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).

Arendt and Truth and Politics

Because of Martin Jay’s The Virtues of Mendacity, I sat down today to read Hannah Arendt’s “Truth and Politics.” I am very glad that I did, but I do wish that I'd started with the Arendt. Much of what Jay was doing, and why he was interested in certain questions and not others, would have then been clearer.

“Truth and Politics” is, as Jay points out, very much Arendt struggling with herself, raising issues that she is unable to contain in any definitive way. One point that Arendt touches, and that one might ask Jay to have dealt with in more detail, is, “the question of numbers” (pg 235 – I’m using the text as reprinted in Between Past and Future). This is salient in terms of the distinction between fact and opinion. Arendt contrasts the repressive capacities of the totalitarian states with the troubling tendencies of free countries,

to the extent to which unwelcome factual truths are tolerated in free countries they are often, consciously or unconsciously, transformed into opinions—as though the fact of Germany’s support of Hitler or of France’s collapse before the German armies in 1940 or of Vatican policies during the Second World War were not a matter of historical record by a matter of opinion. Since such factual truths concern issues of immediate political relevance, there is more at stake here than the perhaps inevitable tension between two ways of life within the framework of a common and commonly recognized reality. What is at stake here is this common and factual reality itself, and this is indeed a political problem of the first order. (236-7)

From this it follows that, “factual truth...is always related to other people: it concerns events and circumstance in which many are involved...it exists only to the extent that it is spoken about...It is political by nature” (238). These are the kind of sensible observations about which one doesn’t quite know what to do. Certainly not, it seems to me, follow Enrique Dussel’s advice and institute a ministry of truth(-telling in the media). Most interesting in this connection is the historical distance that separates Arendt and Dussel, which we might shorthand as the difference between the experience of totalitarianism and authoritarianism.

As I say, Arendt raises but never really grapples with the special problem that collectivity poses for truth. She of course points to the well attested fact that reasonable ethical principles for an individual cannot be followed by a polity—the relevant one here being Socrates’ ‘it is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong.’ If it seems clear than a politician, whose task is to act in the best interests of a polity, cannot abide by this principle, it is less clear to me that the polity itself is obliged to disregard it. Indeed, it seems to me that the eminently political problem of the establishment of collective norms and ideals is crucial to the question of truth—although perhaps it is a rational rather than a factual truth—and is not something Arendt approaches. It seems that for her, collective norms are simply aggregates of individual ones: “that all men are created equal is not self-evident nor can it be proved. We hold this opinion because freedom is possible only among equals, and we believe that the joys and gratifications of free company are to be preferred to the doubtful pleasures of holding domination” (247). Ethical ideals may become collective, for Arendt, only by undergoing a process of what we might call de-philosophication. This might be the gap between the philosophical and the literary. Ethical principles exist, but ethics is learned through example. Examples need not be physical, although they often are—they can be literary (Young Werther!)

For Arendt, truth-telling is not an action. It is purely reflective. In this it is like political thought, which is representative, and therefore not active. Lying, on the other hand, is an action. Ordinary language philosophy would no doubt have something to say here: truth is simply constative, while a lie is inherently performative—it assumes a whole range of things not assumed by the simple recitation of truth. That’s the story. I’m not sure that truth-telling as a specific kind of action is really any less freighted down with implied context than lying. (Doesn’t Doing Things with Words begin with the admission that, in fact, all language is performative? Or is this a willful miss-remembering on my part?) According to Arendt, though, truth-telling only takes on political meaning in specific circumstances: “Only where a community has embarked upon organized lying on principle, and not only with respect to particulars, can truthfulness as such...become a political factor of the first order” (251). This is the image of totalitarianism. It points to my major question about this essay, one that is very often asked and less often satisfactorily answered: do not contemporary forms of information distribution radical change the situation?

