Why I read Wittgenstein

I have never been able to attach myself to a single philosopher as my guru. There are those who find all their philosophical enlightenment in Aristotle or Confucius, in Kant or Nietzsche or Marx, in Heidegger or Derrida. I have never been able to follow them. As soon as I read a philosopher, critical questions start swirling in my mind. That’s certainly also true when I read Wittgenstein.

Why then do I keep returning to the works of some philosophers? As, for instance, Wittgenstein’s Tractatus or his Philosophical Investigations.  I am drawn most of all to Wittgenstein’s minimalism: to the way he strips away all the incrustations that have over time accumulated around the questions of philosophy.  He seeks to bring philosophy down to the ground, to liberate it from its baroque excrescences. He is not afraid to ask the simplest question and look for the most straightforward answers.  Wittgenstein’s thinking is an antidote to all the system building that has gone on over the last two thousand years. The vast structures and labyrinths of philosophical thinking.

Philosophical minimalism has still not been fully identified as a particular form of philosophical thought. Take Wilhelm Wundt’s three hefty volumes of his Logic and then put them beside the slim 70 pages or so of Frege’s Begriffsschrift. The former is now forgotten, while Frege’s monograph has started a new phase in the history of logic. Wundt’s Logic covered everything from epistemology to the methodology of science, Frege reduced logic to a theory of truth and truth relations. And compare the Tractatus with Russell’s Principles of Mathematics. The two works cover more or less the same ground. But how much more fastidiously so in Wittgenstein’s book.

To appreciate this minimalism does not mean that one can (or should) imitate it. My own mind works in a different direction. I think in historical terms.  I call myself a philosophical historicist and this historicism seems far removed from the minimalism of Frege’s or Wittgenstein’s work. But philosophical minimalism is a good antidote to the entanglements of traditional philosophy and as such perhaps also useful in clearing one’s mind for a more detached, historical vision of philosophy.

 

The Enemy In-Chief

Since its foundation the US has always had an enemy in-chief. First it was the British who helped to solder the nation together. Then came the extermination of the American Indians extending the American territories “from sea to shining sea.”. Then the civil war when the Americans made mortal enemies of each other with wounds that are still not fully healed. Then came the Spanish, the Germans (twice), the Russians, the North Koreans, the Vietnamese, the Taliban in Afghanistan, Saddam Hussein in Iraq,

Now it appears that a new enemy in-chief has come into sight. Today it is China’s turn. A new act in a deeply dangerous game.

Karl Marx never looked so good

A cartoon series about the life and times of Karl Marx is set to be shown on a Chinese video streaming website with the full backing of Beijing, according to the host company. The Leader, which recounts the story of the German philosopher and socialist revolutionary, will be broadcast by Bilibili.com “soon”, the company said on Tuesday. The production was commissioned by the central government’s Marxism office, in cooperation with authorities in Inner Mongolia; Weiming Culture Media, which is based in the region; and animation company Dongmantang, Bilibili said on Weibo, China’s Twitter-like service. (South China Morning Post, Dec. 19, 2018)

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.

Made in China 2025

The Trump administration has been worried about China turning itself into a leading economic power. Its current trade war with China is officially aimed at bringing about relatively small changes in China’s economic policies but its real aim is to constrain China’s long-term development. We can be sure that China would be willing to adjust its trade policies but it will certainly not abandon its overall development plans. There is no reason to think that the Chinese would ever consent to being in a permanently inferior economic position.  And it is not obvious that the US can keep it there.

Here is an informative overview from the South China Morning Post of China’s 2025 development plans. Click here

 

Trouble in Paradise

The small city of Paradise has been consumed by one of those California forest fires that are becoming only too frequent. Dozens of people have died. Meanwhile, we have been choking in the polluted air 200 miles away. Last year, close friends almost lost their house in the fires that raged around Santa Rosa.

Who can we blame but ourselves? Our freeways are clogged by millions of cars; we fly across continents for business or pleasure; we maintain polluting industries in order to keep the economy going. When our politicians prove unable or unwilling to take action they only reflect our own attitudes. Living in Berkeley, I find myself surrounded by “environmentalists,” but they still burn their woodfires in their chimneys even on the worst bad-air days. Official “Spare the air” alerts are a joke. They are backed up by nothing and largely ignored.

We are changing the air all around us; not only its quality but also its currents. And so the clouds that used to bring rain do not come any more. One year of drought is followed by another and only occasionally do we have a genuine rainy season. No wonder that forests dry out, that trees are attacked by diseases and insects, and that firestorms consume houses, neighborhoods, and entire cities.

Democracy at the Starline Social Club

Jim Miller came to Oakland last week to promote his latest book and I had the pleasure to introduce him at a book presentation organized by Timothy Don at the Starline Social Club in Oakland. It was the night of the election and we were in a space next to the barroom.  So, as the evening proceeded, we could hear the moans and cheers from the bar as election results were coming in. It sounded like democracy at work while we were talking about its history, theory, and prospects.

Miller’s book is an exhilarating roller-coaster history of democracy, tracing its vertiginous ups and downs from ancient Athens to the present. The story is told in a vigorous, bracing fashion. It spells out the ideals that have propelled democratic activists but it also describes the turmoil, chaos, and bloodshed that have accompanied the history of democracy.

