Mtraven posted an appreciation for Phil Agre. In addition to some techie stuff, he also wrote political tracts like What is Conservatism and What is Wrong With It? Mtraven had referenced that work before and I checked it out again to refresh my memory a tad. My verdict was not good. I wrote the following:
I couldn’t get past where he said conservatism was incompatible with civilization. He had just stated that the Egyptians and Romans were characterized by conservatism, and they’re prototypical civilizations. The thing about conservatism having to re-invent itself each generation makes sense in the current context, saying that it’s about aristocracy doesn’t.
Mtraven responded:
Agre’s Conservatism essay does go a bit overboard in my opinion in projecting the current split between conservatives and democrats back through thousands of years of history. If I had to guess, when he said that conservatism is “incompatible with civilization” he meant that it’s incompatible with the sort we would like to have, one that is dynamic, innovative, at least somewhat rational.
When reading that (or anything outside your comfort zone) I suggest not getting hung up on individual assertions and trying to imagine the sort of world the author is trying to convey. That’s a trick I may have learned from Phil, now that I think about it.
I rejoindered:
Mencius Moldbug has quite an imagination and writing talent to convey it. His individual assertions are often contradictory or just false. That trait indicates to me a sort of performance art rather than dedication to truth. When Bryan Caplan argues that other famous philosophers were just as bad as Rand, I don’t take that to indicate that I should give Rand a chance. It tells me to discount the rest of them along with her.
I should have referenced the assertion from the calculation debate that “socialism/central planning is impossible”, where “impossible” was transformed by Boettke into meaning “won’t produce the prosperity sought by socialists”.
What does everyone else think?
November 26, 2009 at 5:57 pm
I thought that socialist calculation was still impossible, just not as crucial to human existence as some Austrians would think.
November 27, 2009 at 12:24 am
Before even looking at Agre’s essay, my first question was, “how does he define conservatism?” To his credit, Agre anticipates this question, and defines it as “domination of society by an aristocracy.” To his detriment, or rather, to the detriment of his argument, he never defines what he means by aristocracy.
Googling around, I quickly located the following: “Like many terms used to describe government structures, aristocracy is impossible to define. Founded on the Greek word, aristos , which means “best,” at its heart aristocracy means “rule by the best.”
I disagree, in a sense, with the first sentence. Aristocracy is not “impossible to define (otherwise, why bother to go on trying to do so), but is a term of such broad meaning that one must define one’s use of “artistocracy” within the context of a particular discussion. This, Agre doesn’t do (at least, I don’t think so, and I’m not going to scan the whole essay trying to find out). Presumably, he doesn’t mean by democracy its Greek root: “”rule by the best.” Therefore, what does he mean?
Based upon the following, “From the pharaohs of ancient Egypt to the self-regarding thugs of ancient Rome to the glorified warlords of medieval and absolutist Europe, in nearly every urbanized society throughout human history, there have been people who have tried to constitute themselves as an aristocracy. These people and their allies are the conservatives,” he apparently means by “aristocracy” a ruling class, or cabal, or oligarchy.
His argument seems to me to be breaking down here, in that all large scale societies (by which I mean, larger than hunter-gatherer bands) are ruled by such groups. Agre goes on to acknowledge that these groups do not in fact constitute a permanent ruling class, but rather shift and change over time, absorbing new approaches and defenses in their bid to attain, consolidate, and expand their power:
“Although one of the goals of every aristocracy is to make its preferred social order seem permanent and timeless, in reality conservatism must be reinvented in every generation. This is true for many reasons, including internal conflicts among the aristocrats; institutional shifts due to climate, markets, or warfare; and ideological gains and losses in the perpetual struggle against democracy.”
I agree with this point, but what about this invariable aspect of human nature makes it “conservative?” Well, according to Agre, these people are trying to make themselves into aristocrats, or at least, are trying to fool the public into seeing them as such. But how could this description of a political dynamic not as easily be applied to the Stalinist USSR or Mao’s China, or if these cases seem too obvious, to the ongoing evolution of the EU? Does Agre really believe that there are two types of people, those who use power selflessly to protect their fellow citizens and to advance those citizen’s rights and welfare, aa opposed to those who seek power in order to advance their own interests, and those whom they see as being “of their own class?” And can he really believe that these two groups are in such approximtate numerical parity such that, under an urigged democratic system, they can contest each other’s bids for power?
A few more comments (at this point, I am simply skimming Agre’s text, because my interest long ago waned):
“A main goal in life of all aristocrats, however, is to pass on their positions of privilege to their children . . .”
I believe that in North Korea, the Beloved Leader passed on the reigns to power the Dear Leader. Presumably the Dear Leader will, when his end is near, attempt the same for someone of his own choosing (I don’t know about his offspring situation). Therefore, North Korea is an exemplar of a conservative regime. But what does this mean? It means that Agre needs to define “conservative” in terms other than “aristocracy” in order for his essay to have much relevance to any debate about conservatism in the Western sense. And I would again stipulate that any such debate would have to devote considerable attention to what is meant by “conservative” within the terms of its own inquiry.
“The opposite of conservatism is democracy, and contempt for democracy is a constant thread in the history of conservative argument.” Again, I will make reference to the EU. Since the EU makes of practice of repeating its referendums until the demos votes “correctly,” after which, of course, there is no more need for a vote, we can classify the EU as an arch-conservative oligarchy, since it only listens to the people when they agree with their overlords.
“Conservatism promotes (and so does liberalism, misguidedly) the idea that liberalism is about activist government where conservatism is not. This is absurd. It is unrelated to the history of conservative government. Conservatism promotes activist government that acts in the interests of the aristocracy.”
Essentially, I agree, since I assume that he means (as people generally do) that conservative equals Republican, and liberal equals Democrat. Both parties use their power to appeal to their respective constituences, and in both parties, the representatives are primarily concerned with their own political and personal fortunes. Again, we return to the sad state of human nature.
OK, both my wife and my daughter are bugging me to get off the computer so they can have a crack at it. I guess I’ve made the point that Agre’s essay seems to me a pretty barren field.
November 27, 2009 at 1:48 pm
I dont want to read 10 pages that dont seem promising to me, but I did read up through section 2, “hierarchy.”
One tends to hear the arguments in bits and pieces, for example the emphatic if vague claim that people are different. Of course, most of these arguments, if considered rationally, actually argue for meritocracy rather than for aristocracy. Meritocracy is a democratic principle.
Hmm… if people are only “vaguely” different, how will you measure them in order to assign them their meritocratic just desserts?
Is Arthur Jensen’s book on /g/ “vague”?
I think the differences are relatively crisp, but that alone does not guarantee that they be easy to measure. They arent, except for /g/.
Imagine a “super-fair” market, where everyone is raised together in a massive orphanage, everyone starts with equal capital and we intervene powerfully to correct any and all unfairnesses traditionally decried by left liberals. Would money inequalities still arise? Of course! Science verges on proving this: who raises you, in the USA, doesnt really affect your adult income; genetics does. This is a key difference between people, and its not vague. All other kinds of performance differ too, not just economic performance. Who makes great art, for example? The tiny, tiny few who can.
But again, things like diligence are easily feigned on a test, especially if you have the /g/ to understand what the test is about. Only /g/ is unfakeable. Thats why some degree of inheritance of power (not 100%; not 80%) is good, to me. Competence is genetically heritable. On the other hand, the fact that the powerful have the same nepotistic motives as everyone else, is certainly true and must be dealt with.
This is not really about money for me. I’m not passionately concerned with the right to keep your wealth. Thats because of happiness research (which I dont fully trust), because Im not a radical individualist, and because we may be near the Laffer Maximum already, which means that unequal taxation cannot really get “worse” (more coercive) than it already is.
Its about power not dough. Who will make the wisest decision about whether rapists and murderers should be executed? Who will decide wisely about immigration? Etc.
As a note, there is (according to some) a Laffer Maximum for total percent of GDP taken in taxes, which equals the weighted mean tax rate. But there is also probably an analogous maximum inequality of rate, AKA progressiveness, of the tax scheme. Or rather, there is a maximum value for some function that depends on both values, and which basically equals “the magnitude of the redistribution of wealth.” The latter is more like what I mean by Laffer Maximum; I’m not using the actual correct meaning.
What is more congenial to me is something more like the Roman republic. How much more, Im not sure.
November 27, 2009 at 2:00 pm
> something more like the Roman republic
I dont deny that the aristoi will stick it the polloi, given the chance, as well as vice versa. I would not omit some sort of popular, universal-suffrage check on the power of the aristoi, but that check would be limited. However, it doesnt have to be as limited as it was in the Roman republic, for the simple reason that we are living in a non-malthusan world. More elitism was necessary, in the malthus world. THe Romans certainly did act very thuggish, but there was a reason. If the Romans had not raided and exploited the Germanics, the Germanics would have raided the Romans just the same. Acting like a Roman meant yourself not getting killed and daughters not getting raped. Thats malthus, and it leads to an arms race in the broadest sense — which means, in the extreme, Sparta. An ultra-aristocracy is more competent at everything, including not getting pillaged by enemies. Slave-owing can also contribute to not getting pillaged, and slavery is guaranteed to return if malthus does (which it need not).
