Philosophy.Com

debate about America as empire

An article on the debate about America as an empire. Is the USA one? I switch between imperial order and hegemony approaches on philosophy.com. Even though I think in terms of empire i am unclear of the distinction between imperial and hegemonic systems.

Nexon and Wright approach this in terms of dynamics or logics of empire and explore the degree to which relations between the United States and other polities have imperial characteristics.They say that:

We argue that ideal-typical empires ... differ from hegemonic and unipolar orders because they combine two features: rule through intermediaries and heterogeneous contracting between imperial cores and constituent political communities. These characteristics constitute ideal-typical empires as a form of political organization with particular network properties. Ideal-typical empires comprise a “rimless” hub-and-spoke system of authority, in which cores are connected to peripheries but peripheries themselves are disconnected—–or segmented—–from one another

They say that when a particular set of relations takes on an imperial cast, a number of important changes occur in the basic dynamics of international politics.

These are spelt out as follows:

First, dynamics of divide-and-rule supplant traditional balance-of-power politics. Imperial control works, in part, by preventing resistance in one periphery from spreading to other peripheries ... Second, the key axis of political relations shift from interstate to intersocietal. Imperial cores exercise rule through local intermediaries over various actors within the domestic sphere of constituent political communities .... Imperial control of particular peripheries also involves local processes of divide and-rule .... Third, empires face specific problems of legitimating their control. Imperial rule involves heterogeneous contracts that specify varied rights and privileges to different peripheries; empires function most effectively when they maintain their authority over extremely diverse audiences who, in turn, place differing demands on imperial authorities.

Nexon and Wright say that if relations between the United States and other polities reflect imperial logics, then American leaders face more distinctive opportunities and challenges than those specified in balance of- power and hegemonic-stability theory. The debate, moreover, calls into question the still-prevalent “states under-anarchy” approach to international politics.

After working through a lot of theory Nexon and Wright say that:

The American-led invasion of Iraq... currently positions the United States in an imperial relationship with that country. The United States negotiates and renegotiates asymmetric contracts with other states—–such as its bargains with Pakistan concerning counterterrorism policy—–that place foreign leaders in the structural location of local intermediaries between U.S. demands and their own domestic constituencies ... Its basing agreements incorporate many of the hallmarks of imperial bargains

The dynamics of empire suggests that imperial expansion is often more the result of pressures in the periphery that
lead to unintended, unanticipated political developments that generate reactions that pull great powers more deeply into the politics of other polities.

a note on propserity & happiness

Cassandra Wilkinson in the Australian Literary Review argues against those who say increased wealth does not equal happiness. She identifies who opponents as that:

Toxic coalition of anti-capitalist and anti-modern commentators would have us believe that Australia's economic success has caused a tidal wave of human misery. Anxiety, depression and sadness are tendered as evidence that freedom is not all it is cracked up to be

Her argument is based on freedom interpreted as freedom of choice of ordinary people versus extremism:

It is in the interests of both the extreme Right and the extreme Left to pretend our values are in crisis. Crisis suits extremists of all persuasions because an impending calamity suggests you must adopt new behaviours immediately to avoid annihilation. Go to church immediately! Abolish the World Trade Organisation immediately! Have more/fewer/happier children immediately! What they all have in common is the desire to restrict our freedom. Intellectuals and elites spent centuries resisting giving ordinary citizens the vote. Now they want to restrict the enfranchisement that we experience in the modern capitalist economy.

I thought that liberal, social democratic and Marxist intellectuals in modernity argued for freedom and democracy. Wasn't that what the Enlightennment stood for?

Wilkinson plays the common person in a prosperous economy off against the cultural elites who impose their prescriptions of happiness on ordinary people and so stifle our freedom.

Disposable culture and dumbing down are the constant concern of people who think they have better ways for us to live. And while everyone likes to have a go at Paris Hilton, the real targets of this derision are not the idle rich, they are the working class, the people who buy the big-screen TVs, McMansions and cheap Korean cars. It is overconsumption and trash consumption by the masses that really gets up the snouts of the clever types Choice has become a four-letter word to many cultural commentators. For them it's just code for private schools and private wealth and overconsumption and the decay of the great social contract.

She argues that prosperity gives ordinary people choice:

Prosperity provides opportunities to explore the self-actualising behaviours and social engagement that improves our wellbeing. In addition, prosperity and the availability of a wider variety of experiences increase opportunities for sensory pleasure such as better food and more stimulating recreation that, although it isn't happiness, certainly helps the winter nights fly.

Though increased wealth is not the same as haappiness or wellbeing the real problem is the cultural elites:

The problem with looking to social reformers and intellectuals to provide prescriptions for happiness is that freedom to choose for ourselves is fundamental to the pursuit of happiness. Within reasonable limits, that includes freedom to think, to do and, yes, consume what we wish..

it's neglect

Surpisingly, during Costello's parliamentary budget speech for his 12th budget the word 'Indigenous' was never uttered despite a $10 billion surplus. Systemic biases are perpetuated given the marked segregation of health standards between non-Indigenous and Indigenous Australians.

Alan Moir

The aggregate commitment on health is $30 million per annum, about 7 percent of the $460 million that the AMA and Oxfam say is needed to start closing the life expectancy gap between Indigenous and other Australians. Health can't be ATSIC's fault, as it is administered by Tony Abbott's department.

The Australian Medical Association has estimated that Labor's plan to close the 17-year gap in life expectancy between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians within a generation will cost $2 billion.That's a lot of money, but it's just about what the Government will have spent on advertising by the next election.

just like Londistan

The imported conservatives from the UK talk in terms of Australia being part of the streets of Londistan. They say that Australia like Britain stand shoulder to shoulder with our American friends in this hour of tragedy, and that we, like them, will not rest until this evil is driven from our world. As a special friend of the US we need to be on our toes about the Islamic enemies within. A multicultural Australia provides a safe-haven for extremists just like 'Londonistan'. Hundreds of Muslims around the country need to be kept under surveillance and arrested if need be, as AL Qaeda is attempting to destroy the state from within.

A black cloud of Islamist terror is said to be hanging over the Western world; and specific causes of violence and discontent have disappeared into it. Instead, we promote the idea that all acts of political violence involving Arabs or Muslims, if seen from the correct (that is to say US- inspired) angle, will fit together like a jigsaw to form an image of Osama bin Laden.

John Upton in the London Review of Books says:

We are told that we face a complex, overwhelming threat, yet we are given the crudest means of deciphering our predicament: caricatures of Saddam, of bin Laden, of suicide bombers and evil imams. These are the cartoon ogres in whose shadows we are encouraged to unite. But the spirit of the Blitz engenders acquiescence in the machinations of a manipulative state as well as the courage to stand up to ogres.

citizenship, liberalism, democracy

James Madison in Federalist No. 55, argued that Republican government required a specific kind virtue in its citizens than any other form. That argument about the kind of citizens a liberal democracy needs to have is shared by William Galston and Steven Macedo. A liberal polity requires its citizens to have certain civic skills (deliberation, compromise, consensus-building, civility, reason-giving)--and the public spaces where those skills can be exercised.

