of a republic whose people have abused equality. Each guest in turn gives his reason for being pleased with himself. “I am pleased with myself,” says Charmides, “because of my poverty. When I was rich I was obliged to pay court to slanderers, well aware that I was more likely to receive ill from them than to cause them any; the republic constantly asked for a new payment; I could not travel. Since becoming poor, I have acquired authority; no one threatens me, I threaten the others; I can go or stay. The rich now rise from their seats and make way for me. Now I am a king, I was a slave; I used to pay a tax to the republic, today the republic feeds me; I no longer fear loss, I expect to acquire.”—pp. 112-113 in the Cohler et al translation; Part 1, Book 8, chapter 2.

Now we know that Hume read the Spirit of the Laws in 1748 already. And while he had some disagreements he also engaged fruitfully with it. I have suggested that there is tantalizing evidence in the Treatise that young Hume was reading Montesquieu (recall here; and here), and especially interested in Montesquieu’s treatment of despotism and literary self-fashioning).

But I also think it is pretty clear that later in life Hume agreed with Montesquieu that Xenophon’s Symposium (whom he admired as a literary stylist, which is high praise from Hume) is the treatment of democratic decline and corruption. Since both were very familiar with Livy (and Machiavelli’s treatment thereof) and Thucydides this judgment is arresting. And while I lack the appetite to rise to the defense of Xenophon as such, we might have to re-read him in order to understand how the architects of our aristocratic form of democracy understood the imperfections of the more popular kind.

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For Hobbes indignation is a kind of “anger for great hurt done to another, when we conceive the same to be done by Injury.” (ch. 6) This is pretty much what Smith would call a kind of ‘sympathetic resentment.’ It’s especially notable that in Hobbes indignation is caused only by ‘great hurt’ done to “another.” A disproportionate effect gives rise to this emotion. This is not a self-centered passion because for Hobbes the triggering cause of this emotion is when we conceive that the great injury is the effect of injustice done to another. (Hobbes tells us in chapter 15 that injustice and injury are pretty much used interchangeably.)

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Now, before I get to my actual point, two observations: first, indignation is actually not used much in Leviathan. So, in this sense, at the level of vocabulary, Hobbes is very much unlike Machiavelli (recall here), Spinoza (recall here), Hume, and Smith (recall here; and here). But at the level of doctrine Hobbes is very much, as I will intimate, in line with their analysis.

Second, it is crucial that indignation is caused in bystanders by how they conceptualize they world. Indignation tracks how bystanders perceive reality not the underlying causes. So, it is really rooted in people’s opinions. And that also means that the indignation of the people is something that can be managed by statecraft by propaganda and instruction, but also by its actions.

Okay with that in place, let’s turn to chapter 30, “Of the Office of the Soveraign Representative.” This chapter covers many features that belong to both instruction and the actions of the administrative state. And the paragraph I have in mind is called ‘punishments’ in a part of the chapter on what ‘good laws’ are. In modern jargon, this is where Hobbes describes how the administrative state should execute its own laws. The paragraph begins with the (Platonic) claim that the function of law is “correction” of either the offending agent or —and this links up with the second point I just made — “of others by his example.” So, the proper application of law can shape the view/opinions of the people. Hobbes then continues,

[T]he severest Punishments are to be inflicted for those Crimes, that are of most Danger to the Publique; such as are those which proceed from malice to the Government established; those that spring from contempt of Justice; those that provoke Indignation in the Multitude; and those, which unpunished, seem Authorised, as when they are committed by Sonnes, Servants, or Favorites of men in Authority: For Indignation carrieth men, not onely against the Actors, and Authors of Injustice; but against all Power that is likely to protect them; as in the case of Tarquin; when for the Insolent act of one of his Sonnes, he was driven out of Rome, and the Monarchy it selfe dissolved.

What’s especially striking is that here Hobbes basically treats the prevention of treason, the prevention of contempt of justice, and the prevention of indignation in the multitude with the same level of seriousness. Since the first two of these involve the actual undermining of the social contract, Hobbes, hereby, suggests that provoking indignation in the multitude also undermines the social contract.

To paraphrase the point, when the people are indignant they become a “multitude” and, thereby, return it to the state of nature. For, at that point they stop or risk not being represented by a single agent (the sovereign) and lose their unity the sovereign represents (see chapter 16). As Hobbes puts it, “Indignation carrieth men, not onely against the Actors, and Authors of Injustice; but against all Power that is likely to protect them.” It is pretty clear that what Hobbes has in mind is that sympathetic indignation generates a desire for revenge that ultimately can be turned against “all power,” including the sovereign who is perceived to protect the agents of great injury.

What is especially likely to provoke indignation are the crimes of the “Sonnes, Servants, or Favorites of men in Authority.” When there is a perception that the rich and powerful protect their very own from the equal application of the law, as they are wont to do in (let me invoke Machiavelli and Spinoza) corrupt ages, the Sovereign risks undermining the social contract and ultimately his/her own authority. As I frequently note, ‘corruption’ is not just about illegal and legal bribery, but also and even more about the bending of the rules such that when they function properly the public good is structurally undermined.

