Category: Books

AN UNEXPECTED FIND

The other day I came across a reference to The War against the West – a book on Nazi ideology published in 1938 by a Hungarian philosopher. The discovery was, like all real discoveries, unexpected. Having noted a volume on Weimar intellectuals on my bookshelf by Wolfgang Bialas I had searched the internet to find out what my old acquaintance had been up to. It turned out that among other things he had edited a volume of essays on The War against the West – a book he called the most penetrating analysis of Nazi ideology.

That certainly sparked my interest, since I had long obsessed about that weird amalgam of beliefs. But what really caught my attention was that the author of the volume turned out to be  Aurel Kolnai, who had been one of my colleagues at the University of London at the beginning of my teaching career. A lecturer at Bedford College, he was an elderly, odd looking man whom I saw here and there at various official occasions. He was, I found out, a Hungarian exile, a refugee from both Nazism and Communism. He was also a devout Catholic and he had written a book on sex and disgust in which dicey passages were composed in Latin. I had heard all this from my friend Bernard Williams who considered Kolnai to be an interesting and original philosopher. But I never made any attempt to learn more about him at that time.

Bialas’ words, however, made me curious. Our library catalogue showed that we had a number of Kolnai’s books in Berkeley. One of the was called A Political Memoir. I have a long-standing interest in philosophical autobiographies and memoirs – asking myself how philosophers sought to interpret their own lives in philosophical terms. A Political Memoir seemed ta good place to get some quick insight into Kolnai’s thinking.  After that I could turn to the 700 pages of the War against the West. 

The Political Memoir has turned out to be a fascinating opening into an unusual mind. I find myself glued to its pages. Kolnai was born in 1900 into a Jewish Hungarian family. The story he tells of the first fifty-five years of his life is at the same time the story of Europe in the first half of the twentieth century. He reveals himself as a keen and discerning observer of the terrible things that were transforming the world. Essential to his story is his conversion to Catholicism from an indifferent attachment to the Jewish religion when he is in his late twenties. But his course on that road is far from usual. He acquires early on a devotion to the work of G. K. Chesterton, the English Catholic writer, and it is this influence that determines his conversion. Kolnai is, in fact, in his own words an “Anglomaniac.” He admires, in  particular, the conservatism of the English. When he finally gets to London he feels, at last, at home though financial worries will eventually take him to teach in America. A Political Memoir depicts an unusual person writing about his own times and himself in an intelligent  and highly individual fashion. Now I feel that I need to read more of Kolnai’s works.

Not Thinking Like a Liberal

Philosophers should write about their own lives, was Ludwig Wittgenstein’s advice even though he himself never tried to do so. He was probably thinking of Augustine’ Confessions as a template – a work that sought to be both biographical and philosophical at once, not just an unreflective retelling of its author’s life.[1] Augustine initiated in this way a form of writing that confronts the self with the thought that prevails in its world.[2] Montaigne rightly counts among the great practitioners of this art and Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo has to be seen as one of its most memorable examples. Raymond Geuss’s latest book, Not Thinking Like a Liberal, is no doubt, an original and captivating contribution to this genre.  Augustine, Montaigne, and Nietzsche were evidently among Geuss’s inspirations for his new book, though obviously in very different ways.[3] Augustine because, like Geuss, he was much preoccupied with the course of his education, Montaigne because he expressed himself in an essayistic style akin to Geuss’s way of writing, and Nietzsche most of all because, like Geuss, he was driven by a sense of alienation from his own world. “We feel disfavor for all ideals that might lead us to feel at home … in this fragile, broken time of transition,” Nietzsche had written in The Gay Science. “As for its ‘realities,’ we do not believe that they will last.”[4] The words might well have served as the motto for Not Thinking Like a Liberal.

Instead, Geuss has chosen a passage from Robert Musil’s novel Die Verwirrungen des Zōglings Tőrleß in which the young hero begins to read a book “with so many parentheses and footnotes hat he did not understand a word” and “had the feeling that an aged, bony hand was slowly extracting his brain from his skull, winching it out as if winding it around a screw.” (p. v) This is not the last moment when the reader of Not Thinking Like a Liberal will experience a sensation of this sort. Geuss’s book is full of unforeseen turns, unsettling insights, challenging opinions richly interspersed with qualifications, parentheses, and footnotes. It is a book by a philosopher on philosophy but quite unlike most of such productions. It is a piece of autobiography that tells us only a few, select things about its author. It illuminates its author’s state of mind as well as the state of our contemporary culture but in depicting both as puzzles. Geuss concludes his preface appropriately with the words: “The exact relevance of my account is something I must leave up to the reader’s judgment.” (p. xv) Like young Tōrleß, we may find it difficult to reach a settled judgment on the book but with the worrying sense that this uncertainty is precisely what the author intends to leave us with.

What contributes to this feeling is Geuss’s way of writing. He explicitly repudiates the style of writing that has become common in philosophy today with its linear argument leading from sharply defined premises to definite conclusions. His way of writing is exploratory rather than argumentative. The examination of one idea leads him to that of another often in unexpected transitions until the circle is in some way completed. Geuss explains his way of writing in words reminiscent of Wittgenstein’s preface to his Philosophical Investigations: “It often seemed like aimless wandering in a singularly inhospitable environment.” (p. xiv) He has perfected this distinctive style of writing in recent years in a series of essays published in books with intriguing titles like A World without Why (2014), Reality and its Dreams (2016), and Who Needs a World View? (2020).  His new book is probably best read in conjunction with those earlier works – as an extended essay of reflections on a variety of interrelated topics rather than a straight-forward autobiography. It expands in fact on the lead essay of Who Needs and World View? and it may be fully accessible only in company of that piece. The reader of Not Thinking Like a Liberal is, in any case, well-advised to ask constantly: if not like a liberal than like who? To which the answer has to be: like its author who refuses to be pinned down.

The book begins and ends with an indictment of liberalism and that theme maintains a constant presence in the book. The reader may, for this reason, want to look at the discussion of liberalism as the first, upper-most layer in the critical reflections of the book.  Geuss fastens initially on the Anglo-Saxon world with what he takes to be its abiding faith in the conjunction of capitalist economics and liberal democracy. That world is now in steep, even staggering decline, he insists, citing the financial crisis of 2008, the rise of Donald Trump in the US, and the UK’s break with the European Union. But the rot goes much deeper in his eyes and extends beyond the Anglo-Saxon sphere and the West. Our species as a whole appears to be set now on committing suicide by destroying its natural environment.  (p. 167) What has brought about the rise of the West and its increasingly evident decline and what is also bringing ecological disaster upon us now is the “fantasy” we have of ourselves as sovereign individuals with its accompanying illusion of “purity, absolute autonomy, and self-dependence.” (p. 41). Geuss considers this fantasy to be the core of a deeply entrenched version of modern liberalism committed to the inviolability of individual taste and opinion and the protection of unfettered individual choice and free commercial enterprise. His judgment on liberalism (or, rather, this particular form of liberalism) is uncompromising. He finds it impossible to see “how the traditional remedies of liberalism will be of any help in the world we now inhabit.” (p. 165) Liberalism, he adds, has begun to show itself “in an increasingly unmistakable way to be at best irrelevant and at worst actively deleterious to human well-being.” (pp. 165-166) The paradox is that our world is increasingly out of control while we stubbornly hold on to the belief in human autonomy. Given this state of things, Geuss concludes, liberalism is “not the place to seek insight into anything.” (p. 161)

Such bold assertions would seem to need backing up. But that is not what Geuss is after. He writes: “I am not, that is, trying to refute liberalism.” Readers may come to change their views as a result of reading his book “but I realize that that is largely out of my control.” (p. 167)  One has to look for an argued critique of liberalism elsewhere in Geuss’s oeuvre.  In his History and Illusion in Politics of 2001 he had characterized liberalism as a historical movement in which notions of toleration, freedom, individualism, and the limitation of power coalesce in various and contingent ways and he had then proceeded to subject each of those notions to detailed critical analysis. Some of them, he had concluded, were highly confused, others extremely implausible, and several of them stood in severe tension with each other. For all that his judgment had not been completely dismissive. In his 2008 essay on “Liberalism and its Discontents” Geuss acknowledges a “continuing vitality of this tradition” and  allows that a  certain kind of liberalism – one that is anti-Kantian and anti-Rawlsian in spirit – may provide a “promising orientation for thinking and acting politically in the future.”[5] But since writing those words Geuss has become profoundly more negative in his assessment of both liberalism and the situation in which we find ourselves today. He has also become more pessimistic about the use of philosophically systematic arguments than he was twenty years ago. Over the years he has come to see that despite everything that has been or may be said against it, the liberal ideology still prevails. Argument, seems thus unable to dislodge it. Despite all its weaknesses, which Geuss does not tire to point out, the faith in liberalism persists.

His book is, however, by no means a single-minded diatribe against liberalism. It is just as much a critique of authoritarianism and this critique forms what we might call the second layer of Geuss’s book. His initial statement that the world is in the unwavering grip of an individualistic liberalism was, of course, in any case a wild overstatement. So is his unqualified assertion that “the vocabulary of ‘liberalism’ is the dominant and virtually all-pervasive idiom of our thought and speech.” (p. 163) This may hold true in some corners of the world and in some powerful places, but liberalism is surely no longer an uncontested political ideology. There exists today a whole roster of authoritarian powers, starting with China and Russia down to numerous petty autocracies sprinkled across the globe. In the West, too, there have arisen authoritarian parties, politicians, media outlets, and websites with millions of followers. The critique of authoritarianism proves therefore just as urgent as the indictment of liberalism. Geuss can have no doubts about that even when his eye remains mostly focused on the challenge of liberalism.  Some of his critical remarks on liberalism appear, in fact, due to nothing other than his strongly anti-authoritarian sentiments – but directed in his case against the liberal claim to authority

In reflecting on this situation we are in danger, Geuss argues, of assuming that the choice is between liberalism and authoritarianism. And that would generate yet another misconception. It is true that liberals tend to see no other alternative. But “Liberalism or authoritarianism” is a false dichotomy. We must refuse to reflect on these matters in binary terms. Geuss makes his case for such a refusal with what he calls “a kind of ethnographic account, with a strongly autobiographical component.” (p. 2) His goal is , he writes, “to paint a picture of a form of life” which depicts “one particular niche in the ecology of modern societies,” and thus “to trace one life-path that diverges from the liberal consensus without being authoritarian.” (pp. 2 and 9)

Having grown up with “the general authoritarian tendency of the Catholic Church in the United States,” Geuss sets out to describe how he found himself by luck in an extraordinary Catholic boarding school that was both “anti-liberal and non-authoritarian” (p. 43). And later on as a student of philosophy at Columbia University he became acquainted with teachers who, in a very different way, combined the same attributes. To be more specific, he encountered two extraordinary teachers: a Hungarian émigré priest, Father Bela Krigler, at his boarding school and the philosopher Sidney Morgenbesser at Columbia. “None of the many philosophers I met later in life, despite the evident intellectual power and seriousness many of them had, had nearly the real, continuing effect that Bela and Sidney did,” Geuss writes in his essay “Who Needs a World View?”[6].

