philosophy

My Realist Journey, Part 2: Our Enduring Realist Tradition; 2500+ Years of Constructive Realism.

Barry Scott Zellen, PhD Liberty , , , , , ,

In my four-volume The Realist Tradition in International Relations: The Foundations of Western Order, I unpack 2,500+ years of strategic history. To me, “constructive realism” is not a tragic acceptance of endless war, but a tool of heroic idealism—a systematic, philosophical effort by key thinkers across millennia to use power, strategy, and statecraft to actively craft order out of chaos.

My framework is fundamentally the conceptualization, explication and defense of Constructive Realism. By focusing on these states of mind, I attempt to revive the first Waltzian image (the psychological, human, and sub-state level of analysis). I argue that international order is not just an accident of systemic architecture, but a conscious, evolving philosophical product constructed by human actors responding to the changing nature of violence. I structure my exploration chronologically through four distinct eras, using an historic roster of foundational thinkers, military leaders, and strategists to illustrate this concept.

Volume 1: The Classical Foundations (State of Hope)

In the ancient world, where systemic chaos reigned supreme, thinkers laid down the cognitive and linguistic tools needed to conceptualize international order.

  • Thucydides: The ancient Greek historian who chronicled the Peloponnesian War. I  treat him not as a pessimist who famously declared that “the strong do what they can,” but as a constructive pioneer who first mapped out the objective mechanics of the security dilemma, allowing future societies to consciously design balances of power.
  • Socrates & Plato: I highlight the philosophical pivot toward defining justice, structural stability, and the idea of the “Philosopher King.” Plato  epitomizes the constructive realist effort to intellectualize governance, arguing that true political order requires aligning supreme power with supreme wisdom.
  • Aristotle: The father of empirical political science. I also view Aristotle as a pioneering constructive realist who analyzed the anatomy of various state constitutions to determine how practical, balanced, and stable governance could survive internal and external shocks.

Volume 2: The Rise of the Modern State (State of Fear)

Confronting the brutal collapses of regional orders, early-modern theorists sought to build an unshakeable sovereign foundation to protect humanity from its own destructive nature.

  • Niccolò Machiavelli: The Florentine diplomat famous for The Prince. I look past the caricature of Machiavellian ruthlessness to reframe him as a visionary of sovereign creation. Machiavelli’s dream was the journey from a fractured prince’s rule to a stable, enduring republic capable of defending its people through civic virtue and martial readiness.
  • Thomas Hobbes: Dubbed by me as the “Ultimate Constructive Realist.” Hobbes famously described life in the anarchic state of nature as “nasty, brutish, and short” (somewhat like life on the “Island” during the final season of Lost). I note that Hobbes’ response was a masterpiece of constructive statecraft: inventing the Leviathan (the modern state), which trades total individual freedom for collective security under a centralized authority.
  • Frederick the Great: The Prussian king who embodied the transition from theory to practice. I chronicle Frederick’s journey from writing his idealistic critique of Machiavelli (Anti-Machiavel) to ruling as a pragmatic “Philosopher King” who used a highly disciplined military apparatus to stabilize Central European geopolitics.
  • Napoleon Bonaparte: The ultimate catalyst of total war. I view Napoleon’s legacy as the structural shockwave that forced the European continent to graduate from limited Westphalian warfare into industrialized, nationalized conflict, testing the limits of state-built order. Theorists of modern war, Carl.von Clausewitz and Antoine-Henri Jomini serve as the intellectual bridge at the end of Volume 2, dueling over how to impose order onto the chaotic explosion of the Napoleonic Wars.
  • Antoine-Henri Jomini: The Swiss officer and military theorist who sought to reduce the chaotic genius of Napoleon into a reliable, scientific manual. I frame Jomini as an early champion of a highly structured, geometric approach to strategy. To Jomini, war could be mastered through immutable principles—lines of operation, concentration of force, and geometric symmetry. He modernizes constructive realism by codifying these precise rules, so that states could make warfare a predictable, manageable instrument of national policy.
  • Carl von Clausewitz: The Prussian general and philosopher of war whose masterwork, On War, serves as the ultimate counterweight to Jomini. Rather than trying to iron out chaos with geometry, Clausewitz embraced it. He introduced concepts like “friction” (the unexpected things that go wrong in war) and the “fog of war.” I position Clausewitz as a cornerstone of modern constructive realism because he fundamentally reconnects violence back to human order, famously declaring that “war is the continuation of politics by other means.” By subordinating raw military destruction to rational political objectives, Clausewitz provided the conceptual guardrails to prevent war from consuming civilization in the age of total war.

Volume 3: The Nuclear Era and Neorealism (State of Awe)

The advent of the atomic bomb forced 20th-century strategic minds to completely redefine the relationship between state survival and total destruction.