 

 

 

Xi Jin Ping Thought Made Easy

“Xi Jin Ping Thought” has become the fourth pillar of China’s official political ideology. The other three are Marxism-Leninism, Mao Zedong Thought, and Deng Xiaoping Theory. The official title of this new ideological component is “Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era” But what is its content? Beijing’s People’s Daily has taken the trouble to make it all clear to its readers and here is the chart the newspaper designed for this purpose. Good luck with it.

The need that China’s rulers feel to formulate such an official ideology is surely remarkable. It reveals how differently they think about politics which they see as being not just a pragmatic operating with power but as requiring also an associated system of ideas. The roots of this way of conceiving politics go back to the Enlightenment and the French revolution. And it manifested itself subsequently not only in Marxism-Leninism but also in Italian fascism and German National-Socialism.

The Empire of Disorientation. A Preface (2nd draft)

It was the day after the election of Donald Trump when I first realized that we are living now in an empire of disorientation. That morning I faced 200 students who were so distraught that I had to cancel a scheduled examination. Some of my colleagues said soon afterwards that we needed to meet in order to console each other. The media and the commentators were profoundly puzzled that morning and in the days to come about the election and what it meant. Trump’s opponent, Hillary Clinton, was at a loss for words, her supporters destroyed.  Even Trump himself, we are told, was stunned by the unexpected turn of events. I have begun to understand since then that the disorientation that everybody felt that day was, in fact, a symptom of a more wide-spread and, in fact, pandemic condition. My initial picture of the United States as an empire of disorientation gave thus way to the recognition that the empire of disorientation is our new, global reality.

Disorientation is a virulent form of uncertainty. Uncertainty as such is a normal feature of life and an inescapable one in politics. Both in daily life and in politics we are regularly called upon to make decisions when we are uncertain about the circumstances about what we really want. When the circumstances are sufficiently narrowly circumscribed and the action considered sufficiently small, we may find it easy enough to decide. But as soon as we contemplate any larger course of action that presupposes extensive knowledge of the existing conditions and of the likely outcome of our actions and when the question why we mean to act and for what purpose is not clearly settled, we will be inclined to hesitate, dither, postpone the decision, or try to evade it altogether. Such situations are not unknown in politics. Forced finally to make a decision, we become painfully aware of the gap between our deliberations and the action we finally decide on. Sometimes we roll dice or toss a coin or look for an omen to help us along.

Political action responds to uncertainty. It seeks to alleviate and overcome our insecurities. But it also exploits them and generates new ones. Uncertainty is never removed from politics. In normal times such uncertainty remains manageable. But when it magnifies and multiplies  coherent action becomes more and more difficult. It is then when we speak of disorientation. Political uncertainty arises from normal limits to our knowledge and from the normal conflict of our desires. But when it rises too far, it becomes toxic. The resulting disorientation manifests itself as a comprehensive failure of understanding where we are and what we want. We lack, in other words, not only information but also the words and concepts to think coherently. My claim is simply that we are moving today from a (normal) politics of uncertainty to an (abnormal) politics of disorientation and that on a global scale.

This book was initially motivated by the astonishing rise of Donald Trump into the political stratosphere. But it was never meant to focus exclusively on the 45th US President. My aims have always been broader, more analytic, more theoretical – certainly not journalistic, even less polemical, and not at all party-political. I turn to the figure of Donald Trump, instead, only as emblematic of a larger narrative which concerns the increasing instability of our institutional arrangements and the global crisis into which we are heading.

That Trump signals a state of growing political disorientation is clear from the difficulty we have in trying to understand him and what he stands for. His critics have called him a populist and even a fascist; but are these terms really explanatory or adequate? Trump identifies himself as a Republican and a conservative; but is this not just one of the changing veneers he has used in his lifetime?  Our confusion is deepened by the fact that across the “democratic” West, old political affiliations are losing their hold. The ideological strands seem to have become entangled in new, unexpected ways. And so the familiar arrangement of political views on a scale from “Left” to “Right” has become less helpful. The new complexity of our global word makes it increasingly difficult to grasp what is going on and makes predicting the consequences of our actions more hazardous.  The resulting uncertainties afflict everyone: ordinary citizens, but also the members of the political class and even, so it seems, the president of the United States. We find ourselves, in other words, in an empire of disorientation.

We must ask ourselves then how we can our way in this condition. It appears likely that we can expect only tentative and provisional answers and that they can be reached only in a number of steps. The first step will have to be a closer look at the normal uncertainty that affects all politics. Only then can we move on to consider the state of disorientation in which we now roam. It may turn out that our condition of disorientation is constitutive of a new political reality and not a mere obstacle to understanding it. In a third chapter, I turn to the question how we can describe Trump’s politics more adequately. I begin with the question whether we should think of him as a populist or, at least, as an advocate of some populist policies. It will quickly become apparent that the term “populism” is too imprecise to capture either Trump or his policies. “Populism” may, in fact, only be a rhetorical façade behind which another kind of politics is hidden. In the fourth chapter I will consider the more promising idea that we are witnessing the emergence of a plutocratic regime. The plutocratic turn in politics is certainly not limited to the United States and the accelerating concentration of wealth and political power across the globe suggests far-reaching changes in the way politics is conducted.