This also helps explains the potency of the Epstein files. The more the public is focused on the ruined lives of the victims, the more proto-revolutionary circumstances prevail. Not to put too fine point on it, the last Tarquin was driven out of Rome because he refused to punish the sex-crimes of his son.

That we live in a corrupt age became impossible to ignore in the aftermath of Jan. 6; by this I do not just mean the attempted usurpation on the day itself but all the other efforts to steal the election that preceded it and that de facto went unpunished. For, the American political class ended up treating the ring-leaders with considerably more leniency than many of their deluded followers.

In the remainder of the paragraph, Hobbes is pretty clear this outcome has it exactly backwards:

But Crimes of Infirmity; such as are those which proceed from great provocation, from great fear, great need, or from ignorance whether the Fact be a great Crime, or not, there is place many times for Lenity, without prejudice to the Common-wealth; and Lenity when there is such place for it, is required by the Law of Nature. The Punishment of the Leaders, and teachers in a Commotion; not the poore seduced People, when they are punished, can profit the Common-wealth by their example. To be severe to the People, is to punish that ignorance, which may in great part be imputed to the Soveraign, whose fault it was, they were no better instructed.

Hobbes is here subtly evoking Machiavelli’s treatment of the oligarchic sons of Brutus, who were beneficiaries of Tarquin’s tyranny, but were subsequently punished by Brutus. As Machiavelli puts it, “the enemies of present conditions must suffer some striking prosecution.” (3.2. pp. 424-5 in Gilbert)1 American corruption will not end until the perception of, to evoke Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, elite impunity ends.

That’s all I wanted to digress. But it is quite notable how long the American republic has been punishing the ignorant more harshly than the “Sonnes, Servants, or Favorites of men in Authority.” And this suggests the troubling thought that the production of low-level, popular indignation is not a bug, but a feature of the American experiment in popular self-government. This indignation is, as Tocqueville recognized, re-directed at improper objects, that is, the victims and their heirs of great injury.

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Luxury is also proportionate to the size of the towns and above all of the capital, so that luxury exists in a compound ratio of the wealth of the state, the inequality of the fortunes of individuals, and the number of men gathered together in certain places.

The more men there are together, the more vain they are, and the more they feel arise within them the desire to call attention to themselves by small things. If their number is so great that most are unknown to one another, the desire to distinguish oneself redoubles because there is more expectation of succeeding. Luxury produces this expectation; each man takes the marks of the condition above his own. But, by dint of wanting to distinguish themselves, all became equal, and one is no longer distinct; as everyone wants to be looked at, no one is noticed. (p. 97; part 1, book 7, chapter 1.)

As noted, Montesquieu’s accompanying footnote (added to the sentence that ends with ‘by small things’) reads: “In a great town, says [Bernard Mandeville] the author of The Fable of the Bees, vol. I, p. 133 [1732 edn; Remark M; I, 129-130; 1924 edn], one dresses above one’s quality to be esteemed by the multitude as being more than one is. For a weak spirit this pleasure is nearly as great as that from the fulfillment of his desires.” As Montesquieu and Mandeville notes, our desire for attention has a kind of partiality built into it. We desire a kind of mis-recognition; we don’t want to be seen for who we really are, but rather wish for applause from the undiscriminating many for being something more elevated in social rank and hierarchy than we really are.

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As Mandeville notes in the passage cited by Montesquieu (and surely also noted by Rousseau and Smith), in a big city this desire for mis-recognition actually can at first be met to some degree for two reasons: first, we are not generally known as individuals to the other inhabitants, and, second, there are many such strangers who may appreciate our fineries.

Montesquieu’s own conclusion, however, is not in Mandeville. To paraphrase: in mass society, it is our desire for attention and distinction that homogenizes us and turns us into equals. We all go unnoticed. One may say, then, that modern equality is rooted in an unsatisfied longing for attention. This is no small thing because it is exactly the opposite of Hobbes’ (and Mandeville’s) approach to grounding equality by observing that we are all equally satisfied with our own intelligence/wit (viz. a resentment-free distribution—see Leviathan chapter 13, par. 2.).

Interestingly enough, the homogenizing effect of mass society — Marcuse didn’t start this — is an idea we find introduced in the preface of Spinoza’s Theological Political Theory. There it is used to explain the intensity of our identity markers in our sectarian commitments: “Long ago things reached the point where you can hardly know what anyone is, whether Christian, Turk, Jew, or Pagan, except by the external dress and adornment of his body, or because he frequents this or that Place of Worship, or because he’s attached to this or that opinion, or because he’s accustomed to swear by the words of some master. They all lead the same kind of life.” We associate intensely with a particular social tribe because at bottom we do not accept our common form of life.

Montesquieu’s second footnote reference to Mandeville, is on a related topic. It is introduced as follows:

The more communicative peoples are, the more easily they change their manners, because each man is more a spectacle for another; one sees the singularities of individuals better. The climate that makes a nation like to communicate also makes it like to change, and what makes a nation like to change also makes its taste take form.

