SFHS 2015. Part Two of Two.

Here is the promised second post on the SFHS. I’ve delayed long enough that these papers aren’t really fresh in my mind any longer, but I want to get this off my plate. Apologies for any misrepresentations! I’ll say only that these papers deserve a more thoroughgoing treatment than I’m able to give them here.   

Saturday morning, at a little after 8:30, the panel “Beyond Determinism: Rethinking the Philosophy of History and Political Economy in Postwar France” got underway. Presenters included, in order, Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins, Alexander Arnold, and Aner Barzilay, with comment from Michael Behrent. All three papers were excellent and, at least for me, educational. Behrent’s comment was exemplary—at least what I heard of it. Since I had to leave part way through I won’t have anything to say about it here.   

Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins (hereafter: DSJ) delivered a paper on Raymond Aron entitled (I think) “Liberal Dictatorship, Aron’s Critique of Hayek’s Concept of Liberty,” drawn from his dissertation in progress on Aron. DSJ framed his project broadly as rescuing Aron from the historiographical box of ‘lonely liberal critic of Marxism.’ Aron was more than just a critic of Marxism, and engaged in a fruitful way with many different intellectuals (as it happens I posted some notes on one of DSJ’s earlier papers about Aron and Schmitt here). In particular, Aron leveled his critical fire at various forms of ideology that found material support in the United States—development theory, realist IR, etc—that made universalizing claims something like Marxism. DSJ’s goal in this particular paper is to argue against the understanding of Aron as a neo-liberal, as someone who walked the now-famous road to Mont Pelerin, who was influenced by Hayek especially after a wartime stay in London. It isn’t so, DSJ says.

DSJ develops his critique of the neo-liberal Aron first by criticizing or “mitigating” the moment of sociability, the networks, that have been pointed to in linking Aron to neo-liberalism. The heart of the paper, though, is an archival record of a talk Aron gave in 1955 at a conference in Milan (sponsored by the CCF, and in their archive). The context of this talk was Aron’s new prominence as the author of The Opium of the Intellectuals and especially the “end of ideology” thesis found in its last chapter. This is great material, and  DSJ contextualizes the debate in an exemplary way—this, really, is the paper. The point for DSJ’s larger argument is that Aron describes Hayekian liberalism as ideological in the same way as Marxism—indeed he apparently said there that “at the end of the day, what the liberalism of Hayek constitutes is inverted Marxism.” Economic inevitability ruled both vision of the future, although they pointed in different directions. Hayek would require, as in the title of the talk, a “liberal dictator” to get his system off the ground. Well, Rousseau needed his legislator, so perhaps this isn’t so unreasonable. I’d be interested, in light of this discussion, to go back and re-read Aron’s “États democratiques et états totalitaires” (June 1939).

As is sometimes the case with this sort of argument, by the end I wondered how anyone could possibly have ever thought of Aron as a neoliberal. Perhaps this was clarified in the Q&A. My guess would be that this label is as much an artifact of the polemical theater of French intellectual politics as anything else. DSJ did not spend very much time establishing the definition of neoliberalism according to which Aron would be one, and it seems to me that in fact Aron was a liberal, not a neoliberal. DSJ makes the case (I think convincingly) that a key difference between him and Hayek was that the latter never really accepted the legitimacy of democracy, while Aron did. Having spent some time reading Élie Halévy, Aron now sounds to me more and more like his student, or, conversely, as though Halévy really was Aron’s maître-penseur. The talk mentioned above was, after all, delivered on the heels of an extremely pessimistic survey of the field by Halévy. Perhaps we can say that Aron’s liberalism was, at first, anti-totalitarian, but that he learned to shed this fear as Hayek did not? In any case, a great presentation from DSJ.