An important foil, in Jay’s book, to the Arendtian perspective, is the ‘aesthetic’ mode of political thought represented in this case by Pierre Rosanvallon and Jacques Rancière. I think it may be significant, in this comparison, that Arendt’s metaphorical construction of truth and the political are tactile, physical, whereas the ‘aesthetic’ (the quotation marks are there because the usage is a little out of the ordinary) is dominated by metaphors of visuality or of discourse.

I should defend my claims. Arendt describes facts and events early in the essay as “the very texture of the political realm” (231). Later, discussing the possibility of ‘the big lie,’ Arendt again uses the word ‘texture,’ this time comparing a lie to “a hole in the fabric of factuality” (253). The wonderful last lines of the essay are, “conceptually, we may call truth what we cannot change; metaphorically, it is the ground on which we stand and the sky that stretches above us” (264). Truth, that is, is that which can be touched and felt; we use it to cloth the nakedness of our existential condition, and when we engage in political struggle, it is the rocky ground on which we plant our feet.

Rancière’s perspective on the political is quite different. His ‘aesthetics’ is the partition of the visible, the making-visible of new subjects, the making-audible of new voices—in order to disagree, we must already consider one another speaking beings. This is a radically different way of conceiving politics. Rancière is not, I think, very interested in the issue of ‘truth.’ Rosanvallon, who is different from Rancière in many ways, is also not very interested in truth as such, but he does use little factual truths to build up a notion of politics as a discursively constructed field of possibilities that is not unlike the one that Rancière approaches from, shall we say, the direction of rational truth.

What both of these notions of politics share is a sort of placeless-ness, an abstract ‘public’ that is perhaps more substantial for Arendt than for, say, Rancière, but is none the less singular for both. I wonder if the real challenge that we face today in the apparent unification and massification of communication is not really the abolition of this abstract and singular place of the public. This is an argument I heard made long ago by Cass Sunstein, and although I know he has been much abused, his lecture made an impression on me, and seems to me still an important point. There is no public sphere, because there is no one place into which everyone must enter in order to hold an opinion. Mass democracy does not just mean, as Arendt and so many of her generation worried, that techniques of psychological control by a central government would become powerful means of political self-deception. Today, to the degree that the production and partition of ‘factual knowledge’ is autonomous and radically democratic, the process of generating and evaluating such knowledge becomes political to an absolute degree. In fact, today in a way never before possible, it seems to me that our political allegiances are broadly identical with the screens we use to evaluate incoming fact-claims. Certainly identity and political position are bound up in surprising (dare I say, early-modern) ways, it seems to me that this is closely related to the situation that one’s politics always precedes one’s ‘decision to believe.’

The simple fact that the above description of ‘our’ condition seems plausible to me at all is why I find that the final pages of Arendt’s essay sound as though she is attempting to convince herself of what she knows not to be true. Speaking of the independent judiciary and, above all, the academy, Arendt says, “it can hardly be denied that, at least in constitutionally rules countries, the political realm has recognized, even in the event of conflict, that it has a stake in the existence of men and institutions over which it has no power” (261). It is gratifying, although not perhaps practically convincing except in an ideal sense, to read Arendt say that, although the technical achievements of the academic technical sciences are enormous, “the historical sciences and the humanities, which are supposed to find out, stand guard over, and interpret factual truth and human documents, are politically of greater relevance” (261).

Rather than saying that Arendt is attempting to convince herself of what is clearly not the case, perhaps it is better to say that she has here driven her own line of thinking to its contradictory conclusion. The academic ward of truth has a crucial political function, but is not itself political. In what must be a pointed dig at Wittgenstein, Arendt says, “reality is different from, and more than, the totality of facts and events, which, anyhow, is unascertainable” (261). Facts and events (interesting distinction, given that the invasion of Belgium by German in 1914, surely an event, is one of her examples of fact) make up the texture of the political. The historian—and the novelist’s—task is “the transformation of the given raw material of sheer happenstance,” that is, to fuse these facts and events into narratives. Arendt glosses this herself as, perhaps, with Aristotle, the cathartic function of the poet—to cleanse men of emotions so that they may act, but also, “the political function of the storyteller...is to teach acceptance of things as they are” (262)—this acceptance is preparatory to judgment and then action; but does that make any sense? Can politics really require that one stops and judges objectively? Can that be what Arendt means? That the answer is at least a little complicated is suggested by who she identifies as the origin of objectivity: Homer. In the equal portrayal of Greek and Trojan—“Homeric impartiality” (263)—,she says, is the origin of the objective historical account. If, to push her a little, it is really Homer who made the earth and the sky, then perhaps there still exists in the power of fictionality some residual spark of the great poet’s capacity to manufacture the conditions of action?