The society of women spoils mores and forms taste; the desire to please more than others establishes ornamentation, and the desire to please more than oneself establishes fashions. Fashions are an important subject; as one allows one’s spirit to become frivolous, one constantly increases the branches of commerce. (pp. 311-312; part 3; book 19, chapter 8.)

Fashion is not mere frivolity; it is one of the roots of economic growth and prosperity. Montesquieu cites (See [Bernard Mandeville] The Fable of the Bees [I, 250-254; 1732 edn; remarkT, 1,225-228; 1924 edn]., but does not quote Mandeville’s own conclusion here: “I never said, nor imagin’d, that Man could not be virtuous as well in a rich and mighty Kingdom, as in the most pitiful Commonwealth; but I own it is my Sense that no Society can be rais’d into such a rich and mighty Kingdom, or so rais’d, subsist in their Wealth and Power for any considerable Time, without the Vices of Man.”

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When reading Spinoza, the self we were—no, the self we wanted to be—when we were twenty years old is revived within us. Spinoza’s crystalline purity is surely what distinguishes him most, what essentially distinguishes him from all other thinkers. Spinoza is the matured dream of youth, the embodiment of that reaching for the exalted—‘as difficult as it is rare’—which we tend to look down upon with a smile later on, but which we know deep down is the best we have within us. And this, it seems to us, is the great legacy left behind by the godless seeker of God.—translated from (1938) Erflaters van onze beschaving. Nederlandse gestalten uit zes eeuwen is by Jan Romein & Annie Romein-Verschoor.

Yesterday, I strongly implied that Spinoza was absent in Dutch mass culture until the middle of the twentieth century. This had been preceded by an academic revival in the late nineteenth century. In their essay, Jan and Annie Romein-Verschoor note that there was also literary revival of interest in Spinoza — they mention poets like Gorter, Verwey, Leopold, and Van Eyck, alongside the philosopher Bierens de Haan — during the second half of the the nineteenth century. And, more important for my claim, that by 250th anniversary of death of Spinoza’s death, in 1927, there was sufficiently wide interest to appropriate Spinoza to one’s own world and religious view. So, I stand corrected. Spinoza has been a part of the Dutch mass imaginary for almost a century now.

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The two books that Jan Romein & Annie Romein-Verschoor co-authored, De lage landen bij de zee (”The Low Countries by the sea”, 1934), and Erflaters van onze beschaving (”Testators of our civilization, four volumes, 1938–1940), were aimed at a wide audience and seemed to have sold very well. They have a gentle, humane Marxist orientation. And in my youth one could often buy a second hand copy in the antiquarian bookshops in town.

The passage quoted above is the culminating paragraph of their essay on Spinoza, which is a biographical study that aims to put Spinoza in cultural and intellectual context. They view Spinoza as expressing the optimistic phase of early capitalism. And they repeatedly treat him as a political realist.

However, the main thread of their essay is announced earlier. Spinoza’s thought and activity are situated as a natural response to a formerly-Marrano community that itself is unmoored: “Uprooting, whether from the national, class, or spiritual context, always leads to either skepticism or a new faith. Many intellectual and material achievements of humanity are the fruit of emigration, exile, or ‘malicious abandonment’ of the old environment.” That ‘malice’ is supposed to be an echo of Spinoza’s herem with which they start their essay.

So much for set up. I have to admit, I don’t care much for their essay. But I truly adore their concluding image that conveys why Spinoza has such a hold on us, his readers: and this involves a peculiar necromancy. Our once vividly aspirational self is re-animated when studying Spinoza. We never coincide with this self, but it is standing over us. This is an essentially late Stoic, Senecan idea. (Romein and Romein-Verschoor do note that a more properly scholarly study would include exploration of his Stoic sources inter alia.)

Reading with/of Spinoza here is a kind of midwifery of our better natures. What’s most interesting about this aspirational self, when re-animated during our reading, is that we vacillate in our attitude toward it: “we tend to look down upon [it]” when we identify with our experienced, mature self, just as “we know deep down is the best we have within us.”

Many philosophers tell us that we are incapable of holding contradictory or vacillating thoughts at the same time. (Spinoza, however, makes a lot of space for the unsteady fluctuation of our minds.) But I think their ‘we look down and we know its best’ captures something of the phenomenology of thinking with the noble, exalted systematicity of Spinoza’s works; such fluctuation is impossible to avoid. For, when Spinoza leads us to the difficult peaks of the third kind of knowledge, our thoughts map on to these intuitive ideas as if our own, while simultaneously recognizing the train of our actual decisions that has left us in a place incapable of acting according to them.

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If you pass by Amsterdam’s modern city-hall, the Stopera, you’ll find a relatively modern (2008) statue of Spinoza with a big motto in Dutch, Het doel van de staat is de vrijheid. (The purpose of the state is freedom.) Spinoza (1632 – 1677) was born and raised on the Houtgracht (according to Nadler), which is now the Waterlooplein (the site of the Stopera). His father rented there.