For Krigler, liberalism was “a clumsy and completely unphilosophical rubbish heap of narrow-minded prejudices, bits of wishful thinking, and random observation,” a debased form of ancient humanism.[7] He thought that there were only two major spiritual powers in the world, two coherent world-views: Catholicism and Communism.[8]  But he also  dismissed traditional Thomism, considered the authoritative philosophy of the Catholic Church,  as “a particularly sclerotic form of late Aristotelianism” and nurtured a passion for contemporary philosophy (including Heidegger) and psychoanalysis which he freely communicated to his students. While he rejected liberalism and its belief in the autonomous individual, his exposure to Communism also made him shun any kind of authoritarianism. His entire school operated, in fact, on such principles.

In contrast to Krigler, Morgenbesser did not address himself directly to liberalism. Instead, he bypassed it in his thinking. The most important thing Geuss learned from him was a distinction between accepting a philosophical theory on the basis of conclusive arguments and accepting it on the basis of a commitment that outruns the evidence.  Ideally, one should of course, be guided, in one’s beliefs, engagements, and actions by evidence but that is often lacking or inconclusive. Commitment to a theory (we might even say to a faith) or. alternatively, refusal to commit oneself to it can thus not be accounted for entirely in terms of its evidential support. The distinction serves Geuss to explain  Morgenbesser’s attitude to liberalism. Influenced by Dewey, Marx, and the Jewish sense of community, liberalism proved a view of the world that was deeply unsympathetic to Morgenbesser’s way of thinking. He could not even be bothered to find arguments against it. “He simply found he lacked motivation to engage with it on its own terms.” (p. 135) Geuss adds, that he discovered quickly at his boarding school that he lacked similarly the motivation to accept Krigler’s version of Catholicism even though he was deeply attracted to his rejection of both liberalism and authoritarianism.

From Columbia, Geuss moved on to Freiburg as a result of a flirtation with the thought of Martin Heidegger. There he discovered the poet Paul Celan and the philosopher Theodor Adorno. Celan’s poetry taught him the sobering lesson that “the basic fact about the universe that it is infinitely pointless, utterly lacking in any kind of meaning.” (p. 150) It is in this stark condition, according to the poet, that humans “encounter each other, can experience human contact and even a certain limited understanding.”

Geuss found that that this harsh lesson to be re-enforced by Adornos’ observation that there is no right way to live in our false society: “Es gibt kein richtiges Leben im falschen.” (p. 82) Adorno’s Minima Moralia appealed to him thus as “an extended criticism of some of the central tenets of liberalism.” (p. 157) Adorno ‘s reflections showed him that the subject is not naturally autonomous, that the self is constituted by social relations, and that we can hope to achieve at most a partial autonomy but that only by recognizing our dependence.[9]

By telling this story of his own intellectual development, Geuss seeks to subvert both liberalism and authoritarianism. And he is surely right in thinking that such a narrative, when  properly told, will undermine the belief in a naturally given human autonomy as well as that in a naturally determined order of submission to authority. For the biographical story will make evident that the development of human individuality takes place in a shared environment, that there are always others who have guided and accompanied the narrator, that the individual is embedded in and defined by a surrounding world and inherits from it much of its way of thinking. It will also reveal that this course of development allows a degree of liberation from authority, a partial escape from dependence, and it shows how to achieve that partial escape. In Geuss’s account, Father Krigler, Sidney Morgenbesser, and the author himself are meant to illustrate that complex reality.

The indictment of liberalism, the critique of authoritarianism, and the search for a way of thinking that is neither liberal nor authoritarian constitute successive moments in Geuss’s reflections. Those consideration are, however, not their end-point. They take us, rather, to a further and deeper layer of thought Liberalism and authoritarianism are world views (or follow from broad views of the world) and that is one reason why neither of them can be defeated by argument. In order to oppose and defeat them, it may seem necessary to come up with another more satisfying view of things.  One might for that reason assume that Geuss’s autobiographical account is intended to make such an alternative world view plausible and attractive. Developing such an alternative worldview had been Father Krigler’s project. Through him, Geuss learned of the work of progressively minded Catholic philosophers and theologians in Europe who were engaged in devising such a world-picture. For a while Geuss himself became an avid reader of the  Austrian magazine Wissenschaft und Weltbild which actively pursued that agenda. But he did not, in the end, make it his own. While Krigler was sure that humans must have a world view, Geuss writes: “I did not find myself able to respond to Father Krigler’s eloquent appeals… His project didn’t seem to be likely to be achievable… It certainly had no attraction for me.”[10]

His association with Sidney Morgenbesser at Columbia and his reading of Adorno in Freiburg were, in any case, to take him in a different, more skeptical direction.  Morgenbesser was convinced  that the logicians Tarski and Gōdel had  dented the idea that there could be a comprehensive world view.  According to Tarski there can be no single all-encompassing definition of truth and according to Gōdel there can be no single complete theory of elementary mathematics. How then could there be a single true theory of everything, a comprehensive Weltanschauung?[11] And from Adorno, Geuss received the idea that philosophy cannot be “directed at producing detachable propositions or theses that could be extracted and taken away from the whole of the text at the end.” (p. 152)

Geuss concludes from this that “we have become rightly suspicious of all totalizing constructions.” This, he writes, may, indeed, be “the defining philosophical difficulty of our time.” (p. xiii) Our paradox is that we can see the untenability of total world views but don’t seem to be able to do without them.  We need them, so it looks, even though it is evident that none of them is likely to be satisfactory. And because of this need our views of the world will not be defeated by showing that their claims are false. No formal refutation will dislodge them. We should then not be surprised to find that formal arguments against either liberalism or authoritarianism are useless. We need to identify, rather, the underlying needs that give rise to them and hold them in place.

Not Thinking Like a Liberal seeks thus to diagnose the seemingly primal needs that make us hold on to the picture of ourselves as autonomous beings. The need in question may turn out to be that of affirming our power over a world that proves our transparent and growing powerlessness. Not Thinking Like a Liberal also seeks probe the need that makes us cling to an authoritarian world view. It appears as the natural counterpart of liberalism. It is motivated, like liberalism, by a fear of powerlessness but turns that fear – as it does in Calvin’s Geneva – into a belief in absolute authority. Geuss’s reflection on the life of Father Krigler is thus meant to show us what needs support the adoption of one world view as against another. And his account of the life of Sidney Morgenbesser and his own autobiographical narrative intimates how to overcome those needs.

With this we finally reach the final layer of Geuss’s reflections. Philosophy as we have understood it so far has either concerned itself with specific arguments or sought to devise world views (or pursued a combination of the two). But if neither argument nor the construction of world views can help us to overcome our illusions, philosophy itself becomes problematic. Geuss concludes his book by writing that “philosophers cannot pretend to be the voice of universal reason or propose an all-encompassing worldview.” (p. 164) He returns at this point to a theme of his 2017 book Changing the Subject. Philosophy from Socrates to Adorno. The philosophical tradition that started with Socrates, he claims in that book, has come to an end in the late twentieth century. He quotes Celan’s description of poetry as “that form of speech which declared that mortality and futility were infinite.” But he adds immediately that philosophy, by contrast, presupposes a minimum of optimism though certainly not the “almost dementedly sunny view” that the tradition has drawn.[12] There remain philosophical questions that are worth exploring and, as he adds in Not Thinking Like a Liberal, some of the analyses and proposals philosophers have offered may still be of interest. But it is clear, on Geuss’s view, that philosophy cannot in good conscience continue along its well-trodden paths.

The lessons he draws for himself are stark: Not to think like a liberal and not to think like an authoritarian either; and not to look for an alternative world view that is both non-liberal and non-authoritarian; in fact, not to look for any world view; not to expect to sort these matters out by constructing deductive arguments; not to follow the dried-up main-stream of philosophy; not to expect a positive answer. Geuss is surely right in maintaining that critical thinking does not have to come up with positive conclusions and that action does not require hope its ends will be realized. We may still want to ask: what is left after all these negations? It is thinking reflectively and in personal terms, writing in the form of an autobiographical essay, continuing in the task of changing the subject. There are no fixed routes in the place in which we are traveling. Our journey through it will have the character of a ramble characterized by spontaneity, even whimsy and occasionally by the pleasure of the moment. “The text that follows,” he writes in the preface of his book, “tells the story of one individual path through this landscape.”  (p. xiv)

Notes

[1] See in this context Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations 1

[2] Thomas Mathien and D. G. Wright, Autobiography as Philosophy. The Philosophical Uses of Self-Presentation, Routledge, London 2006.

[3] The three are included among twelve philosophers Geuss examines in is 2016 book Changing the Subject. Philosophy from Socrates to Adorno (Harvard U. P., Cambridge/Mass.) though not specifically with respect to the autobiographical aspects of their work. While Geuss takes a favorable view of Montagne and Nietzsche, he writes unsympathetically of Augustine’s “repellent self and … the unattractive flabbiness of his written style.” (p. 95)

[4] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 377.

[5] Outside Ethics, p. 28.

[6] Raymond Geuss, “Who Needs a World View?” in Who Needs a World View?, Harvard U.P.,  Cambridge/Mass. 2020, p. 39..

[7] “Wo Needs a World View?”, loc. cit., p. 6.

[8] “Who Needs a World View?, pp. 6 and 2.

[9] Not Thinking Like a Liberal is a book full of diverse ideas. But there is also much that it leaves out. Its autobiographical narrative, for one thing, is highly selective. The book covers no more than a dozen years of the author’s life. And even those are retold with great circumspection. We never even find out what the main protagonists of the story, Krigler and Morgenbesser, looked liked. They remain mere voices. Geuss himself appears mostly as a listener who records what others have said. One emotional outburst is recalled in the essay “Who Needs a World-View?” where Geuss tells us of his irreparable break with Morgenbesser.  We have to assume that Geuss’s intellectual development did not end around 1970, as he claims. What did he learn from teaching at Princeton and Columbia? How did the move to Cambridge and England change him? At the end we may feel that Geuss has not told us enough about himself. He certainly does not seek to bare his innermost self to us. In Changing the Subject he dismisses the “Christian-inspired” probing of the depths of the self that he finds in Augustine. He prefers, instead, Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo “with the extensive discussion of his life by reference to his preferred diet, the landscapes he loves, and his favourite meteorological conditions.” (p. 191) Not that he follows Nietzsche in this respect.

[10] “Who Needs a World View?” p. 14.

[11] Ibid. p. 20

[12] Changing the Subject, pp. 299-300.

 

Raymond Geuss: The task of political philosophy

There is often a significant time lag between an idea and its expression. Being aware of that gap maybe necessary for appreciating the original idea for what it is. I am reminded of this in reading Raymond Geuss’ book Philosophy and Real Politics which was published in 2008 but draws its inspirations ultimately from the late 1960s and early 70’s when its author was a student at Columbia University in New York City. In his recent autobiographical essay Not Thinking Like a Liberal Geuss write: “Nothing that has happened in the fifty years since I finished my doctoral dissertation in 1971 has really had a radical effect in shaking the basic way of viewing the world which I had acquired.” How then – we want to ask – is Philosophy and Real Politics rooted in that earlier period and why is its lesson still useful to us in the third decade of the 21st century?