Democracy

Pierre Rosanvallon provides an interesting little introduction to the “Republique des Idées” supplement to Le Monde for the 29th of April, 2009. It can be accessed online here.

This supplement is on the occasion of a three-day forum to take place in Grenoble the 8th, 9th, and 10th of May.

Democracy, Rosanvallon begins by asserting, has always been a form of government in tension with itself: “l’imperatif de compétence et la demande de proximité, le nombre et la raison, la fidélité aux engagements du mandat et la réactivité aux changements, le développement de prodédures contaignants pour la pouvoir et l’execise d’une volonté souveraine.” Democracy must be rethought, “au-delà des procédures électorales représentatives.” The economic crisis, he says, simply exacerbates the already obvious need to find new ways to create social cohesion both in the present, and between the present and the future—as he puts it, “d’inclure plus fortement le future dans le présent.” This moment of crisis could, ought, must open a new era in democratic governance.

Rosanvallon sets out three basic lines along which this rethinking and remaking should take place. “l’extension des procédures et des institutions au-delà du système électorale majoritaires; l’appréhension de la démocratie comme une forme sociale; le développement d’une théorie de la démocratie-monde.”

For this first axis, it seems that Rosanvallon has in mind two basic issues. First, majoritarian forms of representation are prone to various forms of exclusion. An awareness of this and a willingness to deal with it in ad hoc, flexible, ways is crucial. When, for a bundle of socio-historical reasons, a group (which might be defined in many ways) is excluded from the normal modes of representation, other forms of representation should be found. Rosanvallon here mentions the parité movement. Second, ‘public’ institutions should be transparent and accountable. This is a way of supplementing, or deepening representation because, I gather, it is allows the public sphere to function. I wonder if this is to be thought of as a way of letting 'technocratic' impulses play out safely? Public decisions should be submitted to public discussion and detailed evaluation by those who can claim to be experts.

The second axis is, “appréhender la démocratie comme une forme de société, et pas seulement comme un régime.” Democracy is not merely a form of government, but must rather be a mode in which society organizes itself so that everyone may be (feel) included within it. Rosanvallon says, “ce sont les formes générales de la solidarité qu’il s’agit de ranimer.” This is not a technical solution that is sought, but a political one. Indeed, this is something like an ontological repositioning because the whole point is to assert that the ‘social question’ cannot be separate from that of democracy. The social and political are not different domains.

Before mentioning the third axis, I want to pause and point out that although Rosanvallon’s call to think of society as both horizontally inclusive (of everyone) and vertically inclusive (of the future), is reminiscent of the late 19th century, of the solidaristes, his call to reintegrate the social and the political is exactly the opposite of the “invention of the social” performed by that era of French Republicanism (Donzelot). I wonder if we can think of Rosanvallon’s mode of analysis as an attempt to resuscitate a certain kind of republicanism—on one level minus its technocratic impulses, and on another level transforming its ‘socialization’ of political conflicts into an ‘institutionalization’ of today’s conflicts. On the one hand, Rosanvallon clearly says that the fabric of French society has suffered from the disassembly of the social safety net. He is, however, clearly aware that contemporary political problems are declined along ‘cultural’ as much as (more than) ‘class’ terms. Hence the need for different, not simply majoritarian, public institutions. Indeed, it might be argued that it is wrong to assert that the problems of the late 19th century were simply ‘economic’ rather than ‘cultural.’ It is worth thinking a bit more about how the conditions of the question are different in the two periods, and where Rosanvallon’s account differs from solidariste ones because of these conditions, or because he believes he has learned from their mistakes.

