Yesterday, I discussed the "Austrian" school of economics, and how it distinguishes itself from the "Chicago" school, although in the minds of the general public they are all alike free marketeers.
I ended with the observation that there is a Kantian edge to Austrian method, it treats the significance of incentives and other premises in much the way that Kant treated his synthetic a priori principles. I am not learned enough to know whether this is a matter of direct influence, coincidence, or something else.
But the Austrian arguments I quoted yesterday do make another bell go off in my mind: Ayn Rand.
Rand, as my readers may know, was the Russian-born screenwriter-turned-novelist who became the center of an "Objectivist" movement of pop philosophy in the 1960s, an influence upon such young minds as Nathaniel Branden and Alan Greenspan, etc. Her aphorisms are still quoted today by many free market advocates, including apparently tea partiers.
I have never been one of her admirers. Certainly my goal in this blog, the goal of refreshing pragmatism, is not one that appeals to Objectivists.
But one fact that stands out in my own mind from the reading I've done in O-ist literature is how vituperative they are toward the memory of Immanuel Kant, and anything that they think smacks of his influence. It is enough to say, "X sounds like Kant" to thoroughly and foundationally condemn X amongst them.
Why this vituperation? I'm not clear. It isn't justified by the reasons they give. Indeed, if you read Kant's essay, "What is Enlightenment?," you'll find that much of it has an O-ist feel to it, beginning with the Latin motto, Sapare Aude, "Dare to Know," that Kant there takes as his own. Dare to think for yourself! he was saying, which is exactly the daring that Objectivists generally believe their own central virtue.
Perhaps the reason for the vituperation, though, is precisely that Rand had to carve out her own space in the world of ideas in order to be seen -- in order even to see herself -- as an original thinker. She couldn't do that by being yet another popularizer of the free-market ideas of the Austrian school. But perhaps (a) I'm right that the Austrians were Kantians, and (b) she knew or sensed the same thing. She might well have decided to carve out some space for herself by being the anti-Kantian Austrian!
Puzzle solved.
Showing posts with label free markets. Show all posts
Showing posts with label free markets. Show all posts
20 August 2011
03 September 2010
Some Themes
Restating some of the themes that are the reason this blog exists, but whence I often drift....
My view is that the soundest foundation for political thought is the moral philosophy outlined by the philosopher William James in "The Moral Philosopher and the the Moral Life".
That essay is perhaps best remembered for this sentence.
"Or if the hypothesis were offered us of a world in which Messrs. Fourier's and Bellamy's and Morris's utopias should all be outdone, and millions kept permanently happy on the one simple condition that a certain lost soul on the far‑off edge of things should lead a life of lonely torture, what except a specifical and independent sort of emotion can it be which would make us immediately feel, even though an impulse arose within us to clutch at the happiness so offered, how hideous a thing would be its enjoyment when deliberately accepted as the fruit of such a bargain?"
The point is that we ought to respect that specifical and independent emotion and refrain from torturing the lost soul.
But let us continue with James' essay. For his overriding point is that we will always act under conditions of uncertainty, because "there is no such thing possible" James writes, "as an ethical philosophy dogmatically made up in advance."
There are a plurality of rights that are, in the context of our limited temporal perspective, in conflict. The only way forward is the meta-right of reconciling the first-order rights. He gives an entertainingly condensed picture of politico-moral conflicts at the end of the 19th century. "See everywhere the struggle and the squeeze; and ever-lastingly the problem of how to make them less. The anarchists, nihilists and free-lovers; the free-silverites, socialists, and single-tax men; the free-traders and civil-service reformers; the prohibitionists and anti-vivisectionists; the radical darwinians with their idea of the suppression of the weak, -- these and all the conservative sentiments of society arrayed against them are simply deciding through actual experiment by what sort of conduct the maximum amount of good can be gained and kept in this world."
In this process, we are all bound to be in the wrong in some sense. Hence the need to pray for forgiveness. But we may also hope that even in our wrongnesses we contribute to the education and development of our species, to the gradual reconciliation of the different rights. To the meta-right.