Next up was Alexander Arnold, whose dissertation concerns postwar (up to 80s) French political economy, and who spoke about Rosanvallon and economic determinism. This paper was also great, the product of lots of reading of Rosanvallon. I myself make use of Rosanvallon’s work, but I read him first as a historian (the book on Guizot, for instance)—so this paper was particularly interesting for me. Essentially, Arnold reconstructs Rosanvallon’s political economy as he developed it over the course of the 1970s, in his writings as an autogestionnaire. An important climax is the critique of Marx offered in Le capitalisme utopique. I’m not certain that I’m reconstructing Arnold’s reading correctly here, but the idea seems to be that Rosanvallon believes we should read classical political economy as philosophy, not really as a description of economic reality. At its base is an utopique description of the subject, for instance. Nonetheless, Adam Smith—and here, can this really be what Rosanvallon thinks? It’s been some time since I looked at that book—allows us for the first time to philosophically grasp both the institution and the continuity of society. But this is not a description of the world. Marx, however, took the writings of liberal political economy for such a description, and his critique is principally a critique of that economic (in fact philosophical) writing, not of the real economy. “There is enormous distance between concrete society and the discourse of political economy.” Capitalism, in reality, should be understood in a minimal way, which allows for the construction of democratic—autogestionnaire—alternatives, or really reforms.  

This account of political economy, Arnold argues, or really this inattention to it, left Rosanvallon and the deuxième gauche more generally unprepared to meet the challenges of austerity that emerged in the Mitterand years. My central question here is not so much about the reconstruction of Rosanvallon—although I would be interested to see this story extended into his much deeper engagement with the French liberal tradition as the 80s wore on—but about this ‘response.’ Who has been able to meet these challenges? As far as I can tell no one really offers a really compelling account of what is to be done (at least no one who isn’t on the side of austerity). The best Marxisant analyses I’ve seen are rather grim. So what does Arnold want Rosanvallon to have done? To have occupied a more intransigent oppositional position? I’m not sure. In any case, to have avoided advocating “d’apprentissage collectif d’austérité...”

I’m leaving out here a number of things: especially Arnold’s nuanced discussion of the merits of Rosanvallon’s self-description of autogestion as ‘realist,’ and Daniel Lindberg’s criticisms of this; and then the larger framing of the paper in the history of liberalism, and adjudication between the political and the economic aspects of this. I look forward to reading more.

Finally, there was Aner Barzilay, whose talk was “Foucault and Deleuze’s Hidden Debate about Nietzsche” [paraphrase!], and whose dissertation is on Foucault’s Nietzsche. The larger project is to emphasize the continuities on the level of philosophy in Foucault’s oeuvre. This is in reaction to an over-emphasis on the late lectures and on Foucault as a theorist of something called ‘neoliberalism.’ The larger context is above all the question of the transcendental and the subject—trying to keep the two apart. Nietzsche is the most important reference for Foucault, the actuator of the whole project. Barsilay’s talk here is a reconstruction of a (largely implied) dialogue between Foucault and Deleuze, and it is built around Barzilay’s archival discovery of a 1977 note from Deleuze to Foucault discussing just these issues. The exchange and the moment are fascinating. This period, and the political break between the two philosophers, has now received a certain amount of attention. So it is remarkable and much to be appreciated that Barzilay can still bring something new to that table.

I cannot do justice to Barzilay’s talk, so I won’t try to report its details. Delicate questions regarding the nature of the transcendental, the plaisir/desire distinction, and power as Kantian schematization of the subject, were all dissected. Neither Deleuze nor Foucault is to be taken lightly, and Barzilay approaches at a level of textual involvement but also abstraction that makes summary difficult. Again, I’d like to read. 