Ordered liberty requires citizens who are independent of mind, public-spirited, respectful of the rule of law, capable of self-restraint, aware of their rights, and respectful of the rights of others. The egalitarian and welfare aspirations to which we have committed ourselves in modern times require even more: a modicum of fellow-feeling, as well as a certain disposition to assume responsibility for oneself and one's dependents. However, the spaces for civic engagement have been shrinking, as the country has been losing many of the associations and institutions where republican skills and virtues are generated, nurtured, and transmitted from one generation to the next.

Where disagreement emerges is less about the qualities that are required than about how and by whom they should be fostered, and the role of religion in fostering them. What can or should we do to instill the skills, habits and virtues required for the survival and flourishing of free, democratic institutions in a pluralistic society?
William Galston argued that the liberal state must become far more actively involved in reproducing the conditions necessary to its own health and perpetuation, but it must do so without undermining the capacious tolerance that gives liberal society its special attraction.

The conservatives argue that the liberation movements of the late sixties and early seventies undermined the cultural foundations of the republic. Those years of adult "liberation"and social revolution took a dreadful toll on children, and on the nation's principal seedbeds of character and competence--families and their surrounding communities of memory and mutual aid. What was rejected was the cultivation of the self-restraint that makes social life possible. The social revolution of 1968 produced a nation of free riders, coasting along on a dwindling social capital.

What is missing in this kind of argument is the effects of the shift to the free market on the formation of citizenship.

the naked public square

In his influential 1984 book, The Naked Public Square Richard John Neuhaus argued that the American "experiment in ordered liberty" is premised on religious assumptions about the freedom and dignity of the human person. In his view, freedom of religion is the first freedom, and the effort by liberal elites to strip the public square of religious language and advocacy is an assault on every American's freedom of conscience. According to Neuhaus, government, because it must inevitably order aspects of our common life that touch on our ultimate moral concerns, cannot turn a deaf ear to the religious aspirations of the governed. Nor, he argues, can the fundamental values of democracy be sustained outside of a larger religious context. Divorced from its religious foundations, Neuhaus warns, democracy is doomed.

This is the argument of the First Things crowd. The public square from which religion is banished is a naked one. Has the public square become more or less open to the expression of religiously grounded moral viewpoints?

It looks increasingly that way as men and women of faith make themselves heard in setting the conditions of debate on some issues, eg., the value ones. Faith-based organizations has made considerable headway in delivering welfare services more cheaply, effectively, and humanely through the mediating institutions of civil society, than directly by the state. Religious voices are stronger and more confident in public debates.

Are they more adept at translating their values into terms that are persuasive to their fellow citizens, so that citizens in a pluralistic republic are in conversation with each other about the conditions under which we are to live, work, and raise our children? I'm not persuaded. I see dogmatism and hostility from the religious Right that engages in a culture war against the Left, not a conversation.

If there is a rationality therein it can be found in the argument about Australian culture. Although it includes many non-Europeans, Australian culture is in the main an extension and reconfiguration of European culture, which is to say it is part of the culture of the West. And today it is the strongest and most vibrant part of the cultural tradition of the West. The challenge of Islam in its militant form of Jihadism powerfully reinforces our awareness that we are part of the West and, however ambiguously so, the Christian West. There fore we are a Christian nation and Australian democracy is grounded on Judaic-Christian values.

Rationality can be found in the argument in the argument that liberalism ceases to be liberal when it not only dismisses [many Australians] most cherished beliefs from the public sphere but even tries, through the device of public education, to make it harder for these beliefs to function in the private sphere. Thus the right to withdraw one's children from government-controlled education can be exercised only by parents determined and capable enough to undertake home-schooling, or wealthy enough to afford private education after paying taxes to support government schools.

t is liberalism that is deemed to be the problem. It argues that as there are limits in a pluralistic society to the degree to which public education can accommodate the religious diversity of the families it serves, the simplest solution is to keep religion out of the public schools. This development is often presented as "neutral" and respectful of pluralism.

However, this form of secularism in public schools is seen, by the religious Right, as the government in control of, and religion banned from, the majority of our country's chief institutions for teaching and transmitting culture. It is nothing less than a program for formation of persons, and thus a program for cultural transformation, if not indoctrinating persons to serve the needs of the state.

religion and state

The relationship between religion and society is becoming tense. A liberal Australia separates religion from the state and yet speaks loudly of integration to Christian-Judaic values and in practice doles out large measures of racism, condescension, and neglect to headscarf-wearing Muslim women born in Australia.

The debate is often framed in terms of "modern" secular liberals against "traditional" Islam, even though the young Muslim women are Australia-born.The state may insist on keeping religion out of the public sector, but it also supports Christian religion. Supports rather than accommodate certain "public" forms of religion.

Underneath this lies a religious opposition to state authority. The conservative secular state cannot tolerate Islamic religious opposition to its authority.

conservatism, 9/11, cultural left

This review of Dinesh D'Souza's The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left by Andrew Sullivan is interesting about the movement of conservatism in postmodernity. In the text D'Souza argues that the cultural left in the US is responsible for causing 9/11, in the sense that the cultural left and its allies in Congress, the media, Hollywood, the nonprofit sector, and the universities are the primary cause of the volcano of anger toward America that is erupting from the Islamic world.

On this account the cultural left---D'Souza names Richard Rorty, Martha Nussbaum, Sean Wilentz, Sharon Stone, Rosie O'Donnell, Paul Begala, Arianna Huffington, many other cultural and political figures, and all the members and employees of the ACLU, Amnesty International, the Ford Foundation--- fosters a decadent and depraved American culture that angers and repulses other societies—especially traditional and religious ones— and by promoting, at home and abroad, an anti-American attitude that blames America for all the problems of the world

The Muslims who carried out the 9/11 attacks were the product of this visceral rage—some of it based on legitimate concerns, some of it based on wrongful prejudice, but all of it fueled and encouraged by the cultural left. Thus without the cultural left, 9/11 would not have happened. American cultural left has been vigorously exporting its domestic war against religion and traditional morality to the rest of the world.The American cultural left stands for the decadence of the West---an old theme of the Right, as is the view that secular pop culture threatens traditional morality.

Sullivan says that on D'Souza's account conservatism is in a death struggle with liberal modernity (modern individualism and autonomy), with the conservative movement out to demonize "the left" and enrage the liberals:

At its core is a deepening rejection of cultural and philosophical modernity. D'Souza believes that the defining new distinction in American politics is no longer between the economic right and the economic left. The size of government and its role as a guardian of the public welfare are increasingly dead issues, or issues where no vital energy crackles. D'Souza rightly holds that the real divide in the new century is between authority and autonomy, between faith-based politics and individual freedom. And in this struggle at the level of first principles, D'Souza chooses his own side. He is at war with the modern West. If forced to choose between a theocratic order that upheld traditional morality and a secular order that saw such morality marginalized, D'Souza is with the former.

