History

WORK

Jacques Delacroix History , , , , , , , , , , ,

This is an essay with a strange origin. My friend Peter Miller, an artist and a craftsman, is also a trained sociologist like me. He posted an essay on his blog about crafts. It’s a sophisticated and unusually perceptive essay. He asked me for comments. I begun answering him in a letter and then, quickly, I thought both his essay and my comments might be useful to others. I think anyone interested in the nature of work and changes in the nature of work should read both Peter’s essay (see above) and mine. I don’t know exactly in what order but it seems to me that my essay is easier for the non-specialist who pays a mortgage or who studies for his Calculus finals. It would not be hard to make me change my mind on this though.

Dear Peter:

This is a thick narrative that demands a lot from the reader. Those are separate and additive reasons to turn it into a book. It would benefit by being watered down; some of the things that you say in one sentence would be better said in three. Just an unsolicited opinion on form. (Lack of solicitation has never stopped me before.)

It seems to me that your argumentation is not finished, that you have not looped the loop. I explain.

The pilot automation that is the pretext for your essay seems to me to be only a special and late instance of a process that began massively and kind of suddenly in the late 18th century. I mean the rationalization of work associated with the Industrial Revolution, of which it is only one facet, I think. I think this because, if nothing had changed in the realm of production but the capture of large amounts of inanimate power, the world would have still experienced a big economic growth spurt. The rationalization of production supplied additional economic benefits.

“Rationalization of production” means the specification in advance of the one best way to achieve a well defined end. It’s not “whichever way works” but “the exact best way.” Nearly always, it involves the decomposition of a task into smaller components most of which are easier to complete than the whole, usually, much easier. This is contrast with crafts production which involves a trained worker doing a job from beginning to end.

Note: This contrast is overdone as far as many crafts are concerned. Craftsmen did not wait for the 18th century to rationalize their methods. They did it in small steps that spread slowly or not at all. (Ask me how we know this.) For every single instance of production the comparison between crafts and rationalized production is often exaggerated. This is in the nature of contrasts. The real difference on the ground is a matter of emphasis, of course.

Until recently, the rationalization of production was a pre-condition to mechanization, the replacement or, usually the partial replacement of human workers by machines. Mechanization is another source of enlarged societal wealth because machines are, on the whole, less expensive to employ than people. Machines don’t get sick; they are maintained at predictable intervals. They don’t take vacations. They don’t retire with benefits. They never feel lazy. They are never reluctant to do the work assigned to them. With machines, the same number of people can do more than without machines, other things being equal. The cost of machines plus their human tenders is normally lower than the cost of people plus people.

Rationalization does not require mechanization. It just makes it easier. Many clerical jobs were rationalized in the 19th century without benefit of any mechanization.

The rationalization of production, and of work that may or may not be considered production (rearing children, for example) is, to a large extent, an attempt to separate every job into parts each of which can be handled on a routine basis. This allows for production to increase seemingly while reducing the level of competence required of the line producers. (Yes, it sounds familiar to you, Peter, because I am paraphrasing someone; his first name was Charlie, his buddy was Freddie.) I mean by “level of competence” three things: specific job training, general education, intelligence and other otherwise desirable personal features. As the level required in all three for a given job drops, the cost of securing workers of the requisite competence also tends to decrease. At least, it drops at first. Over time, the story is vastly more complicated than this. (See below.)

The average worker of the early twentieth century was probably less skilled – any way you define skill – than his 17th century counterpart. He also needed less intelligence to do his work properly.

Here is an illustration of these basic ideas. Today, one can buy shoes made by machine in South Korea or by hand in India. That is, modern mass production along rationalized lines, in the world, exists side by side with craft production fairly similar to all shoe production before 1750. The average line worker in a Korean shoe production does not need to be very bright, and he can be satisfactorily trained in a month or so. By contrast, a traditional Indian shoe-maker is apprenticed for four to five years, or more.** He cannot be stupid and he needs patience, perseverance, and a superior ability to focus, among other personal traits. It’s true that today’s unskilled Korean worker probably has more formal education than the Indian shoe-maker. That’s not because he needs it to do his job but because he lives in a rich society where formal education is a consumption item. It may also be to enable him to spend rationally. It may make him a better citizen. It’s not required by his job beyond basic literacy, if that.

Historically, this rationalization of work driven by the search to save on production costs had an unexpected positive downfall: In many cases it reduced defects in the final product as well as accidents during work. These facts would have been enough to move forward the general movement toward rationalization wherever defects in the product were costly, as with steel, or silicon, or where human life was valued,* wherever the old process was dangerous.

The movement of rationalization of production never stopped; it continues as I write. Fast food restaurants modeled after McDonald are one of the most visible fairly recent results of this process. And some of us remember the days when service stations were staffed with adult men who actually knew how to check your oil and your tire pressure. Automatic piloting is just another instance of the same long societal process of rationalization. (Incidentally, I would guess that if you could compare the dangers of flying with or without automatic pilots while keeping everything the same – you can’t – you would find the former much safer.)

With every tiny step in the rationalization of work voices were raised to regret the crafts methods the new techniques were destroying. A few of those voices belonged to people who were fully qualified to pass judgment. I mean, individuals who had worked both in craft and in the corresponding rationalized industry, home weavers working by hand converted into weaving machine tenders, for instance. I am guessing there would have been and there are still few of those. Many more, like the artist and print-maker Peter Miller, know only the crafts side of things. (I don’t know this for a fact but I imagine that Peter has spent little time in a factory of any sort. He will correct me if I am wrong.) I can’t imagine that there were many who wrote on the lost world of crafts who also possessed both industrial experience and craft experience. Those imagined or proceeded from more or less distant observation. Others, a third kind of commentators, the loudest voices by far, belonged and still belong to professional intellectuals who have known neither craft nor modern industry. Karl Marx is the chief, the best known of those.

Digression: Pseudo “Marxists” in universities and elsewhere have derived a whole quasi-scholarly industry for fifty years from a few paragraphs in Marx’s youthful 1848 Manuscripts that have the merit of being easy to read. In one of those, Marx wrote of the “alienation” of the worker from his work contrasting the inherent pleasure of craft work with the sort of coitus interuptus of factory work. The fact that generation after generation of sociologists have failed to find empirical confirmation of such alienation among real live workers never stopped this industry from expanding. The best treatment of the topic comes the 1964 thin book by the French anarchist Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society. It provides a more sensitive, better informed, detailed, and of course, much more thorough view of the lost world of crafts than does anything in the Marxist tradition. End of digression.

Much of the nostalgia for a pre-rational world is simply mistaken, sometimes grossly mistaken. I sometimes overhear discontented, intemperate comments about the coffee shop chain Starbucks, which has managed to systematize the preparation and serving of coffee products while enlarging their scope. More often than not, I read between the figurative lines of the complaints a longing for the good old days when coffee in America was prepared and poured by real people in real places. In fact, I knew America well before Starbucks and I can assure you that nearly everywhere, the coffee was bad and bitter, the pouring sometimes surly, and the sitting stools hard. It is as if the Starbucks haters remembered their childhood in charming, civilized Florence or Rome, rather than in the real Fort Wayne and Buffalo where they grew up. Nostalgia will do this to you, the lying bitch!

When all is said, I am not attempting here to argue against the merits of crafts activity. Anyone who has even built and painted a garden fence he was not forced to make for pay knows that there is pleasure in making things from beginning to end. It does not take even long before one learns the difference between a well built fence and an ugly one. Craft work is learning work. And millions of what the French call “Sunday painters” (like me) are well aware of the fact that their artistic creations give them more pleasure than almost anything else on earth except babies (and sometimes, making babies). I mean both the result on canvas and the process itself. By the way, “Sunday painters” are amateur artists who know their work has no economic prospects and may not even deserve to be shown. I don’t have a survey in mind but I suspect that even those who are aware of committing frankly bad paintings love their art. Activity that links the senses, brain, and hands is often a labor of love. That’s why we miss the crafts.