I agree broadly that we should take Foucault’s earlier work more seriously when thinking about the later lectures. The problem of the subject—historical, transcendental, prison, etc—is indeed clearly a central one for Foucault (and the career-long circling around Kant is unsurprising). I’m less convinced by the centrality of Nietzsche for Foucault generally, but I think this is mostly because I’m skeptical that there’s much of a ‘there’—what did Nietzsche mean, really? To what extent did Foucault take what he needed to take from this corpus? The reference seems constantly to be to the Genealogy, which isn’t the same thing as Nietzsche. But, after all, the point of the larger project is presumably to argue this point. My larger concern with the paper is, I’m sure, not really justified, but here it goes. This paper is, almost, saying: ‘hey, I know you think that the late Foucault is about investigating the actual conditions in which living human beings are made to suffer, but no, in fact it’s about the far more important question of avoiding the transcendental subject!’ I suppose what I want from Barzilay is an account of how the political thought of this newly continuous philosopher-Foucault looks different, or should be appreciated differently, from the less-continuous version of Foucault against which Barzilay is arguing.

I think this is a legitimate question (despite everything) because all three of these papers were about attempts to grapple with the nature of the State. [I'd have liked, also, to hear more explicitly about the question of determinism--although perhaps the originally-planned fourth paper would have helped with this focus]. This common problem was of course clear. Barzilay mentioned, at the end of his talk—and I’ve lost track of in precisely what register, and would like to know—that to refer to the state is to bring a knife to the gunfight of modern politics. There is also Foucault’s famous remark from the lectures about cutting off the head of the State, as well as that of the King. But at issue between Aron and Hayek was interpretation of the nature of the State; and Rosanvallon’s political economy seems also to have turned on the capacity of a subject—a State? A syndicat?—to intervene in the economy. Now, this was self-consciously a panel of intellectual historians, so it is a little pedantic to call on them to be more contextual. And probably Michael Behrent did (some version of) that in his comment. Certainly his work on Foucault and the Foucaultians makes me think him likely to have done so. But how to create this context? Here the panel turns back on itself—intellectual history often does—because, I think, the central question is how we, here today, understand the changing nature of state power in the face of economic imperatives in the postwar world. This is after all the problem all the subjects discussed by the panel were interested in.

That closing is not too coherent, and not too clear, but perhaps I’ll manage to follow it up with an eventual post on essays from the no-longer-so-new Rethinking Modern European Intellectual History (2014).

Aron and Schmitt

The new issue of MIH contains a number of interesting pieces. I want to offer now only a brief remark on the basis of one of them: Steinmetz-Jenkins’ essay on Raymond Aron and Carl Schmitt, the full title of which is “Why Did Raymond Aron Write that Carl Schmitt Was Not A Nazi? An Alternative Genealogy of French Liberalism.” In brief, Steinmetz-Jenkins wants to show how, over the course of the 1970s and especially in reaction to 1968, Aron became much closer to Schmitt, borrowing many of his key concepts and framings. The essay is actuated by a remarkable pair of opposing quotes. First, Aron in 1941 referring to Schmitt as “one of the official theorists of National Socialism,” and second Aron in his 1983 Mémoires, “Carl Schmitt never belonged to the National Socialist party. A man of high culture, he could not be a Hitlerian and never was.” Steinmetz-Jenkins’ essay is quite rich and worth the time of anyone interested in the revival of ‘liberalism’ in France since the 1970s.

A few points only. First of all, one should probably put a “recent” or “contemporary” into the subtitle before “French Liberalism.” The work in question is very much post 1968, and especially aimed rather damning, in the conclusion, at Pierre Manent. Second, I think the essay demonstrates a moderately interesting issue in this sort of intellectual history. The two statements quoted are not merely expressing opposed views about the worth of Schmitt’s work, or even his merits as a human being. Rather, at issue is at least in part a matter of fact. Was Schmitt a member of the Nazi party? As Steinmetz-Jenkins shows, at one point in his life, Aron believed (knew!) that he had been, and a rather committed one at that. By the end of his life, in contrast, Aron wrote that Schmitt had not been. Now, Steinmetz-Jenkins shows pretty clearly why Aron’s view of Schmitt might have changed, and even entertains—although I think in the end rejects—the idea that Aron came to believe he had been mistaken earlier in this matter of fact. But what I find missing here—what there is not really room for in this sort of closely-argued, I might venture ‘philological’ sort of intellectual history, a kind of scholarship that appeals to me very much—is psychology. What about an increasingly out of touch, even bitter, older person who is choosing to remember things one way rather than another? What about simple error? Aron, surely a precise and rigorous thinker, is not an ideal candidate for this sort of thing, but I am interested in the way that the mode of intellectual history pursued here rules out this kind of argument.