Columbia University was a place of political agitation during Geuss’ time as a student. He may not have been much of an activist, but he was certainly touched by the events. At one point his most important teacher and intellectual role model, Sidney Morgenbesser, was bloodied in a confrontation between the protesting students and the police. This local unrest was part of the political and social turmoil that extended at the time across the globe from the United States to France, Germany, China and numerous other places – including Tunisia where it spawned Michel Foucault political engagement. We can see today that the upheavals had far-reaching effects in all those countries. Our world would look entirely different without them – though they didn’t necessarily bring about the changes their protagonists had hoped for.

One outcome of these happenings was the revitalization of political philosophy in the United States, a topic that had been languishing for some decades. Starting in the early 1930s and accelerated by the arrival of émigré philosophers from Europe, American philosophy had come to focus on the study of logic, language, and the sciences, largely by-passing the problems of politics. What had come to dominate was a somewhat restrictive form of “analytic philosophy.” But in the social and political upheavals of the 1960s the philosophers were suddenly confronted with students who challenged the “relevance” of what they were doing. The result was a renewal of philosophical interest in political philosophy. Of particular importance in this turn were the Harvard philosophers John Rawls and Robert Nozick. Rawls published his acclaimed book A Theory of Justice in 1971 and Nozick followed hm in 1974 with Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Each of those books defended a political view that was widely popular in America: Rawls a mainstream progressive liberalism and Nozick a libertarian anarchism. It was in this period that Geuss also turned to political philosophy.

But he moved from the beginning outside the emerging current of American political philosophy. In his autobiography he writes of his “naturally contrarian temperament” and his feeling “distant from the prevailing philosophical culture.” Having gone to Freiburg/Germany for the academic year 1967-1968 with an interest in Heidegger, he discovered there the writings of Theodor Adorno. Their critical, skeptical, even pessimistic tone attracted him. But this did not mean that he began to think of himself as a fully committed member of the Frankfurt School and its critical theory. He had, in particular, not much sympathy for Juergen Habermas’ attempt to construct a systematic socio-political theory. He remained, rather, true to Adorno and his critical approach to philosophy. It is with this in mind that we must approach Geuss’ Philosophy and Real Politics.

Geuss taught at Princeton, Columbia, and the University of Chicago in the early parts of his career but then moved to Britain in 1993 to take up a position of lecturer and professor of philosophy at Cambridge University.  There he discovered a more congenial intellectual environment than he had known in in the US. Where American political philosophy tended to be affirmative, optimistic, and moralistic, the English political philosophers proved to be more skeptical, more pessimistic, and more “realist” in their thinking. (Stuart Hampshire, Bernard Williams, John Dunn, Quentin Skinner, and John Gray come to mind.)

While teaching in the US, Geuss had been slow to publish. His only book at the time was small volume on The Idea of a Critical Theory that appeared in 1983. But since then, he has published eight books, most of them collections of essays. In that series of publications, Philosophy and Real Politics may be the most important. It is certainly Geuss’ most programmatic statement in political philosophy.

Geuss begins the book by drawing a distinction between “ideal” and “realist” theories in political philosophy. In the book he clearly identifies with the latter but has since come to regret calling himself a political realist. A better description would, indeed, be to call him a diagnostic political thinker (a term he doesn’t us) because the starting point of his philosophical thinking is a diagnosis of what he conceives to be the dominant liberalism of our era. What he opposes, in particular, is the moralistic conception of politics in Rawls’ political liberalism. This, he thinks, derives ultimately from the philosophy of Kant. He writes: “A strong ‘Kantian’ strand is visible in much contemporary political theory, and even perhaps in some real political practice. This strand expresses itself in the highly moralized tone in which some public diplomacy is conducted, at any rate in the English-speaking world, and also in the popularity among political philosophers of the slogan ‘Politics is applied ethics.’”  He adds: “In this essay I would like to espouse and advocate a kind of political philosophy based on assumptions that are the opposite of the ‘ethics-first’ view…”

In the introductory section of the boo, Geuss makes four observations about how we need to think about politics and political philosophy. The first is that “political philosophy must be realist.” It must be concerned “not with how people ought ideally (or ought ‘rationally’) to act … but rather with the way the social, economic, political etc. institutions actually operate.”  Political philosophy must recognize furthermore that “politics is in the first instance about action and the context of action, not about mere beliefs or propositions.” Politics is, moreover, to be understood as “historically located,” And it is, finally, “more like the exercise of a craft or art” than an application of a theory. Its exercise relies on skill rather than theoretical understanding. He summarizes his view later in the book provocatively as a form of neo-Leninism. “In my view, if political philosophy wishes to be at all connected with a serious understanding of politics, and thus become an effective source of orientation or a guide to action, it needs to return from the present reactionary forms of neo-Kantianism to something like the ‘realist’ view, or, to put it slightly differently, to neo-Leninism.”

To explain this surprising claim, he adds: “Lenin defines politics with characteristic clarity and pithiness when he says that it is concerned with the question that keeps recurring in our political life: ‘Who, whom?’ ” He admits that Lenin’s formula is perhaps too dense and needs to be expanded. “First of all, the formula should read not merely ‘Who whom?’ but, rather, ‘’Who [does] what to whom for whose benefit?’ with four distinct variables to be filled in, i.e., (1) Who, (2) What, (3) To whom, (4) for whose benefit? To think politically is to think about agency, power, and interests, and the relations among these.” One consequence of this view is that it helps one to overcome some of the currently popular views in political philosophy. “If one takes this extended Leninist model as the matrix of political philosophy, certain consequences would seem to follow. The first is that it would be a mistake to believe that one could come to any substantive understanding of politics by discussing abstractly the good, the right, the true or the rational.” Another implication of Lenin’s view is that “every theory is ‘partisan.’” This implies that “any kind of comprehensive understanding of politics will also have to treat the politics of theorization.” Political philosophy must, in other words make itself a subject of examination. We must ask such things such as: What is the political background from which a political philosophy emerges? The political philosopher always occupies a place within a political context. So, how does his/her thinking reflect that context? And how does a political philosophy shape actual political practice?

Lenin conceived politics in terms of power and the understanding of the concept of power has to be, indeed, one of the tasks of political philosophy. But Geuss considers it a mistake to treat ‘power’ as a single, uniform substance or relation wherever it is found. We should, instead, speak of a variety of qualitatively kinds of power. “In this account ‘power’ is to be construed as connected with general concepts like ‘ability to do’ “To illustrate this, Geuss offers us these examples: (1) Coercive power by virtue of physical strength, (2) persuasive power “by virtue of being convinced of the moral rightness of your case and having a special training or natural talent for speaking,” (3) the power of a charismatic figure due to an ability to attract enthusiastic, voluntary support, and finally (4) power due to one’s belief that one has power and that one is perceived to have power.

But Geuss adds that the political philosopher needs to think about more than power; other major concerns should be the notions of political priorities, timing, and legitimacy.  Priorities involve an opting for A rather than B or before B. Politics characteristically demands the choice between different options, none of which may be ideal, rather than an unconditional pursuit of an absolute good. We always act politically under non-ideal conditions. Timing is all-important. We usually can’t wait to make decisions and are forced to take action when the opportunity or the need arises without having a full understanding of this situation, of the consequences of our actions, nor even of what the best outcome would be. There is finally also the question of legitimacy. Max Weber distinguished three sources of legitimacy, that is, our reasons for accepting political authority: tradition, charismatic leadership, rational-legal. All these notions call for clarification and providing such must be a basic task of political philosophy.

These then are the tasks of a realistic political philosophy:

  • Understanding: describing and analyzing the actually obtaining political reality
  • Evaluation: assessing features of this reality. Geuss holds, in contrast to Weber, that there can be no “value-free” political philosophy.
  • Orientation: providing us with a more or less comprehensive vision of the political situation
  • Conceptual innovation: by providing a set of new concepts the political philosopher may get us to see our situation in an entirely new way.
  • The critique of ideology as a form of power that is used “to shape opinions, attitudes, and desires and thus to manufacture what look like ‘consent.’”

In the second part of his book Geuss criticizes a number of “ideal theory” versions of political philosophy distinguishing “two influential contemporary views that represent almost the direct opposite of ‘realism.” The first involves an attempt “to construct a society along the lines of an idealized legal system structured around a set of rights.”  These rights may be conceived as “either legal rights or some more vaguely envisaged ‘human’ rights.” He takes as his target, specifically the first sentence of Robert Nozick’s State, Anarchy, and Utopia according to which: “Individuals have rights, and there are things which no persons or group may do to them (without violating their rights).” From where do these rights come? How is the claim justified? “It is not that Nozick got something wrong by specifying the wrong set of rights or making mistakes of argumentation, He does not ask the right questions, and by presenting ‘rights’ as the self-evident basis for thinking about politics, he actively distracts people from asking other, “highly relevant questions.”

Geuss’ second major target of criticism (here and in other writings) is John Rawls who wants to conceive of politics in terms of the implementation of the virtue of justice. His immediate target of attack is Rawls’ initial statement in A Theory of Justice that “justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought… Truth and justice are uncompromising.” Geuss comments: “This brings us to the most general line of criticism of Rawls as a political philosopher. If one looks at the body of his work … one is immediately struck by the complete absence in it of any discussion of what I have described as the basic issues of politics. The topic of ‘power,’ in particular, is simply one he never explicitly discusses at all… Rawls’ view is seriously deficient, because it does not thematize power.”

 We can read Geuss , perhaps, most profitably as spelling out the ways a diagnostic political philosophy should proceed. But he does not, in fact, offer us an example of a worked out political diagnosis. While his eye is critically focused on political liberalism as a formative conception of contemporary politics, he does not proceed to a detailed diagnosis of this conception either in this book or in his other writings. He proves to be, in fact, more of a critical than a constructive thinker and, in this respect, a faithful follower of Adorno. He is more eloquent in his attacks on ideal theories than in developing a realist  and diagnostic political philosophy of his own.

 

Taking Frege Seriously

 

Joan Weiner, Taking Frege at His Word, Oxford University Press 2020, xxvii + 317 pp.

In 1936 Edmund Husserl wrote in a private letter to Heinrich Scholz, the collector of Frege’s writings, that he had never met Frege in person and that Frege was considered at the time “a sharply intelligent outsider who bore fruit neither as a mathematician nor as a philosopher.”[1] That was, of course, a misjudgment. We can see now more clearly that Frege contributed, in fact, at least three things to mathematics and philosophy after him. The first was his new logic (the propositional and predicate calculus) that replaced the old Aristotelian logic. Given the important role that the Aristotelian syllogistic had played in philosophy for more than two thousand years that was, indeed, a significant achievement. The second was Frege’s attempt to show that arithmetic can be reduced to logic. Frege’s logicist thesis has not remained uncontested and his way of trying to prove it has turned out to be defective, but the considerations that led him to it are still being taken seriously by philosophers of mathematics. The third are his thoughts about signs – the symbols and formulas of his logical calculus and the words and sentences of ordinary language – and the way they serve to convey meaning. These “semantic” considerations have contributed much to the subsequent development of the philosophy of language.[2]

Joan Weiner’s new book pays a great deal of attention to the logical calculus that Frege developed, his Begriffsschrift, whose originality and significance she fully recognizes. Her account of that logic is detailed, precise, and illuminating. She also acknowledges clearly that Frege constructed his logic precisely to establish the truth of the logicist thesis. According to her: “Frege was engaged, for virtually all his career, in a single project: that of showing that the truths of arithmetic are truths of logic.” (p. vii) For all that, she does not delve far into the philosophy of mathematic and Frege’s place in it. She does not concern herself, in particular, with the difficulties the logicist thesis faces and whether it can be salvaged. Her discussion focuses, rather, on the question whether or to what extent we should think of Frege as a philosopher of language.