Not surprisingly, nostalgia for the crafts era is all around us and it’s in most of us if not in all of us. My house was built in 1906 of planks that were probably hewn with primitive tools. That’s one (one) of the reasons my wife and I bought it. When I made some repairs on it I found hand forged nails that I put away like treasures. If I am told that a pot was hand-made I become immediately willing to pay a premium for it over a machine-made pot that looks identical to me. Examples are legion. Most of us have an addiction for an “authenticity” that is often the product of selective ignorance. The magnificent Gothic cathedrals, built largely by hand, survived; the clay and straw hovels that abutted them did not. Neither did the results of the lack of toilets immediately at the foot of the great cathedrals. Crafts nostalgia may even taken tragic forms and yet survive.

In France, every year, several people die from eating “artisanal” cheese. It’s labeled by the government according to specific rules. (This is France, after all where the government does almost everything!) One component is that it’s made from unpasteurized milk; another is that it’s shaped by hand. The first feature probably accounts for all the deaths. Some consumers no doubt want unpasteurized milk because it’s more “natural.” Others and some of the same, chose cheese made by hand for aesthetic and sentimental reasons. They get the deadly bacteria as a bonus. The striking thing is that French society broadly defined appears to consider a few deaths an acceptable price to pay for the privilege of consuming cheese issued from a crafts process. The consensus includes those who would never touch artisanal cheese with the business end of a fork.

So what to do with our nostalgia for the crafts and for their more or less imaginary era?

First, we must all admit that we don’t wish to go back to the days when every nail was forged by hand and cost $5.99 retail! Poverty does not mean not earning enough money; it means not earning enough money to buy the things you need or want. If your income is stationary but the price of bread shoots up to $10 a pound, you are poorer. If lettuce is $5 a pound, – as with organic lettuce – you are poorer than if it costs $1.50. We should not allow our nostalgia to drive us into poverty.

Second, we must recognize that the rationalization of production – together with mechanization and reliance on fossil fuels – have made us rich beyond belief, rich to a degree that I, myself, couldn’t have believed fifty years ago. (Good point to plug my book: I Used to Be French: an Immature Autobiography – which goes in detail over the poverty of everyone fifty and sixty years ago.) We are richer because we have become collectively enormously more productive in the past 150 years and accelerating in the past fifty years. We are more productive because of fossil fuels, because of mechanization but also because of the rationalization of production alone. The higher productivity is obvious in the manufacturing fields but I can’t go into it here because of the complicating factor of outsourcing. Let’s take agriculture because Americans import relatively little by way of agricultural products. Here are some numbers that are easy to remember to implant the facts firmly in your mind:

In 1860 about 60% of the American workforce was employed in agriculture and in lumber. Today, the percentage is less than 3% (three per cent). We are not worse fed than in 1860, food has just dropped in price. No catch!

Let’s go back to our shoe workers. Rationalization of much production has made all of us very rich by historical standards irrespective of our individual merits. The low-skill, borderline idiotic shoe machine tender in South Korea earns ten times more money than the skilled, smart, attentive shoe craftsman of India. One lives in a society where rationality of production prevails, the other, not.

The cheapness of the things we need is such that we are not forced to work very long to secure them. In addition, a very large fraction of our society does not work at all (children, many adolescents, middle-class wives and ex-wives, retirees with thirty more years before them). Collectively, we have enormous leisure as compared to our ancestors, even our near ancestors.****

Wealth gives us, with leisure time, the luxury to experiment and schools of all kinds (including California community colleges). Wealth even makes it easy to preserve old traditional techniques as in Peter’s examples: Am I willing to spend pennies each year to support the preservation of craft techniques of Japanese pottery I have never even heard about? Yes; why not? Those who are so inclined can become craftsmen in the broadest sense of the word because we can afford to try and fail. I would bet that there are more painters in Santa Cruz County (“Silicon Valley Beach”), population 50,000, today than in all of Paris in 1880. Are they any good? Not my topic; my topic is nostalgia for crafts production. It’s not art criticism. Crafts are here, in abundance, where I live, no doubt about it.

Note: I understand that real craftsmen in the traditional mold, such as Peter, may argue that I stretch the meaning of crafts beyond recognition because it does not incorporate the common notion of a long, supervised apprenticeship. I think they are wrong. I suspect they confuse “craftsman” and “good craftsman.” (I don’t know exactly, in fact, what Peter would argue; I am just guessing on this. We will find out, I hope.)

Here is my third proposal about what to do about our nostalgia for crafts: We can believe that we have entered  the age of post-rationalization of production. Manufacturing is under control, agriculture too, as I pointed out. Such a belief would not be completely absurd. Today, the amorphous category “Services” accounts for about 70% of American GDP, (the sum total of the value of what all Americans produce in one year at home). The percentages are similar for other developed, rich countries. But, “Services ” is a bad category; it was invented more than a hundred years ago to mean: “everything but agriculture, forestry, fishing, mining and manufacturing.” It did not amount to much at the time. “Services” was a sort of residual category. Nonetheless, on the face of it, it’s possible to believe that in a short time, almost all of us, will be teachers, brain surgeons, professional poets, software “architects,” brewers, not to forget waiters – excuse me, “waitpersons.”

All these occupations have in common that they rely on tacit information. That’s information that is not well understood by the user himself. For that reason, it’s also difficult to transmit that kind of information deliberately to others and in a systematic manner. It’s normally communicated to others through more or less formalized apprenticeship arrangements favoring direct observation of more senior workers.

My own position about this belief in a world of production changing in that direction is like my attitude toward Sasquatch***** I don’t believe in it but I would like to be wrong.

I am not sanguine no, I am rather cautious for two reasons. The first is that the least likely industries have been rationalized in my lifetime; burger making is a strong case in point. The second cause of my cautiousness is that I am witnessing right now, as I write, massive rationalization taking place around me in another unlikely industry, the practice of medicine. I can already see the day when we will be remembering with longing the Bill’s Burger days of medicine when the doctor knew our name and used mostly his intuition to diagnose us. (Sometimes with fatal results, of course.)

A final note in passing. Being beyond the age of rationalization would have serious benefits in terms of power relations in general. Hierarchical arrangements are much less useful, or more difficult to implement when the work process is not rationalized. We see see this in Silicon Valley every day. Unfortunately, this does not mean that it’s the wave of the future. This is yet another story, of course.

————-
* Yes, I mean Christian and, especially formerly Christian regions of the world well on their way to secularization. (This means more or less endowed with some degree of religious indifference.)

** I suspect that the apprenticeship time could be cut in half without damage to competence but that’s another story and it would still remain a long time.

*** “Artisan” just means “craftsman.” “Artisanal” means produced according to a more or less crafts method rather than in a plant with machines. Saying it in French in the US allows for a higher profit margin by exploiting the naive and pretentious.

**** It’s true that traditional peasants have much down time but it’s mostly not leisure because they are lacking the other ingredients of leisure. As I write, I realize I may be overstating my case on this. More thinking needed.

***** Also known as “Bigfoot” and, “L’ Abominable Géant des Forêts“.

My latest on Bangladesh

Amit Ranjan History , ,

“Perpetual violence in Bangladesh“

My latest book review: Rafia Zakaria’s “History of Pakistan”

Amit Ranjan Books, History , , , , ,

The other pertinent issue raised by Rafia is about the patriarchal structure, which is a political institution now sanctioned by religious practices and with social acceptance. The plight of women is considered to be a private affair but it is a political programme through which one gender controls the activities of the other. It defines values and sets up norms to control and regulate the body of women. This control and regulation becomes strong in conflict-affected societies where the level of violence is high. The stronger group tries to abduct and carry out violence against women from other communities while the minority, in the name of protection of its ‘honour’, puts all forms of restrictions on their women and carries out violence against them within their own community.

Read the rest.

Odysseus and Individuality

Barry Stocker History, Liberty , , , , , , , , , ,

The Iliad is the story of Achilles moving from rage with an ally to sympathy with an enemy. Many other characters appear and the extremism of Achilles’ character, which leads him to remove himself from battle and therefore the narrative, lends itself to allowing other characters to present other possibilities of human personality.

The Trojan characters, particularly Hector, provide on obvious source of alternatives, but so do the other Greek hero warriors, and one of those who emerges most distinctly is Odysseus. Though Odysseus is a fierce remorseless warrior, inclined towards killing the enemy, particularly when the enemy can be seen as socially inferior, he is also characterised by his intellectual resources. It is highly indicative that one of the major appearances of Odysseus in The Iliad is on a spying trip into the Trojan camp. This early appreciation of the role of intelligence of in warfare is part of what makes the Homeric epics a classic of the theory of war, as well as a class of many other kinds.