But today there is no need for this, because pillaging is not profitable. There is no need to go to an aristo extreme.
November 27, 2009 at 2:05 pm
To sum it up, the Romans as well as everyone else, did not act the way they did because of some “philosophy” they had. Emphatically no. Humanity has emphatically not “struggled for thousands of years to emerge from the darkness of conservatism”; it emerged from Malthus.
November 27, 2009 at 2:58 pm
It’s always commendable to see mtraven trying to be relevent, no matter how often reality intrudes upon his attempts.
So, a few words in defense of the poor, professor, who so bravely and incoherently ventured out of his own field to produce a theory which relies on the present day lib-con split for a starting-point.
His work, being somewhat, unintelligible and deeply partisan ( in the 21st century, of all times!) merits your criticism and mtraven’s lacklustre, (non)-defense.
But let us consider what the confused soul actually means, when he says that conservatism is incompatible with civilization.
In describing ‘conservatism’, we (not he) are dealing with the absolute ‘type’ of which he knows nothing. With regard to ‘civilization’ we are simply dealing with the Post-Enlightenment humanism, rationalism, whathaveye…
It is absolutely correct to say that essential conservatism is in opposition to all Enlightenment values.
Jeremy Bentham was hardly the first cossetted intellectual whose views might mesh with those of a PETA member.
Most Enlightment intellectuals and their Jacobin descendents thought the Roman Republic was the greatest thing the earth had ever seen, because they were anti-monarchist.
Note the Christianist theory of history-that the rise of great nations has always been linked to their piety and contrast it with the universal worship of the Enlightment and insistence that emergent scientific developments were due to the Christianist humanism of the period.
Why should we not discard nearly every thinker which Caplan referenced…Locke, Kant, or Mill?
Is the good professor still at large? One assumes that all the bathhouses in the vicinity have been checked?
Lastly, didn’t Schumpeter settle this debate about central-planning sometime before Boettke and Caplan were conceived?
He had the advantage of them, in actually have been a minister of finance and banker, whilst most Austrian economists today, have never had a whiff of power, or, more importantly, responsibility.
November 28, 2009 at 2:17 am
Dain, is it impossible for Robinson Crusoe to calculate? At what point does it become impossible?
Dr Horsemeat: Yep, a lot of stuff is left undefined. “Democratic”, for instance is apparently different from majoritarianism, but what it is I don’t know. He objects to conservatives arguing that the professions and/or the highly educated constitute an “elite”, but doesn’t explain why not. He complains about the characterization of government as “hierarchical”, and while the church, family and military (a subset of the government) are as well he doesn’t say why it isn’t. His argument that Marxism does not fit on the political spectrum is weak. Reading most of his argument I was just thinking “tu quoque!”. If I had read this when I was younger and thought of myself as a conservative I would have said “Hey, those are my arguments!” throughout much of it. It’s funny that he jumps from dismissing complaints about “political correctness” to going on about the conservative destruction of language. I actually think he gives short-shrift to political altruism. He assumes that Hollywood funds democrats because of censorship, not because its denizens are liberals who support liberal policies generally.
Eric Johnson: he gives only lip service to meritocracy. He thinks there is no reason why we can’t have every student taught to write clear 700 word op-eds that could be published in the newspaper.
we may be near the Laffer Maximum already
No, we’re not. Other countries take in a significantly larger chunk of GDP in taxation. Whether it’s desirable to be at the laffer maximum is another story.
the Romans as well as everyone else, did not act the way they did because of some “philosophy” they had
Exactly. Conservatism instead might be said to be the philosophy adopted by apologists for a status quo that exists for other reasons. But insofar as conservatism is in tension with rationalism, ideologues are going to tend toward liberalism, which is why I think he’s wrong about conservatives having had so much practice to work out their ideas and philosophy. “Maistre’s use of intellectual arguments to defend monarchic regimes was an indication they were no longer part of an organic order”
Savrola:
the poor, professor, who so bravely and incoherently ventured
That reminds me, it’s ironic that he talked so much about social skills when he seems to have been deprived of them himself.
the Roman Republic
Funny, because I generally read liberals saying that it was a corrupted aristocratic order and that Caesar really was the champion of the people. The French Revolutionaries did go for that sort of thing though.
insistence that emergent scientific developments were due to the Christianist humanism of the period
I thought you were contrasting Christianism and Enlightenment thinking.
Why should we not discard nearly every thinker which Caplan referenced…Locke, Kant, or Mill?
Why indeed.
Agre actually cites Schumpeter favorably compared to other economists (neoclassicals, austrians and game theorists are his three categories of defective thought). Ironic, since Schumpeter was an aristocratic conservative. I didn’t know he debunked central planning. Although a student of Bohm-Bawerk, he became a dedicated Walrasian (one of the few righties of that bunch). It was Walras’ framework that was amenable to central planning and used to argue on its behalf in the socialist calculation debate.
I think there are some modern Austrians who have worked at regional Federal reserve banks, but I agree they’re usually apart from that. Mises advised the Austrian government, which is funny since his acolyte Rothbard always railed against court-intellectuals, particularly among economists.
November 28, 2009 at 2:59 am
It was only today that I discoverd that Agre (whom I’d never heard of before) had gone missing. I was looking at The Fourth Checkraise, a new interest of mine, though I’d heard of Ilkka Kokkarinen long before, when I clicked on a link to I don’t remember what, which led me to a blog called Cobb, which I’d never heard of before, whose fourth post was titled “Agre: His Head Exploded.”
Curious, since I’d only just heard of this guy, and here he was, or at least, here was his story, on yet another blog. Is Agre somehow famous, and I’d just misssed it?
I only mention this because the internet often seems weirdly like high school, made up of about 2000 people, most of whom you don’t know, but whom you see around, and with many of the same personalities popping up at whatever new party you drop in on, and enough cliquishness (or commonality of interest) that you venture off in what you think of as some new direction, and yet discover the same people you run across at Steve Sailer or Unqualified Reservations or Overcoming Bias sitting there on the sofa as you stroll into the room.
November 28, 2009 at 6:44 pm
Robinson Crusoe is the sole actor in the market he is embedded in, and the only ‘price system’ therein involves whatever resource combination he forgoes, the nature of which he can envision, unlike a ‘central planner.’
There is no actual market incorporating a great number of anonymous actors. In other words it isn’t a socialist calculation issue because it isn’t social.
November 28, 2009 at 12:14 pm
> No, we’re not. Other countries take in a significantly larger chunk of GDP in taxation.
They also have lower GDPs than us: viola! Or rather: viola?
I would also think you would likely agree with my point: how steeply progressive the taxation is, should also affect GDP. This should matter vis-a-vis money as an absolute good, but it should matter more vis-a-vis money as a positional good.
It is of course de facto tax that should be considered. Greg Cochran points out that some payroll taxes are flat and that they serve to pretty much flatten the tax schedule. But we might want to look at it on net: people also receive goods from government, though it is hard to estimate how much they value them, and we could subtract that from their tax payments. (Its even possible a priori that government could give better value than the market in some areas — such as one-time curative treatments for chronic disease, which industry cant necessarily profit from, under the current intellectual property regime at least.)
But if you have already thought of that stuff, which you likely have, it would be comedic for me not to concede to you on such a matter.
November 28, 2009 at 12:19 pm
> They also have lower GDPs than us: viola! Or rather: viola?
And thats despite possibly higher human capital. Though I must admit, it may also be lower. Charles Darwin:
There is apparently much truth in the belief that the wonderful progress of the United States, as well as the character of the people, are the results of natural selection; for the more energetic, restless, and courageous men from all parts of Europe have emigrated during the last ten or twelve generations to that great country, and have there succeeded best. Looking at the distant future, I do not think that the Rev. Mr. Zincke takes an exaggerated view when he says: ‘All other series of events-as that which resulted in the culture of mind in Greece, and that which resulted in the Empire of Rome-only appear to have purpose and value when viewed in connection with, or rather as subsidiary to, the great stream of Anglo-Saxon emigration to the West.’
Haha ahaha. I wonder if he would have the same opinion nowadays.
November 28, 2009 at 1:57 pm
Dr Horsemeat: I had only heard of him through Mtraven, but I namechecked Ilkka over there because this sort of thing (the missing person angle) delights him.
Eric Johnson: Per-capita-GDP is the better measurement, and little of the variance in GDP growth there can be attributed to variance in taxation. Labor-market regulations are probably more important in making them punch below their weight. The U.S actually taxes its middle (and lower class) class to a lesser extent than Europe and gives them more goodies (at least if they’re old). Europe’s redistribution is more progressive primarily because of its transfers. The U.S could raise more taxes from the middle class through a VAT without causing that much distortion to the economy (which is not so much the case raising marginal income tax rates). That’s Bruce Bartlett’s proposal. The problem I have with him is that he declares that history shows us that Congress simply won’t reduce spending, but he gives no indication that it will be politically easier to increase the portion of GDP going into taxation. “The political wall” for taxation in the U.S seems to be at about 20%.