The object of her critical attention is specifically what she calls “The Standard Interpretation” of Frege’s work which she summarizes in four points: (1) Frege aimed at constructing a theory of meaning, (2) he sought to develop a compositional semantics, (3) he was concerned with giving metatheoretical proofs in his logic, and (4) he was an ontological Platonist. Weiner’s ambition is to set out an interpretation of Frege that is “deeply at odds with the Standard Interpretation.” (p. ix) That interpretation, she believes, is now so deeply entrenched in the literature that it takes a most careful re-reading of Frege’s words to dislodge it. In undertaking that task, Weiner seeks to expose “the difference between the words that actually appear on Frege’s pages, and the words that many contemporary philosophers believe are on Frege’s pages.” (p. 10)

Weiner’s book puts forward a compelling case for rejecting all the four assumptions of the Standard Interpretation that she identifies. Others, myself included, have repeatedly made similar claims. This leaves me with two questions. The first is whether she does full justice to the adherents of the Standard Interpretation and the second whether her alternative interpretation gives us a fully rounded view of the real Frege. As to the first question, we need to consider that when philosophers read the writings of others they are sometimes motivated by the question “what did the author mean by his words?” and sometimes with the question “what can we do with the author’s words?” And these two questions are not always clearly distinguished in their minds. They are trying to get at the meaning but always with an eye to the usefulness of what they find to their own way thinking. And they also often assume that what they themselves think may be a clue to what the other author must have meant. This is the way Aristotle read the Presocratics and Plato’s dialogues and this is how contemporary philosophers read Frege among others. From a scholarly and hermeneutic perspective that can be annoying. It is from this point of view that Weiner’s irritation with the adherents of the Standard interpretation stems.

Weiner traces the belief that we should read Frege as being primarily a philosopher of language and theorist of meaning back to Michael Dummett’s seminal book Frege: The Philosophy of Language from 1973. I find myself agreeing with her that Dummett is mistaken in maintaining that Frege’s explicit goal was to construct a theory of meaning for natural languages. But this does not undermine the fact that Frege did, indeed, make observations that have since led to the construction of such theories. Weiner does not explore the question how Dummett came to read Frege in the way he did. She seems to ascribe it simply to a lack of reading skill. That surely does injustice to Dummett’s competence as a philosopher.  We can grant that Dummett overstated his case, but that may still leave it worth asking why he came to read Frege the way he did. This is not something Weiner is interested in. Dummett was, of course, well aware of Frege’s preoccupation with the logicist thesis.  But by the time he wrote Frege: The Philosophy of Language he had given up on the idea that this thesis could be salvaged and he had opted instead for an intuitionist constructivism. That view, as developed by Brouwer, Heyting and others, seemed to him, however, to lack a proper philosophical grounding. Expanding the constructivist view to non-mathematical statements, Dummett ended up questioning Frege’s apparently “realistic” conception of meaning and its associated notion of truth in the hope of developing in this way an alternative constructivist sort of semantics. His engagement with Frege had turned thus into dialogue concerning language and meaning.

That linguistic turn in the interpretation of Frege was not entirely Dummett’s doing. He had, in fact, been anticipated in this by Wittgenstein. It is Wittgenstein more than Russell who has brought Frege to the attention of English-speaking philosophers and he was concerned from early on more with Frege’s thoughts on language and meaning than with his logicism. That logicism he had already rejected in the Tractatus and over time he was to become increasingly sympathetic to the mathematical formalism that Frege had so vigorously attacked.  He remained, however, very much interested in Frege’s thoughts on language and meaning. Not that he found all of it plausible. Like Dummett after him, he completed rejected Frege’s idea that propositions are names of a sort and that they refer to truth-values. But he remained attracted to Frege’s principle that words have meaning only in the context of a sentence which he repeated both in the Tractatus and in Philosophical Investigations. He also retained an interest in Frege’s distinction between the sense and the reference, the Sinn and the Bedeutung, of words and sentences to which he returned again in those two books while giving the distinction his own very different slant. When Max Black consulted with him over which of Frege’s writings he might most usefully translate into English, Wittgenstein advised him to take on the essay “Über Sinn und Bedeutung.” The translation appeared in Philosophical Review in 1948 and was the first piece of Frege’s writings available in English. For many English-speaking philosophers it became the gateway into Frege’s thinking and it is still today the one piece of Frege’s work with which students are most familiar. It is this text more than any other one in Frege’s oeuvre that may give the impression that he was a philosopher of language, that he sought, in fact, to advance a theory of meaning for ordinary language, and that this theory had the intended form of a compositional semantics.

Weiner is right in arguing that this imisinterprets Frege’s intentions. She writes that in order to understand Frege’s purpose in “Über Sinn und Bedeutung” we must read the essay as one of three which together set out a major revision of the Begriffsschrift logic of 1879. The first and most important of those pieces is the monograph “On Function and Concept,” (1891), the second the essay on “Concept and Object,” (1892) and the third “Über Sinn und Bedeutung,”(1892). This last essay was, in effect, a mere corollary to  the initial monograph and quite possibly only a belated addition. That it did not refer to Frege’s logical calculus but discussed the issues only in terms of examples taken from ordinary language was the result of limitations set by the editor of the journal in which Frege published the essay.[3] Frege had argued in “On Concept and Object,” among other things, for a revision of his earlier account of identity and “Über Sinn und Bedeutung” was meant to show that this revision called for a distinction between the sense and the reference of signs that he had not made in the first exposition of his logic in 1879. While I find myself in substantive agreement with Weiner’s account of “Über Sinn und Bedeutung,” I don’t think that she takes her case far enough. She does not ask herself, in particular, why Frege considered his revision of the earlier account of identity was so important. The answer, I believe, is to be found in the fact that the axiom V he was to add to his logic in Basic Laws in order to achieve the desired derivation of arithmetic is for Frege an identity statement and one that, according to the 1879 characterization of identity would not have counted as a logical truth. Frege’s new account of identity allowed him, however, to argue that the two parts of axiom V conjoined by the identity sign do not only have the same reference (that axiom V is true) but also that they have the same sense and that this allows us to see that the axiom is a logical truth. I have myself argued repeatedly for that view since 1980.[4] I am surprised to find that Weiner does not pursue that point.

I agree once more with Weiner that the single most important new idea in Frege’s logic of 1879 was his introduction of the concept of function and that the single most important revision of his logic in 1891 concerned that notion. In terms of the history of mathematics, Frege should be seen as a descendant of the Gaussian school for which the notion of a mathematical function had become increasingly important. Frege himself had studied at Göttingen, the headquarter of the Gaussians, and so had his teacher and mentor Ernst Abbe. Both Abbe and Frege had, moreover, worked on the theory of function. Frege’s Habilitationsschrift of 1874 had dealt with the topic even before his interest in logic and the logicist thesis had developed. This function-theoretical view stood in contrast to the set theoretical conception, elaborated by Cantor, for which functions were simply certain kinds of ordered sets. Weiner bypasses this historical context and thus misses out on two important insights into Frege’s work. The first is the conflict between the function-theoretical and the set-theoretical view of logic in which the former was represented by Frege, Russell, and the early Wittgenstein but in which the latter has largely prevailed. The second is the paradox that Frege’s attempt to show that the truths or arithmetic are truths of logic required as a first step a mathematization of logic.

Her silence on this historical context is characteristic of Weiner’s entire approach to Frege. Her book is an exemplar of classical analytic philosophy: clear, organized, thoroughly argued, but moving in a narrow circle of formal concepts and in this respect almost old-fashioned in style. It has certainly all the limitations of classical analytic philosophy in particular in being so thoroughly unhistorical.  Concepts exist for this kind of thinking in a vacuum and their meaning and interrelations can be analyzed without reference to any historical realities. In this respect, Wiener is certainly just like Michael Dummett, whom she otherwise dismisses. Dummett once wrote that Frege’s thought sprang from his head almost entirely unfertilized by outside ideas. In her own account of Frege, Wiener tells us correctly that Frege was for much of his philosophical life preoccupied with sowing that arithmetical propositions are logical truths. But she does not and cannot explain to us why this project should have mattered to him. Ordinary mathematicians and everyday used of mathematics may, in fact, not be much concerned with this matter. But it is one of major importance for Kant and subsequently for John Stuart Mill, both figures of the greatest significance, as Frege was writing. Frege himself made clear in his Foundations of Arithmetic that he sided with Kant’s apriorism and against Mill’s radical empiricism.  This conformed to the position of the Neo-Kantians of Frege’s own time. For both Kant and Mill the question of the epistemic status of mathematics was a key to their thinking very broadly about human knowledge and the way it maps on to the world.

Weiner describes Frege’s new logic as “a major advance”; but over whom and over what? She mentions Boole in this respect, but one would think that Frege’s logic was first of all an advance over the Aristotelian syllogism and then over the logics developed by some of his contemporaries (Lotze, Sigwart, Wundt, to name a few). One thing that distinguished Frege from all of these is that he approached logic from the perspective of a mathematician. We can discern this most clearly in his introduction of the notion of function into his logic. Mathematically inspired was also his use of inductive proofs in his logic. The paradox is that Frege sought to reduce arithmetic to logic by making logic more mathematical. The first to understand this circularity in Frege’s argument was Wittgenstein who, for this reason, rightly rejected Russell’s and Frege’s logicist program.

Weiner’s preoccupation with showing the failings of the standard interpretation limits her reading of Frege also in some further respects. She has no interest in the fact Frege was almost as much interest in geometry and its foundations as he was in arithmetic. It is not easy to say what this came to. His discussion of this topic in The Foundations of Arithmetic is rudimentary and other relevant (but unpublished) writings were destroyed in the Second World War. But there can be no doubt that Frege was committed to the idea of synthetic apriori truths.

However far she seeks to distance herself from the way analytic philosophers read Frege today, she stays close to them in one significant respect. Her reading of Frege is just as ahistorical as theirs. Frege’s own words remain for her placed in a historical vacuum and so are the words of those who subscribe to the Standard Interpretation. We are told in neither case from where those words come. That limits what we can learn from Weiner’s take on Frege. Why did he concern himself so much with the logicist thesis? In his Foundations of Arithmetic he writes that both mathematical and philosophical reasons motivated him. The fist concerned the nature of the numbers and the second the epistemic status of the arithmetic propositions. And with respect to the second we find him arguing vigorously against the view that they are empirical generalizations and for the view that they are apriori truths. John Stuart Mill and Immanuel Kant are for him the respective representatives of those two views. Their names refer us, in turn, to an ongoing struggle in Frege’s time between an influential empiricist naturalism on the one hand and a reviving Kantianism on the other. The urgency of logicism for Frege derived precisely from this historical constellation. That is, however, something with which Weiner doesn’t concern herself. Similarly, she does not try to explain to us the conditions for the rise of the Standard Interpretation. She does seek to explain in the last two chapters of her book what her own interpretation of Frege can do for us.