It was the second statue of Spinoza in Amsterdam—the first dates from the mid 1950s, when an already existing school was renamed as ‘Spinoza Lyceum’ and given a new building. A quick internet search suggests it wasn’t the first school named after Spinoza in Holland, but it’s the only surviving one. (If Spinoza had been born in France or Germany there would be many more schools named after him.)

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Amsterdam had named a rather insignificant street, the Spinozastraat, after him in 1872. This street is very near my current office in the social sciences faculty. When I was young, there was a tramline that ran through the Spinozastraat. So, it’s fair to say that until quite recently Amsterdam was disinterested in commemorating its connection to Spinoza. It’s worth contrasting that with Rembrandt, who has one of the main town squares named after him since 1876. (It was also the site of the former headquarters of the Amsterdam bank.)

In fact, in my view until Spinoza was put on the 1000 gulden note in 1972 (which replaced a design with Rembrandt), he was nearly completely invisible in Dutch mass culture.1 It would be interesting to know how and why Spinoza was included in this series of culturally significant Dutch. He stayed on the 1000 gulden note until in 1994 when the design was replaced by a bird. The Spinoza bill was removed from circulation in 2002 when Euro notes were introduced.

Spinoza left Amsterdam in the Summer of 1661. So, the intellectually most fruitful period of his life he was elsewhere. From his correspondence we can infer that he visited intermittently after. Both books that he published during his lifetime were printed in Amsterdam: Principia philosophiae cartesianae explicitly so, while the (1670) Theological Political Treatise (hereafter TTP) was printed more covertly.

The Stopera Spinoza statue suggests he is ours, but the reality is more tenuous. When I was a young scholar, my then colleague, Julie Cooper (2006) “Freedom of Speech and Philosophical Citizenship in Spinoza’s Theologico-Political Treatise.” Law, Culture and the Humanities 2.1: 91-114, convinced me that Spinoza was a critic of philosophical celebrity (which he associated with the cult of personality surrounding Descartes). In fact, she makes a compelling case that for Spinoza anonymity is the key philosophical ethos. I pay imperfect homage to it in these digressions.

Cooper’s essay was singularly badly timed. As is, we live in a celebrity culture. In the decade before the Stopera Spinoza was installed, Jonathan Israel convinced the Dutch political class that (now I quote my colleague Michael Leezenberg, writing in NRC, October 3, 2008) Spinoza was the perfect exemplar “of the advocates of an extremely anti-religious, atheistic enlightened reason, who demand full assimilation from” mostly Muslim “immigrants.”

The motto under the Stopera Spinoza is derived from final (20th) chapter of the TTP: Finis ergo Reipublicae revera libertas est. This is the conclusion (‘ergo’) of an argument worth reproducing in full (in Curley’s translation):

The end of the Republic, I say, is not to change men from rational beings into beasts or automata, but to enable their minds and bodies to perform their functions safely, to enable them to use their reason freely, and not to clash with one another in hatred, anger or deception, or deal inequitably with one another. So the end of the Republic is really freedom. [TTP: 20:12]2

If you are used to Spinoza as an anti-teleological anti-humanist thinker, these lines are quite striking. For the proper function of a republic is to ensure the proper, safe functioning of minds and bodies and this presupposes the free use (utantur) of reason (which is explicitly contrasted with the functioning of beasts and automata).

Curley’s ‘clash’ translates Spinoza’s certent. Google-translate suggested ‘compete.’ I think what Spinoza has in mind is the manner of mutual emulation or vying. So, if I am not mistaken, Spinoza is advocating for good-natured mutual emulation. This is not ad hoc, because through all his mature works (Ethics, TTP, PT), Spinoza distinguishes between a good kind of ambition and a wrong sort of ambition that is rooted in the desire for immoderate recognition from the crowd. The wrong sort, which is characteristic of a demagogue, generates mutual hatred, anger or deception (see here the Spinoza Lexicon.) Keep that in mind because it returns.

As an aside, in my edition of the TTP, Curley notes the whole paragraph evokes More’s Utopia.3 (This despite the well-known criticism of Utopia at the start of the Political Treatise.) Regular readers know that I think Utopia shapes Spinoza in all kinds of ways. But that’s for another time.

But my present interest is in the motto itself. The Spinoza statue does not note that it is introduced by Spinoza with a clear limitation: “if it’s impossible to take this freedom away from subjects completely, it’s also disastrous to grant it completely.” (20:10) [perniciosissimum contra erit, eandem omnino] While freedom is the purpose of the state, it is only maintained if it is granted with very clear limitations. As Justin Steinberg notes, “the sovereign must stamp out seditious speech (TTP 20.20–21), which includes not only the denial of sovereign supreme authority (TTP 20.21; cf. TP 19.34), but also, apparently, forms of speech marked by pronounced anger, hatred, or deception (TTP 20.14, TTP 20.12, TTP 20.21).” Spinoza’s whole argument is — as Steinberg notes — surrounded by considerations of prudence.