Sullivan says that traditional morality, in D'Souza's view:

"is based on the notion that there is a moral order in the universe, which establishes an enduring standard of right and wrong. All the major religions of the world agree on the existence of this moral order. There is also a surprising degree of unanimity about the content of this moral order." Liberal morality, by contrast, consists first of all in the right of the individual to choose for him- or herself what morality is. It is about "autonomy, individuality, and self-fulfillment as moral ideals." Its essence is the notion that "each person must decide for himself or herself what is right in a particular situation." D'Souza argues that the shift in America over the past few decades from traditional morality to liberal morality is "the most important fact of the past half-century."

Secularism is the primary enemy whilst a neutral public square is a pernicious illusion, that faith of any kind is always and everywhere preferable to no faith or sincere doubt. The shift is towards an enmeshment of church and state. Conservatism roots are in an older, premodern vision of mankind and religion, not in a post Enlightenment.

What I see are the familiar fault lines within the conservative movement -- libertarians versus social conservatives, neo-conservatives versus realists, economic internationalists versus populists -- that are tension filled under the weight of massive spending increases, evangelical overreach, abuse of executive power, conventional corruption, and a mismanaged war. Does the sense of cohesion on the right still manage to keep the rickety coalition together?

cosmopolitanism + national citizenship

Seyla Benhabib begins her account of cosmopolitanism in Another Cosmopolitanism: Hospitality, Sovereignty, and Democratic Iterations, by noting a tension within the world of liberal democratic cosmopolitanism. In this review of the text Michael Blake says that Benhabib argues:

that we are committed, on the one hand, to cosmopolitan norms of human rights, which seek to articulate a concept of legal rights that are universal and unconditional. We are also, however, committed to a bounded notion of democracy, in which democratic authority is derived from the self-imposed nature of legal norms. This tension, argues Benhabib, is of crucial importance for our political future; the tension between the universal and the particular, the cosmopolitan and the local, requires more serious analysis the more unified and integrated our shared global network of institutions becomes.

The process of mediation Benhabib suggests might be accomplished through the integration of universal cosmopolitan norms into democratic practice. In this, cosmopolitan norms become a part of the local, democratic practice. The universal norms are challenged and given form by the specific challenges of the local (particular) political community, whose self-understanding in turn is adjusted through the application of universal concepts in its political discussions.

This is a powerful argument.

Mediation changes the old nationality versus cosmopolitan duality that still borned this debate. It is the resident alien -- subject to legal authority, and so a a member of the demos, but not part of the community of identification grounding the local community (the ethnos), that leads to to the process of iteration. What is disclosed is cosmopolitan right in the form of hospitality. Benahbib argues that respect must be given both for the democratic life of the people, and the rights of the alien within that people's shared life; severs the tacit linkage between demos and ethnos; displaces the old-fashioned notion of national citizenship, and supersedes the notion of citizenship.

A multicultural Australia has loosened the tight connection between demos and ethnos as we can have demos with a diverse ethnos. What holds the polity together is the democratic values around citizenship

Pax Romana and Pax Americana

Just prior to the Second Punic War, Rome's greatest diplomatic weapon was its military projection and the Pax Romana it could provide. Rome did not conquer so much, as city-states and kingdoms willingly placed them self into the Pax Romana and allowed Roman military projection to protect their borders and interests. Spain was largely conquered in this way, as was Greece.

In 221 BC Rome had provinces in Sicily and Sardinia. To their west was the military power of Carthage, and to their east the fractured remnants of Alexander's Macedonian Empire. Both of whom could threaten, not Rome's military power, but its Pax Romana. We see a different Senatorial policy from this point on, which was also reflected in Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus' military policy toward Carthage. It was not enough for Carthage to be beaten, it had to be beaten so well that it was in permanent submission and not able to threaten Roman military projection - ie Pax Romana.

This policy led to the Senate seeking to declare war on Phillip of Macedon immediately after the defeat of Hannibal near Zama. The assemblies declined the first declaration of war - they had after all been fighting the Carthaginians for close to twenty-five years, not to mention enduring sixteen years of Hannibal invading southern Italy and managing to have several cities in Campania revolt to the Carthaginian cause. Taxes were high, the land was under-producing, cities were just coming back under the Roman peace, and the population was tired of war.

But this has become a Senatorial policy of preventative warfare. This can be compared to the campaign against the Illyrian pirates and the Illyrian state that support the piracy, It only became an issue for Rome when their merchant ships were being plundered. A successful campaign was conducted against the piracy, but Illyria was not invaded or conquered. The goal wasn't expansion, it was protecting the Roman peace. However with Carthage, Macedon and later Antiochus; we see preventative and aggressive wars being conducted against possible military competitors to Roman military projection.

Does this Roman policy choice in 221 BC have any modern parables to Pax Brittania and Pax Americana?

The British peace was pre market-state, and the agrarian form of colonisation which was tied by the Royal Navy's control of the oceans became too expensive to maintain. This is when Britain began exporting responsible government rather than Naval colonies and governships - a process Australia knows well. Prior to the industrial revolution, and its leading to the establishment of market-states (non-mercantilist), Britain followed the Pitt Doctrine, via Arthur Herman:

But as a statesman in the 1750s, Pitt would turn the standard formula of sea-power and trade inside out. Instead of seeing the navy as a weapon for getting and defending overseas empire, he saw overseas empire as a tool for the navy, giving it the bases it needed to defend British mercantile interests and to increase its own global reach.

Again we see the British peace being based upon military projection, rather than the ability to conquer and take land. Napoleon tried the latter route, conquering continental Europe, and despite the success of Frankish militarism effectively made an unsustainable French Empire. Each time France or Spain came into loggerheads with Britain, the Royal Navy would blockade those nations - their projection power stopping any incursion of France and Spain into Pax Brittania.

What of the United States? It is the undisputed power in military projection and many American politicians , such as Al Gore, have restated the purpose of the American military as being able to bring peace and security to the oceans such that globalised trade is protected from disturbances. As an example of American power, the Australian Defence Force [ADF] has enough projection that any nation-state seeking to coerce Australia militarily can be stopped in the ocean approaches or the air-sea gap: except the United States. One American super-carrier would be a match for the ADF, two would mean the complete loss of Australian projection power.

However Pax Americana is a westphalian construct, heavily entrenched in the mores and norms of the nation-state organisational structure. The natural development of the market-state its reach, globalisation, erode that central political and military power. This makes the National Security Strategy Paper from 2002 extremely interesting. How is the United States responding to the non-Westphalian threats to the American peace?

From the NSS:

For centuries, international law recognized that nations need not suffer an attack before they can lawfully take action to defend themselves against forces that present an imminent danger of attack. Legal scholars and international jurists often conditioned the legitimacy of preemption on the existence of an imminent threat—most often a visible mobilization of armies, navies, and air forces preparing to attack.

We must adapt the concept of imminent threat to the capabilities and objectives of today’s adversaries. Rogue states and terrorists do not seek to attack us using conventional means. They know such attacks would fail. Instead, they rely on acts of terror and, potentially, the use of weapons of mass destruction—weapons that can be easily concealed, delivered covertly, and used without warning.

Combined with the Doctrine of Pre-emption this is an attempt to re-establish, possibly by coercion, possibly not, a Westphalian organisational arrangement by spreading, not democracy and freedom, but Westphalian political structures, such as a Parliament in Iraq and the dominance of the Lebanese Parliament over Hezbollah. This includes the removal of pan-Westphalian structures such as the United Nations, who are not within the Westphalian system either.