Odysseus we see in The Iliad is the best adapted of the Greek kings to moderating disagreements, speaking with a constructive purpose in assemblies and councils, and thinking about the conduct of the war. This does not always make him sympathetic, but it does show that the human individual can exist in a very vivid and alive way through speech and thought as well as through anger and violence.

It is fitting then that Odysseus get his own epic, The Odyssey, which contrasts the very communal, even hyper communal, world of men at war, with the growing isolation of a man separated both from the brothers in arms community of Troy and from his family community back in Ithaca. The journey from Troy to Ithaca takes him right across the Greek world of the time, conveniently for symbolising other kinds of distance between the world of war and the world of human community. That is in part the distance between a world of plunder and slave girls on one side, and a world of productive labour and marriage on the other side. The Homeric poems does not make the contrast as favourable to the home community, as that might suggest.

Clearly the Heroes at Troy in some way feel most alive at war, straining their human faculties most in that endeavour. The Iliad also suggests other ways in which individuals can heighten the sense of life, the athletic competition at the funeral of the Patroclus and the desire to be remembered in poetry are the most obvious. These are not separate activities from war in Homer. Odysseus participates in games and weeps at poetic performance about himself in the land of the Phaeacians. In both cases war is very close. The games nearly turn in to violence between Odysseus and a Phaeacian who ‘accuses’ him of being a merchant and the poetry refers to the Trojan War.

With all due qualifications, we can still say that The Odyssey shows the value for an individual of getting back to the peaceful world of productive labours and familial affections. It also shows an individual losing all of the normal social bonds that define the self and finding other aspects of the self, which are not obviously present in the community of war and plunder or the community of family and labour. These are the aspects of the self which are part of ‘individualism’, of the idea as an individual as having an existence behind and, to some extent, separable from the most deeply entrenched social roles and connections. The appreciation of such aspects of the individual is the ethical foundation of political ideas of liberty, and Homeric poetry, though apparently the product of very communal communities, does much to establish that ethic (in some ways more than later philosophers in the antique world).

Odysseus confronts the possibility of a lonely death at sea after losing all his men in the long journey from Troy. The fault is partly his and partly his men. The vital passage for many of these issues is the adventure in the land of the Cyclops. Odysseus is thoughtless of danger when he takes some of his men to a cave whose occupant is absent, where they feast on the available food. Odysseus is taking assumptions about the applicability of laws of hospitality to an imprudent extreme here, and even tips over in plunder when it seems he plans to return to the ships with much of what is in the cave before the occupant returns.

The occupant, Polyphemus, returns too soon for that and is inherently more inclined to consume his guests than give them presents. Odysseus evades death through cunning, partly by telling Polyphemus that his name is ‘No man’. This idea of Odysseus that he might be taken as anyone and therefore no one, is itself a comment on how being some thing depends on being recognised as someone. It is also a resourceful individual thinking of how to use these abstractions to evade danger. Odysseus, however, guarantees ten more years of danger by boasting of his name and demanding it be known when he is sailing away from the island, incurring the enmity of Polyphemus’ father the god Poseidon.

The danger of the name and the desire for a name is emphasised later in the Sirens episode where malevolent demigoddesses try to lure Odysseus to his death with songs of the glory of Odysseus. To only want to live by your name as warrior heroics is dangerous. Odysseus has to resist this to live and again be thrown back on a very individualised kind of individuality.

The Homeric role in the origins of liberty is then partly bound up with the sense that even an individual very tied to the basic forms of community in his society can only fully thrive and live, if wiling to experience and play with, or suffer, separation from social bonds, and that the strength of those bonds itself rests most strongly on characters who can confront and live from encounters with extreme and even traumatic loss of communal bonds, and without becoming addicted to such situations and there dangers either.

Barbarian Liberty and Civilisation in Homer

Barry Stocker Culture, History, Liberty , , , , , , ,

Following from my last two posts, this will explore the sort of ‘barbarian’ liberty that Tacitus recognised in his time, that is of the early Roman empire, and was further explored by Montesquieu and Humboldt in the eighteenth century in relation to the poetry of Homer. ‘Homer’ here refers to two Greek epic poems attributed to him, The Iliad and The Odyssey, which had a very large presence not only in Greek culture, but in Roman culture which produced a kind of sequel in Latin, The Aeneid of Virgil, a very major work in its own right deserving of separate consideration.

As already indicated Homer shows us warriors of extreme destructive ferocity, who consider it normal and admirable to destroy enemy cities, taking slaves, and collecting loot as well as killing without mercy. A reasonable immediate reaction to that from a liberty supporting point of view is that this is the opposite of what liberty is about, that liberty oriented thought treats  unprovoked violence as the prime evil. Without denying any of that, the kind of violence that the Homeric Heroes engage in is part of a social bond within which voluntary co-operation of some sorts. Here I am referring to heroes not just in the sense of the main protagonists of a story, but the semi-divine status they are accorded in Homer, and by implication which is accorded to them in Mycenaean (late Bronze Age) Greece, where these stories originate.

The Homeric world is one in which there is trade and commerce, but it is regarded as less ‘honourable’ than Heroic violence, including piracy and physical destruction of cites. What this refers to, in fictionalised and poetic ways, is a world of weak enforcement of rules about property and individual security from violence outside small compact communities. Trade is clearly hazardous, running risks of the piracy referred to and maybe trading valuables of a kind acquired by violence, including slaves. Wealth is to a very large degree understood to consist of what can be seized or occupied through violence, including land, livestock and metal objects, rather than the less tangible and physically identifiable wealth of commercial life.

The value of ‘Heroic’ violence is then understandable in a world where there is very limited understanding of forms of wealth and security arising from relations of mutual advantage and respect for rules that apply to more than a small community and maybe its intimate contacts in other communities. Individual achievement and excellence is then understood in very large part as striving for excellence in war, and maybe in associated activities such as competitive sports which may suit strong aggressive warriors, and in which valuables looted in war or even originating with the gods (presumably a metaphoric poetic way of referring to the skilled workers in metal, leather, and precious stones that only the ‘Hero’ class could employ) may be awarded as prizes.

What this picture is building up is the importance of excellence and competition in the Homeric warrior society, and which continues into later stages of ancient Greek society, certainly up to the great cultural achievements and experiments with political liberty and democracy in Athens of the fifth century BCE. Of course the Homeric poetry maybe to a large degree reflects the growth of that culture of individual excellence and competition between whatever tales of Bronze Age wars are the starting point of the oral poetic tradition that leads to Homer and the writing down of the poems as we know them.

The Iliad begins with a story of extreme personal anger at an insult to honour in which the greatest Greek hero, Achilles, withdraws from the war. This is one aspect of the individualistic competitive nature of the warrior culture in Homer and while it is a classic case of uncontrolled temper which threatens social bonds, it is  also a classic case of the growth of individuality. Achilles’ rage is the product of self-awareness of individuality and demands for respect of that individuality, which Achilles directs at someone with some claim to authority over him, Agamemnon the most powerful of the many kings ruling different parts of Greece, and the leader of the Greek league against Troy.

Achilles’ rage does not easily decline and is even increased when the Trojan hero Hector kills his best friend Patroclus. Achilles shows ‘barbaric’ cruelty in not only killing Hector himself, an inevitable response in this world, but in denying Hector’s body a funeral, even throwing it in the dust to decay and be eaten by wild animals. The greatest horror of the Homeric Heroes is to suffer such indignities in death, which are also an attack on the honour and welfare of family and of the community of that dead Hero. In the end, however, Hector’s father, King Priam of Troy, is able to persuade Achilles to return Hectors body and reflect on their shared experience of mourning for loved ones.