November 28, 2009 at 11:24 pm
Thanks for the link.
Let me just point out that that particular piece of Agre’s is clearly a political polemic, designed to help liberals understand their enemies and defeat them. It isn’t disinterested scholarship (you can find many peer-reviewed articles if you want that; this one sounds like it might appeal to some of you), and it isn’t intended to convince conservatives that they are wrong. You folks are not the intended audience.
November 29, 2009 at 12:35 am
Good writing and thinking in this thread. TGGP, you’re shining.
November 29, 2009 at 12:15 pm
Let’s be quite clear that it is not scholarship, in any sense of the word.
November 29, 2009 at 3:41 pm
Governments officials are often greedy too, taxes are often used for equalizing relative wealth, not just purely for revenue, and the Laffer optimum is very difficult to calculate, so it’s perfectly possible and tragically common for governments to tax at a rate higher than the Laffer optimium.
The terms “conservative” and “liberal” are hopelessly vague. They mean different things in the U.S. and Europe and have meant different things in different eras. That alas makes most of this thread largely pointless.
November 29, 2009 at 10:45 pm
Robinson may not trade with anyone, but he can make economic decisions like investing in a net to catch fish. Central planning displaces markets, making the decisions that would have been made in a decentralized manner through one decision-maker. If Friday lands on the isle, can their economic decisions no longer be made solely by Crusoe?
mtraven:
I agree it is a polemic. Polemics have bad reputations, as polemicists often do. Preaching toward the choir generally involves poorer reasoning. A well-reasoned work has the possibility of persuading those who don’t already agree, or at least cause enough cognitive dissonance to formulate their beliefs in a manner so that the arguments in the work are not telling. It is always possible that an outside-audience will be lacking n some background knowledge necessary to understand a point, but more likely it is the case that gaining understanding isn’t the point at all.
Ed Glaeser has a few relevant papers on preaching to the choir: The Political Economy of Hatred, Strategic Extremism and Extremism and Social Learning.
I checked out the paper you recommended. Agre references “the utopia of Adam Smith”, and while I haven’t read Smith, I’m pretty confident he was writing about the world as it actually existed rather than an imagined utopia. He attacked a lot of contemporary reasoning behind policy, but I don’t think he actually proposed radically different ones. He also famously used the example of a pin factory, which is a firm rather than a collection of individual artisans. In fact, Coase’s paper only refers to Adam Smith in quoting him on an “undertaker” (what would later be called an “entrepreneur”) in the context of a “firm”, “unit” or “factory”. Yet Agre references Coase as discussing Adam Smith’s individual artisans! Agre might be confusing Smith with Proudhon.
A particularly frustrating part is where Agre notes that the lowered costs (transactional/organizational) may seem indeterminate in their effect on the scope of the firm, but then provides “overall clues” as to the net effect. He claims “we are witnessing a historically unprecedented period of industrial concentration” with no citation to any data, some measures of which indicate that concentration has decreased since WW2. In supporting this he notes both the process of mergers as well as splitting off and selling components of companies (as well as outsourcing rather than vertically integrating), which again results in indeterminate effects in the absence of quantification! I don’t know if he’s read Gabriel Kolko’s Triumph of Conservatism, but it is noted there that while we associate the late 19th/early 20th centuries with mergers (which did indeed involve millions of dollars) the actual trend was toward destabilizing decentralization. Many merged companies did not fare so well, as is still the case today. Acquisitions are not about the good of the firm.
Savrola, are you saying his peer-reviewed papers are not scholarship, or merely that this essay is not scholarship, disinterested or not?
nick:
As my link to Worthwhile Canadian Initiative pointed out, taxation (as opposed to transfers) is a poor way to promote egalitarianism. It’s questionable whether super-Laffer taxation is “greedy”, it might be thought of along the lines of altruistic punishment, which bears costs for its enforcers.
The point that “liberal” and “conservative” cannot be applied to such different situations is one of the points I wanted to make against Agre.
November 30, 2009 at 5:50 pm
Robinson may not trade with anyone, but he can make economic decisions like investing in a net to catch fish. Central planning displaces markets, making the decisions that would have been made in a decentralized manner through one decision-maker. If Friday lands on the isle, can their economic decisions no longer be made solely by Crusoe?
They can be, but if Crusoe presumed to make plans for the resources Friday arrived with or first appropriated, to the detriment of Friday’s particular knowledge of how to utilize/ration said resources, I dare say the problem of socialist calculation begins to rear its head.
If Friday only wanted to destroy the resources or consume them at an unsustainable rate, however, then the knowledge held by Crusoe of Friday’s irresponsible behavior would be sufficient “knowledge” for the purposes of this debate, presumably the kind of knowledge missing in the archetypal “central planner” role. (In other words, should Bolsheviks suspect farmers to be planning to destroy their livestock and crops, the knowledge problem is overcome by a particularly dreadful time preference.)
November 30, 2009 at 1:48 am
Capitalism is an economic system which functions quite poorly as a moral ideology. Socialism is a moral ideology which functions quite poorly as an economic system. I have no more patience with capitalist utopians than with their socialist counterparts. Nevertheless, I’m unaware of any evidence that Adam Smith fell into the former category.
AFAIK, Smith never argued that capitalism would set all mankind on the road to solidarity and satisfaction. He explained how it led manufacturers to produce better pins more cheaply, and how it motivated butchers and bakers to feed their customers. He explicitly stated that the benefits of capitalism were dependent upon “a well-governed society.”
Regarding Agre’s essay, if we accept his contention that the greatest threat to liberalism, or freedom, or democracy, or civilization (terms which he seems to use interchangably) lies in the formation of aristocratic classes, and we accept traven’s claim that the function of Agre’s essay is to help his fellow liberals understand and defeat their enemies, then that does raise the question as to what, Agre believes, would prevent this liberal ascendancy from forming its own aristocratic associations (assuming they haven’t already). After all, the main difference between an aristocracy and a meritocracy has to do with who gets to assess relative merit, and there is abundant historical precedent for such a concern.
November 30, 2009 at 9:13 am
I tend to be skeptical of any academic paper that could have been written by a grad-student.
November 30, 2009 at 1:29 pm
Dr. Horsemeat,
I have a lot of problems with your post #16, and one area of agreement.
I agree with your skepticism of a difference between liberalism and meritocracy. A formulation I like is “gentrification of the moral high ground”.
Given the imperfect heritability of administrative talent and talent to win popular support for hierarchical topness, I see at least three tensions. Nepotism, technocrats, and charismatics. I like technocrats, but I suppose a bit of a heckler’s veto must be negotiated with nepotism beneficiaries and charismatics and their followers -so part of what makes an optimal technocrat is warped to accomodate those heckler-created realities.
As for your formulations of capitalism and socialism, too simple and just somewhat wrong. As for Adam Smith -not sure why it’s relevant. Best mechanisms, for wealth production or governing generally shouldn’t rest on a god-founder, IMO. We’re talking economics here, not objectivism
November 30, 2009 at 3:47 pm
Early America (plus the French Revolution) was rather clearly left/right. The main exception was that the Right, Hamilton and Wash, were the “statists.” But that was a somewhat different debate about a very different degree of statism.
Middle American history is much less clearly left/right, from the time when the party strains that would later form GOP were first becoming intense, up to the New Deal. Or, in a way, up to civil rights and the party conversion of the South.
Anyone disagree on specifics? I wrote 800 words on this, while lightly shoring up my knowledge of things like who opposed the Mexican War and whether it seems to be left/right (it doesnt). But I just lost my post by accident.
November 30, 2009 at 7:09 pm
Dr. Horsemeat:
Many capitalists would quibble over your comparison of moral systems. Myself, I’m skeptical of moral systems period.
Savrola:
Is that inclusive of papers that actually were written by grad-students?
H.A:
Interesting analysis, but I believe the term for your non-ideal technocrat which must negotiate with existing evils is “bureaucrat”. My point about Smith was not about an ideal system he created, I was actually arguing against that conception of him. I was calling into question Agre’s scholarship and the relevance of the scenario of small-scale artisans interacting directly with consumers. A better standard of comparison might be monopoly, since most of the rent from concentration seems to dissipate when the pool expands from one to two (through the lens of game theory we might even say that the mere threat of entrance can do much of the job of actual competition). While we’re discussing monopoly, I don’t agree with him but agnostic’s defense of monopoly is certainly unusual.
Eric Johnson:
I don’t think the opponents of the Federalists were that concerned with the power of the individual states (state-level religious legislation certainly exceeded what would be found acceptable today). Rather than “statist” I think “nationalist” is the right term. It would make them more fitting righties since nationalism is associated with the right-wing today, although they are also associated with states-rights and a preference for local power over the federal government (except when they aren’t).
Dain:
I think the Bolsheviks realized the farmers would not go gently into that hungry night, which is why so many were deemed enemies of the people.
November 30, 2009 at 7:22 pm
>>”Q: What is conservatism?