  • Bernard Brodie: Known as “America’s Clausewitz,” Brodie was one of the first to grasp the reality of the nuclear age. I  examine how Brodie brilliantly adapted classical military theory to the absolute weapon, asserting that the primary purpose of the military had fundamentally changed: it was no longer to win wars, but to avert them through deterrence. (My chapter on Brodie in State of Awe later evolved into a separate volume entirely in my States of Mind treatise, becoming State of Doom.)
  • Herman Kahn: The legendary (and provocative) nuclear strategist who wrote On Thermonuclear War. I note Kahn took a “Jominian” (highly calculated, geometric, and systematic) approach to strategic thinking. By boldly “thinking about the unthinkable,” Kahn constructively mapped out scenarios to ensure that even if deterrence failed, escalation could be controlled and civilization could survive (albeit with much denial on the lingering consequences of nuclear fallout and radiation).
  • Kenneth Waltz: The father of structural realism (neorealism), a critique of which began my own realist journey as I sought to reinvigorate the First Image (the individual), and de-emphasize the Third (system level). I focus on Waltz and his peers as the “wizards of automation.” Waltz shifted the lens away from human psychology to system architecture, illustrating how the bipolar structure of the Cold War created an equilibrium that mechanically preserved global stability (until it didn’t!)

Volume 4: The Age of Peoples’ War & Insurgency (State of Siege)

In the contemporary era, the traditional state’s monopoly on violence is challenged by asymmetric, decentralized, and non-Western movements. I highlight that these architects of upheaval are often visionaries constructing alternative political models and sovereign structures.

  • Sun Tzu: The ancient Chinese strategist whose philosophy anchors modern asymmetric conflict. I utilize Sun Tzu to show how strategic order can be achieved by prioritizing deception, subversion, and psychological manipulation over costly, direct state-on-state clashes.
  • Mao Zedong: The architect of modern insurgent warfare. I analyze Mao’s theory of “People’s War,” framing him as a constructive theorist who successfully weaponized marginalized, agrarian populations to overthrow an established political order and forge an alternative state model.
  • Mahatma Gandhi: Pioneering theorist of “People Power.” I explain how Gandhi’s nonviolent resistance (and Gene Sharp’s structural/theoretical interpretation of Gandhi) framework for civilian-based defense are highly strategic, calculated exercises of power designed to dismantle oppressive regimes without the traditional tools of kinetic war.
  • Osama bin Laden: The infamous mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks. I analyze bin Laden through a dark realist lens—not as a nefarious, chaos-inducing terrorist, but as a sub-state strategic actor attempting to challenge the global Westphalian model and build an alternative transnational, faith-based political order through militant jihadism.

My Realist Journey: Looking Back Upon 2,500 Years of Realist Theory as America Turns 250

Barry Scott Zellen, PhD Liberty , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Part 1: An American State of Mind

It’s amazing how fast 250 years can go by!

Celebrating America’s 250th anniversary since its momentous Declaration of Independence certainly makes a quarter millennium feel like the blink of an eye. Especially after the triumph of people power brought President Trump back into office in a sweeping indictment of the deep state and its subversion of American values and constitutional principles.

Ultimately, the American experience has been an experiment in achieving a realist vision of the world, and crafting a modern republic built upon the same balanced “trinity of power” (a liberating alignment of the people, the state and the armed forces) that has empowered the Western order since the days of Socrates, Plato and Xenophon.

But to fully grok the universal significance of the American experiment, we must look back not just 250 years, but much farther — to the start of the Western experiment 2,500 years ago!

And it just so happens that I have penned just such a retrospective analysis, originally (before the Cold War ended) called Visions of Order, a three-volume work (Volume 1: State of Hope; Volume 2: State of Fear; and Volume 3: State of Awe); and later, States of Mind, an expanded four-volume work with the added volume, State of Siege, which soon again expanded to include a fifth, sixth and seventh volume, State of Chaos, State of Doom and State of Recovery. 

My original three-volume treatise (Visions of Order) concluded, in State of Awe, with the bipolar Cold War peace, and was penned in the mid-to-late 1980s, coming to completion just as Cold War ended, collapsing the seemingly millennial era of bipolarity (like all such millennial dreams of everlasting order), and with the swiftness of that collapse, unmasking neorealism and most other Cold War IR theories (with notable exceptions like Regime Theory) as brittle ideological dogmas masquerading as theories.

Visions of Order was going to be my dissertation, a rebuttal of Ken Waltz’s neorealism written under Waltz’s apoplectic supervision (he hated it, but at the same time, loved it, but mostly hated it!) His other students were unwilling to stand up to him, and he loved a good debate (as Scott Sagan came to appreciate with their post- Cold War debate on nuclear proliferation). But when the Cold War ended, imploding the now obsolete field of Soviet and East European Studies, and unmasking a whole generation of IR theorists as delusional navel-gazers and Waltzian butt-kissers, I proposed a new subfield in Circumpolar Studies to replace the now-obsolete field of Soviet and East European Studies (itself a fiction of Russian imperialist fantasy), but was laughed at by the pompous defenders of obsolete subfields.

Rather than kick a dead horse, I hopped on my 250cc Honda Rebel motorbike and road up the Alaska Highway to Whitehorse, and from their up the Klondike Highway to Dawson, and from there up the Dempster Highway to Inuvik on the Mackenzie River Delta near the Beaufort Sea Coast, where over the next decade I penned another three-volume treatise on the foundations of international relations, based upon my observations and experiences in the Western Arctic (and which is discussed in the companion to this retrospective theoretical memoir, “My Arctic Journey.”)