The third axis along which Rosanvallon argues democracy must be rethought, and around which the Grenoble conference will be organized, is the question of global democracy. This is an extremely thorny question, and the one about which Rosanvallon says the least in this quite short introduction. In essence, he says, global governance institutions cannot simply reproduce possible models for national institutions on a larger scale. Again, transparency will be key. There are no doubt practical reasons why a sort of ‘global parliament’ wouldn’t function as desired. Yet the answers that pop into my head about why ‘global’ governance simply can’t work (in some sense) like national governance tend to be answers that I would not accept in a national context. Such reflection, it seems to me, raises difficult and fundamental questions. I know that scholars such as Nancy Fraser have done interesting thinking about ways that various forms of sovereignty and organization might overlap and fit together in a global context. Still, I think Rosanvallon is correct, traditional forms of national governance won’t work on a global scale, but this is because they no longer work on a national one either, no longer make sense in, as it is so often said, an increasingly globalized international environment. Easy to say, hard to think meaningfully about.

Rosanvallon interview

The most recent issue of the Journal of the History of Ideas includes a translation of an interview with Pierre Rosanvallon, conducted by Javier Fernández Sebastián in Madrid in September of 2006. Sam Moyn provides some introductory paragraphs. The interview covers a great deal of ground, but a few things in particular piqued my interest.

I’d like to hear more of Rosanvallon’s thoughts on the role of the intellectual in contemporary society. Here he says “In France, the dominant model has been that of the individual who commits his academic legitimacy or his own academic projects in the public arena in order to take a stand. It's a vision that I've never shared. I don't see what special legitimacy an individual would have to interfere in a domain that is not his own. Granted, it's acceptable in a society where the access to public speech is very limited.” So Voltaire and Zola were doing the right thing, because if they didn’t speak, perhaps truth wouldn’t be spoken. But in today’s society, many voices are able to make themselves heard, and the academic has no special duty to speak for other people. Today, the intellectual’s “work has and ought to have the function of rendering contemporary society's difficulties more intelligible...A more lucid society that better understands its questions will perhaps be more rational, will be a society in which political deliberation will be able to be stronger and more active. Hence, I've defined the intellectual as someone who first and foremost possesses tools of comprehension, tools which may also become instruments of action.” (713)

I understand this to imply that I, as a historian (let’s say) of 19^th and 20^th century intellectual history, am not especially in a position to use my cultural capital or legitimacy to speak out against (for instance) police brutality. Rosanvallon gives two reasons for this that don’t exactly fit together. First, there are plenty of voices speaking, why, if I have no special knowledge, should I speak? Second, no one would listen to me anyway, since the intellectual is no longer able to aspire to meaningful celebrity status. Rosanvallon still, however, thinks that the intellectual should be filling the time-honored role of explaining society to itself--that is, to render society intelligible so that it can perhaps be changed for the better. I wonder if it really is possible to provide genuinely useful and new conceptualizations of society and politics without, also, engaging oneself with issues to which one has no deep ties.

At the end of the interview, Sebastián asks Rosanvallon whether he thinks the revolutions in the Spanish-speaking world—variously described as “Ibero-American,” and “Hispanic”—should be considered along with the North American and French as the third great revolutionary cycle of the period, crucial, in their own way, to the birth of modern political culture. Rosanvallon says yes, of course. I wonder how he would conceptualize the Hatian revolution? Would he take any interest in it, or would he regard it as an aberration, overturning as it did a slave society, rather than a feudal one, and replacing it not with a slowly liberalizing set of democratic institutions, but with long-term dictatorship? Would he make anything out of the republican rhetoric of the revolutionaries, or would its failure to produce a durable institutional structure disqualify it?