What we have in The Iliad is a kind of brutal but real individuality, which at least elevates warriors as individuals above a mass of identical individuals in a collective killing machine. The fierce kind of individuality which leads Achilles to rage at insults to his honour and the death of his friend also shows a capacity to judge wisely in disputes as in Achilles’ way of handling the games which are part of the funeral of Patroclus, and a capacity for empathy with the extreme emotions of others. That is Achilles shows a barbaric strength of warrior individualism and a growth of understanding of impartially administered justice and empathy with the sufferings of others, including his enemies. So we see that ‘barbarian liberty’ encompasses justice within the community and respect of some kind for the individual suffering of others, basic prerequisites for the development of a society in which individual liberty can flourish.

Next week the development of heroic individualism in the character of Odysseus and in The Odyssey.

More on Liberty and Homer: Tacitus, Montesquieu, and Humboldt

Barry Stocker Culture, History, Liberty , , , , , , , , , ,

As I have discussed before here, there is a way of writing about liberty in a conscious focus on political thought, which finds liberty to be emulated in some respect, going back at least to the first century Roman historian Tacitus. He was referring to the condition of the ancient Britons, within the Roman Empire, but rebelling against it, and the ancient Germans who could not be incorporated into the Empire.

The latter situation may have been at least as much for economic reasons as for the German fighting spirit, but they were certainly difficult to overcome and inflicted one of the great defeats on the Roman legions, at the height of Roman power in the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest in 25CE.

The image of barbarian liberty in Tacitus was certainly in some part shaped by Homer given the deep impact of Greek culture on the Romans, and most relevantly in this instance through the continuation of Homer in the greatest latin epic, Aeneid, which links Rome with the Trojan prince Aeneas. As I pointed out before here, Tacitus’ idea of barbarian liberty strongly influenced Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws (1748, a work I will be posting on in future), whose view of liberty in modern Europe, in brutal but meaningful summary, was of a combination of Roman law and Germanic individualism.

Montesquieu was of course a great part of Classical Liberalism and we can follow up his interest in barbaric liberty with reference to other classical liberals. David Hume and Adam Smith, who were writing after Montesquieu, tended to write on ‘barbarism’ and a related idea of ‘savagery’ with some anxiety regarding the possibility that such societies, or societies closer to that stage than those European nations where civil society had advanced the most, might overwhelm commercial legalistic nations with their unrestrained force.

However, some element of respect for liberty in the most simple societies does manifest itself at times, but mostly through an interest in the earliest stages of the Roman and Greek republics of antiquity, which in Montesquieu’s thinking come between the Germanic individualism and the late Roman legalism. Tacitus was thinking of the ‘virtue’ (in the sense of patriotic courage and love of law) of the early Romans when addressing the courage, rough individuality, and fierce independence of the Britons and Germans.

The most interesting way of linking back from Enlightenment liberalism of the Eighteenth century, for me at least, is via Wilhelm von Humboldt, a thinker I will address in at least one dedicated post in future. Humboldt’s major contribution to political thought, The Limits of State Action, was written in the 1790s, so another generation on from Montesquieu, just after Smith and Hume.

At this point, we might think of a movement from Enlightenment to Romanticism in European thought. While we should be very careful about such general distinctions, and amongst other things not engage in simplistic oppositions, it is appropriate to think of Humboldt as belonging to a phase of interest in the history and current meaning of aesthetics, literature, culture, and language as part of the study of political ideas.

He was in fact a major thinker about language and the infinite capacities inherent in the combinatory nature of language, which was part of his thinking about individual human capacity and the power of voluntary co-operation.

It is the interest in aesthetics, language, culture, historical existence, and the capacity of the inner human which makes him ‘Romantic’ rather than ‘Enlightened’, though again we should avoid stereotype and simple opposition here. Humboldt was very much not against Enlightenment respect for reasons, and some of these ‘Romantic’ themes are in ‘Enlightenment’ texts.

One of the earlier big classics of Enlightenment, The New Science (1725, 1744) by Giambattista Vico, is a good example and that is a book giving great importance to Homer. Vico is someone else who merits at least one dedicated post, so there will be more about him at some point. I am not aware of any evidence that Humboldt read Vico, but he certainly made an impression on German thinkers of the time.

Anyway, Humboldt was a learned classicist from a philological and literary way, which has an impact on his idea of how liberty was strengthened in antiquity, which compensated for the tendency of the ancient state to interfere in the soul, as Humboldt thinks of antique laws and institutions to promote moral and religious traditions.

What compensates for this pressure on liberty is the struggle in the lives of ancient humans, which has two main aspects. First the struggle with nature to have enough food and shelter to preserve life. Second the military struggle with rival states and communities, which was a very frequent experience in antiquity, and was an aspect of the history of the early Greek and Roman republics.

The best place to look for that in antique sources is Homer, because of the breadth of the Homeric world, as well as its poetic qualities, as well as its enormous influence on Greek and Roman culture. I had meant to address how the kind of struggle which can promote some kinds of liberty does appear in Homer, but this post is already long enough, and the best thing is to address Homer directly in the next post.

In the meantime, careful reading of any of the translations in books and post on websites, of The Iliad and The Odyssey (or indeed the original Greek for those fortunate enough to have that linguistic capacity), should I hope provide material to confirm what I’m suggesting.

A History of Regional Governments (Part 1)

Michelangelo Landgrave History , , , , , , ,

Cities have historically been compact hyper-dense communities. This is because cities have been constrained in size by the average resident’s capacity to reasonably travel throughout the city within a day. Cities built before the dawn of the automobile are often noted for being walkable. It is doubtful that the walkability of these cities is due to any planned attempt to make them so as the urban planning profession is a relatively new discipline. Rather older cities are walkable because they had to be. For most of history the average man could only travel as far as his own legs could take him. Horses and other beasts of burden substantially increased one’s travel range, but even up to the 19th century ownership of such beasts was beyond the reach of the every man. Any real estate developer who attempted to build outside a city’s natural growth boundary would as such find it difficult to attract the necessary foot traffic to make his endeavor economically feasible.

This constraint in outward growth also led to older cities being easily dominated by a single local authority. This changed with the creation of the automobile. As noted above, a beast of burden was already capable of extending the effective range of their owner. The automobile similarly would have done little to influence the growth of cities if it were inaccessible to the average man. What made the automobile such a game changer to the future of cities was that it was within the reach of the average man’s finances.  In their early days, as in our own, automobiles presented a serious financial investment but were nonetheless cheap enough to afford.

With the advent of the economic automobile the general public was no longer constrained to the urban core. Attracted by cheap land prices in the periphery an increasing portion of the city settled in the periphery region – the so called suburbs. The development of suburbs had several immediate effects, but of interest to us is its effect on local government. At first cities attempted to annex the suburb regions but it was not before long that some suburbs rejected annexation. One of the first such cases was in when Brookline, a wealthy suburb of Boston, rejected annexation in the late 19th century. Even some suburbs which originally agreed to annexation changed their minds and fought to regain their independence.

Suburb residents had been driven to migrate from the cities in search for cheap housing, but they also valued their new found independence from urban politics.  Many suburbs elected to instead incorporate as cities by their own right. Despite their political independence the suburbs remained economically tied to the mother cities. It did not take long for the limits of this style of organization to be realized. In the greater New York metropolitan area New York and New Jersey local governments found themselves unable to settle basic questions regarding their common port. Meanwhile in Los Angeles the various local governments were unable to efficiently synchronize their electric current systems. Los Angeles proper synchronized its electrical system with the rest of the nation in 1936 but the rest of the metro didn’t make the switch for another twelve years. In greater Boston the suburbs found themselves unable to provide for quality running water and other basic utilities. These problems only increased as population growth increasingly favored suburbs and urban sprawl intensified.

Early reformers suggested the creation of a new layer of government, between state and local government, which would preserve the independence of the suburbs whilst creating a central authority capable of providing for regional needs.  Attempts to create regional governments were retarded by the actions of local governments who jealously guarded their own powers. It is unclear what would have happened if things would have been allowed to play out without federal intervention.

