A forgotten Marxist Philosopher of Science, Some Dewey, and some Adam Smith, and some analytic philosophy
Yesterday, I noted that because of Emily Evans’ recent brilliant PhD (Cambridge) on the German reception of Marx, I got interested in Henryk Grossmann ((1881-1950). Grossmann draws a Marxist distinction between pre-Smithian manufacture, in which the division of labor is characterized by relations among skilled artisans and Smithian algorithmic factories, in which the division of labor is characterized by relatively homogenous workers who follow simple routines. I went on to observe that Grossmann applies the distinction to science in order to suggest that Bacon’s and Descartes’ vision for the scientific revolution is modelled on the then emerging Smithian factories in which labor is mechanized and to make science itself be more algorithmic in character. It follows from this, and Grossmann is quite explicit about it, that within science workers are homogeneous and, in a certain sense, deskilled. This narrative is initiated in “The Social Foundation of Mechanistic Philosophy and Manufacture” and developed more fully in Grossmann’s initially unpublished (1946) “Descartes and the Social Origins of the Mechanistic Concept of the World.”
Now, as the learned and (recall) regular readers know, there is a deep tension in Adam Smith’s own treatment of these matters. Early in Book I of Wealth of Nations — in the context of situating philosophy within the growing division of labor —, Smith notes that in a Smithian factory, characterized by mechanized labor, technological improvements can emerge, bottom-up, from the workplace by boys who prefer to save time so they can play with their friends. It is a rather important passage because it signals that for Smith liberty involves the possibility of meaningful choices and that play with friends is one of the proper ends of life. The passage also exhibits Smith’s general anti-elitism in intellectual matters. It fits with Smith’s more general methodological analytic egalitarianism (MAE) that I tend to trace back to Hobbes, but that Grossmann (who is not blind to the significance of Hobbes) tends to stress about Descartes.
But much later, in Book V, Smith introduces an account of what we would now call ‘workplace alienation’ as the effect of the mechanization of the workforce in the context of his discussion of education. (By the way, I cannot praise too highly David M. Levy’s wholly ignored "Marxism and alienation." New Individualist Review 5 (1968): 34-41 on the history of the themes I am about to discuss.) Let me quote the passage (because the wording matters for what follows):
The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects too are, perhaps, always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding, or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as is possible for a human creature to become? The torpor of his mind renders him, not only incapable of relishing or bearing a part in any rational conversation, but of conceiving any generous, noble, or tender sentiment, and consequently of forming any just judgment concerning many even of the ordinary duties of private life. Of the great and extensive interests of his country, he is altogether incapable of judging; and unless very particular pains have been taken to render him otherwise, he is equally incapable of defending his country in war. (WN 5.1.f.50, p.782)
I have a growing suspicion that this is the first use of the implied private/public distinction in the modern sense. Now, Smith goes on to emphasize how the government can combat these externalities of the division of labor through education.
These externalities are obviously most significant to the individuals principally concerned, and are private in character. But it is notable that the second significant externality he calls attention to is social even political in character: workplace alienation has an effect on the citizen’s role to contribute to judgments on “the great and extensive interests of his country.” So, a pessimistic reading of this passage suggests that widespread growth of Smithian factories have anti-democratic effects; without public education, politics is best restricted to the classes with leisure. One needs time and skill to learn about the remote social consequences that enter into social decision-making.
Now, the first time Smith uses ‘citizen’ in Book 1 of Wealth of Nations is, in fact, in the context of philosophy’s role within the division of labor: “In the progress of society, philosophy or speculation becomes, like every other employment, the principal or sole trade and occupation of a particular class of citizens.” (WN 1.1.9, p. 21; this is literally the paragraph after the one in which Smith describes the boy’s labor-saving ingenuity.)
As an aside, The second use of ‘citizen’ is in the next chapter following the one of the eager-to-play boy in the famous passage “on the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker,” where he adds that “nobody but a beggar chuses to depend chiefly upon the benevolence of his fellow citizens.” And the implication is that not even beggar does so wholly and, more significantly, as Sam Fleischacker first emphasized to me, that a beggar’s relationship to the rest of society is mediated by common citizenry. So, the late passage at WN 5.1.f.50, p.782 resonates with important themes introduces at the start of the lengthy work.
Now, one interesting implication of the pre-Smithian manufacture vs Smithian factory distinction, when applied to the analysis of science, is that if scientists are not treated as skilled artisans, but rather (as Grossmann does) people whose “whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations” then one ought to expect a kind of mental mutilation or alienation in the sciences.* Much to my pleasant amazement this is precisely what Grossmann emphasizes:
To grasp the true meaning of the Cartesian “universal science” and the full significance of the problem thus raised for the first time by Descartes, one must recall the dangers threatening modern culture as a result of over-specialization. Descartes foresaw the great intellectual crisis of today, which is the necessary result of specialization. The specialist buried in the forest of details of his special discipline loses the ability to understand contemporary social and intellectual life as a whole and therefore loses the ability to judge it correctly; ultimately this must lead to the lowering of the intellectual and cultural level of society as a whole. (p. 167; emphasis in Grossmann!)