Thus much, James. I do not claim him as an anarcho-capitalist. Indeed, you'll see that he lists "anarchists" as one of the contending factions in the above exposition, part of the fray. A philosopher will be above the fray. (The "conservative sentiments of society" are part of the fray too, though arrayed against all the others.)
My own view of anarcho-capitalism, though, is that it is actually one with the meta-right. It is what I see when I seek to join James above that fray. It is where we will find ourselves heading as we work to reconcile all of our different impulses.
Josiah Royce expounded on a similar concept when he talked about "loyalty to loyalty." A meta-loyalty. He wrote about how wonderful loyalty to a group larger than one's self is. But then he took note of the obvious objection to any "philosophy of loyalty." A pirate may be loyal to his pirate captain. They may all work together quite well. But they are working to rob the honest folk who have trusted treasure to that merchant vessel so unfortunate as to sail past them! Should we celebrate the loyalty of a pirate?
Well ... yes, in a sense. But we should also note that it fails to be loyal to loyalty itself. The loyalty of the sailor on the merchant vessel to HIS captain doesn't infringe upon anyone else's loyalty. THAT sort of loyalty, then, is also meta-loyal. The pirate's loyalty only works to defeat the loyalty of others, and this is both exemplifies an ideal and undermines it.
Meta-right. Loyalties that include loyalty to loyalty. In such ideas we see the way forward, and I hold that way will turn out to be anarchic. In the meantime, we deal with the specific dilemmas we face as best we can, fumbling, and trying to keep in mind the broader goals beyond the day to day crises.
My view is that the soundest foundation for political thought is the moral philosophy outlined by the philosopher William James in "The Moral Philosopher and the the Moral Life".
That essay is perhaps best remembered for this sentence.
"Or if the hypothesis were offered us of a world in which Messrs. Fourier's and Bellamy's and Morris's utopias should all be outdone, and millions kept permanently happy on the one simple condition that a certain lost soul on the far‑off edge of things should lead a life of lonely torture, what except a specifical and independent sort of emotion can it be which would make us immediately feel, even though an impulse arose within us to clutch at the happiness so offered, how hideous a thing would be its enjoyment when deliberately accepted as the fruit of such a bargain?"
The point is that we ought to respect that specifical and independent emotion and refrain from torturing the lost soul.
But let us continue with James' essay. For his overriding point is that we will always act under conditions of uncertainty, because "there is no such thing possible" James writes, "as an ethical philosophy dogmatically made up in advance."
There are a plurality of rights that are, in the context of our limited temporal perspective, in conflict. The only way forward is the meta-right of reconciling the first-order rights. He gives an entertainingly condensed picture of politico-moral conflicts at the end of the 19th century. "See everywhere the struggle and the squeeze; and ever-lastingly the problem of how to make them less. The anarchists, nihilists and free-lovers; the free-silverites, socialists, and single-tax men; the free-traders and civil-service reformers; the prohibitionists and anti-vivisectionists; the radical darwinians with their idea of the suppression of the weak, -- these and all the conservative sentiments of society arrayed against them are simply deciding through actual experiment by what sort of conduct the maximum amount of good can be gained and kept in this world."
In this process, we are all bound to be in the wrong in some sense. Hence the need to pray for forgiveness. But we may also hope that even in our wrongnesses we contribute to the education and development of our species, to the gradual reconciliation of the different rights. To the meta-right.
Thus much, James. I do not claim him as an anarcho-capitalist. Indeed, you'll see that he lists "anarchists" as one of the contending factions in the above exposition, part of the fray. A philosopher will be above the fray. (The "conservative sentiments of society" are part of the fray too, though arrayed against all the others.)
My own view of anarcho-capitalism, though, is that it is actually one with the meta-right. It is what I see when I seek to join James above that fray. It is where we will find ourselves heading as we work to reconcile all of our different impulses.