A: Conservatism is the domination of society by an aristocracy”
Thats’s pretty goofy stuff. He goes on to say that we should clone George Soros, he being the ideal citizen. Soros, of course, is the prototypical member of the modern aristocracy.
A remarkably silly easay. Or maybe not, considering the writer works in academia.
November 30, 2009 at 7:41 pm
>>”Let me just point out that that particular piece of Agre’s is clearly a political polemic, designed to help liberals understand their enemies and defeat them.”
I’m afraid that any liberal who reads that article will know less than nothing about conservatives. They’ll feel smug about themselves through, which often strikes me as the central purpose of liberalism.
November 30, 2009 at 10:38 pm
Hopefully Anonymous,
TGGP quoted from one of Agre’s other papers, “Agre references “the utopia of Adam Smith,’” hence my comments about Smith, pointing out that he was not a utopianist, and did not envision capitalism as a utopia.
You said: “Best mechanisms, for wealth production or governing generally shouldn’t rest on a god-founder, IMO. We’re talking economics here, not objectivism”
I lifted my comments on this thread, in part, from a comment I’d left at another blog regarding a similar topic, though in a different context. I’m going to quote myself some more in response to your comment. The person who wrote the original post at the other blog said:
“Now that communism is no threat to anyone, we can all applaud some of its values and wish someone expressed them more forcefully; but what have we to say to middle-class, suburban youths whom capitalism has taught to believe in nothing?”
To which I replied:
“To go back to your closing remark, I’m not sure I really want my economic system to instruct me in what to believe . Capitalism has no founding figure in the sense that socialism has Marx, and it makes for itself less grandiose claims. Adam Smith, arguably the first to diagram the workings of capitalism, never argued that it would set all mankind on the road to solidarity and fulfillment. He explained how it produced better pins more cheaply, and how it motivated butchers and bakers to feed us.
Expecting capitalism to instruct us in moral or aesthetic values is like expecting your swimming instructor to show you how to walk on water. We should recoginize that our moral values — if we have any — may dictate that we eschew expediency and profit for some more admirable or essential goal. I don’t see this as a failing of capitalism, because I don’t see capitalism — at its heart — as anything more than a mechanism of production and exchange.”
I don’t know if the above comment clarifies or muddies the waters.
TGGP,
I wasn’t comparing moral systems. I was pointing out that capitalism and socialism are two different TYPES of systems. If we are comparing two systems of offense in football, they both have roughly the same objectives, to score as many points as possible and thus win games. Such a similarity of objectives cannot be found between capitalism and socialism. Capitalism focuses on profit, and this encourages increased efficiency of production and product innovation. Socialism focuses on distributional equity, which encourages state ownership of enterprises, national health care, state pension systems, etc. You may believe that such provision is unnecessary, but those who defend such social spending do so principally on moral grounds. To argue that socialism is a moral ideology is not to argue the merits of it’s morality, but rather to point out that the ideology’s claims are primarily couched in moral terms. I don’t believe that the capitalist system, or rather its proponents such as Adam Smith, make equivalent moral claims in defense of their preferred system. Their defense would be more pragmatic or empirical than explicitly moral.
December 1, 2009 at 11:26 pm
There’s nothing special about healthcare under socialism. The same arguments about distributional equity can apply to anything otherwise provided by markets. Contemporary arguments in the United States focus a lot on how screwed up our current system is, with its proponents usually claiming that governments by their nature are superior providers. Much of the logic also applies to other goods & services provided by communist governments. Arguments about equity instead might make us want to subsidize the poor (not the middle class & rich, though we might not means-test to avoid implicit marginal taxation) with vouchers. We could also municipalize medicine, as we do education, rather than nationalizing it. Rather than merely equity, I think the solidarity of the people’s romance is at issue.
December 2, 2009 at 5:23 pm
Most of those points were brought up by me in the Great Healthcare Debate Against Mom — lot of good it did.
December 1, 2009 at 3:34 am
Dr. Horsemeat,
Thanks for the clarification. It’s more in line with what I expected from a bright mind such as yours.
December 1, 2009 at 11:28 pm
flenser:
Isn’t hereditary descent a major part of aristocracy? I think merit/luck is more important when it comes to Soros.
I agree that a liberal’s understanding would not actually be aided by the essay.
December 4, 2009 at 2:05 pm
Agre is vague about what exactly he means by “aristocracy”. If he is using it in the sense of inherited position and power then it’s not obvious how the current political right fits the bill any more than does the current political left.
In places he seems to suggest that he means by “aristocracy” simply the rich and powerful, period.
Agre:”A main goal in life of all aristocrats, however, is to pass on their positions of privilege to their children, and many of the aspiring aristocrats of the United States are appointing their children to positions in government and in the archipelago of think tanks that promote conservative theories.”
So here conservatives are described merely as “aspiring aristocrats”. And if appointing ones relatives to government jobs and think-tanks marks ones down as an aspiring aristocrat, what does this say of the left? Their long march through the institutions is better thought of as simply a “jobs for the boys” program.
December 2, 2009 at 6:41 pm
If we are speaking of political philosophy rather than popular romance, hereditary descent is not necessarily a characteristic of aristocracy.
Aristotle made the following division:
monarchy/tyranny
aristocracy/oligarchy
polity or timocracy/democracy
The property which, in Aristotle’s view, distinguishes the first of each pair from the second is that it possesses virtue (Gr., philotimia or arete), whereas the second does not.
There have been elective monarchies – for example, that of Poland, and (at least in theory) that of the Holy Roman Empire. Similarly, not all aristocracies are hereditary peerages. Cicero was certainly the archetype of a Roman optimate, yet he was a ‘novus homo,’ a man from a family which had not before produced a senator.
Phil Agre’s claim that conservatives wish to pass on their positions in the ruling class hereditarily has to be weighed against the reality of U.S. politics. Are the Kennedys conservatives? the Rockefellers? How about such second-generation luminaries as Al Gore, Jr. (his daddy was Armand Hammer’s bagman in the U.S. Senate) or Andrew Cuomo? It seems to me that if one were to survey those in this country whose family business is politics, the balance would be substantially tilted to the left.
Agre’s essay is more a set of partisan talking points for leftists than it is a scholarly analysis of what ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ actually mean in American public life.
December 3, 2009 at 10:13 am
TGGP:
Etymologically speaking, as Dr. Horsemeeat pointed out, aristocracy simple means rule of the best. I’ve never understood the differentiation between it and meritocracy.
Technocracy, by contrast is limiting, in that involves individuals who are simple the best in their field, and not the best in general.
Heredity, these days, is largely accidental. The most simple method for tracing it is by titles, a far from perfect method.
Soros, for example, is for all intents and purposes, a Jewish aristocrat, who comes from an old family of what less enlightened souls might term ‘International Jewry.’
December 3, 2009 at 10:25 am
Savrola,
1. I think it’s unhelpful to slip from popular connotation to etymology. It encourages the 100 footnotes approach to discussion, which I think is an unhelpful barrier.
2. Also, I think you fuzzily mischaracterize technocracy in its current common usage, which is 1st, populations of experts, not individuals, and 2nd, on more “general” topics, it would be decision making by those who have developed generalist decision making expertise. Hence the MBA, the MPA, and other professional degrees in general management.
December 3, 2009 at 10:31 am
“Phil Agre’s claim that conservatives wish to pass on their positions in the ruling class hereditarily has to be weighed against the reality of U.S. politics. Are the Kennedys conservatives? the Rockefellers? How about such second-generation luminaries as Al Gore, Jr. (his daddy was Armand Hammer’s bagman in the U.S. Senate) or Andrew Cuomo? It seems to me that if one were to survey those in this country whose family business is politics, the balance would be substantially tilted to the left.”
Gentrification of the representational lane. Calling the Kennedys “Left” is obscurantist in my opinion. They approach caricature of what might normally be done more subtely, tacking in a political direction because it has become a comparative advantage, and taking oxygen from others in a gentrifying type way.
December 3, 2009 at 3:38 pm
If calling the Kennedys ‘left’ is obscurantist, then the obscurantism is certainly on their part rather than on mine, and is imbedded in the ordinary public understanding of the terms left and liberal. The same phenomenon is observable overseas. Is Tony Benn not a leftist? If not, by what standard is he not?
This week’s issue of the “New Yorker” carried a scathing review of Sarah Palin’s book “Going Rogue,” in which the reviewer remarked that her emergence marked the disappearance of any distinction in American society between the governed and those who govern. What a delicious irony that a publication edited by Hendrik Hertzberg should contain such a statement. No harrumphing snob in an Edith Wharton novel could have put it better! The mask of left-wing egalitarianism has slipped a bit.
Let us make no mistake, the left is elitist as much as the right. It is just less honest about it. Walter Lippmann’s view that an ignorant citizenry must be guided behind the scenes by an elite of experts who manipulate public opinion has been central to the governing philosophy of self-identified liberals since the ‘thirties. Most significant policy initiatives since the New Deal have been the product of this approach, in which the form of democracy is kept while traducing its spirit.