It was at the height of the New Deal era that the modern regional government was born. The Roosevelt administration began to encourage regions to form councils of government and other regional government associations if they wished preferential federal aid. The Truman and Eisenhower administrations codified this policy with the Housing Act of 1949 and 1954 respectively. Section 701 of the 1954 Housing Act in particular would serve as the benchmark for years to come in promoting the creation of regional governments. As a result of these actions almost one hundred regional governments were formed. The regional governments formed tended to be in name only. Local governments agreed to their formation in order to secure federal funding but granted their regional counterparts little actual control in day to day affairs. Regional governments were relegated to providing technical advice to local government and to aiding state government with paperwork, but were unable to pursue their own objectives. Meanwhile the growth of the suburbs continued strong, aided in part due to the return of WW2 veterans and the preferential mortgage packages offered to them.

The federal government attempted to bolster the strength of regional governments with the passage of the Highway Act of 1962. Thus far federal legislation had merely given preferential treatment in aid allocations towards regional governments. The Highway Act of 1962 made federal aid contingent on having areas with a population greater than 50,000 create a regional development plan. In practice the act gave regional governments little power as the language was broad enough to allow state and local governments to circumvent them. Once more regional governments found themselves with little teeth and better termed advisory bodies.

Liberty and Homer

Barry Stocker Culture, History, Liberty , , , , , ,

The ‘Expanding the Liberty Canon’ label is not adequate for some texts that ought to be discussed with regard to liberty, since they have something important to say about liberty, but even on an expanded inclusive definition cannot be said to put forward a case for liberty, certainly  not from the perspectives of classical liberalism, libertarianism, the liberty movement, or any other label for thinking which favours liberty understood as individual rights, markets, voluntary association, and rule of law over communalism, collectively directed distribution, state domination of society, and administrative rules.

I have plenty of further texts to discuss under the ‘Expanding the Liberty Canon’ heading, but here is a beginning to the ‘Liberty and…’ sequence. It is an appropriate starting point in that the epic poems associated with the name of Homer, The Iliad and The Odyssey are at the very beginning of European literature, culture, and knowledge. This is not say that there is pure beginning to Europe’s cultural and intellectual heritage with no precursors and no outside influence. It is to say that these are the first big texts in the history of anything that can be labelled European history. The name ‘Homer’ conceals considerable uncertainty about whether these poems have a single author and if so who.  What can be safely said is that these are long poems written down in approximately 800 BCE, drawing on a long oral tradition of sung poetry, referring to a world of Mycenaean late Bronze Age Greeks, who traded with and fought with the peoples of Anatolia, in a civilisation that disappears from the archaeological record in about 1 100 BCE.

On the side of Homer not being a hero of liberty is the apparent endorsement of a world where war and piracy have greater respect than trade and manufacture, the greatest role for a man is to defeat enemy armies and sack their cities, women’s role is to stay at home, do a lot of weaving, and obey their husband. Political authority is patriarchal-monarchical, based on the claim that kings are warrior-hero aristocrats are close to the gods. Ordinary people are deprived of choices and influence, subordinated to the hero-aristocrat class and may even be slaves. In The Iliad, a league of Greek kings lays siege to Troy for ten years, purely for reasons of honour connected with a Trojan Prince taking a Greek queen from her husband back to Troy. The violent destruction on enemy cities, the enslavement and murder of civilians, the organised theft of property are all part of the value system of Greeks and Trojans. In The Odyssey after various adventures on the way back from Troy, Odysseus massacres a group of aristocrats who have been trying to marry his wife during the twenty years of his absence, living in his palace using up the wealth, and follows this up with a massacre of those servant women who were too friendly with the massacred men.

So where does liberty come into this world of violence and traditionalist authority? One part of the answer to this question is that maybe the Homeric epics are critical of this world, at least in some part. The exploration of where there might be a critical distance in the Homeric poetry from the most disturbing aspects of the world it depicts gets into much detailed and questions of ambiguity to pursue here, but is something to bear in mind when reading Homer. Leaving that aside, there is the underlying issue of the formation of a world of poetic creation, which in some degree must be distant from and reflect on a world, so raising the possibility of individual critical perspectives.

Anyway, even staying at the level of the more direct and literal meaning, it portrays different possibilities of individual character and ways of being. In The Iliad we are see Achilles the proud angry warrior who lives to become the hero of song, even if that means dying young. His devotion to violence co-exists with a belief that he has rights as an individual against his overlord, a passionate devotion to his best friend, a capacity to overcome his angry nature when he allows the father of the Trojan hero, Hector, who killed his friend to take the body for honourable burial.

Hector himself has a near Achilles level of ‘heroic’ violence combined with a deep and self-effacing attachment to his wife and child. Many other possibilities of human individuality are explored including that of the most intelligent and cunning of the Greek leaders, Odysseus, who understands that war is won by stratagems as well as devotion to violence. This man of reflection, forethought and an early form of the life of the mind, becomes the centre of the second Homeric epic, The Odyssey, which recounts the ten years of his journey back from Troy to his homeland of Ithaca.

Odysseus starts back with his own fleet of ships carrying an army of Ithaca, by the time he gets back to Ithaca all of this is lost, and he is alone, in disguise playing the part of a vagabond when he arrives on his home island. Early in his adventures he described himself as No-man to trick his way out of danger from the giant Polyphemus and then proudly shouts his real name at the giant on his escape. This is at the base of his ten year journey since the god Poseidon is the father of  Polyphemus and takes revenge on Odysseus when Polyphemus can tell his father how Odysseus harmed him. Again and again Odysseus has to struggle with his own impulses and with the need to play a part, stretching his identity, in order to return to his island kingdom. So he is growing as an individual, exploring all the possibilities of individuality, including self-concealment, self-invention, and self-transformation.

The extreme violence of the return of Odysseus is followed by the brief description of a new beginning in Ithaca, an order of social peace in which a possible cycle of revenge is pre-empted through oaths and the prospect of justice settling differences rather than violence. This reconciling ending of The Odyssey itself builds on the sombre peace at the end of The Iliad, when a truce is agreed so that the city of Troy can bury and mourn its hero Hector, so that the values of peace and acknowledgement of individual suffering can stand up against the cycle of destructive violence.

In these and many other ways, Homeric epic offers much to stimulate thought about the nature of individuality and the kinds of social form which might allow individuals to flourish together, even in its depiction of the most destructive outcomes of human passions.

Strange Historical Facts

Brandon Christensen Books, History , , , , , , , , ,

Not long thereafter, they erected the first sawmill in what was to become the state of Washington on a site by the lower falls of the Deschutes River. Much of the capital for erecting the mill apparently came from George W. Bush, Washington’s first black resident. The cut of this mill, it has been claimed, was marketed through the Hudson’s Bay Company at Fort Nisqually and found its way to Victoria and the Hawaiian Islands. The first shipment was supposedly made on the Hudson’s Bay Company steamer Beaver in 1848.

Um, wow. I don’t know where to begin. This excerpt comes from page 25 of a 1977 book by historian Thomas R Cox titled Mills and Markets: A History of the Pacific Coast Lumber Industry to 1900. Aside from the interesting anecdote quoted above, it’s not very good. I picked it up because of the possibilities associated with such a subject, but instead of a theoretical narrative on globalization, identity, state-building, and property rights, it is a book that reads a lot like the excerpt I quoted above (the local history aspect I have enjoyed, though; local history is one of my secret pleasures, the kind of stuff that never makes it into grand theoretical treatises but always lights up my brain because of the fact that places I know and places I have lived are the focus of the narrative).

I blame it on the year it was published, of course. 1977 was at the height of the Cold War, which means that scholarly inquiry was inevitably going to be policed by ideologues, and also that works appraising global or regional scales and scopes just weren’t doable. For instance, there was virtually no mention of Natives in the book. (See archaeologist Kent Lightfoot’s excellent, highly-recommended work – start here and here – for more on how this is changing.)

“Mohammed — in pictures”

Brandon Christensen Culture, History, Religion , , , , , , , , , ,

That is the title of this piece by Barnaby Rogerson in the Spectator. There are three beautiful pieces of medieval art (two Persian and one Turkish), and those alone are worth the price of the click. There is, of course, a short essay explaining why there is now so much resistance to depicting Mohammed in art (of both the high and low brow variety). Check it out:

Whatever the heritage of their medieval past, Sunni Islam — in the Arab-speaking Middle East — had decisively turned its back on depictions of the Prophet well before the 18th-century emergence of Wahhabism. Once again there are no definite answers. It may have been a gut reaction to the magnificent art produced by their Iranian Shiite rivals but it also reflects a very real fear that Mohammed was slowly being turned into a demi-god and that in the process his actual prophetic message would be ignored. This was especially true in the far eastern frontiers of Islam, such as India and Indonesia (numerically the two largest Muslim nations in the world) with their ancient syncretic traditions. So the attack on imagery can also be seen to have a constructive element embedded within it, concentrating all attention on the text of the Koran and reinforcing the Arab nature of that revelation.