Josiah Royce expounded on a similar concept when he talked about "loyalty to loyalty." A meta-loyalty. He wrote about how wonderful loyalty to a group larger than one's self is. But then he took note of the obvious objection to any "philosophy of loyalty." A pirate may be loyal to his pirate captain. They may all work together quite well. But they are working to rob the honest folk who have trusted treasure to that merchant vessel so unfortunate as to sail past them! Should we celebrate the loyalty of a pirate?
Well ... yes, in a sense. But we should also note that it fails to be loyal to loyalty itself. The loyalty of the sailor on the merchant vessel to HIS captain doesn't infringe upon anyone else's loyalty. THAT sort of loyalty, then, is also meta-loyal. The pirate's loyalty only works to defeat the loyalty of others, and this is both exemplifies an ideal and undermines it.
Meta-right. Loyalties that include loyalty to loyalty. In such ideas we see the way forward, and I hold that way will turn out to be anarchic. In the meantime, we deal with the specific dilemmas we face as best we can, fumbling, and trying to keep in mind the broader goals beyond the day to day crises.
04 March 2010
A Thought from Macaulay, Not De Tocqueville
There is a pseudo-quotation that is often attributed to De Tocqueville:
"The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money."
The quote is all over the place these days. I'm told that if you google "de toqueville congress bribe" you'll get almost a quarter of a million hits. It has everything to recommend it as a meme -- it speaks to current anxieties, and is attached to a source whose name we all recognize from school.
But he didn't write it. Or, at least (since I can't prove a negative) nobody ever cites a specific source for it. Successful meme: lousy scholarship. It is sad how often those two things go together.
Anyway, where did this misattribution come from? Is there a real quotation (of de Tocqueville or anybody else of roughly the same era) of which that is the distorted form? I think there is.
Indeed, the first time I encountered this pseudo-quotation I said to myself, "Wasn't that Macaulay?" -- not because I sit around reading Macaulay, but because I have a vague memory of William F. Buckley once quoting Macaulay to this effect in an episode of Firing Line. So I went on Snopes, the wonderful "urban legends" resource. It told me that very similar sentiments are sometimes attributed to Alexander Fraser Tytler, a Scottish historian of some prominence in the early 19th century. He is supposed to have written, "A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves money from the Public Treasury. From that moment on the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the Public Treasury with a result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy always followed by dictatorship."
Usually, when this attribution is made, Tytler's name is mis-spelled Tyler, which hardly gives one confidence. Anyway, Tytler appears not to have written this, either.
Then I did some more eclectic research. I found someone claiming that sentiments like this have been a regular part of the armory of conservatives in the US since the mid 1950s, when William F. Buckley gathered some bright intellectuals around himself and started putting out the National Review, in an effort to redefine conservatism as something more principled than the Eisenhower administration, but less wacky than the John Birchers. Well, yes, I thought, that fits nicely with my own first impression, though the Buckley observation I recall was televised, not printed, and was from the 1970s.
Anyway. it does appear that Macaulay said something like this in a letter he wrote to a friend in May 1857.
Here is part of Macaulay's argument -- you'll find that it isn't as snappy as the above variants. "I have long been convinced that institutions purely democratic must, sooner or later, destroy liberty or civilization, or both. In Europe, where the population is dense, the effect of such institutions would be almost instantaneous. What happened lately in France is an example. In 1848 a pure democracy was established there. During a short time there was reason to expect a general spoliation, a national bankruptcy, a new partition of the soil, a maximum of prices, a ruinous load of taxation laid on the rich for the purpose of supporting the poor in idleness. Such a system would, in twenty years, have made France as poor and barbarous as the France of the Carlovingians. Happily the danger was averted, and now there is a despotism, a silent tribune, an enslaved press. Liberty is gone: but civilisation has been saved."
So there IS a respectable 19th century source for this sort of connection between "purely democratic" arrangements and the threat of "a national bankruptcy." Further, Macaulay was also making the point that the US would be safe from this threat for awhile -- because the US doesn't have so dense a population as Europe -- there is/was the safety vent of western expansion. Once that vent was closed, though, the same dark choice that faced France, and that it resolved by recourse to the second Bonapartist dictator, would face Americans.