An egalitarianism of condition – of pounding down the nail that sticks up, of lopping off the tall daisy – has also been a central part of such liberalism. What else can we call ‘affirmative action,’ or what Barack Obama has called ‘spreading the wealth’? Yet, in the left’s reaction to Palin, we see the dawning recognition that a policy can have unintended consequences; that, after three generations of levelling egalitarianism, someone who is clearly not part of the elite can acquire a political following considerable enough to upset the Lippmannite order. The contradiction between that order and such levelling egalitarianism does not appear to have occurred to most self-described liberals, and it is bitterly amusing to see them try to come to terms with it.
December 3, 2009 at 4:02 pm
Further on Savrola’s and Hopefully Anonymous’s comments: the attempt to distinguish aristocracy from ‘meritocracy’ is another byproduct of confusing a peerage or nobility, as they have customarily been understood in medieval and early modern Europe, with aristocracy as it is understood in political philosophy. Long before the term ‘meritocracy’ was coined, Jefferson spoke of an ‘aristocracy of merit.’
I suspect there has always been such a thing. Few people today, even learned academics, would be likely to meet the standards Castiglione set for a courtier. These would have included an understanding of the principles of political leadership as set forth by the ancient Greeks, and the practice of it as outlined by Machiavelli; the capacity to turn a Latin epigram or an Italian sonnet, to set the latter to music, sing and play it on the lute or viol; to fence, ride, shoot, and have mastered all the military arts; and to be a good diplomat, able to carry on both serious and amusing conversation with similar virtuosi, all the time ‘col sprezzatura,’ without its seeming in the least effortful.
We surely could not expect such accomplishment from our present so-called meritocracy, represented by our Teleprompter Reader in Chief, President Obama; that plagiarist duffer Joe Biden; those bumptious successor to the court alchemists, Tim Geithner and Larry Summers; or Rahm Emmanuel, who cannot even be called unctuous, just slimy. Indeed, none of them could have got past the door at Urbino.
December 3, 2009 at 5:48 pm
Hopefully Anonymous;
By all means let us avoid popular connotations. Otherwise I would be tempted to make a facetious remark about George Bush (MBA) being a model decision maker.
December 4, 2009 at 2:33 am
“Jefferson spoke of an ‘aristocracy of merit.’”
How relatively rare for our time, where elite talent tends not to feel they have the social space to advocate decision making in their field be reserved for elite talent such as themselves.
Michael, the Kennedys remind me more of Palin than of some type of Lipmmanesque (ideologically liberal) experts. They’re (irish catholic) non-wasp white identity politicians. They’re also, like Palin, in the most salient sense government by one of the governed, given their relative averageness of talent compared to true American talent elites.
December 4, 2009 at 11:17 am
White identity? I’ve heard it claimed that John F. wanted to do the immigration bill; at any rate Ted did.
“Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 (Hart-Celler Act, INS, Act of 1965, Pub.L. 89-236) abolished the national-origin quotas that had been in place in the United States since the Immigration Act of 1924. It was proposed by United States Representative Emanuel Celler of New York, co-sponsored by United States Senator Philip Hart of Michigan (known as “the Conscience of the Senate”), and heavily supported by United States Senator Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts – all Democrats.[1]
An annual limitation of 300,000 visas was established for immigrants, including 170,000 from Eastern Hemisphere countries, with no more than 20,000 per country. By 1968, the annual limitation from the Western Hemisphere was set at 120,000 immigrants, with visas available on a first-come, first-served basis. However, the number of family reunification visas was unlimited, and it is only recently that country-origin quotas for spouses of US citizens, and numerical quotas for other relatives of US citizens have been instituted.”
————————–
“The immigration Act of 1924, or Johnson-Reed Act, including the National Origins Act, Asian Exclusion Act, (43 Statutes-at-Large 153) was a United States federal law that limited the number of immigrants who could be admitted from any country to 2% of the number of people from that country who were already living in the United States in 1890, according to the Census of 1890. It excluded immigration of Asians. It superseded the 1921 Emergency Quota Act. The law was aimed at further restricting the Southern and Eastern Europeans who were immigrating in large numbers starting in the 1890s, as well as prohibiting the immigration of East Asians and Asian Indians.”
December 4, 2009 at 11:23 am
What’s odd is that the act passed by such a landslide. If so many wanted it, why wasnt it done in the 50s?
“The House of Representatives voted 326 to 69 (82.5%) in favor of the act, while the Senate passed the bill by a vote of 76 to 18. Opposition mainly came from conservative Republicans and Southern Democrats. On October 3, 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the legislation into law, saying “This [old] system violates the basic principle of American democracy, the principle that values and rewards each man on the basis of his merit as a man. It has been un-American in the highest sense, because it has been untrue to the faith that brought thousands to these shores even before we were a country.” “
December 4, 2009 at 2:46 am
Savrola,
Awhile back on my blog I thought about the ideal background for the Presidency (elite graduate education in bureacratic administration, success in managing an entity only one order of magnitude smaller) and I was surprised George W. Bush actually matched up very well. Except of course that he reportedly did poorly in his coursework.
I think the standard elite professional management degree should be 4 years like a medical degree, it should be much more quantitatively rigorous, and there should be multiple level certifications like with medical boards and licensings.
December 4, 2009 at 12:44 pm
Eric, for clarification, by ethnic white identity I mean in particular that ordinary irish catholics vote for Kennedys even if they don’t seem to have the highest levels of talent for a political job because the Kennedys are irish catholics. I’d contrast that with Bobby Jindal, whose political star seems to have risen, at least early in his career when I think he managed some health projects for the state of Louisiana, due to his administrative achievements.
December 4, 2009 at 1:10 pm
Hopefully Anonymous, while the Kennedys are certainly not themselves elite experts of the Lippmannesque type, they are ideologically in continuity with the Lippmannite governing philosophy that the Democratic party has reflected since the days of Franklin Roosevelt. Jack Kennedy may have been the son of a mobbed-up Nazi-sympathizing son of a saloon keeper, but daddy sent him to Harvard for polishing, and once elected president, he surrounded himself with an entourage that included Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., John Kenneth Galbraith, Ted Sorensen, et al. In this respect he followed in the footsteps of FDR, who was also not a Lippmannesque expert, but who famously created the so-called ‘brains trust’ of presidential advisers.
Both may be, at bottom, “non-WASP white identity politicians,” but there is still a yawning chasm between Palin and the Kennedys. First, she is an unapologetic prole (unlike the progeny of that Irish-American Pelops, Joe Kennedy); and further, she rejects or just doesn’t care about the received and respectable opinion that the Kennedys embraced, together with all the rest of the trappings of the haute monde. They went to Harvard; she to Idaho. Need more be said?
December 6, 2009 at 10:04 am
Michael, come now, you don’t buy into that faux-image of Palin?
Has ‘prole’ come to mean ‘precisely middle-class’ in 2010?
Status-wise in the Northwest, the arguement could be made that her status could be raised to ‘upper-class.’
Her political career was based on her personal financial stability and that WalMartization of a small town.
December 6, 2009 at 11:20 pm
Savrola, what you refer to as the faux-image of Sarah Palin is the one that counts, because it the one generally disseminated and accepted. Percipi est esse.
Everybody above the obvious underclass in the United States likes to think of himself as ‘middle class.’ The words ‘working class’ are hardly used except by a handful of aging commies, and the traditional upper classes may still list themselves in the Social Register but generally keep a fairly low profile. Of course there are the vulgar nouveau riche, and it is hard to know where to put them. It depends upon whether current wealth or family background are the defining factors.
I rather like Paul Fussell’s book “Class,” which is quite minute in distinguishing classes, and equally caustic in its description of every one. Palin’s popular image is assuredly that of what Fussell calls a prole. What is she really? I’ve never met her, and so could hardly venture an opinion. I can tell you there is no listing for her in the Social Register.
December 7, 2009 at 12:40 am
Even the obvious underclass might like to think of themselves as middle class, if only they could persuade themselves that this were so.
Since I’m big on the need to define terms, I’d add to the list of terms in need of definiton, “middle class,” which of course has a multiplicity of connotations. To define middle class, more explicitly, however, is to flirt with upheaval, as one element of the “social glue” such as it is, is the ease with which one can more or less plausibly enroll oneself in the middle class. “Lower class,” after all, sounds too defeatist and depressing, and “upper class” seems arrogant and attention-seeking in a possibly dangerous way. Thus, families with annual incomes of around $50,000 claim to be middle class, i.e. “normal people”, as do families making ten times as much.
“Oh, we’re not really rich. ‘Rich’ is the Farquarsons down the street, who make two millon a year. Plus, we pay half of our income in taxes; our mortgage payments are outrageous (we bought high), and private school fees and college tuition are eating us alive,” etc, etc. Evidently, in America, everybody wants to be rich, but nobody wants to be upper class. Or more accurately, they want to be seen as upper class by some, but not by the maid, the yardman, the plumber, or the IRS.
As we know already, nobody in America wants to be, or to be seen to be, poor. Therefore, let sleeping dogs lie.