 

 

NOTES

 

[1] Gottlob Frege, Wissenschaftlicher Briefwechsel, p. 92. It is unclear from the formulation whether Husserl agreed with that judgment or was only reporting a widely held opinion.

[2] In light of the fact that Frege may have been instrumental in Husserl’s turning away from his early, psychologistic view of arithmetic, we may want to add that Frege contributed also to the decline of psychologism and the rise of the phenomenological movement in philosophy.

[3] Hans Sluga, „Wie Frege zu Sinn und Bedeutung kam,“ in Frege: Freund(e) und Feind(e), Proceedings of the  Gottlob Frege Conference 2013, Logos Verlag, Berlin 2015, pp. 14-23.

[4] Hans Sluga, Gottlob Frege, Routledge, London 1980, pp. 149-157.  See also Sluga, „Frege on Meaning,” Ratio, vol. 9, 1996, pp. 218-223, and most recently and most succinctly in „Wie Frege zu Sinn und Bedeutung kam,“ loc. cit.

The Murder of Professor Schlick

David Edmonds, The Murder of Professor Schlick. The Rise and Fall of the Vienna Circle, Princeton Univerity Press 2020, xiv + 313 pp, $ 27.95.

It was the morning of June 22, 1936. Shortly after 9 am Moritz Schlick, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Vienna, was on the way to his lecture when one of his former students intercepted him on the university staircase. “Now, you damned bastard, there you have it,” the man was heard shouting as he unloaded a pistol into his victim. Schlick was instantly dead. The student, Nelböck by name, remained on the scene, waiting to be arrested. When he was questioned, he gave a variety of confused reasons for his attack. It became quickly clear that he was mentally unstable.  At his trial, Nelböck settled on saying that Schlick’s anti-metaphysical philosophy had undermined him morally. Two years later, after Hitler had marched into Austria, he changed his story and declared that he had acted on the conviction that Schlick was Jewish. He was duly released by the new Nazi authorities and he eventually died twenty years later, still a free man, in post-Second-World-War Austria.

After the murder, Austria’s increasingly strident right-wing press found all kinds of justifications for Nelböck’s deed. Schlick’s philosophy had been damaging “the fine porcelain of the national character” according to one newspaper. Others wrote that the professor had perhaps not been Jewish (he was so neither by religious affiliation nor by family background), but he had promoted a Jewish kind of thinking: anti-metaphysical, anti-religious, and given to “logicality, mathematicality, formalism, and positivism” whereas philosophical chairs in “Christian-German Austria should be held by Christian philosophers.”

David Edmonds puts the harrowing story of Schlick’s murder into the broader context of the emergence of a new kind of philosophy that had been gestating in Vienna since the first decade of the century. It had all begun with a group of young mathematicians, physicists, and philosophers who had met for informal discussions in a Vienna coffeehouse. Later, the group had become consolidated under the leadership of Schlick, a German philosopher known for his book on Einstein’s theory of relativity, who had arrived in Vienna in 1922.  The group now held regular meetings to which not everybody was invited. It began to call itself “The Vienna Circle,” proclaimed its scientific world-view in a 1929 Manifesto, published a journal, organized international conferences, and planned for a multi-volume Encyclopedia of Unified Science.  Its declared heroes were Albert Einstein, Bertrand Russell, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, himself a native of Vienna and the author of the stunning Tractatus-Logico-Philosophicus that had been published in 1921. His book came soon to be a center piece for discussion at meetings of the group. Schlick himself and his assistant Friedrich Waismann succumbed most strongly to its beguiling influence. “What would Wittgenstein say?” became Schlick’s standard question when discussions ran into the ground.  Not that the members of the Circle agreed on a single philosophy. Otto Neurath, Schlick’s voluble counterpart in the Circle, was prone to dismiss Wittgenstein’s pronouncements as badly “metaphysical.”  The members of the Circle were united most by their desire to break with old ways of doing philosophy that still flourished at the university of Vienna and elsewhere. Their slogan was that they rejected metaphysics in whatever for it might come; their commitment was to take the empirical sciences seriously and to use the new, mathematized logic that Russell and Gottlob Frege before him had developed as an alternative to the old-fashioned Aristotelian syllogistic still being taught in philosophy departments.

The members of the Vienna Circle were not the only ones looking for new ways to do philosophy. There were also, for instance, Hans Reichenbach and Carl Gustav Hempel in Berlin with their Society for Empirical Philosophy. Others were looking for a renewal in other directions. Edmund Husserl at Freiburg sought a phenomenological way back “to the things themselves” from abstract philosophical theorizing. His way of doing philosophy spawned, in turn, Heidegger’s existential ontology with its distinctively anthropological dimension. During the same period, Horkheimer and Adorno in Frankfurt were seeking to recast philosophy in the form of a critical social theory. At Cambridge, Wittgenstein was abandoning the assumptions of his Tractatus. Philosophical problems were now to be treated by attending to the features of ordinary language. And in this he was followed by a generation of younger Oxford philosophers. After 1945, Sartre’s existentialism took off from Paris along yet another trajectory and in reaction to it there arose eventually a whole line of ever more radical challenges to the tradition, from Foucault’s archaeology and genealogy of knowledge, to postmodernism and Derrida’s deconstruction. All of those thinkers and movements were set on redefining philosophy, what it was, how it should be conducted, on what sources it was to draw, what domains of knowledge or of human experience it should build on. And they fought bitter battles over these questions. The members of the Vienna Circle gleefully denounced Heidegger’s “metaphysical nonsense.” Heidegger, in turn, laughed off Sartre’s existentialism. Russell complained that the later Wittgenstein and his followers had given up on serious thinking. Foucault and Derrida poked each other with their verbal stilettos. The panoramic story of this great revolt against the tradition is still to be told. What set it off? Why did it take such different forms? We are still far from a full account of this multi-fronted rupture of the tradition. We don’t even know yet whether it has run its course.

The new movements in philosophy did certainly not emerge organically from the tradition. That is, presumably, one reason why the traditionalists proved so hostile to the upstarts. Outside forces were pushing the subject in new and unexpected directions. While the Circle’s Manifesto listed a long line of philosophical forerunners, its way of thinking was the product, rather, of the explosive growth of the sciences (the hard sciences like physics, first of all, but also of newer ones like psychology and sociology), of changes in the prevailing social values, and shifts in the institutional environment in which philosophy operated.  New developments in physics and the other empirical sciences were stripping philosophy of some of its old problems. (Could it really tell us something about the causal, spacio-temporal structure of the universe?). Its way of dealing with those problems came to be dismissed now as “metaphysical.” New  problems concerning the meaning of the scientific theories and their epistemic status were, instead, coming into view. Mathematics had been undergoing its own revolution since Gauss, turning more abstract and formalized in the process. This induced the mathematicians in the Circle to turn to Frege’s and Russell’s new logic. Meanwhile social changes encouraged more sober, “utilitarian” forms of thinking and with that a devaluation of “belief” of the religious kind and of the “speculative” forms of thinking practiced by the traditional philosophers. The encasing of philosophy in the university and the appearance of a welter of new academic disciplines, were undermining its customary self-understanding as the ultimate, foundational science. Philosophy, it seemed obvious to the member of the Vienna Circle, was being pushed off its old pedestal.

To find a new way of doing philosophy became thus their prime objective. But they came to project in different ways. While many of them were born in Vienna, others came from Bohemia, Hungary, and Germany and later on there would be visitors from England and the United States, from Poland and from as far away as China. Two of its most influential members (Schlick and Rudolf Carnap) were Germans. A substantial number were Jewish – at least by family background – but Schlick and Carnap were, once again, not. Most of them veered to the political left (Otto Neurath, above all, as well as Carnap) but others were neutral. They came also from different disciplines (physics and mathematics but also biology, medicine, economics, and jurisprudence) and thus different perspectives into their discussions. What they shared was an attitude, an ethos, a commitment to science, to critical argument, to reason, to the pursuit of truth. They represented, in other words, a new, up-dated Enlightenment.

If this was one thing that distinguished them from others who were looking for a philosophical renewal, the second was that they engaged in their project as a group, reading, discussing, arguing with each other, seeking to refine their ideas in interaction with each other. Since the beginning of the modern period philosophers have pursued their calling for the most part individually, each seeking to develop their own distinctive way of thinking. This is how it has been with Descartes, Hobbes, Leibniz and others. With Kant, the creative philosophers had begun to work within the framework of the university. Even so they continued to develop their philosophies largely on their own. That pronounced individualism is, indeed, still alive in philosophy today. The Vienna Circle represented a very different way of doing philosophy. It pursued a collaborative form of philosophizing, reaching out to each other in pursuit of what they called “the unity of science.”

There is yet another thing that set the Vienna Circle apart. Unlike the other movements that aimed at a reformulation of the task of philosophy, the members of the Circle were keen to disseminate their thinking not only into the academy but also beyond it and beyond even the educated elite. In its Manifesto the Circle declared it one of its goals “to fashion intellectual tools for the everyday life of the scholar but also for the daily life of all those who in some way join in working at the conscious re-shaping of life.” Given the political leanings of its membership, it came natural to them to engage in leftist causes. Neurath, half a Marxist and half a Benthamite utilitarian and the most politically engaged in the Circle, sought to pursue the greatest happiness of the greatest number of people by socialist means. Austria’s Social Democratic Party was their natural home. The Circle also associated itself with the Ernst-Mach-Society founded in Vienna in 1927. Named after the philosopher-physicist the Mach Society was dedicated to spreading the new insights of the natural sciences into all social groups. Members of the Vienna the Circle soon began to dominate the Mach Society and provided much of its programming. They also served as lecturers in Vienna’s adult education program which addressed itself primarily to a working-class constituency. That kind of teaching also provided them with an income since university positions were almost impossible to obtain for the Jewish members of the Circle.  All this activism did not mean, however, that the Vienna Circle itself was a political forum. Its internal discussions were limited strictly to scientific and philosophical matters. Schlick, in particular, strongly insisted on the separation of philosophy and politics. Their empiricism made them, in any case, antipathic to doctrinaire forms of politics. But the links between their philosophical and their political commitments were nevertheless strong and visible enough to make the Vienna Circle a target for the rising forces of Austrofascism in the 1920s and of Nazism in the 1930s.