Third, finally, and at least to me most interesting is the opposition Aron presents in the later quote. One cannot be, cannot have been, both a man of great culture and a Nazi. This is a logical contradiction. Now, this is one line in a late-written memoir. It is not a statement in the philosophy of history. I hesitate to call it symptomatic. Nonetheless, here is surely a nice example of French liberal rationalism. Culture is incompatible with a nihilistic, bad materialist, violence worshiping political ideology. Spirit and matter cannot both be at work. So, anyway, in light of my own thinking about earlier rationalist French liberalism, I would read that line.

A full citation for the article: Steinmetz-Jenkins, Daniel. “Why Did Raymond Aron Write that Carl Schmitt Was Not A Nazi? An Alternative Genealogy of French Liberalism.” Modern Intellectual History, 11, 3 (2014), pp. 549-574.

Aron on Marx

On the theory that ideological purity is a sign of intellectual degeneration, I turned to Raymond Aron’s textbook (or something like it) Les étapes de la pensée sociologique for a treatment of Marx before looking at Althusser.

This particular text is interesting for several reasons. The book was published in 1967, which I think we can treat as the autumn of Marxism as a fad in French intellectual life. Aron is thus accustomed, at this point, to being set aside. This is perhaps the source of the clarity of his prose. I have for the moment only looked at the chapter on Marx (I think next will be Durkheim), so although I can’t say what the book as a whole attempts to do, I can say that for Marx, Aron attempts simply to say what points he thinks Marx plainly tried to make and to elaborate the sources of the ambiguity that typifies interpretations of this foundational thinker. I can also say that, as someone who has read a great deal about Marx, and has now read a few of the major texts, Aron seems enormously even-handed, though not without his faults.

Whence the ambiguities? First of all, because any philosophy that becomes ‘official,’ sanctioned by governments, and taught to hundreds of millions of people, can only be contested and confused. Apart from this there is the widely discussed philosophical/scientific division in Marx’s corpus. Aron presents this ‘Althusserian’ theory of Marx in contrast to the tripartite set of influences claimed by Marx for himself: English economics, German philosophy, French socialism (that is, sociology). Aron views skeptically the claim that we know, now, that the early philosophical manuscripts contain the secret of Marx’s work, even though Marx himself left them to rot. Many objections could be made (and no doubt have been made) to this somewhat ‘naïve’ approach. I think it is enormously valuable. Aron certainly does not hide the philosophical issues at play for Marx, nor does he attempt to paper over the (perhaps productive) leaps in Marx’s thinking. His naïve reading, then, is in fact an attempt at a less engaged (though no less ideological) appreciation of the author of Capital.

For Aron, Marx is first of all, above all, the author of Capital. Marx was and ‘wanted to be’ a scientific economist. Yet he was, plainly, at first and durably, a philosopher. His economics itself, Aron says, passes necessarily through sociology. So, in very compressed form, we can say that for Aron, the sources of Marx’s various ambiguities are to be found, first, in the confusions, slippages, or décalages between these three areas and, second, in the attempt to derive historical movement, then necessity, from the economic/sociological/philosophical conceptual toolkit he has constructed.

