A Digression on Mill and Foucault; and Hacking.

It is fair to say that bread and butter philosophers of science — unlike their siblings in STS, Social Theory, Political Science, Political Theory, anthropology, and history of ideas — have had little use for the Birth of Biopolitics [hereafter BoB] lectures of 1978/9 offered by Foucault’s Winter and Spring 1979. Even Ian Hacking, who has two excellent essays on Foucault’s idea of biopower to track two axis in it: first, “the fetishism for counting, which brings with it the need for easily applied categories in terms of which to count.” This Hacking discusses in "Biopower and the avalanche of printed numbers." Biopower: Foucault and beyond (2015). The other axis involves “the theoretical and practical reasoning of individual professionals— doctors, say— when confronted with the bodies of individual patients.” This Hacking discusses in "Multiple personality disorder and its hosts." History of the Human Sciences 5.2 (1992), and then develops in Rewriting the soul: Multiple personality and the sciences of memory. In so far as these are inspired by Foucault, they do not draw on the lectures.

In Sour Grapes (1983), a much admired, widely taught, and widely cited work, that also doubled as a kind of introduction to the philosophy of social science and economics, Elster made Foucault’s Surveiller et Punir seems enmeshed in rather simplistic fallacies, and does not invite further engagement with Foucault. (I have discussed this here.) Much to my amazement, a search on “philosophy of economics” and “birth of biopolitics” reveals no work in (ahh) analytically inflected philosophy of economics.

Even so this state of affairs is a bit odd because one of the main topics of BoB is covered with some prominence in Mill’s System of Logic: Ratiocanative and Inductive, Being a Connected View of the Principles of Evidence, and the Methods of Scientific Investigation. In fact, BoB main topic’s just is the same as the topic of closing chapter of Mill’s Logic, “Of The Logic Of Practice, Or Art; Including Morality And Policy.” Now ‘art’ here evokes the older meaning of a ‘skilled practice’ (not the thing you hang in a museum.) That ‘Or’ is ambiguous between a “that is” and “rather, more like” So, there is a logic of practice, which is rather more like a skilled practice. I return to this below in explaining what this means.

Now, even in the most anti-historical phases of professional philosophy, parts of Mill’s Logic were actually read, taught, and cited. This is, in part, because the first book forms the target of much early analytic philosophy of language. And even as a student I heard about Mill’s philosophy of science (an account derived from this Logic) and his views on causation. Of course, the Logic is a very long book, and many of the topics would be classified under very outdated views on ‘logic of discovery’ or ‘evidential reasoning’

The closing chapter of Mill’s Logic is actually very short—a mere 8 brief sections. It quickly becomes clear that an art just is constituted by “rules, or precepts” as we may find in “ethics, or morality.” Now, when it comes to lawmaking (which involves the move from policy aim to law), the “legislator has rules, and maxims of policy.” (A maxim is a robust rule of thumb.) Interestingly enough, for Mill, the legislator is not a mere rule-follower (that would make him — he is definitely gendered male — a judge or a bureaucrat), he “is bound to take into consideration the reasons or grounds of the maxim.”

At this point Mill makes a striking move: “the reasons of a maxim of policy, or of any other rule of art, can be no other than the theorems of the corresponding science.” What makes it striking is that it manifestly excludes questions of a (sub-)population’s or state’s interest or political opportunism and party tactics (etc.). So, this a rather technocratic conception of reasons here. (This provide some evidence for Maurice Cowling’s general thesis in Mill and liberalism.) We may say, then, that in so far as there is an art of government or legislation it follows rules or maxims that are (to use some jargon) epistemically warranted by or well grounded in the relevant science. In particular, the art receives from the science whether a policy or its aim is feasible and the mechanism by which it could be pursued. The role of art is to convert this knowledge into a rule that can be the basis of legislation. Mill makes it sound quite mechanical in his own words:

The art proposes to itself an end to be attained, defines the end, and hands it over to the science. The science receives it, considers it as a phenomenon or effect to be studied, and having investigated its causes and conditions, sends it back to art with a theorem of the combination of circumstances by which it could be produced. Art then examines these combinations of circumstances, and according as any of them are or are not in human power, pronounces the end attainable or not. The only one of the premises, therefore, which Art supplies, is the original major premise, which asserts that the attainment of the given end is desirable. Science then lends to Art the proposition (obtained by a series of inductions or of deductions) that the performance of certain actions will attain the end. From these premises Art concludes that the performance of these actions is desirable, and finding it also practicable, converts the theorem into a rule or precept.