Edmonds places his account of the rise and fall of the Vienna Circle into this historical context. His book provides in this way a valuable contribution to social history as well as to the history of  a philosophical movement.  He tells his story persuasively by focusing on individual personalities in and around the Circle.  His goal is thus not give a detailed exposition of the ideas and problems that motivated their discussion. But he tells us just enough about those idea and problems to keep the story together.  More would have produced a less readable and less useful book to the general reader. Edmond’s account of the members of the Circle ranges from the patrician Moritz Schlick, an accomplished philosopher who had come to Vienna with a recommendation from Einstein, to the oversized figure of Otto Neurath, loud, boisterous, full of irrepressible energy, a political agitator and born organizer. Another central figure was the kindly, scholarly, somewhat austere Rudolf Carnap who had been one of Frege’s students and maintained close links with Russell in the Circle. Other members were typically introverted academics; others had careers in business and law that kept them somewhat apart fro the others. Kurt Gödel, the mathematician, managed to attend the meetings without ever saying anything and then stunned the group (and the mathematical world) with his incompleteness results.

The two most remarkable figures associated with the Circle were, however, not members of it. One was Ludwig Wittgenstein and the other Karl Popper, both powerful and disturbing personalities. Wittgenstein had been living in Austria during the 1920s and he returned frequently enough from Cambridge in the years after that. But all attempts to bring him to the meetings of the Circle failed. He finally agreed only to meet a select few in Schlick’s house or on his own ground. Later, in 1938, when the members of the Vienna Circle were congregating at Cambridge for their fourth Unity of Science Congress, Wittgenstein was seen demonstratively leaving the town. In contrast to Wittgenstein, Popper was never invited into the Circle and he began to consider himself the group’s appointed opposition. His interests certainly overlapped with theirs. Like them, he was interested in the physical sciences and in the question of the relation between theory and observation. He also saw his work as close to that of Alfred Tarski, the Polish logician, who came frequently to attend Circle meetings. But his abrasive and self-aggrandizing personality kept the two sides apart.  In retrospect we see, however, that those two outsiders actually produced work that had the widest philosophical impact. Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and his Philosophical Investigations and Poppers Logic of Scientific Discovery and The Open Society and Its Enemies became classics of 20th century philosophy. The writings of the members of the Vienna Circle, on the other hand, are read today only by specialists. Schlick’s and Neurath’s publications are barely remembered and Carnap’s have proved too technical to attract wide attention.

The murder of Schlick occupies just one chapter in Edmonds’ narrative. But he treats it as a pivotal moment in the history of the Vienna Circle. In the years heading up to that moment, the Circle had grown and flourished but it had also become the target of right-wing agitators. Hitler’s rise to power in Germany in 1933, the ever more tenuous political situation in Austria, and the increasingly vociferous attacks on the Circle was already making evident that the future of the Vienna Circle might be uncertain. Schlick’s murder had thus a devastating effect.  In 1937, Waismann left for the UK, the physicist Philipp Frank, one of the senior members of the Circle, went to Harvard, the mathematician Karl Menger to Notre Dame University in the US, and Karl Popper took a job in New Zealand. Most of the others were to follow soon. By good luck all of them survived. But none of them ever went back to live in Vienna after 1945. Many of them never even visited their old haunts. The loss, they felt, was too great. The magic that had created the Circle and so much else of Vienna’s cultural life was gone.

During its life, the Vienna Circle attracted many philosophical visitors from abroad. Among those who came was a 23-year-old Englishman, A. J. Ayer, who afterwards condensed what he had learned in the months he had spent attending the Circle into a brashly provocative book entitled Language, Truth, and Logic. It was the first work to acquaint English-speaking readers with the outlook of the logical empiricists. In later years, after he had recanted his attachment to the ideas of the Vienna Circle, Ayer said with cruel wit that its greatest defect was that nearly all of what it believed had proved false. But he added at once that Circle’s way of thinking had nevertheless been “true in spirit.” Contemporary philosophers do, indeed, not worry much any longer about “the verification principle” that had occupied the Vienna Circle so intensively or many of other issues that kept its discussions going. But when we look closely, we can see that the Vienna Circle has still made a permanent contribution to the way philosophy is now being done. The contest between the various schools and movements seeking to renew philosophy has, of course, not been resolved. They go on living side by side, only occasionally making contact but more usually at growling distance from each other. Traditional ways of doing philosophy are also persisting. Still, the Circle lives on today in some strands of that motley we call “analytic philosophy.” There is a new respect for the empirical sciences in almost all philosophy. Modern, mathematical logic has become a standard part of the syllabus. Philosophers speak more with each other. None of this might have happened without the efforts of the Vienna Circle. What has disappeared, however, is their exciting sense that philosophy is embarking on a new path. We are no longer living in a revolutionary age of philosophy. Analytic philosophy insofar as it is an heir of the Vienna Circle has become a professional, disciplinary, and often self-contained enterprise. It has little ambition to change its surrounding society. Immanuel Kant, who was one of the thinkers the Vienna Circle most sought to oppose, has been anointed a forerunner of the analytic tradition. The Vienna Circle is history; all of its members are gone. The one to live longest was Karl Popper who died in 1994 after a long career at the London School of Economics. There he had ruled like a king, always alert to anyone seeking to challenge him. Attending his seminars in the 1960s. I don’t recall that he ever mentioned the Vienna Circle.

Edmonds tells his story in vivid terms. Like his earlier bestselling Wittgenstein’s Poker his book is meant for a broadly educated public with a taste for philosophy but for personalities and social environments. His story of the rise and fall of the Circle is at the same time one of the rise and fall of Vienna as a vibrant center of creative and intellectual life. Since so many members of the Circle had Jewish roots, it is a story also of the destruction of a unique moment in Jewish and European culture. Hitler and his Austrian allies destroyed It all: the Vienna Circle, Vienna as a cultural capital, and that miraculous union of Jewish Viennese sensibility.  Vienna would eventually regain its wealth, but never its energies, Edmonds writes in a voice of regret. He himself, it turns out, has roots in the Vienna that is gone. “My family like many in the Circle was middle class, assimilated Jewish,” he writes, “and, like many in the Circle, blind for the extreme turn that politics would take.”

 

 

The philosopher as a toad

I have been reading all summer – right across the field, whatever has come into my hands. My seminar last semester on Foucault’s  “The Order of Things” stimulated my interest in French literature and because of Foucault’s well-known hostility to Sartre I decided to have another look at that philosopher. So I took up Sartre’s autobiographical work “Les Mots” which had been on my bookshelf for quite a while.

Certainly an intriguing and disturbing book. Intriguing as a description how Sartre leaned to read and began to write. But disturbing also because Sartre speaks about himself in the starkest terms.  We read, for instance: “My long hair got on my grandfather’s nerve. ‘He’s a boy,’ he would say. ‘You’re going to make a girl of him. I don’t want my grandson to be a sissy!’ One day – I was seven years old – my grandfather could no longer stand it. He took me by the hand, saying that we were gong for a walk. But no sooner had we got around the corner than he rushed me into a barber shop, saying: ‘We’re going to give your mother a surprise.’ I returned home shorn and glorious. There were shrieks, but no hugging and kissing, and my mother locked herself in her room to cry. Her little girl had been exchanged for a little boy. But that wasn’t the worst of it. As long as my ringlets fluttered about my ears, they made it possible to deny my obvious ugliness. Yet my right eye was already entering the twilight. She had to admit the truth to herself. My grandfather himself seemed nonplussed. He had been entrusted with her little wonder and had brought back a toad.”

And Sartre writes in similar words not only about his own small, dwarfish stature and his bad, disfiguring eye but also about his inner flaws, his hypocrisy and self-deception. Spell-binding as the book was, I must admit that after 250 pages, I felt I had heard enough about the inner life of a precocious ten-year old.

I ended up, however, with one fascinating realization. “Les Mots” came out in 1964 just two years before Foucault published his “Les Mots and les Choses.” Its manuscript had been full of invective against Sartre which had been eliminated only at the last moment. So we must assume that Sartre’s title was presumably on Foucault’s mind. What is more, Sartre criticizes himself at the end of his book for what he considers to have been his early idealism and writes: “”As a mystic, I attempted to reveal the silence of being by a thwarted rustling of words and, what was most important, I confused things with their names.” And there you have the two words that make up Foucault’s title, “les mots” and “les choses,” in one sentence. So, what are we to make of Foucault’s title? Does he mean to say that where Sartre has been stuck in his words, in his subjectivism and humanism, while he, Foucault, is concerned also with things and how words bear on them. But if that is what he means, then Sartre has already anticipated him and has diagnosed the shortcoming in his own earlier self.

One thing is clear, of course, Foucault would never have been able to write a book like “Le Mots.” He would never have been able to lay himself bare in the way that Sartre did.

Can Democracy Work?

Can Democracy Work? is James Miller’s sequel to his book of thirty years ago, Democracy Is in the Streets. In the intervening years he seems to have become less certain of the answer. The earlier book had been a somewhat nostalgic view back at the radical students of the 1960’s from the sobering perspective of the Reagan years. Can Democracy Work? is a view back at the history of democracy from the equally sobering perspective of Trump’s America.

Miller begins his book by recounting his own engagement in 1967 with the Students for a Democratic Society. But: “As time has passed, I’ve had second thoughts about many of my old convictions, and I’ve tried to imbue my students with a skeptical outlook on their own political assumptions, no matter how fiercely held.” (p. 10) He has been asking himself, he adds, in particular: “What is living, and what is dead, in the modern democratic project? … For that matter, what is the modern democratic project? … And can it really work – especially in complex modern societies?” (Ibid.) With these questions in mind, Miller looks back at the history of democracy which he tells in a series of vividly recounted episodes.  By the end of his book it is obvious that he has not come up with answers. “As I contemplate what democracy has become in modern times, I find myself feeling uncertain about its future,” he writes “(1) as a name for various actually existing forms of government; (2) as an ideology, an ideal manipulated by a ruling elite in the material interests of a few, not the many; (3) as a moral vision, of free institutions as a better solution to the problems of human coexistence than the authoritarian alternatives.” (p. 240) Still, he feels committed to “a democratic faith that was instilled in me from birth… I find as a result that I harbor hopes that form part of who I take myself to be.” (p. 241) He ends by reminding us of “Abraham Lincoln’s characteristically American hope, especially in the darkest of times: ‘that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth,.” (p. 245) But given Miller’s forthright account of the terror, turbulence, and violence that has accompanied the history of democracy, and his bleak vision of the present, it isn’t clear on what he thinks this hope is based.

Miller is clear, however, on one point: that the democratic experiment of the radical students of the 1960s has failed. He is skeptical, therefore, also of the attempt to resurrect its ideals and practices fifty years later.  He argues, for that reason, against the “Occupy Wall Street” movement of 2011 and similar spontaneous political movements around the world. These movements, he writes, have pursued “an unstable political idealism, an amalgam of direct action and direct democracy, with many of the virtues of a utopian and romantic revolt … but also some of the vices.” (p. 229) Miller is particularly critical of these movements to pursue a leaderless, non-hierarchical form of direct democracy.  “Organizing without organizations,” he argues “is a fantasy – not a winning long-term political strategy.” A fantasy, we might add, that in Miller’s eyes also brought down the SDS.