But to speak of plutocracy as the new political paradigm can’t be the end of the story. For the rule of the rich, though not universal, has been common in history. Over time plutocracy has, moreover, had many different embodiments. In order to understand what plutocracy could mean in the twenty-first century, we must raise the broader question of the material and the moral conditions under which this form of politics is now being re-invented.

Contemporary plutocracy is made possible by technological means that have brought about new forms of economic accumulation, new forms of communication, and an entirely new globalized system of human interaction. As a result, we are witnessing a re-arrangement of power relations across the globe. In order to understand this process, we will need to consider the peculiar dialectic of these relations, their weaving back and forth in processes of concentration and dispersion. Given these fluctuations we should not be surprised to discover a transformation and deformation occurring at every level of human society. Hannah Arendt has argued that we are by no means “naturally” political beings, that human politics is, rather, a historical and contingent arrangement, and that the conditions for its existence may disappear. She conceived of this possibility as taking the form of a rigidly administrative “post-political” state. It is also possible that our disorientation will lead to disorder and chaos, and the ultimate destruction of the entire human form of life. In either direction, technological change would appear to be a decisive factor.

The disappearance of politics in Arendt’s sense is not inevitable. But do we have the moral resources to prevent it? We need to remind ourselves here of Nietzsche’s observation that we are living increasingly under nihilistic conditions. Nihilism does not here mean the total collapse of values. Our nihilism manifests itself rather in their proliferation which as such makes those values arbitrary and evanescent. Our kind of nihilism consists, in other words, in a “desublimation” of values: in values losing their value. It is in this desublimated climate that plutocracy is now re-instituting itself with the help of technological means. Our twenty-first century variety of version of politics may thus turn out to be a nihilistic techno-plutocracy and as such the antecedent of a post-political future.

In order to flesh out these speculations we must begin with a closer look at the political ground. I start, therefore, with Donald Trump and then broaden my perspective to the overall political condition.  It is essential then to distinguish from the start between the individual case of Trump’s presidency and the broader political transformations it signals. An exclusive focus on Trump and his idiosyncrasies may lead us to overlook that his election, though by no means predetermined, was also no fluke. It marks one significant place on a road that stretches both backwards and forwards; it signals an increasing destabilization of the political order; it indicates that we can no longer take the assumptions of the classical modern state for granted; and it points to an uncertain political future. There is a second reason why we must not limit our attention to the person of Donald Trump. We don’t know as yet how successful his presidency will be. If it is and how it is, will force us to rethink where we are politically. But Trump’s political edifice is also a ramshackle affair and may eventually collapse under its own weight.  If that happens, our preoccupation with Trump may mislead us in another way, making us think that the old order is still with us, is stable and has been saved — when its disintegration may, in fact, be only taking another course. In thinking about where we are politically, we need to be aware of the forces of transformation that are at work and these are of global reach and not limited to Trump’s America. But this does not mean that dynamics of global politics is the same as America’s. Different parts of the world exemplify different stages of political development. And how these develop depends on local as well as on global conditions. We can be fairly sure that China will never become like the United States and the United States is not likely to turn into a replica of China and the destiny of Europe is bound to be different from both. We must therefore avoid speaking about global politics as if it were just an extension of the turbulences, tremors, and tragedies of Trump’s regime.

The model for my book is Ci Jiwei’s Dialectic of the Chinese Revolution (Stanford University Press 1994) a work that has not yet received the attention that it deserves. The book  undertakes a philosophical diagnosis of Chinese history from Mao’s revolution to the mid-nineties. It describes the historical course as a shift from utopianism to a hedonism that constitutes a nihilistic “desublimation of values.” My goal is to supplement Ci’s story with an account of the development of American and global politics in a direction that encompasses both an individualistic hedonism and an aggressive nationalism as another embodiment of the nihilistic “desublimation of values.” It may turn out that the development of China and that of Trump’s America and the rest of the global community resemble each other and can be considered parts of one story.

My line of thinking has its origins in two earlier books. The primary objective of Heidegger’s Crisis. Philosophy and Politics in Nazi Germany was to explore the political entanglement of Martin Heidegger and other German philosophers during the nineteen-thirties and forties. My discussion aime in this way at raising a series of interrelated questions: why is political philosophy such a treacherous subject? How are we to conceive the role of philosophy in politics? How is philosophy shaped by the political circumstances in which it operates and how does it respond to those circumstances? Are philosophers qualified to define ultimate standards and norms of political action, as they have sought to do for such a long time? Or is the function of philosophy more modestly to help us diagnose the political realities, to provide concepts for its understanding, and thereby to prepare the ground for practical choices? German philosophy in this period proceeded in the midst of a political crisis and this raised the further question how one should think about such crises and, in particular, about the German crisis of that moment. My concern was to show that, in spite of their political missteps, Heidegger and some of his fellow philosophers had come to a few enduring insights. They had understood that the crisis they faced had to do with the emergence of nihilism, as Nietzsche had identified it before them, and that this development was, in turn, related to the technological transformation of our human reality. And this story remains of interest because the crisis the German philosophers diagnosed is continuous with the one we face in the age of Trump. It is the continuation of this story that concerns me in this book.