Two decades later, as the dust and debris of 9/11 was settling, I pulled out my handwritten draft of my completed, three-volume Visions of Order on spiral bound notebooks, and hired a wonderful typist on Craigslist to digitize the manuscript for me for the Internet era, with the idea of adding new volumes to bring what I was now calling States of Mind up to date (as both tribute to, and defiant mockery of, the nonsensical, and overly ideological, Constructivist school that has colonized the hive mind of academia after neorealism became obsolete with the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall to people power.)

As my updated expanded treatise approached completion, I decided it was time to publish it. Waltz was still alive, and still beating the dead horse of neorealism, even arguing in The New York Times that an Iranian bomb would be good for world peace. Though too late to become a dissertation under his supervision, he did enthusiastically agree to serve as an external reader, but unfortunately passed away before the public defense, owing to an overly eager junior faculty member insisting on yet another revision to bring the work current with the literature, since I wrote the first draft just before the end of the Cold War, resulting in a year delay that we simply did not have as Waltz’s precarious health deteriorated.

With Waltz no longer with us, I refocused my attention on State of Awe, in tribute to Waltz, and wrote the expanded State of Doom which further evolved into a strategic biography of Bernard Brodie, a contemporary of Waltz’s who did for deterrence and strategic theory what Waltz did for IR theory: wedded it to the existential nuclear challenge of the post-Hiroshima world.

States of Mind further evolved into what ultimately became a seven-volume treatise and I ended up dividing the work in two to ensure the entire work could be published. Praeger Security International agreed to publish the original Visions of Order with the addition of the post-9/11 State of Siege, while Continuum Books agreed to publish State of Doom, State of Chaos, and State of Recovery.

Thus, in 2011, my four-volume, twenty-five century chronicle of realism across the ages (The Realist Tradition in International Relations: The Foundations of Western Order) came to press—the first part of my seven-volume States of Mind project. In it, I present a sweeping and provocative (if I do say so myself!) reinterpretation of realist theory.

Challenging the systems-centric neorealist tradition of structural realism as articulated by Waltz—one of the two most stubborn mentors I’ve ever had, the other being Gene Sharp, another realist thinker of Waltz’s generation who was as unyielding on strategic nonviolence as Waltz was on systemic structure—I frame the evolution of realist thought through the eyes of two-and-a-half millennia of individual realist thinkers and their respective quests to tame the chaos of their times, from the era of city-states and classical empires to global nuclear superpowers, yielding an evolving but strikingly consistent philosophical and theoretical tradition.

I conclude that the foundations of world order are built upon these evolving “states of mind” that correspond to distinct historical eras and their respective technologies, strategies and paradigms of warfare. I organized this framework into four distinct “states of mind,” each examined in its own volume, capturing how political leaders, philosophers, and strategists responded to, and yearned to transcend, the chaos of their times.

Volume 1: State of Hope: Order in the Age of Classical War

  • The Era: Classical Antiquity (tracing back to Thucydides and ancient Greece).
  • The Concept: This state of mind emerges from a baseline of supreme geopolitical chaos. It is a “state of hope” because it represents humanity’s earliest philosophical efforts to conceptualize, predict, and ultimately tame international anarchy. Rather than accepting perpetual vulnerability, classical realism sought the intellectual foundations necessary to construct a predictable, sustainable balance of power out of raw conflict.

Volume 2: State of Fear: Order in the Age of Limited War

  • The Era: The early-modern period through the Enlightenment (and the rise of the Westphalian states system).
  • The Concept: Driven by a collective psychological dread of endless religious and civil bloodbaths (such as the Thirty Years’ War), this state of mind prioritized survival and stability above all else. This collective “fear” directly catalyzed the birth of the modern sovereign nation-state. By monopolizing violence and establishing strict borders, states constrained the scope of conflict, transitioning the world into an era of structured, “limited” warfare governed by clear diplomatic rules.

Volume 3: State of Awe: Order in the Age of Total War

  • The Era: The 20th century through the Cold War (both World Wars and the nuclear age).
  • The Concept: The rise of absolute industrialized warfare and the advent of the atomic bomb shifted humanity into a state of psychological “awe”—a paralyzing realization of our capacity for total self-destruction. Realist strategy during this period evolved to manage unprecedented systemic danger. It gave rise to the philosophy of nuclear deterrence and strategic stability, where order was paradoxically maintained through the terrifying equilibrium of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD).

Volume 4: State of Siege: Order in the Age of Insurgency

  • The Era: The post-Cold War and post-9/11 contemporary world.
  • The Concept: This modern state of mind reflects the fragmentation of the traditional nation-state’s monopoly on security. As globalized networks, tribal factions, and asymmetric actors rose up against Western modernization, states found themselves in a perpetual “state of siege” from within and below. This era shifts the realist focus away from massive, state-on-state clashes toward navigating non-state insurgencies, counter-terrorism, and localized border friction.