Let’s leave aside the somewhat amusing fact that it is the ‘bad boy’ of philosophy, ‘punk’ Spinoza, more than any liberal, who is the sergeant-general of tone-policing by the authorities. A free political life presupposes moderate forms of public speech. Unlike Machiavelli and later Adam Smith, Spinoza is averse to the possible fruitfulness of social tumult. For Spinoza, all speech that undermines the conditions under which the social contract can be maintained is seditious and pernicious. And in the modern jargon the social contract is maintained in circumstances where mutual trust — (fides) a term Spinoza uses — flourishes. Of course, in practice Spinoza holds that “What can’t be prohibited must be granted, even if it often leads to harm.” (20:24.)

It’s in the context of such mitigated freedom that the one and only (and somewhat famous) mention of the political practice of Amsterdam occurs in Spinoza’s text. I quote the whole passage leading up to it. This is framed by the conditions under which trust and not flattery is common (20:37):

Men must be so governed that they can openly hold different and contrary opinions, and still live in concord [concorditer].4 There can be no doubt that this way of governing is best, and has the least disadvantages, since it’s the one most compatible with men’s nature. For we’ve shown that in a democratic state (which comes closest to the natural condition) everyone contracts to act according to the common decision, but not to judge and reason according to the common decision. Because not all men can equally think the same things, they agreed that the measure which had the most votes would have the force of a decree, but that meanwhile they’d retain the authority to repeal these decrees when they saw better ones. The less we grant men this freedom of judgment, the more we depart from the most natural condition, and the more violent the government. The next thing to establish is that this freedom has no disadvantages which can’t be avoided just by the authority of the supreme ‘power, and that the only easy way to restrain men from harming one another, even though they openly hold contrary opinions, is by this authority. TTP 20: 37-39.

What’s crucial in Spinoza’s account is that no common judgment or law needs to be final. Democratic political life is, then, characterized by the possibility and mechanisms for a repeal or change in the law.

It is tempting to assimilate Spinoza here to an epistemic understanding of democracy in which democracy is constituted by social learning. And there is no doubt that Spinoza invites this link by suggesting that what motivates repeal is the perception of something better (meliora viderint). But lurking here is also an argument about the role of hope in maintaining social authority. When there is a hope for change, even repeal of a bad law, bad circumstances are born with more patience and endurance. And this is what Spinoza (prudentially) implies: if you remove genuine possibility for repeal, you introduce violence into the art of government. Violence because the state aims to impose its views permanently, and because it invites rebellion.

So, for Spinoza ‘freedom’ is really a term in the art of government: a society in which people are left free to feel differently about public affairs. Amsterdam is introduced as an example that flourishes by permitting such freedom:

Consider the city of Amsterdam, which, from its great growth and the admiration of all nations, knows by experience the fruits of this liberty. In this most flourishing Republic, this most outstanding city, all men, no matter what their nation or sect, live in the greatest harmony mutual concord. When they entrust their goods to someone, the only thing they care to know is whether the person is rich or poor, and whether he usually acts in good faith [bona fide] or not. They don’t care at all what his Religion or sect is, for that would do nothing to justify or discredit their case before a judge. Provided they harm no one, give each person his due, and live honestly, there is absolutely no sect so hated that its followers are not protected by the public authority of the magistrates and their forces. (20:40)

The flourishing is characterized in a number of ways: first, expansion/growth [incremento]; second, foreign admiration; third a cosmopolitan population with people of different national backgrounds and religious sects, who do not judge each other by religious background. Rather, people are judged by other people for being reliable in contracting. And this general flourishing is made possible by the protection of the law that evaluates one on one’s individual behavior (including dispassionate mutual judgments of character) not one’s sectarian membership.

For where people’s judgments are left free, people will become reasonably reliable judges of mutual character. This despite the fact that they will not be in mutual agreement with each other on a lot of topics. So, the pay-off for granting freedom is ultimately a high trust society. And in a high trust society growth will follow. This is the lesson that Amsterdam teaches.

Sometimes I wish that the Spinoza statue had included something about the role of mutual trust in freedom. Of course, Spinoza is quite clear that such high trust can be abused and corrupted, but I have gone on long enough.

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The presence of Eucken (who died in 1950) and Röpke intrigued me because one doesn’t encounter much discussion of mainstream political theory of them. This neglect is not altogether unjustified because Röpke, especially, eventually became associated with the gold standard and pro-Apartheid views. But his work from the 1940s, especially, is really very interesting. As Foucault puts it in Birth of Biopolitics, “With regard to Röpke, I should add that during and just after the war he wrote a kind of great trilogy.” (p. 104, 7 February 1979)

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Shklar first mentions Röpke in the context of a discussion of the post WW-II views, Karl Jaspers. She writes about him, “He has also adopted a rather conventional conservative liberalism in which Hayek, Lippmann, and Roepke have been his avowed guides.” (p. 147, citing Jaspers’ The Origin and Goal.) As it happens this is the only mention of Lippmann. But the category ‘conservative liberal’ recurs and is rather important to Shklar’s general argument.