This present work also takes off from Politics and the Search for the Common Good, a book in which I set out a critique of the normative thinking that dominates political philosophy till today. I sought to argue that it is an illusion to assume that we can determine the common good once and for all by means of abstract, philosophical reasoning. The common good has to be worked out, instead, In a political manner. We must therefore reject the claims of the normative thinkers as being an authoritarian appropriation of a political process. I called, instead, for a diagnostic form of political thinking in which philosophy sets out to contribute to an understanding of our political reality by providing analyses and concepts. In his theses on Feuerbach, Karl Marx famously noted that the philosophers have so far only sought to understand reality, but that the real task is to change it. We may be allowed to ask how the philosophers are supposed to do this. The answer may be that they can do so only by helping us to interpret the situation in which find ourselves. Coming to think of it, we might even say that this is, in fact, also what Marx himself ultimately did.

Politics and the Search for the Common Good ends with reflections on the way that technology shapes and transforms our political practice; how power gets distributed and redistributed by means of technology; and how this leads over time to both concentrations and dispersions of power. And to this, the book adds as a concluding thought, that the way this happens is not full accessible to our understanding and that politics is therefore inherently a domain of uncertainty. It is this uncertainty that constitutes the starting point of the present work.

Diagnostic political practice

             Political life calls for reflection: What’s going on? What must we do? It might even be that the agitations of life become “political” only when such questions are asked. Also, that asking such questions is an essential part of political life. We should say then that our reflective thinking plays here three roles at once: it is deliberation about politics, it is constitutive of politics, and it is at the same time integrally part of it. The natural stance of this kind of thinking is towards the conditions in which it finds itself. Being located in the political plain and asking how life in it is to be understood and how to carry on with that life as well as we can, political reflection expresses itself in political speech. But political speech is soon surpassed by another form of reflection: one that seeks to remove itself from its location in the political plain in order to achieve a distanced and theoretical overview. This kind of theorizing can take a variety of forms. It can issues in claims about what all politics is and even must be or it can seek to spell out what all politics should be and what we must always and in all places do. Man is by nature a political animal. Man is man’s wolf. And: The meaning of politics is the implementation of justice -.are among the claims of political theory or philosophy so conceived (I have yet to find a compelling reason for distinguishing sharply between the two.). Comprehensive political theorizing of one or the other of these forms aspires to standing above the political plain, to deliver objective insights into its constitution, and to adjudicate what goes in the political fray. The aspiration of political theorizing is, in fact, that of Plato’s philosopher-kings. And there have never ceased to appear pretenders to that position. Against their overweening ambitions we must affirm an engaged and modest form of political thinking. We must defend political speech against the political theory. We still need to topple the philosopher-kings from their throne.

Political speech serves the needs of practical politics; but it can also drive further and ask more thoroughly about the condition in which we exist and how to proceed. If we call the former political speech, we can reserve the term “diagnostic practice” specifically for the latter. But we must understand that this kind of practice is not sharply separated from political speech. It differs only by degrees and is for that reason just as political as the former. Let us also recognize that the pretensions of the political theorists to detach themselves altogether from the political plain are no more than pretensions and that what these theorists deliver is, in fact, only another, unacknowledged kind of political diagnosis. Our theorists speak in the end always of the place and time in which they happen to be; they speak politically and not in a higher, purer, supra-political voice. This suggests that we can read their works in a different way from how they are usually read: not as contributions to the timeless truth about politics, but as disguised and perhaps only rudimentary diagnoses of their own time. We can read Plato’s Republic as a contribution to the Athenian and Greek politics of the 4th century; Hobbes’ Leviathan as a diagnosis of 17th century England and Europe torn by theological struggles; and John Rawls’ Theory of Justice as political speech on behalf of America in the 1960’s. We can add that these works would have been more transparent, if their authors had themselves been clearer about their undertaking or, at least, more explicit about it. To “historicize” these writings, as I suggest we should, need not deprive them of value for us. We can still learn from them what political  constellations may look like and what it means to reflect on politics in their variable contexts. We will see that diagnostic practice can never restrict itself to a narrow focus on the immediate present. In order to understand the present, we need to take note of the events that that have brought us to where we are now. In order to diagnose the present we need to track also that part of our political past that consists in its varying reflections.