We can probably look at the NSS Paper as being a recognition of the limitations of how the American Peace can be maintained in a globalised market-state world, which has increasing decentralisation, local innovation, and low barriers of entry for capitalisation. We are actually seeing in some areas, such as South Lebanon, that a nation-state is not necessary for some semblance of civil order and peace to be maintained. It may produce inferior governance outcomes to a nation-state, but in a globalised market-state system that is not as necessary, if anything the overlapping and tenuous control of a non-state body provides greater liberty such that greater innovation outside of regulatory regimes can occur.

The problem is a Hobbesian outcome, but it seems the non-state bodies provide services such as health, education, etc to maintain their legitimacy so this does not always seem to happen. The continuing disorder in Mogadishu is a warning of what can happen in that situation, but it doesn't have a competing nation-state body and non-state body with overlapping sovereignty competing against each other to provide services.

The symbolic threat to the westphalian American Peace was Sept 11th. Under Bush and Cheney the United States has responded by operating outside of the westphalian international system. It has conducted wars of aggression, established a domestic state of emergency (or exception) and dropped the pretense of the rule of law. The argument is that in this emergency we don't have time or the need to act within the parameters of the westphalian order as the enemies of the American Peace do not follow it at all.

But we are moving into the organisational order of global market-states. This is having an effect on how we judge violence and sovereignty. Centralised political organisation, such as the nation-state is being challenged and constantly required to justify itself, its overhead and cost. This is post-westphalian in that sovereignty can be over-lapping, and political/legal institutions compete for legitimacy through services. It also means that the peace through military projection is easily stifled. Iraq is a good example of this, that kind of peace can only come through a domestic embrace of Pax, which was a large part of Roman, British and American success.

Noel Pearson on Rudd's critique of neo-liberalism

Noel Pearson has an op-ed in The Australian on Rudd's critique of neo-liberalism that spells out his reservations with this crique for indigenous people. It is an edited extract from Noel Pearson's essay 'White Guilt, Victimhood and the Quest for a Radical Centre' in Griffith Review 16: Unintended Consequences

Pearson interprets Rudd's critique by starting with Rudd's description of the neo-liberal fundamentalism of the Howard Government. Rudd, Pearson says, states that:

"Modern Labor argues that human beings are both self-regarding and other-regarding. By contrast, modern Liberals argue that human beings are almost exclusively self-regarding." Rudd concedes that the self-regarding values of security, liberty and property are necessary for economic growth. He argues that the other-regarding values of equity, solidarity and sustainability must be added in order to make the market economy function effectively, and in order to protect human values such as family life from being crushed by market forces.

Pearson says:

My reservation about this analysis is that it is mainly concerned with those who are not deeply disadvantaged in a cultural and intergenerational way.....Rudd's ideological manifesto is concerned with the effects of neo-liberal policies on people who may have less bargaining power than the most sought-after professionals, but who are nonetheless firmly integrated into the real economy, not only because they have jobs but because they are culturally and socially committed to a life of responsibility and work.

Pearson says that he welcomes the debate Rudd sought to revitalise about the long-term effects on most working people of neo-liberal policies: what will the effects be on family life, on people's sense of security and purpose, on social cohesion? How great is the risk that families among the lower strata of the real economy will descend into the underclass?

Pearson goes on to say that these are real issues, but the important question from an African-American or Aboriginal Australian perspective is: What is the correct analysis of self-regard and other-regard in the context for those already disengaged from the real economy? Disengagement is the problem in Cape York Peninsula and in dysfunctional African-American communities. He adds:

The moderate Left, as represented by Rudd, would probably argue that neo-liberal dominance increases the number of disengaged people and the difficulties of returning them to the working mainstream. This may well be true. However, disadvantage can develop and become self-perpetuating even without neo-liberal government policy. In Australia, Aboriginal disadvantage became entrenched during decades when social democrats, small-l liberals and conservatives influenced policy; many policies for indigenous Australians have been liberal and progressive.

He says that the insight that informs our work in Cape York Peninsula is that disengagement and disadvantage have self-perpetuating and cultural qualities: problems not covered by Rudd's analysis. These are the problems of the underclass, people who are psychologically and culturally disadvantaged.

Rudd does not spend time thinking about the underclass. In the scramble for the political middle, who does? His is an analysis of the prospects of the upper 80 or 90 or 95 per cent of society: how it will fare under social democratic or neo-liberal regimes. If Rudd's analysis was extended to the truly disengaged, his model would probably be interpreted like this: some people are successful and, as well as being self-regarding, they should be other-regarding. And then there are the disadvantaged.

The problem is that it is assumed that the life chances of the disadvantaged depend on the other-regard of the successful: either a precarious dependency in the absence of state institutions or an institutionalised dependency which my people have come to know as passive welfare. In reality, what is needed is an increase of self-regard among the disadvantaged, rather than strengthening their belief that the foundation for their uplift is the welfare state and the other-regard of the successful..

Deleuze

Gilles Deleuze:

Capitalism is constituted on the failure of all the pre-existent codes and social territorialities.

If we admit this, what does this represent: the capitalist machine, it is literally demented. A social machine that functions on the basis of decoded, deterritorialized flows, once again, it is not that societies did not have any idea of this; they had the idea in the form of panic, they acted to prevent this--it was the overturning of all the social codes known up to that point--; so, a society that constitutes itself on the negative of all pre-existing societies, how can it function? A society for which it is proper to decode and deterritorialize all the flows: flow of production, flow of consumption, how can it function, under what form: perhaps capitalism has other processes than coding to make it work, perhaps it is completely different.

utopian puzzles: America + Australia

If Australia as the new world was “empty” (the “black man” was invisible in Britain’s eyes, part of the continent’s flora and fauna), it was quite literally a tabula rasa, a blank tablet upon which new men might inscribe a new history. As John Locke argued in in his Second Treatise of Civil Government, those discontented with the constraints of the social contract could seek refuge in the loci vacui, the empty places of the world, and start society over again.

If America was utopia, then Australia was dystopia--a prison.

However, America had slavery. So how could it understand itself to be pure and innocent? How come it understands itself in terms of an inner good being defended from an outer evil; or New World innocence being protected from Old World corruption. Is America as Eden the expression of what is known as American exceptionalism?

And yet there were utopian yearnings in Australia, such as the utopian-socialist one like William Lane’s The Workingman’s Paradise (1892), Barnard and Eldershaw’s socialistic and feminist Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow (1947), and that great utopian experiment, the design and eventual construction of the federal capital at Canberra, whose design by Walter Burly Griffin involved a visionary scheme for a “cosmic city”, based on
the area’s natural topography, but also on Pythagorean geometry and esoteric symbolism.

Australian culture has been founded on the economy of pastoralism. Australia as a culture yearns naively for innocence but is “riven” by the ineffectiveness of its attempts to forget or dismiss the violence that founded it, or the the landgrabbing and quick settlement that marked the 19th century colonial economy.

