Apologies for my radio silence this past week. Before I get to that. Let me first introduce some bonus material: a few weeks ago I gave a 30 mins talk on the origin of liberalism in Santiago Chile at an event celebrating Adam Smith at 300 years *here). (I start at the 32 mins mark.)
I had an unusually busy week, which included a two day event that brought political scientists, political theorists/philosophers, formal philosophers, and political sociologists together to discuss affective polarization that I co-organized with my colleague, Eelco Harteveld.
Anyway, during one of the talks I noticed that ‘crisis’ was treated as unproblematic empirical content, even though it is clearly (to use terminology that I derive from Ernest Nagel) an appraising judgment. (See here for my paper on the history of debates over this kind of judgment; and here Alexandrova’s more recent excellent analysis of such judgments.) Because of my recent reading in Oakeshott and Foucault, I expressed some reservations about ‘crisis’ talk in the development of empirical and normative theory. This post is a first attempt to articulate some of the roots of my reservations.
As any etymological dictionary will inform you, ‘crisis’ is derived from the Greek term for decision. It seems to have acquired the connotation of a decisive turning point in medicine in the Latin of the middle ages. And it seems to have lost this restriction to medicine by the seventeenth century. I suspect that in our contemporary use, it’s lost the idea of a turning point altogether and it just means ‘a very bad situation’ where the connection with a decision is altogether quite attenuated. (Think of the environmental crisis which induces a kind of hopelessness among many.) But I assume that social scientists use the term to describe social contexts when they think policy-makers are expected to do something or are likely to be held accountable for their inaction or bad decision-making in some sense.
Before I get to my methodological reflections. It is well known that there are two economic-centered narratives that compete for attention.
The business cycle (identified in the 19th century) in which after a period of expansion economic activity declines sharply and induces a crisis (characterized by bankruptcies, stock market collapses) and usually prefigures high unemployment. There are many variants and models of the business cycle (pertaining to endogenous and exogenous shocks, length of the cycle, periodicity, and causal analysis of them, etc.). There are Keynesian, Austrian, stochastic versions of this.
There is a class of Marxist approaches known as ‘crisis theory’ which focus on the purported fall of the rate of profit in capitalist society. This theory has been formulated in a number of ways, and also has shaped soft-Marxist sociological analysis (partially inspired, say, by Frankfurt school) of the instability democracies within capitalist societies. The latter variant received considerable attention a decade ago in Wolfgang Streeck’s Buying Time.
I don’t mean to suggest that these two approaches exhaust quasi cyclical or periodic accounts of crises. I am, for example, drawn to the idea that periods of liberal reform are followed by periods of successful rent-seeking by the (sometimes wholly unexpected) beneficiaries of reform who in their accumulation of rents induce economic and political crises of all kinds.
Now, what must be done (change of interest rates, bank-reform, industrial rationalization, a class revolution, etc.) during a crisis can vary enormously not just in light of the analysis of the nature and cause of a crisis, but also in light of the larger social theory and social circumstances that shapes one’s understanding of it.
Unsurprisingly, the very idea of a social crisis that demands policy attention has come under attack. Although it seems to me that the manner of this attack is still largely unfamiliar. In what follows I want to focus on two kinds of critical analysis of this whole frame of policy analysis.
First, in his essay (1957) “Rationalism in Politics,” Oakeshott describes the surprising victory of what he calls ‘Rationalism’ in politics. This victory is the victory of a kind of scientific art of government. This victory is due to the fact that political life is dominated by inexperienced political elites who draw on techniques of governing (presented as the ‘art of governing’) increasingly under the rubric of science. Oakeshott is rather famous for (while drawing on Polanyi) at pointing out that as presented and deployed this science is always incomplete (recall here). Importantly (recall) from his perspective many laissez-faire programs (including Milton Friedman’s and Hayek’s) also instantiate what he calls rationalism.
Now, while writing from the perspective of traditionalism, Oakeshott writes, when he introduces rationalism as a polemical category in his social theory, the following:
for the Rationalist, politics are always charged with the feeling of the moment. He waits upon circumstance to provide him with his problems, but rejects its aid in their solution. That anything should be allowed to stand between a society and the satisfaction of the felt needs of each moment in its history must appear to the Rationalist a piece of mysticism and nonsense. And his politics are, in fact, the rational solution of those practical conundrums which the recognition of the sovereignty of the felt need perpetually creates in the life of a society. Thus, political life is resolved into a succession of crises, each to be surmounted by the application of 'reason'. (P. 5 in the 1962 Methuen edition of the collection Rationalism in Politics.)
Here we can see that for Oakeshott ‘crises’ are (and now I use language familiar from the philosophy of science) really theory-loaded re-descriptions of social conundrums. Of course, social theories can shape social perception. Oakeshott is explicit that rationalism as a fashion or style of thought and its emphasis on technique has become predominant: “under this influence, the intellect in politics ceases to be the critic of political habit and becomes a substitute for habit, and the life of a society loses its rhythm and continuity and is resolved into a succession of problems and crises.” (pp. 22-23) In fact, in his larger narrative Oakeshott himself focuses on the impact of Machiavelli, Bacon and Descartes, and when it comes to ‘crisis’ this fits the more etymological narrative I gestured at above.