            We still need to indicate more precisely what a diagnostic practice in political thinking will look like. “To diagnose” means to investigate a specific object or process in order to determine its nature, how it works, and to identify possible faults or flaws. We speak of diagnosis in this way in engineering, computer science and elsewhere, but most commonly in medicine. Diagnosis in engineering means an investigation of a particular machine or kind of machine, in computer science it means the testing of a particular program, and in medicine the examination of a particular patient. Diagnosis concerns thus always a specific object and seeks to reach specific conclusions about it. Diagnosis does not aim at making broad claims about all machines, programs, or human patients. Diagnosticians consider their object of diagnosis, moreover, not from a detached, timeless, and purely theoretical point of view but as it presents it to them at the moment and with practical conclusions in mind: in the workshop, the lab, or the examination room. Diagnosticians must, for that reason, also always take their own capacities for understanding into account, the skills, procedures, devices, and tools they have for conducting their investigation, and its circumstances, conditions, and limitations. The diagnosticians’ primary goal is, finally, not one of seeking to gain theoretical insight, but to reach a practical understanding of the object of diagnosis that can lead to an appropriate response which may determine that the machine is working, that the program functions, that the patient is healthy or, alternatively that the machine needs repair, the program needs redesign, and the patient needs treatment, or, as yet another possibility, that the machine is beyond repair, the program must be discarded, and the patient’s problem can only be alleviated.

Diagnostic political practice appears to be closest to the practice of medical diagnosis. One obvious reason for this is that in both cases we deal with human beings. We may be able to sharpen our conception of political diagnosis then by comparing it with and contrasting it to the medical kind . We can learn to gain a clearer understanding of what a diagnostic political practice might consist in because medical practitioners have, in fact engaged in diagnostic practices for more than two thousand years. Over time they have developed complex and organized diagnostic procedures. And there exists now an extensive medical literature on the topic.[1]

The first step in medical diagnosis is always to acquire knowledge about the patient. The patient may be coming to see the doctor for a regular check-up, for a general consultation, or because he/she feels unwell. And here we encounter the first dissimilarity between political and medical diagnosis. The latter is typically solicited whereas the former is most often not. And this relates to a second difference in that the doctor is confronted by a specific patient whereas the political diagnostician is located in the political system he or she is trying to diagnose. The physician can and is, indeed, called upon to distance himself from the patient. Medical diagnosis is well aware of the problem of familiarity bias which arises when that distance is broken. Such bias may taint the diagnosis. This can occur when the medical doctor is trying to diagnose him- or herself or a member of his or her own family or friends and acquaintances. By contrast, we might say that familiarity bias is almost impossible to avoid in diagnostic political thinking. There is, moreover, an additional problem here. Whereas the medical patient is a well-defined entity, it is not at all clear that there exists a distinct domain of politics separate from how we conceive it. Politics is not a natural kind but constituted by our reflection on it and, in particular, by the concept of the political with which we are operating.

Still, there are illuminating similarities between the two types of diagnosis. One concerns the kind of knowledge we require, the second the kind of concepts we have available.

The acquisition of knowledge in medical diagnosis begins as soon as the patient enters the examination room. The look, the gait, and the behavior of patient provide the medical diagnostician with first clues. “During a medical encounter the physician is being literally bombarded with information such as sights, sounds, smells, emotional affect, body language, and so on.”[2] It is part of the physician’s skill to be attentive to this wealth of information, not to overlook significant clues, but also not to be rushed into a false diagnosis. First impressions may after all prove misleading. The medical examination proceeds from this first moment to a more systematic attempt to gather knowledge and the first part of that is linguistic. The physician will ask the patient a series of questions. And this again requires skill for not every question and every kind of questioning will evoke an informative answer. For, “the patient may intentionally or unwillingly engage in denial and fail to openly convey critical information necessary to make the diagnosis.” The physician will want to know why the patient came for the examination and why now. He will want to hear about how the patient feels, whether there is pain, where it is, what kind of pain it is, and so on. He will also take notice of the patient’s description of how his symptoms have come about, how long they have lasted. He will record the patient’s medical history and the medical history of the family. Two features stand out in this: the crucial importance of the first person (i.e, the patient’s) report and secondly that a diagnosis of the present state of the patient depends on knowledge earlier states.  These two features carry directly over into political diagnosis. What is being said by all those who are operating in the political plain is essential for the political diagnostician and as in the medical case that information has to be carefully evaluated since the political actors may use language deceptively (by intention or inadvertently) and they do use language not only to communicate but also for rhetorical effect and to exercise power. But in listening to what is being said about the present, it is also important to find out is being said about the past. The political present can be understood only by knowing how it has come about. The political diagnosis of the present must involve thus a history of the present.

Medical diagnosis proceeds at this point to physical examination, laboratory tests, x-ray examination – procedures that are not available in the political case. The result will, however, be in both cases an overwhelming amount of information. The physician’s task is to determine what information provides him with clues about the patient’s state of health. Many bits of information will be irrelevant. Others may by indicate that something is wrong and that the patient is suffering from a disease. But which disease? Some bits of information belong together and point to a particular diagnosis. But which? There may be widely different symptoms which still are clues for one particular disease as well as very similar symptoms that indicate the presence of more than one disorder. The physician must take care not to over-diagnose and identify a disease when the patient is, in fact, healthy, not to overlook a disease that is actually present but may be manifesting itself in an unusual form, not to misdiagnose the disease that is present and prescribe a wrong treatment, and not to assume that a patient may only have one disease. There are no physical tests that the political diagnostician can perform, but otherwise his situation is similar to that of the physician. One crucial difference is, however, that the overabundance of information may be much greater in the political case than in the medical one – certainly so when think of contemporary politics.