In 1953, Russell Kirk wrote a book called The Conservative Mind, which has gone through several editions and is still revered by many conservatives with an academic flavor to their minds. If you use the neat "look inside" feature at this book's amazon dot com page, you'll find that Macaulay is treated as an important link in the chain Kirk is forging between Edmund Burke's writings and mid-20th century figures like Santayana or Eliot. And on p. 163 you'll see a quotation from that letter to Randall. Kirk renders it thus: "I have long been convinced that institutions purely democratic mustsooner or later, destroy liberty or civilization, or both. In Europe, where the population is dense, the effect of such institutions would be almost instantaneous....Either the poor would plunder the rich, and civilization would perish; or order and prosperity would be saved by a strong military government, and liberty would perish."
Which brings us again to Buckley. For it was just two years after the publication of the first edition of this book that Buckley founded National Review. Kirk was one of the first bright young men he brought into that fold, although Kirk held to a sort of traditionalist conservatism rather at odds with the market-oriented elements of the thought of some of the other founders of NR, including to some extent Buckley.
Anyway, whether the above expressed thought is right or wrong: it is not de Tocqueville.
"The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money."
The quote is all over the place these days. I'm told that if you google "de toqueville congress bribe" you'll get almost a quarter of a million hits. It has everything to recommend it as a meme -- it speaks to current anxieties, and is attached to a source whose name we all recognize from school.
But he didn't write it. Or, at least (since I can't prove a negative) nobody ever cites a specific source for it. Successful meme: lousy scholarship. It is sad how often those two things go together.
Anyway, where did this misattribution come from? Is there a real quotation (of de Tocqueville or anybody else of roughly the same era) of which that is the distorted form? I think there is.
Indeed, the first time I encountered this pseudo-quotation I said to myself, "Wasn't that Macaulay?" -- not because I sit around reading Macaulay, but because I have a vague memory of William F. Buckley once quoting Macaulay to this effect in an episode of Firing Line. So I went on Snopes, the wonderful "urban legends" resource. It told me that very similar sentiments are sometimes attributed to Alexander Fraser Tytler, a Scottish historian of some prominence in the early 19th century. He is supposed to have written, "A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves money from the Public Treasury. From that moment on the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the Public Treasury with a result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy always followed by dictatorship."
Usually, when this attribution is made, Tytler's name is mis-spelled Tyler, which hardly gives one confidence. Anyway, Tytler appears not to have written this, either.
Then I did some more eclectic research. I found someone claiming that sentiments like this have been a regular part of the armory of conservatives in the US since the mid 1950s, when William F. Buckley gathered some bright intellectuals around himself and started putting out the National Review, in an effort to redefine conservatism as something more principled than the Eisenhower administration, but less wacky than the John Birchers. Well, yes, I thought, that fits nicely with my own first impression, though the Buckley observation I recall was televised, not printed, and was from the 1970s.
Anyway. it does appear that Macaulay said something like this in a letter he wrote to a friend in May 1857.
Here is part of Macaulay's argument -- you'll find that it isn't as snappy as the above variants. "I have long been convinced that institutions purely democratic must, sooner or later, destroy liberty or civilization, or both. In Europe, where the population is dense, the effect of such institutions would be almost instantaneous. What happened lately in France is an example. In 1848 a pure democracy was established there. During a short time there was reason to expect a general spoliation, a national bankruptcy, a new partition of the soil, a maximum of prices, a ruinous load of taxation laid on the rich for the purpose of supporting the poor in idleness. Such a system would, in twenty years, have made France as poor and barbarous as the France of the Carlovingians. Happily the danger was averted, and now there is a despotism, a silent tribune, an enslaved press. Liberty is gone: but civilisation has been saved."
So there IS a respectable 19th century source for this sort of connection between "purely democratic" arrangements and the threat of "a national bankruptcy." Further, Macaulay was also making the point that the US would be safe from this threat for awhile -- because the US doesn't have so dense a population as Europe -- there is/was the safety vent of western expansion. Once that vent was closed, though, the same dark choice that faced France, and that it resolved by recourse to the second Bonapartist dictator, would face Americans.