December 7, 2009 at 1:36 am
I think it is mistaken to view Lippmann as the father of modern liberalism. I think it is clear that they have sided with his opponent Dewey, while Lippmann himself tacked to the right.
GWB was reportedly a pretty good governor. Foreign policy doesn’t come into much play there, and that was the biggest thing dragging down his administration.
Strictly speaking, I believe Palin is white, of anglo-saxon descent, and religiously a protestant.
It seems odd to me to throw around the term “prole” so widely as to make exclusion from the Social Register sufficient. It makes more sense to say “middle class”. Hispanics seem to make up much of the prole sector of the American economy.
I would also hope that here we can try to focus on reality rather than mere popular image.
December 7, 2009 at 2:26 am
Maybe the really broad-sense usage of “prole” is a relict of the Optimates vs Populares, warrior aristoi vs farmers past, when there was no bourgiousie. Today this is alluded to not rarely I think, but ususally ironically.
December 7, 2009 at 12:55 pm
Eric, there was a bourgeoisie in ancient Greece and Rome, ranging from small shopkeepers to a few phenomenally rich bankers/financiers (Gr. trapezitai, Lat. argentarii), e.g., Pasion and Phormion in Athens.
These members of the business class were, however prosperous, of lower status socially than the landed upper classes. Pasion had begun as a banker’s slave, and later gained his freedom and took over his master’s bank; Phormion, Pasion’s own slave, followed a similar path. Suetonius recounts that Mark Antony taunted Octavian (later Augustus Caesar) by alleging that the latter’s grandfather was an argentarius. Petronius’s character of the rich freedman Trimalchio in the Satiricon is a fictional portrait of the type. Such people still ranked above the proletarii, the lowest class of citizens, who served the state only by begetting offspring (Lat., proles). Of course the proletarii were still citizens, thus ranking above slaves and non-citizens who were subjects of the Roman empire.
Palin may be white, of Anglo-Saxon descent, and religiously Protestant, but does anyone really suppose she is what E. Digby Baltzell (who coined the term) meant by a WASP? As for her socioeconomic status, she is perhaps at best petit-bourgeois. As best I can tell, the reason she resigned the governorship is that she did not have the resources to pay the legal bills for her defense against all the frivolous ethics complaints brought against her by ‘opposition researchers’ after she was nominated to the Republican ticket. It seems to me a minimal definition of bourgeois involves the possession of capital, and employment in connection with its use – even if as no more than a small shopkeeper. “White collar” workers in businesses belonging to others are middle class only by courtesy.
Lippmann fell in and out of love with the New Deal and the Democratic party several times, but he was certainly never a Republican or a conservative. At the very end of his long career he publicly disagreed with Lyndon Johnson, whom he had earlier advised, over Johnson’s conduct of the Vietnam war, which Lippmann opposed.
Deweyism is just Lippmannism-lite. Deweyite educational philosophy is to disregard the development of the skills of critical thinking, and instead to teach the children of the masses to be “good citizens” – i.e., docile and pliable under the guidance of their betters. It is a consequence of Deweyism that today so much time is taken up in government schools with things like diversity education, and sex education, and singing little ditties about the great leader Obama – and so little about reading, writing, and arithmetic. Can’t let ‘em think too much. They might get the wrong ideas.
December 9, 2009 at 1:15 pm
“As best I can tell, the reason she resigned the governorship is that she did not have the resources to pay the legal bills for her defense against all the frivolous ethics complaints brought against her by ‘opposition researchers’ after she was nominated to the Republican ticket.”
Sounds like bullshit to me.
“and so little about reading, writing, and arithmetic. Can’t let ‘em think too much. They might get the wrong ideas.”
The idea that technocrat elites underemphasize teaching reading, writing, and arithmetic to prevent populist uprisings is silly on its face.
December 10, 2009 at 2:44 am
Following up on my point regarding direct education, it has been said that middle class parents & teachers have been particularly opposed to it despite its proven effectiveness dating back to the Johnson administration. One argument is that middle class kids will learn a certain minimum level of reading, writing & ‘rithmetic regardless of their schooling so they want other material where they can explore & be creative or whatnot. Direct instruction means serving the needs of marginal kids who might otherwise wind up illiterate. It’s not about avoiding populism, but position on Maslow’s hierarchy.
December 8, 2009 at 1:23 am
Eric Johnson, today’s military seems to draw disproportionately from rural areas. Of course, American farmers are subsidized by the political elite rather than the other way around.
Michael, my understanding is that the complaints had been filed before she was nominated. You make a good point about white collar office workers, they vote differently from managers. But lawyers aren’t capital-owners like shopkeepers, and I think they’ve been considered bourgeois as far back as the French revolutionary period.
Just because Lippmann never became a Republican doesn’t mean he didn’t move to the right of his previous position. Did John Flynn or dos Passos join the GOP?
I agree that today’s schooling is a consequence of Deweyism (though “critical thinking” actually seems to receive disproportionate attention relative to the tried-and-true fundamentals of Direct Instruction), that’s why I think he rather than Lippmann is the one to focus on.
December 8, 2009 at 1:05 pm
TGGP – Lawyers, like clergymen, university dons, and physicians, were considered to belong to ‘learned professions.’ They were not really members of the bourgeois/roturier class, because such occupations were considered suitable occupations for the younger sons of the gentry. One might then say that they were of the middle class without being bourgeois, i.e., shopkeepers, traders, or merchants – indeed being drawn at least partly from a class superior to them. Indeed the source of many elevations to positions of political power or influence was from this class. The Grosvenors (dukes of Westminster), for example, are descendants of a seventeenth-century lawyer who bought up much of London on the cheap after the Great Fire of 1666.
It seems to me that the legacies of Lippmann and Dewey, to the extent they survive in the American political order today, represent two sides of the same debased coin. Dewey harbored idealistic hopes about citizen participation in government, which have not been realized. To the extent citizens participate, it is as voters manipulated or bought by the elite. What else is the purpose of ACORN and other such ‘community organizing’? And the elite operates, as it has since the ‘thirties, in just the way Lippmann advocated it should. Thus it is Lippmannite, whatever later course Lippmann’s thoughts may have followed.
Such ‘manufactured consent’ (Lippmann’s phrase) is common not only in the U.S. but in the E.U. Think of how many referenda they have repeated there on such things as the E.U. constitution, until the great unwashed finally “got it right.” Here we do things a little differently, and take almost all such plebiscitary authority away from the untrustworthy masses – vesting it instead in unelected bureaucrats and judges that are appointed for life.
Deweyite education therefore does not serve Dewey’s proclaimed purpose of enhancing citizenship, but rather the Lippmannite one of rendering the ignorant public more compliant to the will of the elite. It coaxes them to swallow the ‘filboid studge’ concocted by that elite, making it unnecessary to employ gavage in most cases. The Deweyite educational philosophy survives under Lippmannism, because gentling works better than breaking – fraud is a more useful tool than force.
December 8, 2009 at 4:04 pm
Further to your point that “American farmers are subsidized by the political elite rather than the other way around” – have you investigated who the principal recipients of Federal agricultural subsidies really are?
I seem to recall that some years ago the Bush administration proposed capping the amount of subsidy any single farmer could receive. This proposal was quickly cried down in Congress. According to USDA’s own figures, 67% of all farmers and ranchers in the United States collect no subsidy payments. Ten per cent of subsidy recipients collected 74% of the subsidies. Of the top twenty recipients in 2006, in first place, Riceland Foods, Inc., of Stuttgart, Arkansas collected $7,710,705; the twentienth from the top, the American Peanut Marketing Ass’n., of Leary, Georgia, collected $1,578,045.
Such luminaries as Sen. James Eastland of Mississippi, a large cotton planter, and news announcer Sam Donaldson, who owned a mohair sheep ranch in New Mexico, have appeared in the past as recipients of farm subsidies. Might it not be fairer to say that the political elite is subsidizing itself? I doubt that many of these people are sending their children into the enlisted ranks of the military.
December 9, 2009 at 2:49 am
I think what’s being done is what Dewey meant by “enhancing citizenship”, if not what you’d mean if you said that phrase.
You make a good point that not all crops are created equal when it comes to subsidies. That’s usually said to be the case in the U.S, in Europe it’s claimed that hardly anybody would be a farmer without subsidies and they’d import it all from poorer countries. I don’t know how accurate that actually is.
December 9, 2009 at 12:28 pm
I do not know much about European agriculture in general, but I am familiar with, and an avid consumer of, one product of European agriculture, viz., wine.
There are wine co-ops in parts of Europe, which may receive some government subsidy, but I do not think the well known vineyards get any. The Hospices de Beaune is surely a tax-exempt charity, while the Chevaliers du Tastevin, who own the chateau and part of the Clos de Vougeot, is a non-profit fraternal order under the French law of 1902. I suppose they are thus recipients of what liberals in this country call ‘tax subsidy’ – i.e., the government lets them keep all their money. Putting these to one side, if the MM. the barons de Rothschild (Lafite and Mouton branches), the marquis de Lur-Saluces (Yquem), the prince von Metternich (Johannisberg) and the count von Matuschka-Greiffenclau (Vollrads) receive subsidies, given the prices of their wine, that would seem to me to be as scandalous a circumstance as Sam Donaldson’s subsidized mohair ranch.