Near the start of After Utopia, Shklar had introduced and described the term, conservative liberal as follows, “Since the last century liberalism has itself become increasingly conservative and fearful of democracy. Today a conservative liberalism flourishes that also sees Europe doomed as a result of economic planning, egalitarianism and “false” rationalism.” (p. 24) What’s interesting and striking about this characterization is that it is essentially a negative one: one learns what ‘conservative liberals’ stand against or fear, not what they wish to promote.

After this early mention, and except for the brief mention in the context of the evolution of Jaspers’ views, the ‘conservative liberals’ (including Röpke) go unmentioned until Shklar discusses ‘Christian fatalism.’ She then notes that “Canon Demant explicitly rejects the contention of such liberals as Professor Wilhelm Roepke that it was not in the economic realm that liberalism failed, but in the rest of the social fabric, which then forced distortions upon the operation of the free market.” (p. 205) This, too, is not very illuminating about Röpke's actual views, although what it hints at is Röpke’s sociological thesis that modern mass society creates the conditions that undermine the flourishing of a liberal social and political order and that this makes possible the interventions that disrupt and destroy free markets. But a reader of Shklar cannot reconstruct Röpke’s view from the evidence she provides in context.

However, this turns out to be preliminary to Shklar’s actual treatment of ‘conservative liberalism,’ (including Röpke). She introduces it as a “liberalism that denied the Enlightenment altogether.” (p. 235) Here’s how she puts it:

Nothing that has occurred since the First World War could conceivably encourage the orthodox liberal. In fact, liberalism has become increasingly conservative and fatalistic. If during the last century it still offered an alternative to romantic escapism or religious orthodoxy, it has now succumbed to the spirit of despair as well. It is only another expression of social fatalism, not an answer to it. To those who lack the aesthetic and subjective urges of the romantic, or find it difficult to accept formal Christianity, conservative liberalism offers the opportunity to despair in a secular and social fashion. But those who seek the remnants of the Enlightenment must look elsewhere. (p. 235)

As it happens Röpke is her paradigmatic case of social fatalism. And she explains it as follows:

The political fatalism of conservative liberalism emerges only in its interpretation of the entire course of modern history, not in these specific ideas, important as they are to the theory in general. It is in a view of history as a rigid sequence of causes and effects that conservative liberalism displays its fatalism. First of all, it adheres to a theory of intellectual determinism. This is nothing less than turning Enlightenment intellectualism against itself. Where it was once held that social progress must inevitably accompany the advancement of scientific knowledge, it is now argued that social decline has unavoidably followed the false “rationalism” that has dominated modern thought. Moreover, the first political expression of this rationalism, the French Revolution, is seen as something akin to a second fall of man, a calamity that has forever warped European life. Every contemporary disaster, totalitarianism, the threatened destruction of civilization, is deduced, step by inexorable step, as a necessary consequence from this one event. Modern history is represented as nothing but an account of its baneful results. Thus Professor Roepke, in a representative passage, writes, “The world would not be in its present hopeless state . . . if the errors of rationalism—more fatal than all misguided passions—had not caused the promising beginnings of the eighteenth century to end in a gigantic catastrophe of which we can still feel the effects: the French Revolution.”

To these considerations a simple economic determinism has been added. “Rationalism,” it is claimed, has led to the destruction of the free market and to the introduction of economic planning by political authorities. Without economic freedom, however, conservative liberals insist, no other kind of liberty, intellectual or civic, can possibly survive. Here, too, is a display of disenchanted liberalism. The positive aspect of Enlightenment anarchism, the belief in natural harmony, has been discarded, but the hostility to state action remains. “Planning” especially is an unnatural interference with the organic structure of society. The Burkean belief that there are permanent limits upon man’s ability to alter society has re placed the hopes of the Enlightenment. (Shklar After Utopia pp. 236-237)

In context, Shklar cites Röpke’s (1942) The Social Crisis of Our Times, translated in 1950 (this is part of the trilogy admired by Foucault), although it is pretty clear she also has Hayek’s The Counter-Revolution of Science in mind (which she cites shortly thereafter).

One oddity about Shklar’s argument is that the very “representative passage” she quotes from Röpke actually conveys his sense that he is the heir of “the promising beginnings of the eighteenth century.” He is, in fact, claiming the mantle of the true Enlightenment, and treating the ‘rationalism’ of the French revolution as the false Enlightenment.

But for Röpke the true Enlightenment never embraced ‘natural harmony’ of interests that Shklar describes as ‘Enlightenment anarchism’ throughout After Utopia. (Recall this post and this one on that vocabulary.) She inherits this interpretation of the Enlightenment from Élie Halévy’s once influential The Growth of Philosophic Radicalism (which she cites in her interpretation of Adam Smith on pp. 9-11; Rawls also cites Halévy in Theory of Justice.)