In fact, for Oakeshott crisis talk becomes itself a species of self-fulfilling prophecy (akin to what I have called ‘philosophical prophecy’). He puts it as follows:
[The Rationalist] conceives a contempt for what he does not understand; habit and custom appear bad in themselves, a kind of nescience of behaviour. And by some strange self-deception, he attributes to tradition (which, of course, is pre-eminently fluid) the rigidity and fixity of character which in fact belongs to ideological politics. Consequently, the Rationalist is a dangerous and expensive character to have in control of affairs, and he does most damage, not when he fails to master the situation (his politics, of course, are always in terms of mastering situations and surmounting crises), but when he appears to be successful; for the price we pay for each of his apparent successes is a firmer hold of the intellectual fashion of Rationalism upon the whole life of society. (p. 31)
Again, Oakeshott himself is not a dispassionate analysist here, but engaged in a polemics (in fact, itself a species of philosophical prophecy). After all, he explicitly and sweepingly denies that the Rationalist ever really has a ‘successful’ policy response to a crisis. About that some other time.
Now, what matters about Oakeshott’s polemics is that, of course, framing a social circumstance as a crisis is not a neutral affair. It’s always a clarion call for attention and concerted and directed action. One of the most tension ridden versions of this is the tendency of newsmakers and sociologists to focus on trust in government or trust in democracy, which seems to be in permanent crisis. (In his inaugural address, my colleague the political sociologist, Tom van der Meer, noted how selective this perception is.) And this means that once a situation is widely understood as a crisis, it may well prevent us from discerning other competing narratives of the circumstance, including the causes that might give rise to it. And because a crisis is always urgent, it’s likely that the policy response will make mistakes (even by its own lights) due to haste and incomplete understanding.
Oakeshott’s account anticipates Michel Foucault’s treatment of the nature of crisis within liberalism in the third lecture of Birth of Biopolitics (recall my previous treatment here; and here).
Finally, and above all, there are processes of clogging such that the mechanisms for producing freedom, precisely those that are called upon to manufacture this freedom, actually produce destructive effects which prevail over the very freedom they are supposed to produce. This is, if you like, the ambiguity of all the devices which could be called “liberogenic,” that is to say, devices intended to produce freedom which potentially risk producing exactly the opposite.
This is precisely the present crisis of liberalism. All of those mechanisms which since the years from 1925 to 1930 have tried to offer economic and political formulae to secure states against communism, socialism, National Socialism, and fascism, all these mechanisms and guarantees of freedom which have been implemented in order to produce this additional freedom or, at any rate, to react to threats to this freedom, have taken the form of economic interventions, that is to say, shackling economic practice, or anyway, of coercive interventions in the domain of economic practice. Whether German liberals of the Freiburg School from 1927 to 1930, or present day, so-called libertarian American liberals, in both cases the starting point of their analysis and the cornerstone of their problem is this: mechanisms of economic intervention have been deployed to avoid the reduction of freedom that would be entailed by transition to socialism, fascism, or National Socialism. But is it not the case that these mechanisms of economic intervention surreptitiously introduce types of intervention and modes of action which are as harmful to freedom as the visible and manifest political forms one wants to avoid? In other words, Keynesian kinds of intervention will be absolutely central to these different discussions. We can say that around Keynes, around the economic interventionist policy perfected between 1930 and 1960, immediately before and after the war, all these interventions have brought about what we can call a crisis of liberalism, and this crisis manifests itself in a number of re-evaluations, re-appraisals, and new projects in the art of government which were formulated immediately before and after the war in Germany, and which are presently being formulated in America.—Michel Foucault, 24 January 1979, translated by Graham Burchell, Lecture 3, The Birth of Biopolitics. 69-70
Let me rephrase Foucault’s analysis in Oakeshott’s terms. What the neo-liberalism of the twentieth century amounts to is Rationalisms self-awareness that its scientific art of government can be self-undermining or self-defeating (in various ways). But as Oakeshott kind of predicts (hah!) because neo-liberalism is itself Rationalist in character, it, too, is self-undermining.
If that is right it does not follow we should all become Oakeshottian traditionaists. However, it does behoove even descriptive social scientists, who keep policy and activism at arms length, to reflect on how their own conceptualizations contribute to this pattern of self-undermining. It is also an invitation to (even skeptical) liberals (like myself) to reflect on how even neo-liberalism may itself lack the practical wisdom to pursue an art of government effectively.
Like every other term in public discourse, "crisis" is used sloppily, and without much regard to its central meaning. Still, I think it does refer to a situation in which a decisive turning point is to be expected: in the case of global heating, a view that we will either decarbonize by some impending date like 2030, or else suffer catastrophic consequences. I wouldn't think of referring to, say, poverty in the US, or long-standing dictatorships in lots of places as involving a crisis. These are bad things, which, we suppose will persist indefinitely unless some decisive action is taken.
And, it is the latter class of problem, I think where the rationalist wants to do something and the (Oakeshott-style) conservative wants to leave ill enough alone. By contrast, in a crisis, there is no choice about whether to do something and not much time to figure out what to do.