December 10, 2009 at 2:19 pm
T, relative to our malthusian and non-malthusian materialism (or partial-materialisim): what caused the french revolution? Was it science, rather than economics? (I myself really have no idea, at present.) And was it really different in scope and tenor from prior demos revolutions, such as in ancient Athens? Or was it just the same ball of wax, another revolution of the type that was always reversed (as it itself was) in the course of international struggle, until war finally became unprofitable somewhere in the industrial age.
Of course, I ought to do my own homework, and I have more than one unread history book lying around. So feel free to give me your two-sentence opinion with no justification, if you like, or no answer at all.
December 12, 2009 at 9:00 pm
Rather than ancient Athens, I’d think about the English Civil War and the American war of independence. The nobility had been on the decline (monarchs had cemented their power at the aristocracy’s expense) and the bourgeoisie had been the ally of the central state against the nobles. It came to pass that the bourgeoisie felt strong enough to grab power for themselves. The ancien regime had its roots in the medieval era after the Roman empire (the king was originally the first-among-equals of a war-band), and the modern era killed it off.
December 14, 2009 at 12:33 pm
TGGP –
The English civil war (more properly, the War of Three Kingdoms, as the Scots call it – it encompassed Scotland and Ireland as well as England) is best considered a counter-example to the French revolution.
In France, absolute monarchy succeeded in subduing the nobility and gentry – beginning with Richelieu’s centralizing efforts, and culminating in the personal rule of Louis XIV. In Britain, the squirearchy made an alliance of convenience with the Puritans – each, for different reasons, desiring to curb absolutist tendencies on the parts of James I and Charles I. After Britain had its bellyful of Puritanism, the squirearchy swung toward royalism and brought back Charles II, but under restraints on his authority, so Britain never became an absolute monarchy as France did.
In France, the noblesse was deprived of its feudal responsibilities for the administration of justice and the provision of men-at-arms, but was allowed to keep its privileges. Dancing attendance on the king at Versailles was the only way a nobleman could advance his fortune, since feu duties were frozen at rates set in the fourteenth or fifteenth centuries, and engaging in trade derogated from nobility. This circumstance created an antipathy between the poorer country gentry, who could not afford to attend court, and the greater magnates who could. Further there was an antipathy between nobles, who enjoyed an exemption from taxes and levies that fell all the harder on the roturier class, which resented the fact.
In Britain, then, nobility and gentry made common cause with merchants and traders to restore a limited or constitutional monarchy, whereas in France an absolute monarchy suppressed the political authority of the noblesse and relying on bourgeois civil servants (e.g., Colbert) to help it do so. The result was that a century later, Britain had no revolution – its prosperous mercantile class were profitably allied to its landed aristocracy in preserving an order agreeable to both; in France, the two classes were at odds, and when the economy collapsed under Necker’s mismanagement, the king and nobles, with their extravagant and idle lives, took the blame.
A point should also be made about the difference between continental nobility and British aristocracy. The continental nobility was not socially porous. It was a caste, its members easily identifiable by the nobiliary particule (de, du, von, zu, etc.) in their names. All children of a noble family were noble, enjoying the rank and privilege thereto appurtenant, if not the money to enjoy them; those who had no money were restricted in their choices of occupation essentially to the clergy and the military.
In Britain, only the head of an aristocratic family was styled nobly (Lord So-and-so); the British nobility, properly speaking, is a peerage. The children of dukes and marquesses might be called Lord X or Lady Y, but were such only by courtesy. Children of lower-ranking peers were simply the Hon. So-and-So; the grandchildren of a peer had no title. A wider variety of employments was open to the son of an aristocratic family, particularly if he was a spare rather than an heir. Daughters of noblemen often married rich profesionals or merchants; rich professionals and merchants bought country houses, became squires, and many of them (or their descendants) eventually were elevated to the peerage.
These differences are reflected in the respective fortunes of most of the Continental nobility as compared to those of the British aristocracy. The former was rigid and hence brittle; the latter, flexible and thus resilient.
December 14, 2009 at 3:40 pm
So, in Michael’s picture we can see the english war as a feudal will in the spirit of the Magna Carta and english liberty. Though here of course only the nobles could have liberty, and also the power that many would say is needed to maintain liberty. Still, this was a lot of liberty for that epoch; it was relative “democracy” in spite of material conditions that were perhaps(?) not much different from nations where absolute monarchy took hold.
Even in the post WWII period France is said to be more “technocratic”, read less democratic, which some say could have contributed to advantages such as nuclear energy (80% of electricity in France, 30% in the States). Activism against nuclear energy began long before Three Mile Island in ’79, which was itself before Chernobyl and probably harmed the health of no one. There were multiple events in which thousands of protesters were arrested, again this is before Three Mile, though it certainly further intensified afterward. Whether or not it would necessarily have remained the case, nuclear power was quite dead here before Three Mile, that is to say orders of new reactors were down something like 80%, because protesters exerted pressure via regulatory costs, and otherwise.
Anyway, the French Revolution, even if carried out by burghers who were once allies of the crown — still killed the king, no? Did they actually spare anyone or anything substantial of the crown / central state? If not, then I should think we could still see it as a democratizing revolution of the weak against the strong, part of the old pattern in its genesis — if that is so, then the reason it is part of the post-malthusian progressive narrative would simply be this: it succeeded, and so only Athens could match it as a high-water mark for demos power.
So why did it succeed, in the immediate sense? Its success could depend greatly, moderately, or not very much on the nature of its genesis, because there is also the nature of the resistance to consider. Thats where I wonder if science comes in, and not least, the original scientist, Copernicus — moderate erosion of the divine right of kings and more generally of a transcendental justification for soldiers to fire on the defiers of the old order, and for rulers to order them to do so. Which is of course the basis of any regime, including the one we have now.
December 14, 2009 at 3:51 pm
Ah, I had forgot to read the end of Michael’s comment. Was the French nobility larger than the British, and thus a bigger burden, in addition to just being irritatingly more snobbish ie less meritocratic?
Or, more precisely, if we accept Greg Clarkism, was the nobility’s consumption *growing* as a fraction of GDP. Clark says, to elide a few variable, that a malthusian peasantry will grow or die off to fit the (absolute) net amount of food production they control after taxes — after the nobles/state shake them down. Thus, the prosperity of peasants is the same across millennia, when things are equilibrious. But of course they go out of equilibrium when the absolute net food available to the peasantry shrinks or grows. If it shrinks, peasants will live truly oppressive lives for years, probably a few generations, until a new equilibrium is reached, a new constant total population.
December 14, 2009 at 6:39 pm
Eric –
Yes, the French nobility was larger than the English peerage, and it was both constrained by custom and law to maintain itself as a caste above most ordinary gainful economic activity, and guaranteed privileges that distinguished it from the ordinary run of humanity. The concept of the ‘poor hidalgo’ may be of Spanish origin, but the species existed also in France, and France did not have a sufficiently large colonial empire into which to send such people in a proconsular role. One reads, for example, of the parents of Charlotte Corday, who were poor nobles. As her mother was giving birth, the peasants were compelled by feudal duty to beat the marshes to silence the croaking of the frogs. Yet her father was essentially a farmer of not much greater prosperity than his nominal tenants – a ‘bonnet laird,’ as the Scots would say.
Britain’s peerage-nobility, which passed by primogeniture, was certainly smaller in numbers than were the French aristocracy, in which noble status passed by gavelkind, and thus one noble father begat a whole gaggle of titled children. We can see the resultant difference in comparing the relative rarity, for example, of marquesses in the British peerage, as compared to the numbers of Frenchmen who might claim the title of marquis. A British marquess would in all likelihood possess a considerable landed estate, the patronage of several seats in the house of commons, and of course his own seat in the Lords. A French marquis would as likely as not be an impecunious fellow, who, if he did not hold a military commission or a civil office bought from the crown, might eke out a living as a card sharp or a fashionable pimp. Burke’s or Debrett’s lists every British peer down to the most recently created baron – it can, because there are few enough. Gotha does not even bother with those below the rank of duke. There are too many, and the legitimacy of some of their titles is hard to establish – it was even in the 18th century.
Let us bear in mind that a portion of the nobility in France supported the revolution, at least to the degree of calling the Estates General and subjecting the centralized government (represented by the monarchy) to some sort of constraint. Many of these people were of the sort that Englishmen might have described as old county families, without influence at court. M. de Lafayette was exemplary of the type, which made up the so-called Girondin faction that eventually fell victim, along with the king, to the Jacobins. Also, the antipathy between nobles and commoners was not uniform throughout France. In the Vendee, for example, landlord and tenant were united against the Jacobins, who persecuted both dreadfully.