The goal of the medical diagnostician is to identify the patient’s disease, if there is one present. The diagnostician will try to connect the identified clues with a name. Various techniques have been developed to do so. The exhaustive method is to gather and organize every available piece of data in order to arrive at a diagnosis. But this is not always practically possible, it is time-consuming, and does not always lead to a definite diagnosis. An algorithmic method sees the diagnosis as a series of decision procedure where each new bit of information leads to a choice between more definite conclusions. But such a method is not available for all medical problems because they prove too complex for this process.  A physician may also recall another patient or case he had seen or learned of before. Pattern recognition may help to reach a conclusion. But the method most often used in medical diagnosis is the hypothetico- deductive one in which the physician generates a hypothesis on the basis of his examination which is then evaluated and refined by further questioning of the patient, more tests, etc. At this point we must admit that the procedures of a political diagnosis are not as highly sophisticated and may never become so because of the uncontrollably large body of information, the impossibility of empirical testing, and the indeterminacy of the classificatory tools at hand.

And here we certainly encounter another significant difference between medicine and politics. Human patients are complex beings but political societies (particularly of the modern variety) are even more complex.  Human patients suffer from a large number of maladies but those can still be enumerated and are recurrent. The ills of politics are no so easily defined and as a large scale historical phenomenon it is not clear to what degree political ills are recurrent and enumerable. What is shared in the two attempts at diagnosis is that we seek to attach names (or concepts) to the identified clues. This is a case of tuberculosis we say, in one case. That is the case of a military coup, we say in the other.  Naming is important to both the physician and the patient and it is tied to therapeutic (or reforming) outcome of the diagnosis. It is also essential in politics. But the clinical practice of medicine is supported by a large body of scientific knowledge in biology, physiology, chemistry, and even physics. Such sciences are not in the same way available in politics. We may draw on socio-biology or anthropology or even climate science to reach our diagnosis but this support is more limited and perhaps less solid than the one we can rely on in medicine.

When we look at the history of medicine we discover, of course, that it has achieved its current scientific character only in the nineteenth century. Until then medical diagnosis was an art more similar to what we can now conceive as political diagnosis. We can also see in this earlier history how the practice of medicine involved a process of creating categories and concepts, of defining and specifying illnesses. Here the diagnostic practice involved not just applying given concepts to the observed phenomena but also to generate new concepts on the basis of observation.

We can thus identify two particular problems in the diagnostic process both medical and political. The first concerns the acquisition of knowledge: an overabundance of data, the need to sort those out into significant and insignificant, the difficulty of saying which data provide significant clues and which clues belong together. We need to attend, in particular, to the use of language in the diagnostic procedure; the question of how to assess what is being said. The second concerns the concepts (words, terms, or classifications) we have available to make sense of the data. We need to ask what they are and how they are to be understood, and how they are applied; we need to consider their adequacy and the possibility of generating new, better suited concepts. We need to recognize, moreover, that these two problems are substantially greater in politics than in medicine.

And because of this difference, we will also find it more difficult to evaluate diagnostic hypotheses when it comes to politics. And this is worth emphasizing because in politics we are still given to believe in the certainty of our convictions, and instead of proposing hypotheses we are inclined to speak our opinion loudly, assertively, and dogmatically. In fact, it is only rarely that we consider different hypotheses and seek to determine their degree of validity.  This differs sharply from the practice of medical diagnoses, where it is considered essential; to take all relevant hypotheses into account, where, in the course of the examination, the physician will try to whinny their number down always conscious of how easy it is to reach a false diagnosis.  The medical handbook finally advises us: “Physicians and patients must learn to live with some uncertainty.” How much more correct this is with political matters.

Finally, we must keep in mind that diagnosis, even when fully successful, produces always and only local knowledge in two senses of the word: (1) In medicine, for instance, it produces knowledge of an individual patient, the concrete states of an actual body, and of physically located cues. (2) It also produces knowledge whose validity may be limited to the diagnostic occasion. And the same thing holds in the political sphere. Diagnosis does not and cannot satisfy our hankering for a global theory though it may help us to at times to achieve a broader political view. In doing so it may diagnose our desire for more.

 

Notes

[1] Mark B. Mengel, Warren Lee Holleman, Scott A. Fields, Fundamentals of clinical practice,  2nd edition, 2002.

[2] John P. Langlois, “Making a Diagnosis,” loc. cit. All further quotations are from this essay.

What’s the Matter with Sociology? A Conversation with Robert Dunn

HS: Sociology used to be a much sought-after subject some decades ago. Students flocked to it. The works of sociologists received wide attention across the social and human sciences and even by the general public. But today it has become somewhat quiet around the field. Can you explain what has happened?