Miller own views have, over time, come closer to those of the American political scholar Samuel Huntington. When he had first read Huntington, he writes: “I bristled at his hostility to the New Left and his skepticism about the value of participatory democracy.” (p. 217) Huntington’s analysis had been simple: “What ailed the country was an excess of democracy. America needed a new ‘balance,’ in which citizens would remember that in many situations ‘expertise, seniority, experience, and special talents may override the claims of democracy as a way of constituting authority.” (p. 218) Huntington had warned of the self-destructive potential of democracy. Miller adds: Such worries, which  seemed absurd to me as a young man, seemed eerily apt as I was writing this book – and discovering that my own views had grown closer to Huntington’s than I imagined possible.” (p 218)

Miller proves sympathetic also to Huntington’s final thought that America’s democratic faith is grounded in a conception of its own identity, an identity that is in danger of being undermined by demographic changes and the  threat of a reactive “white nativism.” Miller asks: If the Soviet version of democratic idealism has collapsed under the weight of a “renascent, religiously inflected form of Russian nationalism, why should Americans assume that their version of democratic idealism would prove any more resilient, if put to the test of white nativism?” And in what sounds like agreement, Miller concludes: “For Samuel P. Huntington at the end of his life, this is what American democracy looked like: a fragile ideology, with cloudy prospects.” (p. 226)

There is little that Miller can tell us about the road ahead. If democracy fails, what then? What possibilities arise at that point? Will we face political chaos? Or autocratic and bureaucratic order? Can we think of more or less desirable forms of political order ahead? How will we set about in solving the problems created by a gigantic world population, by technological innovations, and the pressures these two factors put on our environment? Miller’s book remains in the end a history, looking back rather than forward. The question he leaves us with is how much we can learn from the past with respect to a quickly changing future.

 

 

Democracy Is in the Streets

Miller’s book describes how the SDS initially sought a radical renewal of American democracy. The group was sidetracked from this objective by the ever-expanding and ever more controversial war in Vietnam. By June1969, the SDS had fallen into the hands of Maoists in the Progressive Labor Party and soon afterwards the group fell apart.

Democracy is in the Streets had been a Bible for me when it first came out. I felt that it made sense of the political perturbations I saw on the UC Berkeley campus, even though the 1960s already gone. The book also opened my eyes that democracy could be more than a form of government; that it could also be form of life and a way of thinking. I am still drawn to the idea of “participatory democracy” that the SDS laid out in the programmatic statement composed at Port Huron in Michigan in June 1962 and helpfully reproduced in James Miller’s book.  I am also still attracted to the idea of a “consensus politics” as the SDS pursued it.

But Miller’s book makes clear how underdeveloped the notion of participatory democracy remained and how difficult it proved for the members of the SDS to practice the promised consensus politics. Miller himself joined the group in the late sixties. “I was, of course, opposed to the war in Vietnam,” he writes. “But I was also attracted by the vision of participatory democracy, although at the time I scarcely understood its intellectual provenance.” (p. 17) In re-reading the book now, I am struck by Miller’s sense of alienation from this early political enthusiasm – a feature that I had hardly taken in at my first reading many years ago. Miller writes in retrospect that his experience since the 1960s have left him “skeptical of the assumptions about human nature and the good society held by many radicals; … cynical about the ‘revolutionary’ potential of youth.” For many years he did not even want to think about the Sixties at all, “since I had grown ashamed of my youthful naiveté.” (Ibid.)

Miller wrote his book during the Reagan years.  He was thus keenly aware of the limits of what the radical students of the 1960’s had achieved.  “In city streets and on college campuses, in thousands of small experiments in participatory democracy, mys generation tested for itself the limits of political freedom. Those limits proved sobering,” he writes at the end of his book. But he adds: “Yet the spirit of Port Huron was real. A mass Movement to change America briefly flourished, touching countless lives and institutions.” (pp. 327-328) And there were important changes in American life that occurred as a result of the political agitation of the 1960’s – changes that have proved permanent. For one thing, he quotes Tom Hayden, “the system of segregation, which until 1960 was considered impregnable, collapsed. Students, who had never been considered a social force, became a political factor. The Vietnam War was brought to an end, partly because of the role of students. More than one President was thrown into crisis or out of office. And the Movement created an agenda. At the time it was seen as anathema, as terrible – very unruly. But people have absorbed more of the agenda than they realize.” (p. 325)

Compared to the activism of the 1960’s the political engagement of American students today appears listless and tame.

And how about democracy?

Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die, Crown Publishing, New York 2018

Are we facing today the twilight of democracy? Patrick E. Kennon, a retired CIA analyst, argued this point more than twenty years ago in a book entitled The Twilight of Democracy. On the front of its dustcover it said: “Those societies that continue to allow themselves to be administered by individuals whose only qualification is that they were able to win a popularity contest will go from failure to failure and eventually pass from the scene.” On the back cover it added: “Washington isn’t the problem – Democracy is.” Kennon was convinced that democracy had reached its expiration date even though it was still being touted as an ideology. Democracy, he wrote, “is an earthbound, human creation subject to the entropy of all such creations. It now travels a course of declining relevance much like that of the European monarchy from the power of Elizabeth I to the impotence of Elizabeth II.” (p. 255) Replacing democracy, he foresaw, would be a new elite of experts: military, administrative, and private-sector specialists who would administer the state of the future in a bureaucratic fashion. Under such a scenario, he concluded that by 2050 the developed, first world “would have largely retired its politicians. The internal affairs of the country would be run by faceless but expert bureaucrats under the general supervision of equally faceless representatives of the population as a whole.” (p. 279)

It’s not obvious that Kennon’s vision is coming true. Today we are being ruled by a shaky business man who has convinced his followers that he is a master at making deals. He is also a media figure who has learned to stir their emotions into political frenzy. He may not be much of a democrat but he is also certainly not a faceless expert specialist operating an anonymous bureaucracy. We seem to be traveling on a different road from the one Kennon saw ahead. But he seems to have been proved right in assuming that the future of democracy is by no means assured. The result of this realization has led to a spate of recent books entitled The Crisis of Democracy, The Plot to Destroy America, Democracy in Decline?, How Democracy Ends, and Democracy: The God that Failed.

Levitsky and Ziblatt’s How Democracies Die is another contribution to this genre. Its title is, however, somewhat misleading in that the book is largely concerned with the United States. Its central question is to what extent Donald Trump represents a threat to American democracy and what to do about it – with illustrative references to the failure of democracies in Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, post-Communist Russia, Argentina, Chile, and Venezuela, and passing references to various other places. This perspective structures but also limits the authors’ discussion of how democracies may fail. Their eye is on internal forces for failure; they are not concerned with the collapse of democracies due to foreign interventions, to military, economic, or environmental disaster, or to ideological and religious rifts. And their explanations are given in psychological terms: the authoritarian personality, the need for toleration and forbearance, the dangers of radical opposition in that it might provoke a political reaction. They do not ask whether there are structural changes in society that are destabilizing the democratic order

Levitsky and Ziblatt see American democracy threatened above all by the rise of an authoritarian figure who is set to undermine existing political institutions and practices. They identify four indicators of authoritarian behavior: 1. Rejection of (or weak commitment to) democratic rules of the game. 2. Denial of the legitimacy of political opponents. 3. Toleration or encouragement of violence. 4. Readiness to curtail civil liberties of opponents, including media. And they then proceed to document all four of these behavior patterns in Donald Trump. Trump is therefore on their view a serious threat to American democracy.

The two authors allow that authoritarian personalities exist in every society but, they argue, healthy democracies have procedures for keeping them in check. These are not, however, to be found in the existence of a written Constitution. “There is nothing in our Constitution or our culture,” they write, “to immunize us against democratic breakdown.” (p. 204) Other checks are needed to bring this about. The first is the fostering of a spirit of toleration and forbearance. If democracy is to work, political opponents must be respected as citizens and not be treated as enemies to be suppressed. And politicians need to restrain the use of their power so a not to undermine the democratic system for the sake of their own cause. In Levitsky and Ziblatt’s telling, the Republican and Democratic Parties have in the past served as “guardrails” that have kept American democracy in place by fostering these two fundamental political virtues. Through a process of selection and vetting of presidential candidates, the two parties have managed to keep authoritarians more or less at bay. The existence of political parties has thus proved essential for the survival of democracy. But the Republican and Democratic Parties have become less powerful in recent decades and they have therefore increasingly lost their guardrail function. This is due, the two authors think, to a polarization affecting all of American society and politics. “The weakening of our democratic norms is rooted in extreme polarization – one that extends beyond policy differences into an existential conflict over race and culture. America’s efforts to achieve racial equality as our society grows increasingly diverse have fueled an insidious reaction and intensifying polarization. And if one thing is clear from studying breakdowns throughout history, it’s that extreme polarization can kill democracies.” (p. 9)

The authors sketch three possible scenarios for post-Trump America. The first, optimistic one, is that Trump will fail and that the Trump interlude will be “taught in schools, recounted in films, and recited in historical works as an era of tragic mistakes where catastrophe was avoided and American democracy saved.” (p. 206) But they are not convinced that the end of Trump’s presidency will be enough to restore a healthy democracy. “A second much darker future is one in which President Trump and the Republicans continue to win with a white nationalistic appeal.” (p. 207) This would, of course, not be possible in a democratic way. Levitsky and Ziblatt are, however, convinced that – conceivable as it is – “such a nightmare scenario isn’t likely.” (p. 208) There remains a third possibility. “The third, and in our view, most likely post-Trump future is one marked by polarization, more departures from unwritten political conventions, and increasing institutional warfare – in other words, democracy without solid guardrails.” (p. 208) Levitsky and Ziblatt call this also a scenario in which democracy is left in a half-life state.

They proceed to consider how such a development may be prevented. They argue that it would be wrong for the opposition to use the same hardball tactics adopted by Trump and his Republican followers. They write: “In our view, the idea that Democrats should ‘fight like Republicans’ is misguided. First of all, evidence from other countries suggest that such a strategy often plays directly into the hands of authoritarians. Scorched-earth tactics often erode support for the opposition by scaring off moderates. And they unify progovernment forces, as even dissidents within the incumbent party close ranks in the face of an uncompromising opposition. And when the opposition fights dirty, it provides the government with justification for cracking down.” (pp. 215-216) The advice seems plausible, but it fails to address the question whether there will not be a point at which only all-out opposition can be effective. Clearly, America is not at this point and so Levitsky and Ziblatt’s reasonably suggest that “opposition to the Trump administration’s authoritarian behavior should be muscular but it should seek to preserve, rather than violate, democratic rules and norms. Where possible, opposition should center on Congress, the courts, and, of course, elections.” (pp. 217-218) So, not violence in the streets, but maintenance of the democratic values of toleration and forbearance in the building of broad opposition coalitions.