Take this as you will. My instinct is to suspect “the Arab nature of that revelation” as the initial reason for this change in Islamic aesthetics. That is to say, I suspect that a medieval notion of Arab chauvinism is responsible for the shift.

The Best Book I Have Read Recently

Jacques Delacroix Books, History , , , , ,

I make some notes about almost all the books I read. I am thinking my notes may be useful to others. Here is an instance; it’s about a good book I read recently:

Jared Diamond’s 2012 The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?

A confession first: When I die, I want to come back as Jared Diamond. He had the exemplary academic career; he wasted no time; he took advantage of academia’s largess and low standards to change himself several times into a different kind of scholar. He addresses ordinary literate people with much success. He is a great teacher.

What Diamond means by “traditional societies”  (in the title) is an imaginary aggregate of what social scientists call “hunters-gatherers” and “horticulturalists.” The latter are largely hoe cultivators, people who don’t use the plow but who grow food. Horticulturalists live entirely in tropical and equatorial climates.

Diamond’s book makes very good reading and, in addition, he tries to make it practical, useful at every step. His guiding theme is that by observing traditional people more closely, we may be able to improve many of our civilized practices. He visits in turn how his traditional societies define strangers and how they deal with war, child rearing, the treatment of the aged, attitudes toward danger, religion, language and health.

Traditionals, in general (also called “primitives”) live in fairly small units because their technologies (plural) cannot support large concentrations of people. They have no cities; they are not “civilized.” Diamond makes the implicit assumption (implicit, I think) that small scale and the preservation of “traditional beliefs” go hand in hand. He makes the further assumption – a fairly common one – that today’s traditional societies are similar to the societies in our own past. Thus, the part of the title that says, “Until Yesterday.” According to this assumption, the observation of such societies has much to teach us about how we – civilized people – grew up, so to speak, and about what we lost while growing up.

I am skeptical about both assumptions, not rejecting, skeptical. First, I don’t really believe that tradition does not change. I think that traditional people live in environments that change to some extent, sometimes rapidly. They change, in particular, because the powerful civilized societies in which they are embedded tend to grow, thus threatening or reducing the traditionals’ physical space and their resources. The tragedy of the Plains Indians reduction to near nothing must have happened many times before. Thus the thing that defines traditional people, “tradition” itself must change to some extent to accommodate change in their environments. The mere fact that traditional societies are around to be observed at all tells us that they must have adjusted to some extent. Thus, when considering them we don’t know if we are looking at our own past, or at pathetic survivors next to extinction, or on the contrary, at extraordinarily skillful ones. That’ s a problem for the generalizing Diamond invites us to engage in. That’s my second main objection to Diamond’s overall approach.

In point of fact, the traditional societies to which Diamond alludes include none situated in the temperate zone. It’s not his fault, of course, Lapps in Northern Scandinavia and Finland may be the only ones left more or less intact. But this fact aggravates my skepticism about the exemplarity of the primitive groups Diamond describes. I cannot eliminate from my mind the fact that civilization arose only in temperate zones, in the Middle East, in Europe, and in China. And independently, in the temperate elevations of meso-America and of South America. Perhaps, possibly, probably this is not a coincidence. Diamond’s tropical, desert, and far north groups may be in no way similar to our ancestors.

Beyond these general remarks, I have two specific quarrels with Diamond. The first is about health and the second about language acquisition. Diamond contends that the maladies of old age that affect civilized people today, including arthritis, cardiac illness, and diabetes, are practically non-existent among primitive people. He also says that primitive people have low life expectancy, I think he means at all ages. So, I am wondering if the first statement is not simply the result of a major sampling error, of a major optical illusion: If people seldom live beyond age fifty-five there will be few of the illnesses associated with old age in their society. It would seem like a gross error for a man of Diamond’s intellectual distinction to make. He may have in fact taken care of this objection and I missed it. Or, he did not do it loudly enough and then, why?

My second specific objection concerns one of the many statement he makes on language acquisition. At one point, he declares himself in favor of “crib bilingualism.” That’s the practice of speaking to babies in more than one language from birth. Personally, I think it’s a dangerous gamble. I don’t have any systematic data. My judgment relies on anecdotal evidence spread over fifty years. So does his. I believe he has not done enough due diligence of tracking possible downsides of the practice. (I don’t need to track its upsides because they are obvious: Get two languages for the same price, same as heads of cabbage at the flea market.)

I may write Prof. Diamond soon at UCLA where he teaches to ask him to discuss these points. Don’t wait on me to act to read this wonderful book though. Do it, do it critically if you can.

Also, read my book : I Used to Be French: an Immature Autobiography

From the Comments: Foucault, Obscurity, and Liberty

Brandon Christensen Culture, History, Philosophy , , , , , ,

Jacques and Barry had an excellent back-and-forth on Barry’s post about Foucault’s contributions to liberty. Here is Dr Stocker’s final response to Dr Delacroix’s questions:

Well Jacques, my last comment was not supposed to be the full reply to your preceding comment, as I tried to make clear. As I said I needed time to think before posting anything from Foucault. I was just preparing the way with comments on the background to Foucault’s style. On Montaigne, how easy is Montaigne? Maybe he seems clear to you and other French people who read him in the Lycée. I teach a lot of Montaigne in Istanbul and students don’t find him easy. Maybe his style at a sentence by sentence level is clearer than Foucault, but I would say only Foucault at his most supposedly obscure. Montaigne can seem clear because he writes in a conversational way, appearing to just comment informally on something in his mind. However, his essays are endlessly digressive and shifting in viewpoint and claim within just one essay, some of which are very long and very detached from the starting point. He mixes quotations from classics, historical illustrations, unreliable anecdotes, and personal memories, in ways which could be often said to obscure as much as clarify any underlying claim, though sometimes a relatively simple maxim seems to be the point. Even there, one really has to think about the relation between the apparent maxim and Montaigne’s shifting point of view to get the underlying point/points. The way that the style interacts with Montaigne’s mind and the uncertainties of his point of view, and the persistent anxieties about saving his world of experience from extinction in death, all have some echoes in Foucault and in various ways it seems to be me that Foucault works on a basis in Montaigne, even if adding the kind of abstract language, vocabulary and sentence construction coming from a mixture of German philosophy since Kant, and poetic-literary language since the Romantics.

Now for a couple of quotations. The first is a random selection from the book that first made him famous, History of Madness. The second is a less random selection from his late essay ‘What is Enlightenment?’.

History of Madness, page 29 (2006 Routledge edition translated by Murphy and Khalfa)

Rising up in spirit towards God and sounding the bottomless depths into which we find ourselves plunged are one and the same, and in Calvin’s experience madness is the measure of man when he is compared to the boundless reason of God.

In its finitude, man’s spirit is less a shaft of the great light than a fragment of shadow. The partial and transitory truth of appearances is not available to his limited intelligence; his madness discovers but the reverse of things, their dark side, the immediate contradiction of their truth. In his journey to God, man must do more than surpass himself—he must rip himself away from his essential weakness, and in one bound cross from the things of this world to their divine essence, for whatever transpires of truth appearances is not its reflection but a cruel contradiction.

‘What is Enlightenment?’ (as published in Michel Foucault Essential Works vol 1, ed. Rabinow, 2000), p 315

We must obviously give a more positive content to what may be a philosophical ethos consisting in a critique of what we are saying, thinking, and doing, and through a historical ontology of ourselves.
1. This philosophical ethos may be characterised as a limit-attitude. We are not talking about a gesture of rejection. We have to move beyond the outside-inside alternative; we have to be at the frontiers. Criticism indeed consists of analysing and reflecting upon limits. But if the Kantian question must was that of knowing what limits knowledge must renounce exceeding, it seems to me that the critical question today must be turned back into a positive one: In what is given to us as universal, necessary, obligatory, what place is occupied by whatever is singular, contingent, and the product of arbitrary constraints? The point in brief, is to transform the critique conducted in the form of necessary limitation into a practical critique that takes the form of a possible crossing-over.