Mill recognizes, of course, that things are not simple in practice, and we often lack an “ideally perfect theory.” And no wise legislator will treat the judgments of the art of government as anything but provisional or work in progress; also because, as Mill notes, it’s quite possible a science may not have had the chance to study the interaction of multiple policies. (He treats the failure to attend to such interaction effects effects as a distinctly French problem!)

It’s quite clear then that for Mill an ‘Art of Government’ — a rule governed skilled practice — is normative in two senses: first, the aims it pursues are derived or rooted in ethics/morality. Second, it provides guidance with epistemic warrant. Notice, too, that there is nothing mysterious about such an art. It’s not like phlogiston or sympathy. Even on its own terms, a weakness of Mill’s formulation is that he takes for granted that it is clear which science is salient; another that science isn’t shaped by the demand for its services; and another that he assumes the legislator is benevolent (etc.). Foucault keeps his distance from the term ‘normative,’ but the gap gets filled by the his deployment of ‘program’ and its cognates.

Now, as I have documented before, Mill’s understanding of what an art of government (or political economy) was finds a counterpart in J.N. Keynes, Sidgwick, and Milton Friedman (who is drawing on J.N. Keynes). Why Mill’s terminology and way of conceiving the subject has disappeared is worth careful study by those interested in so-called Kuhn-loss. However, the concept finds it echoes in the policy practices of applied economics and utilitarian social entrepreneurs (etc.). You know my polemics on this front.

About half of the pre-twentieth century material of BoB can be read as explaining the intellectual and social roots of Mill’s account of the art of government. (I say ‘half’ because Foucault divides the two streams he follows, and Mill fits squarely in the radical stream.) Foucault is not interested in Mill. I think this is because he finds Bentham far more interesting, especially because Bentham matters to his own research and activism on prisons. I also suspect, more speculatively, Foucault thought that Elie Halévy The growth of philosophic radicalism had covered the nineteenth century quite adequately. (That’s compatible with BoB being a polemic against it.)

There is also a more salient reason lurking here. The liberal art of government of the twentieth century that Foucault is discussing is itself rooted in a partial rejection of Mill: Hayek, who is one of Foucault’s sources, is quite polemical against Mill in the material that Foucault is familiar with. The Chicago school types he is focused on are more shaped by Robbins rather than Mill.

I want to wrap up. But a reader may come away thinking that the neglect of philosophers of economics of BoB is not a mystery requiring an answer (even if we leave aside the very large sociological divide between then analytic philosophers and ‘Paris’). For, what BoB lectures on is now covered by the ‘practice turn’ and the ‘philosophy of policy sciences’ both relatively recent phenomena. Perhaps, so.

But notice that the 1970s saw an enormous growth of so-called ‘applied’ ethics and policy-salient theorizing in the shadow of Rawls (this has been documented nicely by Katrina Forrester.) All of these were often intended to supply legislation with at least one half of the material of what was previously known as the art of government. And often, in their engagement with the relevant sciences, they also sought to apply the other half. So, it’s not like as if the practice had disappeared. (To what degree it was skilled, we leave aside.) After all, and here I can appeal to the authority of Hacking, Foucault’s biopower project explains the conditions of the ‘applied’ turn.

Okay, at this point, it’s clear that nothing will substitute for the philosophical details of Foucault’s analysis of then contemporary economics which for him was the Stigler/Becker program of the 70s. To be continued.