RD: A number of interrelated things.   First, social change itself is perhaps the most fundamental reason for the decline of interest in sociology.  More than any other academic discipline, sociology is closely tied to society and therefore gives expression to its general state of affairs—its structure and culture and the forces that shape and change it over time.  If conditions in society change, this will be reflected in changes in the discipline, in the kind of work being done and in theoretical orientations. For a number of reasons I think of the postwar period in the US as the heyday of American sociology.  The 1950s and 1960s were decades of unprecedented change, ushering in new possibilities, promises, and dangers affecting all parts of the population.  These possibilities captured the attention of large segments of the public.  As you say, sociology seemed to have an impact beyond disciplinary borders.  For one thing, the discipline for the first time began to acquire scientific legitimacy.  Major theoretical statements were being made, most (in)famously that of Talcott Parsons, who attempted to establish the functionalist paradigm as the foundation of the field. Also, numerous developments in research methodology.  At the same time, social change was accompanied by a host of new social problems and issues of concern to a growing number of educated readers.  —there emerged a kind of popular sociology in mass circulation books and other media—what I call in my book the tradition of social criticism–.  C. Wright Mills stands out in this regard.   These two tendencies, forming a contradiction and set of tensions within the field, imparted a dynamism to sociology, giving it a strong presence both inside and outside the university. Toward the end of the sixties and into the 1970s, sociology took on a political flavor.  Cultural and identity politics drew large numbers of students into the field who were interested in issues of gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, and so on.  So, I guess the first part of my answer would be that those decades represent a period of exceptionalism in the discipline, just as many believe it was for society at large.  We know how society has changed since then.

The rest of my answer has to do with the discipline itself and trends in academia more broadly.  Sociology has lost definition.  Since the demise of the functionalist paradigm, the field has gone in different directions; there has been a dispersal of ideas and energies, a lack of cohesion and coherence, to the point where nobody can quite say what sociology is anymore.  If anything, positivist forms of thinking have to some extent reasserted themselves so that content has given way to formal considerations of research methodology and technique.  In effect, the field has been fragmented through overspecialization.  (This is a big point in my book.)  Also, funds have been flowing elsewhere, into the physical sciences, information technology, business, etc., resulting in underfunding of the social sciences.  Of course, this is also clearly a matter of social change.  The job market has been less friendly to sociologists than to people entering these other fields.

HS: There are certainly past writers in the field who are still being cited: classical sociologists like Weber and Durckheim, but also more recent ones like Bourdieu and, perhaps, one might also add here Foucault. But I can’t think of anyone of equal stature today. Who do you think is producing work that deserves attention beyond the boundaries of the discipline?

RD: Certainly, thinkers of the stature you mention seem to have disappeared.  Let’s note first of all that these earlier thinkers were European not American.  This country has never produced theorists of the quality of the Europeans.  American sociology has labored under an anti-theoretical bias—perhaps a reflection of what the historian Richard Hofstadter long ago called the anti-intellectualism in American life.  Parsons and his descendants are a failed and ideologically motivated example of the poverty of theory.  The discipline has instead favored piecemeal empirical work, the study of milieu, to use C. Wright Mills’s term.  In opposition to this trend, Mills advocated studying the relationship between milieu and social structure.  He chided other sociologists for failing to look at “the big picture.” There are a few sociologists today attempting to do this kind of work.  Theda Skocpol,  Erik Olin Wright, Fred Block, Michael Burawoy, are a few names that come to mind.  Also, the work of Barbara Ehrenreich, strictly speaking not a sociologist but she has done some excellent studies accessible to general readers.

HS: Your criticism of sociology focuses on, what you call formalism. Could you explain what you mean by that term?

RD: I think of formalism as a type of sociological thinking and practice that gives priority and sometimes reduces things to concept formation and methodological rigor, at the expense of attention to content.  Formalist sociology is preoccupied with analytical tools and procedures while minimizing engagement with actual subject matter.  This kind of sociology manifests itself in the form of abstract theoretical systems or structures and research methodologies that are divorced from the real world.  C. Wright Mills accurately characterized this situation when he accused the discipline of engaging in what he called “grand theory” and “abstract empiricism.”  Interestingly, the prominent sociologist Robert K. Merton, a student of Parsons, years ago gave the cat away, so to speak, when he suggested that sociology, or sociological theory specifically, was mainly in the business of analyzing concepts.  Perhaps this was more of an agenda setting statement than many have realized.  Another way of putting this is that formalist agendas are attempts to implement scientific protocols at the expense of engagement with social realities.  Or, we might say a failure to ground sociology in real empirical phenomena.

I take the work of Mills as a model of the latter type of sociological work.  Mills was theoretically and methodologically sophisticated but studied society on its own empirical terms, regarding theory and method as only necessary means or guides to social inquiry rather than ends in themselves.

HS: You associate formalism with value-neutrality. But what is the connection between the two? I would think that the two issues are really separable from each other.

RD: As I attempt to show in the last chapter of my book, social science is inherently normative in character.  Social life is founded upon and shaped by values.  Genuine social analysis, whether theoretical or empirical in nature, cannot escape dealing with the problem of values.  Not only is the subject matter of sociology inherently value-laden, but value judgements inhere in the research process itself, not to mention the very language we use to talk about and analyze society.  So, it seems to me that with genuine substantive work value questions are unavoidable. A major impulse behind formalism is the attempt to avoid the problem of values and value judgments.  This is joined to the positivist impulse to emulate the rigor and precision of the natural sciences by turning social phenomena into objects of purely scientific concern.  Thus, for me, formalism and value neutrality go hand in hand.  I might put it this way: Formalism is both cause and effect of a preoccupation with analytical constructs, and such constructs tend to become substitutes for the investigation of real social and cultural phenomena.