Now, Röpke rejects such anarchism. For Röpke, “The glory of liberalism would indeed be unblemished if it had not also fallen victim to rationalism and thereby increasingly lost sight of the necessary sociological limits and conditions circumscribing a free market.” (p. 51, emphasis added.) For Röpke, markets need to be embedded in a wider social and legal structure that requires political agency.1 It’s very peculiar that Shklar misses this. It’s also clear that when she wrote After Utopia, she had not assimilated either Lippmann’s The Good Society or Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation—both project what Foucault later calls ‘liberal governmentality’ back onto Adam Smith.

In fact, Röpke’s fondness for the “early eighteenth century” is a fondness for Shklar’s own subsequent hero, Montesquieu!2 (I am not claiming that Röpke influenced Shklar on Montesquieu.) To quote Roepke’s Social Crisis of Our Time, “One might say that there was too much of Rousseau and Voltaire and too little of Montesquieu.” (p. 41) And what Röpke admires in Montesquieu is not that he defends unearned privilege, but rather that he articulates what Röpke calls ‘functional hierarchy.’ (p. 41) This is not all Röpke admires in Montesquieu, who he sees as the inventory of an idea of “Europe national diversity...a nation of nations.” (p. 51) In addition, he treats Montesquieu as a fellow critic of Caesarism (p. 69) and as a theorist of intermediary orders (p. 85).

Okay, that’s all I wanted to digress today. Later in the week, I return to Shklar’s more expansive interpretation of and argument against these ‘conservative liberals.’ For now I just note that early in her trajectory Shklar lacked attunement with Röpke’s attempt to articulate a liberalism rooted in admiration of Montesquieu.

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European states have been willing to accept U.S. extraterritorial pressure because of their “shared democratic values and indeed economic interests.” Currently, they benefit more than they suffer from the U.S. exercise of network hegemony. However, this acquiescence “implies that [the equilibrium of transatlantic relations] should not be disturbed by the abuse of that which certain people perceive as a form of imperium in the domain of law.” Policymakers in Europe have started to explore financing options that are isolated from the U.S. financial system. While the practical effect of these specific initiatives may be limited in the short term, they put in motion a potential decoupling. This sanitization process may possibly fall victim to infighting within and among allies, but might also generate its own internal self-reinforcing dynamics. If the war of words between Europe and the United States over secondary sanctions devolves into clashing standards and competing financial instruments, the United States may face the slow erosion of its ability to weaponize key economic networks, constraining its ability to project power globally. Farrell & Newman (2019) “Weaponized interdependence: How global economic networks shape state coercion,” International security 44(1): 78-79.

Back in 2019, one of my distinguished co-bloggers at CrookedTimber, (now at Johns Hopkins), co-authored with Abraham L. Newman (Georetown) an instantly classic journal article. (It’s also and justly a veritable citation monster.) The very fine paper is framed by the imposition of sanctions on Iran in May 2018 by the first Trump administration, so it still feels quite up-to-date. The title usefully conveys one of the main arguments of the paper, which shows how global network structures may be leveraged as “coercive” tools and “under what circumstances.” (p. 43) I have placed the final paragraph as a pull quote above so that you get a sense of why people find the argument topical in more than one sense.

I taught Farrell & Newman (2019) as the culmination of my honors course on imperialism. I am sure that I was nudged into doing this when I became aware of the title of their public facing book, Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy which I look forward to reading more carefully.

The “argument” of the original (2019) paper self-consciously “brings scholars of economic interdependence and security studies into closer dialogue with one another, generating important new insights for both.” (p. 75) As my students noticed, there is no attempt to bring it in conversation with the longue durée scholarship on imperialism. This despite the fact that the final paragraph (again see the quote above) quite self-consciously hints at the imperial context.1 I am myself not an expert on the historiography of imperialism, but I found a few resonances quite stimulating. And so today I explore one of these pertaining to Lenin (and, perhaps, another time a post on the resonances with Nkrumhah).

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My discussion will not adhere to their order of presentation. A key concept in their argument is what they call the ‘panopticon effect.’ Here’s how they introduce and discuss it:

Global economic networks have distinct consequences that go far beyond states' unilateral decisions either to allow or deny market access, or to impose bilateral pressure. They allow some states to weaponize interdependence on the level of the network itself. Specifically, they enable two forms of weaponization. The first weaponizes the ability to glean critical knowledge from information flows, which we label the “panopticon effect.” Jeremy Bentham's conception of the Panopticon was precisely an architectural arrangement in which one or a few central actors could readily observe the activities of others. States that have physical access to or jurisdiction over hub nodes can use this influence to obtain information passing through the hubs. Because hubs are crucial intermediaries in decentralized communications structures, it becomes difficult—or even effectively impossible—for other actors to avoid these hubs while communicating. (pp. 54-55)

I wish & Newman had called it a ‘Hayekian panopticon effect’ because what is especially notable about their examples is that the ‘panopticon effect’ can emerge spontaneously without anyone originally intending it. As Farrell & Newman note it is not, of course, wholly contingent that asymmetrically distributed hubs and nodes of a network reflect pre-existing (say) imperial patterns.2 Crucially, the networks they describe are not originally designed to be weaponized.3 Now, what’s really important about their argument is that the ‘panopticon effect’ is not sufficient for successful weaponization. But that’s for another time.