Escaping the Fatalism of the Thucydides Trap: A Manifesto for Constructive Realism

Barry Scott Zellen, PhD Liberty , , , , ,

We’ve long been told by the foreign policy establishment (aka the Blob) that war between great powers is mathematically encoded into the structure of international politics. For generations, the Blob’s dark, deterministic and devoutly bipartisan fatalism has taken root in the corridors of power. Analysts and statesmen have viewed the shifting tectonic plates of global power as an inescapable conveyor belt leading directly toward interstate conflict.

This deep geopolitical anxiety has found its modern vocabulary in the “Thucydides Trap.” The concept, popularized by political scientist Graham Allison, warns that when a rising power threatens to displace an established ruling power, war becomes the historically expected outcome. Scholars constantly point back to the ancient Greek historian Thucydides’ famous assessment that “it was the rise of Athens, and the fear that this inspired in Sparta, that made war inevitable.”

Today’s strategists map this ancient framework onto the contemporary turbulent relationships between established great powers and their ascendant rivals, treating geopolitical friction not as a series of manageable human errors, but as an unalterable, structural law of nature.

However, I reject such systemic and ubiquitous fatalism. Fifteen years ago, my sweeping exploration of the realism (The Realist Tradition in International Relations: The Foundations of Western Order, PSI, 2011) convinced me that we are not helpless prisoners of historical cycles, nor are states passive victims of structural fate. The Thucydides Trap is a psychological prison of our own making, and we possess the agency to break its locks.

To do this, I proposed a framework I call Constructive Realism. This approach reconciles the harsh truths of power politics with the profound reality of human agency. It acknowledges that structural constraints exist, but it refuses to let those constraints dictate our destiny. Leaders can consciously shape their strategic choices, reject the false binary of zero-sum competition, and avoid the devastating cycles of hegemonic war.

The Problem with Structural Fatalism

Traditional realism assumes that the international system is anarchic, states are rational actors seeking survival, and the distribution of material power dictates state behavior. Under this view, when a rising state gains economic and military might, the established power panics. The rising state feels a growing entitlement to prestige and global influence, while the ruling state interprets every single move as an existential threat. A classic security dilemma follows: actions taken by one side to ensure its own security are viewed by the other as active preparations for war.

However, traditional realism commits a critical error by removing human choice and agency from the equation. It reduces complex nations to uniform billiard balls knocking into one another on a table. It implies that regardless of who is in power—whether statesmen are wise, reckless, diplomatic, or deeply paranoid—the structural outcome remains predetermined.

This structural fatalism is inherently dangerous. When leaders fully believe that war is inevitable, their behavior shifts fundamentally. They stop looking for diplomatic off-ramps. They begin to treat compromise as a weakness and dangerous escalation as prudence. The shared belief that a conflict is inevitable becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, and fear, rather than rational calculation, takes the steering wheel of global statecraft.

The Alternative: Constructive Realism

Constructive realism offers a vital corrective to this flaw. It bridges the gap between traditional realism and constructivism. While realism focuses heavily on material power and structural anarchy, constructivism reminds us that international relations are socially constructed. The identities, core interests, and threat perceptions of states are not fixed in stone; they are continuously forged through human interaction, political rhetoric, and strategic choice.

Constructive realism asserts that geopolitical reality is malleable. The international structure sets the stage, but human leaders write the script.

First, consider agency over structure. While structural conditions impose clear constraints, the actual paths nations take are determined by deliberate strategic choices. The transition of power does not mechanically trigger global war. History shows us that peaceful power transitions are entirely possible. Structure did not doom earlier generations to fight, just as structure does not doom us today.

Second, we must actively manage fear. Traditional realism correctly identifies fear as a primary driver of conflict, but it treats fear as an unmanageable constant. Constructive realism focuses on diagnosing and actively managing the psychological drivers of geopolitical insecurity. It requires dominant powers to understand a rising power’s legitimate desire for respect and integration into the global order. Simultaneously, it requires rising powers to recognize and respect the ruling power’s deeply-rooted security concerns.

By addressing these perceptions directly through diplomatic engagement, states can open doors for mutual accommodation. We can maintain a stable balance of power through careful, empathetic diplomacy, rather than relying solely on brute deterrence and military mobilization. (This was, to my great relief, on display during President Trump’s cordial summit with President Xi in Beijing, where the Thucydides Trap was openly discussed by the very world leaders most able to escape it.)

Transcending the Trap

To transcend the Thucydides Trap, emerging and dominant powers must actively construct entirely new narratives of cooperation. For generations, international relations discourse has been overly saturated with zero-sum competition, where the Blob saw every economic policy, technological breakthrough, and diplomatic summit through the distorted lens of an impending cold war. If one side won a trade agreement or a technological race, the other side assumed it had lost vital ground.

Instead, constructive realism demands that we build positive-sum frameworks. There are vast, critical arenas where the ultimate interests of great powers converge, including global economic stability, climate volatility, pandemic prevention, and collaborative management of disruptive technologies such as artificial intelligence. When states anchor their relationships in their shared vulnerabilities, they can agilely rewrite the rules of their engagement.