HS: Formalism flourishes not only in sociology. One of the doctoral students I am working with right now is writing on formalism in neo-liberal economics. And I am inclined to say that formalism also manifests itself in philosophy. I am speaking of the pervasive drive to mathematization in all these fields. How are we to explain this development?

RD: I’m not entirely sure how to explain the drive to mathematize but it is surely evident in sociology, where for a long time there have been attempts off and on to develop mathematical models and procedures.   I guess I see it as another manifestation of the worship of scientific technique and the ambitions of those seeking scientific respectability in their respective fields.  To me, mathematizing the subject matter is simply sociological positivism at its extreme, driven by the mistaken belief that science always means quantification and the illusion that scientific “truth” is ultimately to be found in numbers and ideally in mathematical concepts and relationships.  Tension between “quantitative” and “qualitative” methods in sociology is an old story, and I think to this day these competing approaches are still debated between rival camps.

HS: I was struck by a certain ambiguity in your book and even its title. Sometimes it reads as if you were describing a past moment when John Dewey and C. Wright Mills were working towards a pragmatist sociology. In other parts of your book you seem to be saying that contemporary scholars should work toward a pragmatist sociology. Is your book more of a backward-looking essay on the development of sociology since Dewey or one about the future? More a historical treatise or an exhortative call to action?

 

RD: I see the book as both.  The overall structure of the book comprises 1) an attempt to retrieve past “progressive” or “radical” traditions in the disciplines, represented primarily by the work of Dewey and Mills but extending into the social criticism genre of the 1950s and 1960s; and 2) an effort to show how these past traditions can revitalize the field and perhaps bring it back to its original sense of mission as a critical and democratic project to solve social problems and bring about social improvement.  The crucial turning point in my historical perspective is the 1940s and 1950s, decades during which the discipline assumed the mantle of “science,” thereby marginalizing or overshadowing the earlier progressive and ameliorative tendencies in the field.  Whereas the disciplinary focus had once been on social problems and their resolution, the focus now turned to the development of scientific technique.  This was when professionalism and formalism took hold, the change that is the main object of my critique.  So, the book both looks backwards to something “lost” and forward to a revival of an intellectual and political vision and a greater sense of social relevance and responsibility.  My arguments culminate in the notion of a “public sociology,” as articulated by Michael Burawoy, which would bring the work of sociologists and the concerns and interests of the public closer together.

HS: To what extent do you believe can Dewey’s philosophy be of help to today’s sociologists? I always have difficulties in reading Dewey. He often paints with a very broad brush and with little attention to the complexities of history. What I find most problematic in him is, however, his Hegelian progressivism. He speaks of himself as thinking in evolutionary terms. And it used to be the case that the theory of evolution was understood as telling a progressivist, quasi-Hegelian story; but we have come to understand that the theory has also a dark side: species can and will fail; historical developments can be dead ends; some forms of life can flourish for a while but still eventually be faced with a situation they can’t master. Dewey seems to me to have had a naïve view of the course of democracy. We can see today in China and other places that technological and scientific progress can very well be de-coupled from political liberty.

RD: I agree that Dewey paints history with a broad brush but it’s important to keep in mind that he was motivated by a specific philosophical agenda, namely to “reconstruct” philosophy along pragmatist lines.  Accordingly, he talks about major moments, broad trends, turning points, etc. to develop a frame for his critique of traditional philosophy and inherited habits of thought.  Also, he attempts to show how salient ideas and movements of thought are tied to changing historical and social conditions.  Here I think he conducts a sociology of knowledge far superior to most of the work that’s been done in this subfield.

I think the real problem with Dewey is the multiplicity of intellectual and philosophical influences shaping his thought and work.  There are many Deweys, at any given point in his career and over time…. In my book I attempt to highlight those intellectual lineages that shaped his conception of society and human behavior.  For instance, you raise the question of the dark side of evolution.  I’m sure Dewey would agree but would say that the value in Darwin’s work and the idea of evolution more generally resides in the understanding it provides of processes of adaptation to one’s environment, adjustment, change, problem solving, and so on—key elements in Dewey’s social thought.  To take another example, I emphasize in the book his belief in the unity of theory and practice, which I believe he took from the Hegelian-Marxist tradition.  Richard Bernstein heavily emphasizes the parallels here to the Marxist notion of praxis.  These are the aspects of Dewey that I think are highly significant for today’s sociologists.  The field is in need of a reorientation (back) toward problem solving and its connection to social change, major themes in Dewey.  I think Dewey’s concern for the problems of agency and the consequences of social action in this respect are extremely important.  The other side of Dewey, his commitment to democracy and his role as a public intellectual, I try to weave into these issues.  He saw the social sciences as playing a central role in guiding society toward a freer and more democratic state by having a strong and relevant presence in public life.  History, especially now, perhaps is showing him to be naive but there nonetheless is in his writings a political vision, a sense of commitment and intellectual purpose, and a strongly humane approach to society’s problems that can serve as a model for the practice of sociology today.

Robert Dunn is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the California State University, East Bay.