Benjamin Barber: citizenship in a global world

Benjamin Barber's Tanner Lecture on Human Values was given in 2002 and it was entitled Democratic Alternatives to the Mullahs and the Malls: Citizenship in an Age of Global Anarchy. He opens the lecture thus by saying that this is a time of particular urgency for the democratic and civic values we cherish in America.

We are confronted not only by the obvious challenge of terrorism but by the far more subtle perils of a pervasive consumerism rooted in privatization and the seemingly unstoppable spread of a neoliberal ideology. While we remain wedded to democracy in theory, we often seem to regard marketization as the alternative to fundamentalism. Faced with Jihadic terror last fall, our government recommended shopping as an antidote. But consumers are not the same thing as citizens any more than true believers are the same thing as citizens. If our only significant choice is to between the mullahs and the malls, we may lose our liberty no matter who wins the battle between Jihad and what I have called McWorld.

Nope. Citizens are not consumers. The former refers to democracy whilst the latter refers to the market. These are two different kinds of institutions in a nation-state.

Barber then challenges the claim by the national security state that the sovereignty of liberal democracy is just threatened by the terrorists after 9/1. It sis the 'just' that is questioned thus:

For not only the terrorists pursuing their fundamentalist Jihad but the ardent market advocates of what I have called McWorld have been engaged in systematically undermining the sovereignty of nation states, dismantling
the democratic institutions that have been their finest achievement, without showing the way to extend democracy either downward to the subnational religious and ethnic entities that now lay claim to people’s loyalty or upward to the international sector in which Mc- World’s pop culture and commercial markets along with criminals and terrorists operate without sovereign restraints.

Thus we have this argument:

Terrorism turns out to be a depraved version of globalization no less vigorous in its pursuit of its own special interests than are global markets, no less wedded to anarchist disorder than are speculators, no less averse to violence when it serves their ends than marketers are averse to inequality and injustice when they represent the “costs of doing business.”

It kinda makes sense doesn't it.

Relevance of Rome to a Modern Republic

I have been working my way through the Roman Constitutional system on ssr, in part to answer whether a written constitution is superior to a non-written one, but also to explore where the analogies between Rome and an Australian Republic coincide. Pax Romana was real, and Italy did benefit from the Roman commercial and civil view of citizenship and half-citizenship. Prior to Roman dominance of Italy there was constant warring between city-states, tribes, towns and the immigration of Gauls from the north. Rome's military extension halted the incursion of this violence - this is the Roman Peace or pax Romana.

None of that is constitutionally relevant though. These Roman gains were achieved through the sword and military dominance. The democratic systems extended back in structure to regal rome and were established for the purposes of military organisation and land-taxation. With the removal of the King, the Consul position that replaced the monarch were military positions. All the magistrate positions, other than the praetors, were expected to be generals and lead Rome in provincial expansion.

This is where the Roman system becomes alien to a liberal democratic nation-state. Rome was an agrarian martial state. Wealth came from land, and expansion meant greater wealth. A downside of this process was that pro-consuls became wealthier and more militarily capable than the consuls in Rome which was the cause of the civil wars in the late republic, until Augustus strengthened Rome's central military capability. Arguably the English empire was an agrarian martial state as well, and as it moved to a nation-state, the colonies, rather then being a source of wealth to the center, became an expensive drain. Consequently the English exported responsible government which maintained political dependence, but lowered the costs of political influence in an empire that was relying less on land and more on industrial production.

Today a political structure that is for the purpose of expansion has no merit. The technology of a Westphalian nation-state has meant that there is a lot of stability between nations and when there is war, the original boundaries of the nation-states are largely maintained. The military of a nation-state is less for expansion, provincial administration and colonisation than it is defence. Additionally the Commander-in-Chief is a civil position and not intended to directly conduct warfare unlike the Roman Consuls who were generals first and civilian administrators second.

We are currently moving to the Market-state structure courtesy of modern telecommunications and transportation. Rather than the heavily centralised political systems of a nation-state, the market-state rewards local and decentralised innovations. As John Robb wrote:

Whereas the nation-state used centralized control to enable slower regions to catch up, the market-state will need to accelerate (mostly by getting out of the way) innovation at the regional/community level.

The nation-state is constantly having to justify its massive overhead as well as its legitimacy. Smaller semi-political and semi-militaristic movements, such as Hezbollah, have proven that they can fight a larger and more powerful nation-state into stalemate. In Iraq we have seen this type of warfare paralyse a nation-state's civil legitimacy entirely.

So what lessons can a Roman Republic offer a modern Australian Republican? Well not much really. An agrarian martial-state which expanded to empire has little relevance to a liberal republican market-state. One is centralised, militarised and oligarchic - the other is decentralised, civilised and democratic. Rome was pre-Montesquieu and had separation of magistrates (or executives) while a republican principle is separation of powers, not positions. Where a martial-state and nation-state respond to crisis with a centralised military, a market-state responds with decentralised volunteer civil structures such as the Bush Fire Brigade and State Emergency Services.

A republican market-state has a written constitution, decentralised structures, separation of powers, universal rights (not limited by citizenship), political equality and legal equality. Rome lacked all of these.

more democracy needed

Is there a crisis of legitimacy facing Australian politics? A crisis in terms of there being a democratic deficit say? A democratic deficit in a neo-liberal world? Yes, is my response. Here are some of my reasons.

Firstly, Australia is becoming increasingly centralised. The commonwealth Government has become locked in a vicious circle of centralising power in an effort to improve public services, only to find this leads to increased dissatisfaction. The quango state - unelected and unaccountable bodies which have a direct impact on ordinary people’s lives - has become a common feature of our political life.

Secondly, a simple majority in the House of Representatives with government control of the Senate can curtail our rights and freedoms by changing our unwritten constitution. At a time of heightened security and fear of terrorism how do we citizens in Australia Britain ensure that our basic rights and freedoms are entrenched?

Thirdly, elections - whether central or state - carry no mandate; there is no accountability for ‘promises’ implied in the leaflets that drop through your door; policy is devised and implemented behind closed doors, public opinion is of little consequence. After the election the promises are dropped and policies change.The nearest thing to accountability is the Senate.

Fourthly, the fourth estate has steadily gone downhill in terms of it being the watchdog for Australian democracy, despite the increasing corruption in the government.

These are the reasons for my yes. This kind of approach is not even on the radar of the rethinking of social democracy amongst the federal ALP.

So what do we mean by democratic deficit? Murray Goot argues in his paper Public Opinion and the Democratic Deficit: Australia and the War Against Iraq in the Australian Humanities Review that:

A ‘democratic deficit’ might be defined as the gap between the democratic ideal and the daily reality of democratic life. While the underlying idea is as old as democratic government itself, this way of expressing it is new. The origin of the phrase lies within the European Community; specifically, in debates about the relationship between economic and political integration in general and the legitimacy of non-majoritarian institutions in particular triggered by the establishment of the European Council and the European Parliament...

...Beyond the European Community and international organisations more generally ... the application of the phrase has been quite circumscribed. Barry Hindess relays ‘a widespread perception that the problem of the democratic deficit is getting worse’.... But ‘democratic deficit’ is not a phrase that finds much place in the burgeoning literature on deliberative democracy, among contemporary writings on direct democracy or in reports from those involved in democratic audits, where the performance of actually existing democracies are measured against a number of democratic criteria.