The Path Forward

The Thucydides Trap is not a law of physics. The rise of Athens and the fear of Sparta did not make war inevitable; the specific choices made by Athenian and Spartan leaders made war seem inevitable. They allowed fear to blind them to alternative paths, choosing pride over prudence, and military mobilization over diplomatic negotiation. Add in a little bit Hellenistic hubris to this volatile mix, and the ruinous path to tragedy came to be perceived as all but inevitable. It wasn’t.

We stand today at a similar historical crossroads; the structural pressures of a shifting global balance of power are real, and they are immense. But they do not hold the pen that writes our future. We do.

By embracing constructive realism, we can acknowledge the realities of power without succumbing to its worst, most destructive impulses. We can recognize that our rivalries are real, but also accept that our survival is shared.

We have the agency to shape our strategic choices. We can manage our fears, rewrite our competitive narratives, and deliberately choose a path of peaceful coexistence. The trap is open, it always has been; it’s up to us to see this, and carefully avoid its grasp.

Nightcap

Brandon Christensen Links , , ,
  1. How to leave philosophy Greg Stoutenburg, Philosopher’s Cocoon
  2. Will bourgeoisie ever rule the Chinese state? Branko Milanovic, Global Inequality 3.0
  3. Adam Smith’s three theories of the British Empire Barry Weingast, SSRN
  4. Desert and self-defense Irfan Khawaja, Policy of Truth

American Classical Liberals Suck

Edwin van de Haar Comments, Culture, Current Events, Liberty, Philosophy , , , , , , ,

This week Kevin Vallier published a new entry on neoliberalism in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Neoliberalism (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). It is a well-written, well-researched piece. However, it is also symbolic for the greatest deficiency of American classical liberals: they are unable or unwilling to defend the name, or label if you like, of the ideas they are associated with. Given the influence of American academia and thinks tanks on the rest of the world this is especially important. It has happened before, and it is happening now. It sucks.

This is how Vallier starts his entry:

“Though not all scholars agree on the meaning of the term, “neoliberalism” is now generally thought to label the philosophical view that a society’s political and economic institutions should be robustly liberal and capitalist, but supplemented by a constitutionally limited democracy and a modest welfare state. Recent work on neoliberalism, thus understood, shows this to be a coherent and distinctive political philosophy. This entry explicates neoliberalism by examining the political concepts, principles, and policies shared by F. A. Hayek, Milton Friedman, and James Buchanan, all of whom play leading roles in the new historical research on neoliberalism, and all of whom wrote in political philosophy as well as political economy. Identifying common themes in their work provides an illuminating picture of neoliberalism as a coherent political doctrine.”

The problem is in the words: ‘“neoliberalism” is now generally thought…’’.  Neoliberalism is a hotly debated term, there is certainly no consensus on its meaning. As Oliver Hartwich has emphasized in Neoliberalism, the genesis of a political swearword, it is still most often used as a swearword by the left for all that they think is wrong with capitalism, (classical) liberalism, (more or less) liberal policies by IMF, WTO and World Bank, et cetera. These left wingers are also found in academia, policy and in media circles, which has led to its routine use. However, it is not true that the work of Hayek, Friedman and Buchanan is generally thought to be covered by a neoliberal label. Only those who disagree with it call them neoliberals. It is painful to see that the ideas of these three Nobel Prize winners are now used to explain neoliberalism in a leading online source. They self-identified as classical liberals and just because opponents of their views use a different label is no reason to comply with that malicious practice.  

The worse thing is, it has happened before, also commencing in the US. Fairly recently, classical liberals began to use the label libertarian, as the Cato Institute has been promoting, for example on their (very useful) website  Libertarianism.org, or in David Boaz’ The Libertarian Mind.  Jason Brennan’s Libertarianism, what everyone needs to know is another example. The issue here is that the three aforementioned classical liberals, and others, are now thrown onto the same heap as Rothbard and Rand, to name a few rather different thinkers.

Decades earlier, Hayek and others noted with regret that the Americans were unable to defend the original meaning of the word liberal, with the result that a liberal in the American sense is now what people in other parts of the world call a social-democrat. It is also the reason Hayek and other started to use the name classical liberal.  

The result of all this changing of names is confusion and vulnerability. Nobody knows what label belongs to which ideas, which gives rise to a petty industry on liberal labels, yet without any clarity in the end. It also provides ample opportunity for opponents to negatively attack ideas loosely associated with the (classical) liberal movement, which results in a negative image, which also make liberal ideas less attractive for outsiders. The lack of clarity also makes vulnerable for any kind of criticism. Actually, embracing the swearword other use for you, by offering the ideas of your greatest and brightest thinkers, is a shameful act at least.

American classical liberals should stay firm and defend their ideas under the proper labels. There is no reason for change (see my Degrees of Freedom: Liberal Political Philosophy and Ideology), there is only a need for explanation and defense. Giving up clear and proper labels plainly sucks.         

Monday’s hints and suggestions, rumors and hunches

Michalis Trepas Current Events, Links, Philosophy , , , , , , ,

Or, some Monday links – on thinkers, their devices and “ad hoc” cities, above/ below the sea surface

Back in February, Nick Cowen here at NOL pointed the 100th anniversary of John Rawls’ birth. At the time I somehow caught that this year also marks 50 years since his Theory of Justice book publication (a rather banal discovery it seems now, but still). The “veil of ignorance” was a strong introduction to the world of ideas and one of the few things to make it past my undergraduate studies.