I am especially struck by the fact that Grossmann calls attention to the social effects of the consequence of a kind of mental mutilation that is the effect of specialization. On his account the trained fastidiousness and cognitive focus that are the effect of specialization undermine the synthetic ability to understand contemporary social and intellectual life as a whole.
In historical context Grossmann’s analysis is a bit unusual. Grossmann had studied with Carl Grünberg, the Austrian economist. The un-Marxist Austrian school economists — think of Mises and Hayek — that warn against technocratic rule (which falls under the threat of Saint-Simonism), treat it as an instance of expert over-confidence. In fact, Mises and Hayek both would deny that that anyone is a position to have the synthetic understanding of social life as a whole that Grossmann posits.
Now, much of “Descartes and the Social Origins of the Mechanistic Concept of the World” reads as praise of the factory model because of its anti-elitist implications for science. But it has, as Grossmann emphasizes, the unintended effect of generating a great downstream crisis that undermines the individual’s ability to participate in collective decision-making and undermines the quality of public discourse as such (“lowering of the intellectual and cultural level of society as a whole”). So the social paradox lurking in Grossmann’s analysis is that the more technocratic a society becomes, the less capable of Habermasian public deliberation it will be.
It’s unclear what Grossmann himself suggests must be done. He doesn’t seem to treat it as an argument for political avant-gardism nor does he suggest any corrective efforts. A natural suggestion would be either to educate synthetic knowledge outside the workplace or to create synthetic specialists who take on an important public role. But maybe he discusses these issues elsewhere.
In the accompanying footnote, Grossmann writes, “Thus a contemporary author rightly says: “Knowledge in its ideas, language, and appeals is forced into corners; it is over-specialized, technical, and esoteric, because of its isolation. Its lack of intimate connection with social practice leads to an intense and elaborate over-training which increases its own remoteness” (Joseph Ratner, The Philosophy of John Dewey, New York, 1928, p. 415.) I am only familiar with Ratner as a Spinoza scholar, so I can’t speak to this book (which I will try to hunt down).
Grossmann leaves it a bit unclear, but the quoted passage is actually from near the end of Dewey’s essay, “Social Organization and the Individual.” This originates, I think, as a Chapter in a co-authored (1908) textbook by Dewey with James H. Tufts. And this mental mutilation that science generates on scientists would risk some of Dewey’s more far-reaching visions on the relationships between democracy and (well-ordered) science.
And, in fact, Dewey himself immediately proposes a remedy in the following sentence (not quoted by Grossmann): “Only when science and philosophy are one with literature, the art of successful communication and vivid intercourse, are they liberal in effect; and this implies a society which is already intellectually and emotionally nurtured and alive.”** So, this presupposes either the specialist’s grounding in (let’s say) the liberal arts or requires that social life is permanently characterized by the intertwinement of science and philosophy with literature, so that workplace effects arising from specialization are mitigated or never arise.**
I would be amazed if Ernest Nagel was unfamiliar with these views in Dewey. So, I think there is a passage that speaks to it in his (1954) essay "The Perspectives of Science and the Projects of Man," in Sovereign Reason p. 306 (that I have discussed here in print). Even if Nagel were not thinking of this material in Dewey, he does draw out an alternative way of construing the situation:
The achievements of science are the products of a cooperative social enterprise, which has refined and extended skills encountered in the meanest employments of the human intellect. The principles of human reason, far from representing the immutable traits of all possible being, are socially cultivated standards of competent intellectual workmanship. The life of reason as embodied in the community of scientific effort is thus a pattern of life that generates an autonomous yet controlling ideal. That ideal requires disciplined dedication without servitude to any ultimate authority, imposes responsibility for performance upon individual judgment but demands responsiveness to the criticism of others, and calls for adherence to a tradition of workmanship without commitment to any system of dogma.
The key move from our perspective is that Nagel resists the thought that science is a Smithian factory, but while it is characterized by division of labor it remains or persists as an artisanal activity. But rather than emphasizing the elitist effects of this (as Grossmann does), science so conceived is an education in what we may call the republican values and social habits of life of democracy that is, in principle, available to all. Science is a social mechanism by which one becomes responsive to reasons and participates in a social division of labor that both improves each of our cognitive functioning collectively and individually as well as being in some sense self-legislating. For Nagel, then, the increasing scienticity of society is itself, thus, no source of social anxiety.
*Yesterday, I demurred from Grossmann’s analysis because I think science is characterized by a hybridity at the micro and macro levels between manufacture and the factory system. So won’t repeat that here.
**I am going to ignore the implied causal mechanism between the liberal arts and liberal effects.