Goot says that to call a gap between democratic theory and democratic practice a ‘democratic deficit’ begs a key question: against what yardsticks are democratic practices to be measured? He says that standards of democracy are contested. In the theoretical literature the range of possible democratic arrangements – and therefore of possible democratic deficits – is wide:

At one extreme lies the democratic ideal famously articulated by the political economist Joseph Schumpeter: ‘that institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions in which individuals acquire the power to decide by means of a competitive struggle for the people’s vote’ (1943: 269). At the other lies the ideal of direct democracy, defined by Ian Budge, in a recent defence, as ‘a regime in which adult citizens as a whole debate and vote on the most important political decisions, and where their vote determines the action to be taken’.

I reckon that representative liberal government provides the predominant modern understanding of democracy i9n Australia, and so the democratic deficit is an integral part of its design. as it blocks any substantive participation by citizens other than voting in elections. If citizens don't like John Howard's Government, then they can vote in out in an election. So the democratic deficit can be measured in terms of a genuine democracy public policy reflecting citizens’ policy preferences.

Rethinking social democracy

An interesting article by Craig Emerson, a federal Labor MP. It is entitled Expanding opportunity or the welfare state?,’ and it was given as a speech to the Centre of Independent Studies in October 2006. In it Emerson says that the founders of what is now called the neo-conservative philosophy, including Adam Smith and Friedrich Hayek, understood not only the wealth-creating power of unfettered markets, they recognised the damage that practising the free-market philosophy can do to human sensibilities and personal relationships. Thus:

Smith spoke of the stupefying effects of the division of labour and was a strong advocate of better education for workers. He saw a role for the state in providing a general and probably compulsory education for the masses. Smith regarded equal opportunity for education as a more sustainable means of achieving social justice than transfer payments from rich to poor.

And:

Hayek warned that if we were always to apply the rules of the market ‘to our more intimate groupings we would crush them’. He saw a place for altruism and solidarity in the family and in community groupings.
But it is absurd to believe that people are capable of living their everyday lives according to two different sets of rules: the cold, ruthless, dispassionate market and the warm, nurturing, compassionate family. As Hayek feared, these two worlds are not coexisting in harmony, they are colliding. The market is crushing family and community.

Emerson then argues that the modern Labor Party should affirm the family as the focal institution of social wellbeing and reconcile the market with family and community through a love of learning. So what does 'a love of learning' mean?

Emerson links it immediately to social justice. He says:

A society that loves learning is a society that cherishes fairness, tolerance and compassion. A society that loves learning is an open society, a creative society. A society that loves learning is a society in which everyone has a decent opportunity in life. A society that loves learning sets itself apart from a society dictated by doctrine, by anti-intellectualism, a closed society driven by fear of foreigners and security among kin.

I presume that open here means open to the global market. Is the ALP such a party? Emerson says:

The modern Labor Party can be the party of learning, of creativity, a party dedicated to lifting the human spirit in open, strong, vibrant communities, not crushing it with fear of outsiders. It can be the nation-building party, attaining security in openness through a triumph of hope over fear, of compassion over intolerance, of creativity over dogma. Labor can be the party that recognises that a flourishing, self-assured society is much stronger and makes for a much more secure nation than a society cowed by doctrinaire government, a government at best indifferent to learning and at worst hostile to intellectual thought.

This is painting a picture of what a 21st century ALP could become as it is not the ALP today. Emerson says such a party would be guided by the following values:

The modern Labor Party can have a vision of a prosperous, fair, tolerant and compassionate society. Labor’s vision can be brought to life by promoting reward for effort, opportunity for all, tolerance, ecological sustainability, strong communities, a community of nations and a world at peace.

Not a hint of democracy in there. Citizenship is not even mentioned. Emerson goes through each of these values in terms of policies but reforming parliamentary democracy is not on the agenda. Nor is a democratic deficit acknowledged.

Very disappointing.

Liberal democracy's space for citizens

Democracy depends on enlightened and educated citizens if it is to function properly. In a liberal democracy it is not necessary for the Commonwealth government to base policy on the democratic will, however enlightened. The government is not a delegate of the people, however much legitimacy is grounded on popular sovereignty.

Liberal democracy is premised on Joseph Schumpeter's understanding of democracy as ‘that institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions in which individuals acquire the power to decide by means of a competitive struggle for the people’s vote’. According to Murray Goot in his paper Public Opinion and the Democratic Deficit: Australia and the War Against Iraq in the Australian Humanities Review:

On Schumpeter’s view, voters elect the government and, come the next election, can re-elect it if they choose. The idea of an election as some sort of transmission belt for the voter’s will on almost any issue, including issues of war and peace, was one that Schumpeter dismissed out of hand: ‘national and international affairs’ that lacked a ‘direct and unmistakable link’ with ‘private concerns’, he argued, were matters on which, typically, even the best educated citizens lacked interest, were unqualified to judge, and failed conspicuously to apply the rules of reasoning that governed other aspects of their lives.

Were Australian citizens incapable of judging whether or not to go to war in Vietnam or Iraq? They did not consider themselves to be judging from the polls at the time. There was a public feeling or mood that we citizens were experiencing a decaying of democracy. This is one that is deemed to occur in both the quality of representation of the MPs and the engagement of citizens in government processes.

Mark Garavan says that one way to understand this mood is in terms of the dominance in public discourse of a certain version of economic rationality.

This rationality elevates the functioning of a theoretically imagined free market economy to be the epitome of sound social behaviour. Concepts such as competition, efficiency, free choice, privatisation and many others have been elevated to a non-problematic status as guarantors of prolonged economic growth and social well-being. The logic of the free-market is asserted to be the most rational logic available – anything else becomes, ipso facto, irrational and potentially dysfunctional. The claim made is that each individual pursuing his or her own maximum utility results in optimum social well-being. The State’s role is merely to ensure the best environment within which this rationality can proceed. The consequence however is that the concepts of a particular economic language game have overwhelmed our ability to speak politically in any other credible way. Those who attempt to do so can be charged with being unreasonable, unrealistic, and even dangerous. The effect on public discourse of this ascendancy has been to close down the capacity of public representatives to speak credibly in any other categories.

This neo-liberal rationality contributes to the growing loss of belief in liberal democracy as it delimits the space for citizen engagement at a time when the formal channels of exercising democratic power grounded on votes exercised by citizens has become outflanked by informal channels of influence, resting on financial power and political funding (licit and illicit), by the big corporations.

Levinas: rethinking liberalism?

In this review of Howard Caygill’s recent "Levinas and the Political Eric Nelson says that it is Levinas' critique of autonomy and the constructivist recourse to the autonomous self, along with his use of messianic and prophetic language derived from the Torah and Talmud, that makes Levinas a noteworthy alternative for rethinking contemporary liberalism.