The 1st American edition – source

Beyond those lectures (early 00s), I have yet to read the book. I suspect that it could belong to the “books everyone would like to have read, but almost no one actually reads” list, along with that Beveridge Report (this quip about the Report I read somewhere I cannot remember). Anyway, here be a fresh tribute proper:

On the Legacy of A Theory of Justice (Law & Liberty, there are responses to the main essay, too)

As far as round anniversaries involving nice thought experiments go, I would also note that Judith Jarvis Thomson’s “violinist” and Herbert A. Simon’s “alien telescope” papers were published in 1971 and 1991, respectively. The first is a defense of the right to abortion, while the second is a tool to discern social structures (guess what, I have not read the “violinist” paper either. It seems interesting and timely enough – the top courts in US and Germany decided on abortion in 1973/75 – but I firstly found out about it, and some relevant criticisms, only last year. Simon, the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences laureate 1978, provided insights across a few fields over the years):

The trolley problem problem (Aeon)

Organizations and Markets (Journal of Economic Perspectives)

Getting to more recent staff, Brandon the other day expressed his doubts about the new charter city project in Honduras (Próspera). Find below a comprehensive read on the matter:

Prospectus On Próspera (Astal Codex Ten)

Now, as a pc gamer of yore, I have been expecting more nods to the underwater city of Rapture from the Bioshock game series, maybe. Rapture was a utopia free of state intervention, purportedly founded top-down on individualistic ideals in 1946, that failed. No, not quite libertarian ideals, more of a wildly objectivist kind, with a paternalistic edge. The adherence to laissez-faire, but not to laissez-passer (the founder forbid any relations with the rest of the world), brought smuggling, inequality and eventually the downfall of the city.

Not Rapture, but close enough style-wise (Moscow State University main building) – source: my own archive

At least this is how I understand it (right, I have not played any of these games. Survival/ horror FPS, nope. I do appreciate the games’ grandeur for 40s-50s ideas and architecture, though). As for any relevance to the Próspera project – come to think of it again – I admit the whole comparison is tempting, but way overblown, ok. Próspera is a public/ private law creature, envisaged in the constitution of a sovereign state. I desist.

Why Bioshock still has, and will always have, something to say (Ars Technica)

Ideology in Bioshock: A Critical Analysis (Press Start)

Some Monday Links

Michalis Trepas Links , , , , , ,

Madison’s Consistency on the Bill of Rights (National Affairs)

Reading Wealth of Nations and Meeting Adam Smith (The Hedgehog Review)

Not everyone (Verfassungsblog)

Philosophers Rebuild Society (Existential Comics)

Nightcap

Brandon Christensen Links , , ,
  1. The imperial sociology of “the tribe” in Afghanistan Nivi Manchanda, Millennium
  2. Life in the capital city of pre-modern Japan John Butler, Asian Review of Books
  3. The Irish free trade crisis of 1779 Joel Herman, Age of Revolutions
  4. Insiders and outsiders in 17th century philosophy Eric Schliesser, Philosophical Reviews

In memory of Gerald Gaus (1952-2020)

Nick Cowen Current Events, Liberty, Philosophy , , , , ,

I was saddened to hear that Gerald Gaus, the world-renowned liberal philosopher, died yesterday. Gaus was a critical developer of a public reason approach to classical liberalism, and powerful exponent of the interdisciplinary research agenda of Philosophy, Politics and Economics. While we met in person only occasionally, he was a significant influence on my approach to understanding the liberal tradition.

His perspective was deeply pluralist. One observation that really struck me from The Order of Public Reason (and that I still grapple with today) was that a society could function more effectively (in fact, might only function at all) when citizens have a range of moral attitudes towards things like rule-following, and especially eagerness to punish rule-breakers. For society to progress, you may need both conservative-inclined individuals to enforce moral norms and liberal-minded people to challenge them when circumstances prompt reform.

He applied this idea of strength through moral diversity to the political system too. On Gaus’s account, one of the strengths of liberal democracy is its ability to shift from conservative to liberal, and left to right, through competitive elections. Social progress cannot follow a straight and obvious path but requires, at different moments, experimentation, innovation, reversal and consolidation. Democracy helps select the dominant mode from a diversity of perspectives.

This depth of pluralism is counter-intuitive within the discipline of normative political theory that increasingly avers a narrow set of ideological commitments as acceptable, and rejects even fairly minor variations in social morality as possessing little or no value. Indeed, the last time I saw Gaus was early this year when he gave an evening talk at the Britain and Ireland Association for Political Thought conference. He presented a model for seeking political compromises among very different moral ideals. His commitment to treating the whole political spectrum as worthy of engagement drew a few heckles. The prospect of engaging with Trump supporters, for example, evidently nauseated some of the audience. Gaus was the very model of the liberal interlocutor, ignoring the hostility, and responding with grace, civility and ideas for going forward productively.

His approach to scholarship and discussion embodied his commitment to liberal toleration and the fusion of ethical horizons. That’s how he will be remembered.