What I would like to suggest is that a variant or close cousin of the ‘panopticon effect’ is already visible in chapter 2 of Lenin’s Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916). (I have discussed the material before here.) Lenin’s wider argument is an account of the role the transition of the banking sector plays in his stadial theory of the development of monopoly or financial capitalism from its origins in the older capitalism with free enterprise. To simplify he recognizes that certain banks become central hubs in (monopoly) capitalism, and generate something like the panopticon effect as described by Farrell & Newman. Now the passage I have in mind almost certainly inspired Oskar Lange in developing his side of the Socialist Calculation debate, so I am not suggesting I am the first to pay attention to its informational processing features.

At this point in Lenin’s argument, Lenin is interested in showing the concentration of capital in a few hands:

These simple figures show perhaps better than lengthy disquisitions how the concentration of capital and the growth of bank turnover are radically changing the significance of the banks. Scattered capitalists are transformed into a single collective capitalist. When carrying the current accounts of a few capitalists, a bank, as it were, transacts a purely technical and exclusively auxiliary operation. When, however, this operation grows to enormous dimensions we find that a handful of monopolists subordinate to their will all the operations, both commercial and industrial, of the whole of capitalist society; for they are enabled by means of their banking connections, their current accounts and other financial operations—first, to ascertain exactly the financial position of the various capitalists, then to control them, to influence them by restricting or enlarging, facilitating or hindering credits, and finally to entirely determine their fate, determine their income, deprive them of capital, or permit them to increase their capital rapidly and to enormous dimensions, etc. [Emphasis in Lenin]

It’s crucial to Lenin’s argument that banks have a knowledge advantage over their clients. And this knowledge advantage is part of the leverage they gain over individual firms (which have a tendency to form cartels that the banks will control) and, thereby, whole industries. As Lenin puts it, “to obtain fuller and more detailed information about the economic position of its client, the result is that the industrial capitalist becomes more completely dependent on the bank.”

I don’t mean to suggest that Lenin is only interested in the panopticon effect in the big banks. Their control over the economy is reinforced by banks’ control of (shareholder) positions in firms as well as appointments to boards of directors. Lenin’s argument is all about showing how cartelized industries facilitates the control of a tightly knit group of bankers’ over these industries and thereby “accelerate the process of concentration of capital and the formation of monopolies in all capitalist countries, notwithstanding all the differences in their banking laws.”

For Lenin, the significance of this concentration and cartelization is that the market loses its epistemic function to the banks. This is symbolized by the reduction of the significance of the stock exchange. Lenin quotes Jacob Riesser approvingly, “the Stock Exchange is steadily losing the feature which is absolutely essential for national economy as a whole and for the circulation of securities in particular—that of being not only a most exact measuring-rod, but also an almost automatic regulator of the economic movements which converge on it.” On this view, which Lenin adopts, the few great banks have internalized the measuring-rod and the regulator of economic movements previously found in stock-markets. Obviously, Lenin is describing how a few leading financial institutions both instantiate and take advantage of the panopticon effect when they become the hub of payments and so information processing in financial flows.

One of the two central case studies through which Farrell & Newman illustrate the Panipticon effect is the interbank communication that is handled by the (Brussels based) SWIFT network. Here’s how they begin to introduce it. (This is the passage that got me thinking about Lenin.)

Large international financial institutions such as Citibank, security settlement systems such as Euroclear, consumer credit payment systems such as Visa/Mastercard, financial clearing houses such as the Clearing House Interbank Payments System, and financial messaging services such as the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) have become crucial intermediaries in global financial networks, acting as middlemen across an enormous number and variety of specific transactions. All these actors play key roles in their various architectures, coordinating and brokering numerous specific relationships, benefiting from efficiencies of scale and, in some cases, from the unique access to information that their brokerage position supplies. (p. 53, emphasis added)

Okay, that’s really all I wanted to digress today.

But it may be worth adding a further reflection. Farrell & Newman offer quite a number of apt polemical reflections on what one may describe as ‘complacent’ or ‘optimistic’ liberal theorists of the past who have seen in “global networks” merely as “complex interdependence” or “reciprocal dependence” (p. 48 in the section on “Statecraft and Structure”) not further enabling conditions for domination (with citations to Keohane and Nye). Since I regularly identify as a liberal theorist, I take these to heart (but won’t speak for the others). My own sense is that the apparent complacency is rooted in two features: first, a more general tendency by late twentieth century liberals to recoil from internalizing politics into their theoretical models (this I have regularly documented); second, a tendency to assume that Pax Americana has superseded past imperial projects in character and because its beneficence is assumed (and so the literature on imperialism not worth having ready at hand)

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