In the first passage above, Foucault uses a language recognisable to anyone who has read much Heidegger to discuss the thought of the 16th century religious reformer Calvin. Since Heidegger’s thought in Being and Time has some roots in Reformation theology this maybe a particularly intriguing way of using Heidegger. The finitude of man compared to God is something that alludes to Heidegger’s understanding of the essential mortality, finitude, temporality of humanity. It also brings out how for Calvin, madness is an aspect of the limitation of human consciousness compared with that of God. In this passage Foucault is bringing together 16th century religious thought, the way that some 20th century philosophy approaches the themes of earlier philosophy and religion when concerned with questions of the limit of experience, how the question of defining ‘madness’ relates to the questions of defining consciousness, experience and limits from the viewpoints of the dominant ways of thinking and organising experience at the time, the ideology operating in the institutions and laws which are applied to the ‘mad’. What Foucault also brings out is that madness’ was closely related to a positive idea of transcending human bounds, so that the stigmatisation of madness then as now is intimately associated with altered states of consciousness that are given value. The use of a ‘mad’ perspective in 20th century Surrealism is one of the aspects that Foucault is alluding to here, an the ways that such aestheticised encounters with the limits of consciousness and rationality relate to earlier religious ideas of exalted spiritual states.

In the second passage above, Foucault is still concerned with the limit and while individual passages in Foucault may seem obscure, he had a very persistent interest in limits of experience, and related questions over some decades, so it is possible to build up an accumulating familiarity with Foucault’s treatment of the issue. The ‘message’ in that passage is the value of moving from Enlightenment of a Kantian kind, which places limits on the claims of universality, to a a kind of Enlightenment based on exploration of the non-necessity of limits, the exploration of the plurality of individual instances unlimited by rationalistic limitations. This is a very Montaigne-like thought, even if the language is more ‘obscure’. There is a commitment to a ‘historical ontology’, that is the understanding of ourselves as individuals and of the ‘human’ in general as the product of contingency and circumstances rather than a deep self or deep humanity detached from experience and history. This is both a proposal for the study of human institutions and discourses as Foucault already had been doing for decades and a proposal for an ethics which values subjectivity in its variability and different contexts. There is no clear limit to knowledge or consciousness, just as there is no clear limit between different areas of knowledge or experience. Foucault’s idea of Enlightenment knowledge and ethics is to keep exploring and pushing at the limits that have been assumed, which is a way of showing their continent constructed nature as well as the way that consciousness is always dealing with a sense of inside and outside that is open to transformation.

In both passages above, I would argue, Foucault uses allusion and compression of multiple allusions, to show connections and differences, and to make us think about those connections and differences. Calvin’s thought about theology has implications for defining ‘madness’, Enlightenment scientific inquiry is related to assumptions about limits of reason and experience. The ‘obscurity’ arises from the way that the syntheses, allusions, and challenges to a priori boundaries are put in a language which shows these things at work rather than just saying that they exist and makes us aware that the language we constantly use is structured and energised by the unions and tensions contained within these thoughts.

If one simply wants the ideas about institutions, history, discourse and so on in Foucault, without the ‘obscure’ language, then to some degree these can be found in Foucault’s lectures, and then maybe more so in those commentators committed to a clarification of Foucault for those not immersed in the use of philosophical language to convey meaning beyond the most literal transmission of messages, commentators including Gary Gutting, Ian Hacking, and Hans Sluga. I recommend them to anyone who finds Foucault’s style to be a chore but wants to find out about ideas which have certainly influenced a lot of work in the humanities and the social sciences.

The whole dialogue between the two starts here, if you’re interested.

Artunç paper on legal decentralization and the Ottoman Empire

Brandon Christensen History, Law , , , , , , ,

Awhile back Tyler Cowen linked to this paper (pdf) by Cihan Artunç on legal pluralism in the Ottoman Empire, and I found it to be really interesting. Here is the abstract, followed by some comments from yours truly:

Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, non-Muslim Ottomans paid large sums to acquire access to European law. These protégés came to dominate Ottoman trade and pushed Muslims and Europeans out of commerce. At the same time, the Ottoman firm remained primarily a small, family enterprise. The literature argues that Islamic law is the culprit. However, adopting European law failed to improve economic outcomes. This paper shows that the co-existence of multiple legal systems, “legal pluralism,” explains key questions in Ottoman economic history. I develop a bilateral trade model with multiple legal systems and first show that legal pluralism leads to underinvestment by creating enforcement uncertainty. Second, there is an option value of additional legal systems, explaining why non-Muslim Ottomans sought to acquire access to European law. Third, in a competitive market where a subpopulation has access to additional legal systems, agents who have access to fewer jurisdictions exit the market. Thus, forum shopping explains protégés’ dominance in trade. Finally, the paper explains why the introduction of the French commercial code in 1850 failed to reverse these outcomes.

Got that? If not, you know where the ‘comments’ section is. What stood out to me the most in this paper is that the Ottoman Empire limited choice of law to a specific population within the realm:

“Muslims were restricted to Islamic law but non-Muslims could use any of the available legal systems, including European jurisdictions upon paying an entry fee. This subsection extends the model by allowing variation in the legal options agents have in order to capture this asymmetric jurisdictional access.” (11)

This looks, to me, a lot more like the Jim Crow South in the United States, or the present-day Maori in New Zealand, than a good case study for understanding legal pluralism. I guess the Jim Crow-esque laws in the Ottoman Empire can be described as “legal pluralism,” but I think this is a bit of a stretch on the part of Artunç. Perhaps not. Maybe there needs to be a distinction between “good” and “bad” legal pluralism? I was under the impression that legal pluralism meant difference court systems operating under an assumed set of rules rather than a different set of laws for different classes of people within a society.

Another interesting tidbit is that Artunç attributes the empire’s economic stagnation (“Such an expansion in asymmetry increases the buyer’s payoff for moderate values of effective enforcement, but will always decrease investment, partnership size, seller’s payoff and total surplus.” [12]) to legal pluralism rather than the Jim Crow-esque legal system actually in place.

I’d say this paper does a good job explaining, in an off-hand way, how Ottoman Jim Crow created a path dependency of poverty for the states encompassing the territory of what used to be the Ottoman Empire. I’d say it does a much worse job explaining what legal pluralism is (Artunç defines legal pluralism as “a single economy where two or more legal systems coexist.” [1] That’s it! That’s his definition of legal pluralism!), and enhances that weakness with an analysis based upon a definition of legal pluralism that is, if I read the paper correctly, wrong, or at least sorely lacking in depth.

For the record I have my doubts about legal pluralism as it can sometimes be interpreted by anarcho-capitalists. Anarcho-capitalists argue that the “assumed set of rules” I identified above that are necessary for legal pluralism to work are largely, naturally understood by humanity and therefore provide Anarcho-Capitalistan with everything it needs for a fully functional legal system. I think that’s stretching it a bit. In fact, it’s close to ludicrous. I think legal pluralism does work in systems like the one found in the US (where circuit courts compete with each other, for example, or state and federal courts clash).

Regardless of my opinions on libertarian legal theory, I think it is clear that Artunç’s brilliant paper is brilliant because it tackles an important topic (Ottoman Empire and, more deftly, international trade) that can be used as a stepping stone for further research, but I cannot bring myself to buy his conclusion (legal pluralism is to blame for the path dependency of poverty in the post-Ottoman world rather than Timur Kuran’s “Islamic law” thesis) because he gets legal pluralism so wrong. (I don’t think Kuran’s thesis is right either, but that’s a story for another blog post and has nothing to do with the fact that he once taught at USC; briefly, Kuran argues that Islamic law was responsible for keeping the Ottoman and Persian empires poor while Europe grew rich, but this is as superficial – and important – as Artunç’s thesis; importantly, Kuran also confuses the Ottoman Jim Crow system with legal pluralism, which suggests Artunç’s critique of his work is less robust than initially thought.)

Holla back!