In 1953, Russell Kirk wrote a book called The Conservative Mind, which has gone through several editions and is still revered by many conservatives with an academic flavor to their minds. If you use the neat "look inside" feature at this book's amazon dot com page, you'll find that Macaulay is treated as an important link in the chain Kirk is forging between Edmund Burke's writings and mid-20th century figures like Santayana or Eliot. And on p. 163 you'll see a quotation from that letter to Randall. Kirk renders it thus: "I have long been convinced that institutions purely democratic mustsooner or later, destroy liberty or civilization, or both. In Europe, where the population is dense, the effect of such institutions would be almost instantaneous....Either the poor would plunder the rich, and civilization would perish; or order and prosperity would be saved by a strong military government, and liberty would perish."
Which brings us again to Buckley. For it was just two years after the publication of the first edition of this book that Buckley founded National Review. Kirk was one of the first bright young men he brought into that fold, although Kirk held to a sort of traditionalist conservatism rather at odds with the market-oriented elements of the thought of some of the other founders of NR, including to some extent Buckley.
Anyway, whether the above expressed thought is right or wrong: it is not de Tocqueville.
21 August 2007
Pragmatism in South Korea
A former CEO of Hyundai, Lee Myung-bak, is now running for president of South Korea as a member of the Grand National Party.
Lee calls himself a pragmatist. Indeed, he uses the phrase "empirical pragmatist," which sounds a tad backwards to me, but that may be an artifact of translation. I prefer "pragmatic empiricism" when both terms are used, because pragmatism is a variant within the broader empirical camp.
Lee, at any rate, used "empirical pragmatism" as a label for his desire to get beyond ideologies, which he believes have simply blinded previous governments to the national interest. He also thinks the national interest is best served -- pragmatically advanced, by what he calls the "smart market economy," in which on the one hand competition, freedom and creativity are protected, and on the other hand stragglers are assisted.
I don't know South Korean politics well enough to comment, but I will say as a pragmatist I don't object to Lee's use of the term. In my own mind, as I have long contended, the fullest political expression of pragmatism is anarcho-capitalism. But ....
I recognize that the Republic of Korea is unlikely soil for anarcho-capitalism, largely because the notion of a free-market system for territorial defense leaves people queasy, and with Communism-induced famine so evident just to the north of an arbitrary line on a map, that queasiness is rather hard to overcome. So, pragmatically, I suspect Lee is going as far in what I regard as the rational direction as could be expected of him.
Iceland, after all, in the days sometimes evoked as an anarcho-cap model, or for that matter in all days since, has been ... well, an island. Not the southern half of a peninsula.
Lee calls himself a pragmatist. Indeed, he uses the phrase "empirical pragmatist," which sounds a tad backwards to me, but that may be an artifact of translation. I prefer "pragmatic empiricism" when both terms are used, because pragmatism is a variant within the broader empirical camp.
Lee, at any rate, used "empirical pragmatism" as a label for his desire to get beyond ideologies, which he believes have simply blinded previous governments to the national interest. He also thinks the national interest is best served -- pragmatically advanced, by what he calls the "smart market economy," in which on the one hand competition, freedom and creativity are protected, and on the other hand stragglers are assisted.
I don't know South Korean politics well enough to comment, but I will say as a pragmatist I don't object to Lee's use of the term. In my own mind, as I have long contended, the fullest political expression of pragmatism is anarcho-capitalism. But ....
I recognize that the Republic of Korea is unlikely soil for anarcho-capitalism, largely because the notion of a free-market system for territorial defense leaves people queasy, and with Communism-induced famine so evident just to the north of an arbitrary line on a map, that queasiness is rather hard to overcome. So, pragmatically, I suspect Lee is going as far in what I regard as the rational direction as could be expected of him.
Iceland, after all, in the days sometimes evoked as an anarcho-cap model, or for that matter in all days since, has been ... well, an island. Not the southern half of a peninsula.
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