Nightcap

Brandon Christensen Links , , ,
  1. Great philosophers are bad philosophers Michael Huemer, Fake Nous
  2. Great philosophers as architects Kevin Vallier, Reconciled
  3. On being wrong, but with style Jason Brennan, Bleeding Heart Libertarians
  4. On incompatibilities and inconsistencies Irfan Khawaja, Policy of Truth

Sunday Poetry: Hermann Hesse’s Stages

Alexander Albrecht Books, Culture, Liberty, Philosophy , , , , , , ,

Not much to say about this one. Helps me to take the edge off stressful times.

Phases

As every flower fades and as all youth
Departs, so life at every stage,
So every virtue, so our grasp of truth,
Blooms in its day and may not last forever.
Since life may summon us at every age
Be ready, heart, for parting, new endeavour,
Be ready bravely and without remorse
To find new light that old ties cannot give.
In all beginnings dwells a magic force
For guarding us and helping us to live.
 
Serenely let us move to distant places
And let no sentiments of home detain us.
The Cosmic Spirit seeks not to restrain us
But lifts us stage by stage to wider spaces.
If we accept a home of our own making,
Familiar habit makes for indolence.
We must prepare for parting and leave-taking
Or else remain the slaves of permanence.
 
Even the hour of our death may send
Us speeding on to fresh and newer spaces,
And life may summon us to newer races.
So be it, heart: bid farewell without end.
 
I wish you all a pleasant Sunday.

Sunday Poetry: Rüstow vs. Mises

Alexander Albrecht Culture, Economics, History, Liberty, Philosophy , , , , , , ,

One of the bests books I’ve read this year was Serge Audier’s & Jurgen Reinhoudt’s relatively unknown (unfortunately!) translation of the protocols of the Walter-Lippmann-Colloquium. The NOUS-Network organized a wonderful seminar in which we thoroughly discussed the book and the emergence of Neoliberalism. For the preparation of this weekend’s Hayek-Kreis seminar, I reread the book and stood once again in awe of the magnificence of the discussion during the Colloquium.

By the way: If you are an undergraduate, graduate, or PhD scholar, please consider joining the NOUS-Network for Constitutional Economics and Social Philosophy as a Young Affiliate! NOUS is an information platform and a community for interdisciplinary research. The network links all academic fields relevant for thinking about social order and liberty. It spans philosophy, politics, economics and fosters scholarly research, contact and exchange.

In the following excerpt, it becomes clear, that the participant’s opinion on the psychological and sociological causes of the decline of Liberalism differed significantly. Mr Rüstow eloquently captures the standpoints of the two opposing groups (not without bias to be fair) and even cheekily disses Ludwig von Mises.

“Mr Rüstow: ‘All things considered, it is undeniable that here, in our circle, two different points of view are represented. One group does not find anything essential to criticize or to change in traditional liberalism, such as it was and such as it is, apart from, naturally, the adjustments and the current developments that are self-evident.

In their view, the responsibility for all the misfortune falls exclusively on the opposite side, on those who, out of stupidity or out of malice, or through a mixture of both, cannot or do not want to discern and observe the salutary truths of liberalism. 

We, on the other hand, we seek the responsibility for the decline of liberalism in liberalism itself; and, therefore, we seek the solution in a fundamental renewal of liberalism. In order to justify in a positive manner this second point of view, I have to refer to what I have said and, especially, to the excellent arguments of Mr Lippmann.

Here, I would only like to draw attention to the fact that if the unwavering representatives of old liberalism were right, the practical prospects [for liberalism] would be almost hopeless. Because it does not really seem that old liberalism has gained in persuasive and in seductive force or that the arguments, no matter how shrewd they may be, of these representatives have the least possibility of bringing about a conversion movement within the realm of Bolshevism, Fascism, or of National Socialism. If they did not listen to Moses and the prophets—Adam Smith and Ricardo—how will they believe Mr. von Mises?'”

As always, I wish you all pleasant Sunday.

 

Sunday Poetry: Junger’s War Observations

Alexander Albrecht Books, Culture, History, Liberty, Philosophy , , , , , , , , ,

Without noticing it, I heavily built my reading schedule this year around of what one might call a “post-liberal reading list”. The idea, that the demise of social institutions might be the inevitable consequence of an ongoing individualization of society struck me as initially convincing. I am currently in search of good examinations on the ultimate effect Liberalism has on the development of social institutions. Hopefully, Steven Horwitz’ “Hayek’s Modern Family” will provide me with some compelling arguments to refute the post-liberal agenda.

Not directly being post-liberal, but pointing towards the importance of “homecoming and belonging”, Sebastian Junger’s book “Tribe” has had a lasting influence on me. I found the following observations of a war refugee voluntary reentering Sarajevo during its siege both fascinating and devastating.

“What catastrophes seem to do – sometimes in the span of a few minutes – is to turn back the clock on ten thousand years of social evolution. […]

“‘I missed being that close to people. I missed being loved in that way’, she told me. ‘In Bosnia – as it is now – we don’t trust each other anymore; we became really bad people. We didn’t learn the lesson of the war, which is how important it is to share everything you have with humans being close to you. The best way to explain it is that the war makes you an animal. We were animals. It’s insane – but that’s the basic human instinct, to help another human being who is sitting or standing or lying close to you.’