Why Republican Libertarianism? V Concluding Remarks

Barry Stocker History, Liberty , , , , , ,

(This text was written for the European Students for Liberty Regional Conference in Istanbul at Boğaziçi University. I did not deliver the paper, but used it to gather thoughts which I then presented in an improvised speech. As it was quite a long text, I am breaking it up for the purposes of blog presentation)

There is a tendency within liberty oriented though which sees the intrusions of the state in the modern world as something to do with republicanism and the democratic political spirit. The development of what has been called the administrative state, administered society, the iron cage of bureaucracy, disciplinarity (generalised power throughout society), biopower (sovereignty over life and health), and so on, has taken place in all state forms. It is deeply embedded in the emergence of modern industrial world, where traditional authority structures and customary laws are eroded by city life, national and international markets and technological innovation.

This process has one aspect the emergence of a modern state in which we see national debt financing an investor class, and the expanded central state enforcing uniform legal codes. There is a political economy of this which ties interest groups to the state, and tries to find ways in which everyone could be defined as belonging to a group that benefits from state action. At any time we see states in the double process of maintaining such a political economy and using state power to protect the associated institutions.

There are periods in which such developments of the state take place at a heightened pace, usually due to war of some kind and maybe a collapse of attempts at peaceful balance between groups in a society. Groups  which seem marginal or even as the source of violent resistance are assimilated or subject to maximum state force.  in practice has always gone along with these developments, in all forms of state.

A lot of this has come out of the pre-modern monarchical state reinforcing its traditional power. Resisting he administrative-bureaucratic state means engaging in politics, in citizen movements, in peaceful civil disobedience where necessary to defend basic rights. That is not  looking back to pre-modern forms of law, authority and statehood, in which pluralism exists in rigid state enforced hierarchies, and tradition limits individual self-creation. In the modern world republicanism has sometimes acquired a ‘Jacobin’ form of intense and violent state creation, but as Tocqueville pointed out in The French Revolution and the Old Regime, it carries on the work of the old monarchy in doing so.

The republican political tradition has to some degree acquired a tainted reputation due to association with the most violent aspects of the French Revolution, and Machiavelli’s frankness about what can happen when regimes change. However, the violence attributed to the republican moment was always at work before in the strengthening of central political institutions and the unified ordering of the society concerned. There have been such moments throughout history, but the shift to the modern administrative state has made them  much more thoroughgoing in  their influence on social relations.

Republicanism is a way of coping with this that tries to bring in the restraints of law and accountability to the public in various forms. It has not been an escape from the modern administrative state, or the violence accompanying much of the historical emergence of that state, but no other way of doing politics has escaped either, and the republican way even in its worse moments has at least emphasised the principles of law above persons, the non-passive rights of citizens, and the importance of instruments of political accountability. The monarchist and depoliticised forms of thinking about liberty have also sometimes collapsed into state terror, without the message that a better way exists. The conservative empire and the traditionalist state have used, maintained, and intensified violence in reaction to real and perceived threats without being able to offer the prospect of better political forms and structures than the hierarchies of tradition. The differences are not absolute, as Tocqueville indicates, and at times republican city governments have existed within traditional hereditary states, and monarchist reformers have attempted to bring in ideas with republican origins. A republic can collapse into a permanent system of personalised authority, but it is the republican tradition which tells us what is wrong with that.

In any case, republicanism as it exists now in political thought is concerned with restraints on power not intensification of state power. Its engagement with historical situation and concrete politics, its appeal (at least in the form associated with Hannah Arendt) to individuality and contestation in politics is the best way of making a complete application of the principle of liberty to the political and historical world.

Why Republican Libertarianism? IV

Barry Stocker History, Law, Liberty, Philosophy , , , , , , , , , , ,

(This text was written for the European Students for Liberty Regional Conference in Istanbul at Boğaziçi University. I did not deliver the paper, but used it to gather thoughts which I then presented in an improvised speech. As it was quite a long text, I am breaking it up for the purposes of blog presentation)

(I took a break from posting this over the holiday period when I presume some people are checking blogs, rss feeds, and the like, less than at other times of the year. Catch up with the three previous posts in the series, if you missed them, via this link.)

The most important advice Machiavelli gives with regard to maintaining the state, is to respect the lives and honour of subjects, refrain from harassing women, avoid bankrupting the state with lavish expenditures, uphold the rule of of law outside the most extreme situations,  and concentrate on military leadership, which is to turn monarchy into a hereditary command of the armies, a republican idea, if the monarch withdraws from other areas of state business and certainly from law making. That is certainly how John Locke, at the beginning of classical liberalism saw the role of kings.

It is true that unlike antique thinkers, Machiavelli does not see human nature as essentially ‘good’, at least when guided by reason and law. What those thinkers meant by good was a life of self-restraint difficult to make compatible with commercial society. Machiavelli understood the benefits of commercial society compared with feudalisms, and though there was an element of antique nostalgia in his thinking, he understood like the political economists of the eighteenth century that public goods come from self-interest, softened but not eliminated, by some sense of our connections and obligations to others.

Machiavelli’s longest book on political thought is The Discourses, a commentary on the Roman historian Livy’s account of the earlier periods of Roman history, covering the early kings and the republic. Here Machiavelli makes clear beyond any doubt that his model state was a republic and though it was Rome rather than Athens, he takes the original step of seeing Rome as great not because of Order, but because of the conflicts between plebeians and patricians (the poor or at least non-noble masses and the aristocracy), which resulted in a democratisation process where the plebeians learned to think about the common good and where everyone shared in a constructive competitiveness which developed individual character through civic conflict under law (well a large part of the time anyway). His view of the republic requires both a sphere of common political identity and action and a competitive non-conformist spirit.

Machaivelli’s republican hopes for Florence, and even the whole of Italy, were dashed by the Medici princes and a period of conservative-religious princely absolutism under foreign tutelage in Italy, but his ideas lived on and not just in the one sided stereotypes. He had an English follower in the seventeenth century, James Harrington, author of Oceana. Harrington hoped for republic in England, though a more aristocratic one that Machiavelli tended to advocate, and was too radical for his time, suffering imprisonment during the rule of Oliver Cromwell, the leader of a republican revolution who became a new king in all but name. There was a British republic, or commonwealth, after the Civil War between crown and parliament, lasting from 1649 to 1652, which was then not exactly absolved but became a less pure republic when Cromwell became Lord Protector.

Even so the republican poet, John Milton, served Cromwell as a head of translation of papers from foreign governments. Milton is more famous as a poet than as a political thinker, nevertheless he wrote important essays on liberty, drawing on antique liberty in Greece and Rome, as well his republican interpretation of the ancient Jewish state (important to Milton as a deep religious believer whose most famous poems are on Biblical stories). Milton helped change English literary language, almost overshadowing the ways that he furthered republican political ideas and did so on the basis of an Athenian model of law and free speech. His defence of freedom of printing, Areopagotica is named in honour of the central court of Athenian democracy (though with older roots) and draws on the idea of a republic based on freedom of speech and thought. Both Milton and Harrington were major influence on the Whig aristocratic-parliamentary liberalism of the eighteenth century and early nineteenth and so feed directly into classical liberalism in practice and the defence of liberty of speech and thought to be found in Mill’s On Liberty.

The development of classical liberalism and the libertarian thought of the present come out of the republicanism of antiquity and the early modern period. There is a strand of thought within libertarianism which is anti-politics or only minimally willing to engage with politics as a part of communal human life. However, the parts of the world where liberty is most flourishing, if far short of what we would wish for, are where there ‘republics’ in the original sense, that is political power is shared between all citizens, regardless of the issue of whether a royal family provides a symbolic head of state.

On the whole, historically commerce has been linked with the existence of republics, even within monarchist medieval and early modern England the City of London was a partly autonomous city republic focusing resistance to royal power as it protected its commercial gains from state destruction. Despotism, and the state that plunders civil society, wish for a depoliticised atomised society. Republican politics can go wrong, but the answer is republican reform, republics with less of the aspects of absolutist monarchy and traditionalist power structure, not an idealisation of states which exist to preserve and reinforce forms of authority obnoxious to open markets, individuality, equality before the law, and the growth of tolerance for forms of living not so well recognised by tradition.