A centerpiece of Caygill’s argument is that Levinas’s ethics emerges out of the ambiguity of and need to reconceptualize the republican trinity of liberty, equality, and fraternity. This trinity is restructured by Levinas through a radicalized understanding of fraternity. For Caygill, Levinas’s reinterpretation of fraternity on the basis of alterity and difference promises a new politics of liberty and equality. This politics is oriented and informed by—even if irreducible to—ethics via the notion of justice and the third. This strategy of reconfiguring liberalism and republicanism in the name of the other person is not without its risks. Based on his early experience of the Dreyfus Affair, where Christian fraternity aimed its hostility at Jews and the republicanism that promised their liberty and equality, and its consequences, Levinas focused on the problem of fraternity. Fraternity raises all the issues of identity, solidarity, and community that the dominant tendencies of liberal political theory attempt to bracket. For Levinas, more appropriate concepts of liberty and equality cannot be articulated without fraternity. Levinas’s questioning of national and religious self-assertion through his explorations of fraternity—with all of its promise (solidarity, love of the neighbor, etc) and danger (exclusion, forced assimilation, and annihilation)—also suggests Levinas’s relevance for our situation with its resurgent fundamentalism and nationalism.

Hayek and state planning

Does Hayek approve of state planning? Is he engaged in fostering state action to shape the activity of free individuals in a market order? Does Hayek transgress the libertarian and classical liberal duality of individual freedom versus the state unfreedom?

In this text by Viktor Vanberg in The Cato Journal it is argued that Hayek in both his 1939 article "Freedom and the Economic System" as well as in The Road to Serfdom took particular care to point out that his criticism of modern planners was not about whether we ought to choose intelligently between the various possible organizations of society but about the ways in which we can reasonably hope to improve the order of society by planning and rational construction. Vanberg says:

There is, [Hayek] argues, an important distinction between two kinds of "social planning," namely the "distinction between the construction of a rational system of law, under the rule of which people are free to follow their preferences, and a system of specific orders and prohibition" (1939: 9). While liberalism denies that the latter kind of social planning can be a suitable tool for social improvement, it is not only compatible with the former type of planning, but, in Hayek's understanding, has to consider it the principal means by which we can hope to improve our social condition.

The paper on "Free Enterprise and Competitive Order" stressed the role that the classical liberal doctrine, in his view, ought to assign to the positive task of improving the "legal framework." He suggests there that it is more adequate to interpret "the fundamental principle of liberalism" not as absence of state activity, but "as a policy which deliberately adopts competition, the market, and prices as its ordering principle and uses the legal framework enforced by the state in order to make competition as effective and beneficial as possible" .

Vanberg adds that in a handbook article on Liberalism, written in 1973, Hayek included a section entitled "Positive Tasks of Liberal Legislation" in which he refers approvingly to certain "neoliberal" approaches that explicitly address the issue of what the positive content of the legal framework must be in order "to make the market mechanism operate satisfactorily" ..... Though he did not specify which neoliberal approaches he had in mind, his description certainly fits German Ordo-liberals of the so-called Freiburg School, like Walter Eucken and Franz Boehm... It corresponds to their understanding of the role of liberal legislation when Hayek...notes that the "attitude of the liberal toward society is like that of the gardener" who seeks to create favorable conditions for natural growth.

Hayek is mostly definitely engaged in planning' a system of general rules for a liberal order.

Hayek, Democracy

Many on the libertarian right-wing of Australian politics defend Hayek for taking a strong stand against socialism (social democracy) when socialism was at its peak in England during the 1940s. Road to Serfdom was a trenchant defense of laissez-faire in the face of planned economies, wherein Hayek argued that we should never have a naive trust in the good faith of people who happen to find themselves empowered by bureaucracies to start making decisions regarding how a society’s resources will be doled out. Socialism is a nursery for the growth of totalitarian policies.

However, I've never understood Hayek to be a libertarian; he is a combination of market libertarian and social conservative-in that his "free people" in a spontaneous order are always "submitting to the discipline" required by society's current moral conventions. How does this fit with democracy?

Alex Robson points out Knowledge, Demagoguery and Democracy in the CIS Policy magazine

Democracy is desirable only to the extent that it ensures freedom in the negative sense, and an unchecked democracy is just as undesirable as unchecked totalitarian rule. Democracy can only ever be only a means to an end—the end being freedom—and not an end itself.

Presumably democracy as an end in itself equates with “democratic despotism.” Since Hayek approves of democracy bounded by the "rule of law", and disapproves of "unlimited democracy", it depends what he means by a 'democracy bounded by a rule of law.'

Consider this passage from the 1956 Preface to Road to Serfdom:

Of course, six years of socialist government in England have not produced anything resembling a totalitarian state. But those who argue that this has disproved the thesis of The Road to Serfdom have really missed one of its main points: that "the most important change which extensive government control produces is a psychological change, an alteration in the character of the people." This is necessarily a slow affair... attitude[s] toward authority are as much the effect as the cause of... political institutions under which it lives.... [T]he change undergone... not merely under its Labour government but in the course of the much longer period during which it has been enjoying the blessings of a paternalistic welfare state, can hardly be mistaken.... Certainly German Social Democrats... never approached as closely to totalitarian planning as the British Labour government has done.... The most serious development is the growth of a measure of arbitrary administrative coercion and the progressive destruction of the cherished foundation of British liberty, the Rule of Law... [E]conomic planning under the Labour government [has] carried it to a point which makes it doubtful whether it can be said that the Rule of Law still prevails in Britain...

Hayek has an odd conception of 'democracy bounded by the rule of law. 'Britain under a Labor Government in the 1950s was an "unlimited democracy." This majoritarian legislative-law was lawless government. Presumably, 1950s Britain (or Australia) is a democratic despotism whose paternalism infantilizes people, increases poverty and constrains individual freedom.

The implication is that Hayek would countenance an abridgement of democracy to support the freedom of the spontaneous order. If democracy endangers free markets though regulation then it can legitimately be suppressed. What sits under this is the historical difference between classical liberal constitutionalism and democracy. Classical liberals have always had a healthy suspicion of democracy, fearing that it might amount to mob rule. if Kant called democracy despotism, then Hayek argued that arbitrary majoritarianism was no better than other methods of oppression.T he core principle is freedom from arbitrary (that is, "ruleless") coercion, whether emanating from the crown, the parliament, or the people.

This opens the possibility of a liberal authoritarianism that preserves freedom.

Hayek: Economics and Knowledge

Hayek's The Road to Serfdom and The Constitution of Liberty are works of political philosophy in which he defends market institutions against interventionist policies designed to achieve "social justice." Hayek's antipathy toward socialistic (social democratic) intervention was an expression of his more general concern with what he called the "knowledge problem".

What is less frequently mentioned is that Hayek also argued against the whole neo-classical tendency in all modern equilibrium analysis, to turn economics into a branch of pure logic, a set of self-evident propositions which, like mathematics or geometry, are subject to no other test but internal consistency. The assumption is that individuals have perfect rationality and foresight, and so they then unfailingly make decisions about the allocation of their resources that maximize their utility. This assumption was deeply flawed, given that human knowledge which people will acquire in the course of their economic activity is intensely personal and irretrievably limited or incomplete.

n the 1937 essay "Economics and Knowledge," Hayek formulated the "knowledge problem", which he understood as a problem for all the social sciences, thus:

"How can the combination of fragments of knowledge existing in different minds bring about results which, if they were to be brought about deliberately, would require a knowledge on the part of the directing mind which no single person can possess?"