I asked Ahmetašević if people had ultimately been happier during the war. 
‘We were the happiest,’ Ahmetašević said. Then she added: “And we laughed more.'”

I wish you all a pleasant Sunday.

Psychedelics versus modern philosophy

Bill Rein Culture, Philosophy , , , ,

Anyone who studies philosophy has run into the assumption that psychoactive drugs and philosophy go hand-in-hand. Really, after analytic and continental, and whatever other traditions people come up with, there could be another sect, that of “stoner philosophy,” which is something like Mister Rogers, Alan Watts and Bob Ross thrown into a peaceful blender. This is when you’re sitting around getting high, wondering if aliens exist, instead of sitting in a classroom, wondering if other people’s minds exist.

A historical study of this connection, from East to West, would probably scandalize a lot of “serious” philosophers, and show some regular inebriation, but in general, I think the two are opposed (tragically or not). Particularly, the institutionalization of philosophy, when “natural philosophy” and “moral philosophy” etc all became separated some time after Hobbes, is opposed to what it sees as a lay way of thinking about the world. As my philosophy of science professor told me – you become a philosopher when you have your doctorate.

Professional philosophers and “psychonauts” are in opposition to each other. The analytics and continentals have spent centuries building elaborate systems – developing monstrous levels of specificity, so as to make their work completely incomprehensible to the rest of the world – and earning credentials to close the gates of access. Meanwhile, the casual or professional tripper is able to buy a tab for less than $10 and experience, or imagine they experience, market-price existentialism without reading a page of Camus.

The professional philosopher sneers in bad faith at psychedelic profundity because it makes them seem irrelevant.

On the other hand, the inarticulate tripper is not in such a great place. The psychonaut rests on intuition, and is probably not equipt with the critical thinking and logical itinerary to make sense of the journey on the comedown. A trip promises insight but also promises that neither your epistemic priors nor a rational reconstruction will be enough to establish its validity – by its very nature. (Psychedelic knowledge is “revealed,” not “discovered,” right?) You might get an insight that looks good, but is bad, without you knowing it. (I wrote about this in college. Holy shit my writing was bad.)

What happens when you irrationally, psychonautically attach to an idea that’s immune to logical tinkering? If you believe something for irrational reasons you’ll hang on to it for even longer than something that you believed for rational reasons, because new rational reasons can talk you out of a logogenetic idea, but not an irrationally-formed one. Depending on the centrality of the belief, of course.

The psychonaut claims easy knowledge, but could have trouble organizing it in the other, orderly web of belief of his coldly-discovered priors. However, this kind of knowledge has taken a high prestige today, with help from accredited social figures like Steve Jobs dosing LSD. In a way, the win of casual inebriated profundity is a “people’s victory” over the esoteric, pretentious toils of the professional philosophers. If you can figure out Truth by serotonin-fucking yourself on any day of the week then there’s no need to study Heidegger… and there’s even less reason to get a PhD in phenomenology, making institutional philosophy obsolete.

So, philosophers will be opposed to the psychonauts because it trivializes their hard-earned degrees (bad faith), and trivializes all their carefully crafted logic (slightly less bad faith). Psychonauts will be opposed to the philosophers for their specialized field which must explicitly reject such spontaneous routes to knowledge. The people taking psychedelics find themselves fighting some sort of anti-scientific elitism war, doing Feyerabend’s work. The tension is worse with the professional, modern philosophical class, but still exists in general.

A survey of history would show a lot of intertwining, but ultimately, I think the newer age of philosophy has a lot more overlap with other drugs than psychedelics (specifically Epicurean as opposed to elucidatory drugs, e.g. Adderall, analgesics, cocaine) — which is its own interesting question.

Sunday Poetry: Camus about Europe

Alexander Albrecht Books, Culture, History, Liberty, Philosophy , , , , , , ,

Albert Camus is the most influential writers to me (See here why). This passage is from his third “Letter to a German Friend” (1944), depicting his unbroken love for European culture in the dark times of the second world war.

“Sometimes on a street corner, in the brief intervals of the long struggle that involves us all, I happen to think of all those places in Europe I know well. It is a magnificent land moulded by suffering and history. I relive those pilgrimages I once made with all the men of the West: the roses in the cloisters of Florence, the gilded bulbous domes of Krakow, the Hradschin and its dead palaces, the contorted statues of the Charles Bridge over the Vltava, the delicate gardens of Salzburg. All those flowers and stones, those hills and those landscapes where men’s time and the world’s time have mingled old trees and monuments! My memories have fused together such superimposed images to make a single face, which is the face of my true native land. … It never occurred to me that someday we should have to liberate them from you. And even now, at certain moments of rage and despair, I am occasionally sorry that the roses continue to grow in the cloister of San Marco and the pigeons drop clusters from the Cathedral of Salzburg, and the red geraniums grow tirelessly in the little cemeteries of Silesia.”

I wish you all a pleasant Sunday.