Aron seems to rely on Schumpeter for his criticism of Marx as an economist. For instance, in his discussion of the labor theory of value, after arguing that Marx adopts this theory as the only one that can account for the quantitative nature of the exchange of qualitatively different goods, Aron seems to endorse Schumpeter’s argument that since the value of labor itself is itself qualitatively determined, the whole thing is a word-game. Yet, if I understand correctly, it seems to me that this objection falls into the hole Aron describes between economy and sociology. The value of labor (that is, the cost of reproducing the worker physically, which includes his dependents) is determined socially. It is true that there is a physiological lower limit to the resources necessary for the reproduction of labor (or even for the act of labor), but Marx is quite clear that the cost of labor is determined, we might now say, culturally. This makes it no less real, but it does mean that the primary question is not biological, and perhaps therefore qualitative, but rather remains quantitative. Social norms declare that a certain set of material, of a given value, is necessary for the maintenance of the given worker. There is no bottom to the labor theory of value, and it seems to me that this means it does not run aground on physiology. This, however, is a quibble.

I won’t summarize Aron’s points about Marx more than I have already. But I do want to mention the final section of the chapter, in which Aron sets out the three great crises so far encountered by Marxism. The first, naturally, is the revisionist crisis between Kautsy and Bernstein. Then there is the crisis precipitated by the Bolshevik revolution. This time the antagonists are Kautsky and Lenin. The third crisis—and this struck me as odd—Aron says is contemporary (1967), and is between the Bolshevik and the Scandinavian models of socialism. The antagonism here is between, on the Bolshevik side, an economy planned entirely by a ‘total’ state, and on the ‘occidental’ side, an economy partially planned by a democratic state. Some Marxists, says Aron, are looking for a third way: a genuinely democratic state with a fully planned economy. If I, today, were asked to enumerate the crises of Marxism, I would quite naturally chose the first two in the same way as Aron has done. I might then say that Maoism, or tiers-mondisme was a third. I would want to think about whether the fall of the Soviet Union in fact constitutes a crisis in socialism, but it would be perverse to argue that it does not. I don’t think such an enumeration of crises would be controversial.

One might say that Aron didn’t have the perspective we have now. I think, however, that Aron wanted his crises to line up with the three poles of Marxian thought. The first, the revisionist crisis, is clearly economic. The second, the Russian Revolution, is sociological in that what is at issue, according to Aron, is the relation of state and class. Lenin claimed that the Bolsheviks, since they represented the proletariat, were, when in power, the dictatorship of the proletariat. Or, as many other Marxists thought, did the Bolsheviks really only represent a dictatorship over (‘sur,’ as opposed to ‘de’) the proletariat? Aron thinks that the dictatorship of the proletariat is a ‘myth,’ on obvious impossibility. How can the majority rule? The state itself, the actual human beings making decisions, will always be a minority.

This means that the last crisis, the one that Aron says is contemporary, is a philosophical crisis. It is philosophical in the sense that it represents an attempt to collapse the economic (a planned economy) and the political (democracy). Does Aron mean to suggest that this operation leaves us with the more general science of society, sociology? Writ large, it seems to me that Aron endorses Marx’s sociological categories, but does not draw the same conclusions from them, or find them in history in the same way, as did Marx. So perhaps the lesson is that Bourdieu will rise over the grave of Althusser? Aron, himself, defends the specificity, the irreducibility, of the political. Indeed, I could only smile, thinking about Badiou and Laclau talking about how Marxism tends to collapse the political into the economic—while Aron wrote, 30 years earlier, that one of Marx’s major problems was, “la réduction de la politique en tant que telle à l’économie...l’ordre de la politique est essentiellement irreductible à l’ordre de l’économie” (199). Perhaps it was a commonly made point? I don’t know.

I can’t finish without noting the odd presence, on tel gallimard’s cover for the book, of a detail from Volpedo’s The Fourth Estate, which is also the opening shot of 1900, and on the cover of Laclau’s On Populist Reason. Everyone wants to love that painting.

At any rate, I look forward to reading Aron on Durkheim. I expect he will need to be less careful, but I hope that won’t make him less lucid.