He then adds:

To show that in this sense the spontaneous actions of individuals will, under conditions which we can define, bring about a distribution of resources which can be understood as if it were made according to a single plan, although nobody has planned it, seems to me indeed an answer to the problem which has sometimes been metaphorically described as that of the "social mind."

Hayek's answer was that market institutions manage to gather the "fragments of knowledge" and coordinate individuals toward efficient outcomes. Hayek's argument is that free markets help compensate for the limitations of human knowledge and rationality. By spontaneously gathering dispersed information and coordinating it through the setting of prices, markets make the choices of individual men both better informed and more rational than they would otherwise be.

Hayek, knowledge, markets

I have come across F. A. Hayek's 1974 Noble Prize speech entitled The Pretence of Knowledge. He opens by saying the:

failure of the economists to guide policy more successfully is closely connected with their propensity to imitate as closely as possible the procedures of the brilliantly successful physical sciences - an attempt which in our field may lead to outright error. It is an approach which has come to be described as the "scientistic" attitude - an attitude which, as I defined it some thirty years ago, "is decidedly unscientific in the true sense of the word, since it involves a mechanical and uncritical application of habits of thought to fields different from those in which they have been formed."

Hayek is concerned to make a distinction between the physical and the social sciences and to argue that these develop their knowledges differently.

Referring to a wellfunctioning market Hayek says that into the determination of these prices and wages there will enter the effects of particular information possessed by every one of the participants in the market process

.. a sum of facts which in their totality cannot be known to the scientific observer, or to any other single brain. It is indeed the source of the superiority of the market order, and the reason why, when it is not suppressed by the powers of government, it regularly displaces other types of order, that in the resulting allocation of resources more of the knowledge of particular facts will be utilized which exists only dispersed among uncounted persons, than any one person can possess. But because we, the observing scientists, can thus never know all the determinants of such an order, and in consequence also cannot know at which particular structure of prices and wages demand would everywhere equal supply, we also cannot measure the deviations from that order; nor can we statistically test our theory that it is the deviations from that "equilibrium" system of prices and wages which make it impossible to sell some of the products and services at the prices at which they are offered.

So Hayek is primarily concerned with the nature, scope, limits, use, and abuse of reason in human life and he argues that our knowledge of the world is at best limited, incomplete, and uncertain. Consequently, the fatal conceit is our undue faith in the power of reason. This is the foundation for Hayek’s primary warning against the pretensions of socialist planning: that human knowledge is intensely personal and irretrievably distributed throughout the population in such a manner that it would be impossible to collate, assimilate and act upon it within the ambit of any collective entity which aspired to better or even match the co-ordination capacities of markets.

This is the message which is developed from his article “Economics and Knowledge” of 1937 through his well-known article, “The Use of Knowledge in Society” of 1945; and the series of articles on “scientism”.

Derrida on philosophy

Back to my digging through the electronic archives of the Canadian electronic journal Surfaces. On this occasion up comes Jacques Derrida engaged in a panel discussion on the crisis of humanities and philosophy. This discussion is based on papers previously published in this issue.

In challenging the exclusionary nature of departmental philosophy that is entrenched in Anglo-American philosophy departments--- eg., an analytic philosophy that has little to do with the humanities and defends the opposition between literature and philosophy---Derrida says something that I utterly agree with.

Now this question of the place for philosophy, the topos for philosophy, is a very strange question. For instance, in the German debate between Kant and Hegel, Schelling, about Humboldt - the place of philosophy within the university. As you know, some of you are, like myself, interested in this problem of the conflict of faculties. On the one hand, you have Kant, who says, well, philosophy is and should be a department, a faculty - - the lower one, under the theological, medical, and law school, but at the same time, the only place where we should be absolutely free to say whatever we want, provided that we simply speak directly and don't try to make performatives. You have this view of philosophy, occupying a circumscribed place, however privileged it may be. And then you have Schelling's (I think it's Schelling's) view. He said, well, the university is philosophical through and through. We don't need a department of philosophy; philosophy is everywhere.

It may have been Schelling but this conception of philosophy runs through Hegel as well as well as Nietzsche.

Derrida continues:

So is it a choice between two logics? Is it a choice? I would say no. Philosophy must be everywhere, is everywhere - not only in the university, but on the radio, within the speeches of the politicians, and so on and so forth. It is everywhere. It is everywhere in the academy. There is philosophy at work in literature, in physics, and so on and so forth. Nevertheless, in addition to that, we should have a specialized training, professional training for philosophy. Otherwise, this, philosophy everywhere, could become a terrible dogmatic weapon. So that's a paradox in the topology of the discipline.

Philosophy is everywhere, but it requires professional/specialized training to be able to practice it. This open conception of philosophy is one that understands philosophy to be part of the humanities. However, this training or education is difficult to acquire, given the entrenched power of the sciences and technology in the corporate university that is run as a business.

The humanities have their roots in romanticism and in the self-questioning, self-critical, auto-critical enterprise, attempting to point out presuppositions, metaphysical assumptions of romanticism exemplified by Nietzsche. The humanities remains a subject of contest and a subject of reinterpretation. The older understanding of the humanities--- their central axis as it were---was been a notion of culture as the synthesizing of symbolic life into something that can be both an object of study and a process to be taught-- has disintegrated.

Redemptive politics

I don't know Surfaces. I've just stumbled into this electronic Humanities journal, which marks the break with the the traditions of the old scholarly institutions. It indicates that the turn to electronic publishing is the way of the future. Surfaces looks to be very interesting, even though it is no longer being published. Presumably, it ran out of grants under a neo-liberal mode of governance.

What we have is an extensive archive to explore, something we should be thankful for in the transition from print to electronic media. I was looking for material to help me understand redemption and politics and I came across Valeria Wagner's Just Politics: Bill Reading's Impertinent Call in Surfaces (Vol.VI). She says that Bill Readings (The University in Ruins) understands "redemptive" as:

all politics relying on the modernist metanarrative of development and assuming that the aim of politics is to lead society to its perfected state, at which point politics itself would reach its end. Such politics, Bill argues, are inherently exploitative, because they "promise a hereafter" which can justify the pains of today: "submit to your bosses in the factory, the home or the party now, and all will be well later on".

I guess we have all been informed by this one as it informs the grand narratives of both liberalism and Marxism in modernity. It is theology secularized.

Wagner says that:

In so far as this kind of metanarrative understands the perfection of society as the absence of conflicts and the end of politics, it ... is not only exploitative, but also terroristic in its vision of a harmonious "all of us" that would be just in itself. This "all of us" is terroristic not only because it is an "all" which we should become, but also because, in order to enable the model of justice and politics of the perfected society to apply, it must be postulated in the present time as a "dormant" and universal "we" in all, which justice, as it were, actualizes, and which cannot be disavowed.

The assumption of such universal "we", Bill argues repeatedly, "lights the way to terror even as it upholds the torch of human rights". We have stepped into the postmodern.