But the two authors understand that resistance to the abuses of the Trump administration is not enough. They believe, rather, that “the fundamental problem facing American democracy remains extreme partisan division – one fueled not just by policy differences but by deeper sources of resentment, including racial and religious differences.” They are convinced that “America’s great polarization preceded the Trump presidency, and it is very likely to endure beyond it.” (p. 220) They see the Republican Party as the main driver of the political chasm that has opened up. Hence: “Reducing polarization requires that the Republican Party be reformed, if not refounded outright.” (p. 223) And Democrats must address the problem of economic and social inequality. “The very health of our democracy hinges on it.” (p. 230)

Important as these considerations are, Levitsky and Ziblatt do not pursue them far enough to come to a compelling analysis of the state of democracy in the 21st century and particularly that of US American democracy. One obstacle on the way is their tendency to describe the situation in binary terms, as if there was a clear choice between being authoritarian and being democratic. Neither authoritarianism nor democracy is one thing; there are different degrees and forms of each and the two even occasionally overlap as in the so-called peoples-democracies of the Soviet era. Moreover, not every form of government is viable at any given moment. There are external constraints that make one system more viable than another at a given time. Thus, the radical democracy known to the Athenian state of the fourth century is not possible for us. Levitsky and Ziblatt follow mainline American thinking when they conceive the matter in an essentially voluntarist fashion. It is all a matter of choice for them. We must get ourselves into the right (democratic and anti-authoritarian) state of mind and then act according to its dictates. It’s all a matter of good will.

But we should ask ourselves what the constraints are under which modern democracy has developed and how and why these may be changing – and how then we are to proceed in this shifting terrain. The rise of Donald Trump is linked to an accumulation of wealth made possible by new technologies, to a globally operating financial system, and to the messaging power of the electronic media. The concentration of power in the hands of authoritarian leaders parallels and is accomplished through the accumulation of economic, financial, and informational power. The important point to understand is that we are not  facing just another authoritarian in Donald Trump, but a newly evolving form of authoritarianism. Reforming America’s political parties and striving for greater equality and less polarization may be good things, but they are not enough in the face of a newly forming system of political power.

Politics in an age of advanced technology

Technology has transformed and deformed our long-evolved political order and it is likely to do more of that. A technologically enabled economic and financial system has certainly diminished the regulatory power of the state. Goods, services, and people can now move easily across continents, not always under the control of governments. Pictures, words, ideas, and information are massively channeled within and between political systems, often defying the power of states but also often abetting it. At the same time, the state’s tools of surveillance and repression have become definitely more effective. Its military strength has vastly increased and can be projected over wider distances. We notice, thus, a diminution of state power in some respects, but also an increase in others.

It’s worth returning at this point to an almost forgotten classic: Jacques Ellul’s masterwork The Technological Society (La technique) of 1954 which anticipated much of this development. With respect to the technological transformation of both economics and the state, Ellul wrote at the time: “The fact that the economy and the state are reciprocally joined is technically founded in such a way that the two tend to become aspects of the same phenomenon, a phenomenon which, moreover, is not the result of a simple accretion of previous phenomena. It seems to me particularly important to emphasize this new character. Because of the existence of techniques we are beyond the problems of ordinary étatism or of socialism. It is not the simple phenomenon of the growth of power or the struggle against capitalism which is decisive here. We are witnessing the birth of a new organism, the technical state.” (Quoted from the English translation of 1964, pp. 196-197)

In describing this development, Ellul emphasizes the distinction between the technological machinery (implements, tools, and instruments) and the techniques we have developed to produce, use, and interact with this machinery. For Ellul our society is, first and foremost, a society of techniques, rather than strictly speaking a technological society. (The title of the English version of Ellul’s book is thus potentially misleading.) He anticipates in this way by twenty years Michel Foucault’s famous examination of disciplinary society in Discipline and Punish. Ellul’s “technique” and Foucault’s “disciplines” are, indeed, closely allied notions. Where they differ is that Ellul pays more attention to the way techniques interact with technology.

The two agree, however, in the way they see human beings embedded in the resulting social order and determined by it rather than as independent, autonomous agents. Ellul writes: “Let no one say that man is the agent of technical progress … and that it is he who chooses among possible techniques … He is a device for recording effects and results obtained by various techniques … He decides only in favor of the technique that gives the maximum efficiency.” (p. 80) Ellul commits himself thus to a technological determinism that certainly needs scrutiny. Is he right, for instance, when he adds later on: “It was not the public which demanded air travel and television. Technical progress created these things, and they were technically diffused and imposed on the public.” (pp. 212-213) It is true that the public did not demand air travel or television before their invention. But this does not mean that they were “imposed” on it. We are dealing rather with the creation of new desires based on others that are more fundamental and that are certainly not the product of technical manipulation. First, there was the desire motivating the inventors of these devices. Then came the new possibilities created by their inventions and these, in turn, stirred previously dormant desires in the public. Without our more basic drive to move and our basic desire for visual stimulation, these inventions might not have taken off. But Ellul is right when he concludes that all that is natural and that is natural in us gets transformed in the technological society. “Economic technique tends less to eliminate the natural than to integrate it … But when the natural is integrated, it ceases to be natural. It is an element of the mechanism, an element which must play its role.” (p. 217)

Ellul’s is, however, not only a technological determinism but also an economic one. He believes that in the technological society “maximum efficiency” and “utility” are the determining factors. He writes accordingly: “The development of techniques is responsible for the staggering phenomenon of absorption by economics of all social activities.” (p. 158) And he adds: “Economic life, not in its content, but in its direction will henceforth entirely elude popular control. No democracy is possible in the face of a perfect economic technique. The decisions of the voters, and even of the elected, are oversimplified, incoherent, technically inadmissible. It is a grave illusion to believe, that democratic control or decision-making can be reconciled with economic technique.” (p. 162) And it follows for Ellul that: “Popular will can only express itself within the limits that technical necessities have fixed in advance.” (p. 209) But then the question is what we understand by efficiency and utility. For a medieval Christian, the erection of a cathedral would have been useful in a way in which it is no longer for us and constructing it with the help of craftsmen and prayer would have been the most efficient way to do so. Usefulness is, after all, a transitive notion. Things are never useful in themselves but always for something else. So, the question becomes what our technology is meant to be useful for and that may not be determined by technology itself.

Ellul has few illusions as to where technological development will take us. “History shows that every technical application from its beginnings presents certain unforeseeable secondary effects which are much more disastrous than the lack of technique would have been. These effects must exist alongside those effects which were foreseen and expected and which represent something valuable and positive.” (p. 105) Among the secondary effects of technological development are extensive new means of social control. “The techniques of the police,” he writes, have as their necessary end the transformation of the entire nation into a concentration camp. This is no perverse decision on the part of some party or government.” He is using this provocative language in order to indicate the coming of what we would now call the surveillance state. “To be sure of apprehending criminals, it is necessary that everyone be supervised. It is necessary to know exactly what every citizen is up to, to know his relations, his amusements, etc. And the state is increasingly in a position to know these things.” (p. 100)

Ellul is convinced that technological development will go on to shape and reshape our political order. Differences in the theories of government will not make much difference to this. Capitalism and communism, democratic and non-democratic systems of government will all be affected in the same way. “The structure of the modern state and its organs of government are subordinate to the techniques on not dependent on the state. If we were to consider in turn each of the indispensable services of the modern state, we would find that they are becoming more and more alike, regardless of the theories of government under which they operate.” (p. 271)

Critical questions are certainly appropriate concerning Ellul’s claims. For one thing, he ignores non-technological factors that direct and inhibit technological development. Among these are the environment, the availability or poverty of resources, financial constraints, as well as the beliefs of those creating and using technological means. Ellul, moreover, does not see that there might be alternative technologies available and that, hence, choices exist in what kind of technology to develop. (See Andrew Feenberg, Alternative Modernities). He also fails to take into account that concentrations of power may lead to a new dispersion of power and that dispersed power has always within it a disruptive potential. (See Sluga, Politics and the Search for the Common Good, chapter 8)

Reading Wittgenstein

Ludwig Wittgenstein was one of the leading philosophical minds of the twentieth century and his thought remains of live interest. But he is not easy to read. Not  that he writes long, complex sentences with obscure philosophical terminology. On the contrary. His prose is simple, straightforward, and exemplary. But his texts are so condensed that it often becomes difficult to follow the course of his thinking.

Twenty years ago, David Stern and I published the Cambridge Companion to Wittgenstein which was intended to help readers along. The volume became eventually one of the bestsellers in Cambridge University’s companions to philosophers series. We have now brought out a second edition of this work, Some of the contributions to the first edition have stood the time and are reprinted in this new one. But we have also added some great new pieces and included a completely updated bibliography. The volume contains, among others things, now a lucid essay by Kevin Cahill on Wittgenstein’s reflections on ethics and a brilliant piece on Wittgenstein’s concept of seeing an aspect by Juliet Floyd. David Stern has contributed a new essay on Wittgenstein’s changing thoughts in the 1930’s and Joachim Schulte has tackled the topic of “body and soul.”

Apart from a new introductory essay, I have written a piece on time and history in Wittgenstein for this second edition. Wittgenstein’s thoughts on these topics have not yet been fully explored. My goal in this essay is to find a new way of looking at Wittgenstein’s writings. Another aspect of that same project is a lecture on Wittgenstein’s conception of the world in the Tractatus. The power point file for this lecture is available on this website. Click here

A Bad Bargain

Joshua Green, Devil’s Bargain. Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Nationalist Uprising, Penguin Books 2017, republished with a new preface 2018

Joshua Green’s book has been somewhat overshadowed by the publication of Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury (Read more) but it adds significantly to Wolff’s account and corrects it at some important points. It tells in fascinating detail the story of bad bargain the American people accepted when they elected Trump.

Green, shows, in particular, how doggedly Trump had been pursuing the project of a presidential campaign. Over long years he had “developed many of the themes that became hallmarks of the eventual campaign – everything from the evils of Chinese currency manipulation to the economic damage that NAFTA inflicted on a broad swath of U. S. workers.” (p. 41) When Trump and Bannon finally met they discovered that “both believed, for instance, that the United States was constantly victimized in foreign trade deals.” (p. 93)

Green, whose book is based on extensive interviews with Bannon himself and his associates as well as with others in Trump’s circle, gives much credit to Bannon for Trump’s victory. He writes that “Trump wouldn’t be president if it weren’t for Bannon. Together their power and reach gave them strength and influence far beyond what either could have achieved on his own.” (p. 22) In a word, Bannon provided for Trump his own “hard-right nationalist politics” and “Trump sold this brand of nationalism with the same all-out conviction he brought to selling his own name. Whether he actually believed in it, he recognized that it was the key to closing the biggest deal of his life.” (p. xxix) It was Bannon, Green argues, who “supplied Trump with a fully formed, internally coherent worldview that accommodated Trump’s own feelings about trade and foreign threats, what Trump eventually dubbed ‘America First’ nationalism.” (p. 46) After their break, Trump sought, of course, to minimize the importance of Bannon for his presidential campaign. “Steve had very little to do with our historical victory,” he declared. (p. xxi)

Given Green’s premise of the importance of Bannon to Trump, it is obvious why he focuses so intensely on Bannon and his worldview — even more so than on Trump. Bannon is, in his eyes, clearly the more complex and more interesting character. Like Michael Wolff after him, Green highlights the volatility of Bannon’s career which took him from serving for seven years in the navy to Goldman Sachs as a banker, Hollywood and movie-making, two years spent on an anti-Clinton crusade, editor of Breitbart News and finally presidential adviser. Both authors also acknowledge the importance of Bannon’s Irish Catholic working-class background. But there are some differences in the two accounts. Green’s Bannon is more successful than Wolff’s and his development is more coherent. Green also makes much of Bannon’s long-standing preoccupation with Hillary Clinton and the ways he sought to undermine her.