The left has usually laid claim to the French revolution, and the right has been happy to leave it to them. Yet it is interesting to read documents of the period, like the Declaration of the Rights of Man. There’s much in it about private property rights and onerous taxes that would not please many social democrats today. It is probably fair to say that the French revolution began as a sort of inchoate revolt against the statism and centralized government that had been so constant a note in French history since the time of Louis XIV, and which soon enough was reasserted by Bonaparte, by the restored Bourbons, by the Orleans monarchy, and every republic, empire, or state since then. The tragedy of the French revolution is that it fell into the hands of the Parisian canaille and degenerated into chaos and slaughter. There is something emblematic of the period in that it was practically the only time in his mature life that the clearly mad Donatien Alphonse Francois de Sade was allowed out of prison – and that he was one of the milder, saner characters in circulation.
December 15, 2009 at 7:53 pm
I hadn’t heard of the squirearchy’s alliance with the Puritans. The Royalist side in that war is associated with aristocratic “Cavaliers”, who went on to form the society of the tidewater South of the American colonies. You are right that the English kings never attained absolutism, the Magna Charta reveals their weakness relative to the nobility. In France there was the Fronde, but it wasn’t as successful when it comes to changing the balance of power. It was the case that many nobles supported the Glorious Revolution, which wasn’t much of a revolution anyway (though I also think that of the American war of independence).
I think science played a role, but not through Copernicus deligitimizing anybody. I argued a while back that Athens was relatively democratic because it relied heavily on oarsmen who could be commoners with little property. Only wealthy nobility could be heavy cavalry, so the medieval era (following the invention of the stirrup and the end of the Roman empire) was characterized by feudalism/manorialism. The decline of heavy cavalry means the decline of the aristocratic warrior class, and even kings had to use nationalism appeals to mass armies of their countrymen. Democracy is the government of the masses.
I don’t think there’s any evidence that the French parasite class was consuming a larger fraction of national output. I think their economy was actually growing. The Malthusian era ended ironically enough around Malthus’ time.
I actually recall hearing that it was the Girondins who were responsible for the Vendee (and also France’s conflict with outside powers at that time). The Jacobins did carry out the Terror though.
I agree that the French revolution had rather classical liberal (“bourgeois” might be the best descriptor) origins. Keith Preston talks a lot about that in likening the neo-conservatives to Jacobins. Many of the complaints brought to the Estates/Parlement were about feudal-era rules. Uniformity of regulation was the demand, which French kings had been pushing for at the expense of the nobility for some time. I don’t know if it’s helpful to try claiming it for the right. Is feudalism “left wing” though it had statist aspects?
December 16, 2009 at 2:02 pm
On the common cause made by at least some British nobility and gentry with the Puritans, the best source I know of is the essays of Lord Dacre (Hugh Trevor-Roper). Much 19th-20th century commentary on the Interregnum is written with the intent of shoehorning the period’s events into some preconceived political interpretation, be it the whiggery of writers like Macaulay and Gardiner, or the Marxism of Dr. Hill. Unlike them,Trevor-Roper explores the original evidence before arriving at a conclusion.
He points out that opposition magnates and the beneficiaries of their patronage in the commons were motivated not so much by religious Puritanism as by antipathy to royal absolutism and to the newly created court nobles of Charles I:
“On one side was the renewed drive of the Crown towards a legally institutionalized ‘absolutism,’ on a Continental model, supported by an established, hierarchical national Church; on the other the determination of the aristocracy, animated by half-feudal, half-Whiggish doctrines, to resist and contain that drive. Often, on this side as on that, the families are the same: the heirs or successors of Bedford, Essex, Leicester, Northumberland, Argyll, against the sons of Charles I with their new courtier nobility.”
(extracted from “The Continuity of the English Revolution,” p. 227, in the collection “From Counter-Reformation to Glorious Revolution.”)
As for the supposed royalism of the Tidewater cavaliers, I’d point out to you that the third Lord Fairfax of Cameron (1612-1671) was a Parliamentary general and commander-in-chief; his descendant, the sixth Lord Fairfax, was one of the grandest of colonial Virginians, and a friend of George Washington’s. The old cliches are not so accurate as some folk believe.
December 16, 2009 at 5:42 pm
Further re – the Jacobins and the Vendee.
The Vendeen revolt began in February 1793. The Jacobin coup took place in May 1793, and the genocidal ‘pacification’ of the region under Carrier was ordered by the Committee of Public Safety on August first that year; the Jacobins were by then in charge. The final Shermanesque march through the Vendee under Turreau was ordered in February 1794, at which time upon enquiring what to do with the women and children, he was told to ‘eliminate the brigands to the last man…’ The Jacobins fell with the execution of Robespierre on 27th July, 1794.
Though the Vendee revolt began before the Jacobins came to power, and it continued after their fall, the principal atrocities were committed in the Vendee by the Revolutionary government after the ascendancy of the Jacobins, just as in the case of the Parisian terror.
December 16, 2009 at 10:08 pm
>>”If I had to guess, when he said that conservatism is “incompatible with civilization” he meant that it’s incompatible with the sort we would like to have, one that is dynamic, innovative, at least somewhat rational.”
I think most readers took that much away from him. The sticking point is that most readers also thought this was nonsense. Most civilizations worthy of the name have been somewhat dynamic, innovative, and rational. Many of these have been quite conservative at the same time. The British Empire is a good example. It was even run by a hereditary aristocracy.
December 17, 2009 at 11:01 pm
Eric Johnson wrote “Slave-owing can also contribute to not getting pillaged, and slavery is guaranteed to return if malthus does (which it need not)”.
Actually, no. Slavery actually makes sense in an environment that is not up against resource constraints, in which free workers find it practical to set up for themselves. When resource constraints stop that, you don’t need the expense of securing slaves if you control resources, because more than enough free people will come to you for access to those. Some of the background to this is in Nassau Senior’s discussion on the fading economics of slavery in the introduction to his work on wages. Oh, and don’t confuse not being up against Malthusian limits with being non-Malthusian or post-Malthusian; it’s not the same at all.
teageegeepea wrote ‘[Agre] also famously used the example of a pin factory, which is a firm rather than a collection of individual artisans. In fact, Coase’s paper only refers to Adam Smith in quoting him on an “undertaker” (what would later be called an “entrepreneur”) in the context of a “firm”, “unit” or “factory”. Yet Agre references Coase as discussing Adam Smith’s individual artisans!’
In the context of the time, the workers were individual artisans, just working at specific tasks. That is, they weren’t machine operators in the sense that later factory workers were, they were working with individual skills and tools, and they brought the skills and maybe even the tools to the work.
Michael wrote “There have been elective monarchies – for example, that of Poland, and (at least in theory) that of the Holy Roman Empire”.
In theory, the British monarchy is. That is, the monarch is chosen by the Council of Accession (once the Witanagemot, now a special session of the Privy Council) – only, it is directed to choose according to instructions (once the will of Henry VIII, now various acts governing the succession). When it disregards instructions, as in 1603, in practice – if it succeeds – the dynasty changes and the instructions get changed later.
Michael wrote “The Deweyite educational philosophy survives under Lippmannism, because gentling works better than breaking – fraud is a more useful tool than force”.
It’s worth remembering Philip II of Macedon’s dictum as quoted by Mary Renault, “fraud before force but force after all” – both parts of it.
Michael wrote “The English civil war (more properly, the War of Three Kingdoms, as the Scots call it – it encompassed Scotland and Ireland as well as England)…”.
No, no more than the War in the Pacific is more properly called the Second World War (and it should really be the Wars [plural] of the Three Kingdoms, too – they connected, but not enough to make one single war). The English civil war is specifically the war that started in England, not the whole series of wars that it blurred into. Indeed, it is possible to distinguish the English civil war as two or more civil wars, with gaps, though these days that is not common.
“A point should also be made about the difference between continental nobility and British aristocracy. The continental nobility was not socially porous. It was a caste, its members easily identifiable by the nobiliary particule (de, du, von, zu, etc.) in their names. All children of a noble family were noble, enjoying the rank and privilege thereto appurtenant…”
This is true of the longer established structures to the west and south, but less so in the north and east. In particular, Denmark, Sweden, and even more so Russia had aristocracies reformed to be more meritocratic (in the sense of supporting the monarch’s purposes, e.g. letting in the likes of the De la Gardies). The Russian system somewhat resembled something that was practised under various Chinese dynasties, with each generation descending one rank in the nobility from the previous one and needing individual success to climb back up the down escalator.
teageegeepea wrote “I argued a while back that Athens was relatively democratic because it relied heavily on oarsmen who could be commoners with little property. Only wealthy nobility could be heavy cavalry, so the medieval era (following the invention of the stirrup and the end of the Roman empire) was characterized by feudalism/manorialism. The decline of heavy cavalry means the decline of the aristocratic warrior class, and even kings had to use nationalism appeals to mass armies of their countrymen.”
That’s almost correct, up until the last part. Changes in the art of war meant that smaller professional armies were superior to larger hosts between the mid 16th century and the late 18th century, so that last observation is only true for monarchies trying to steer between the popular Scylla and the military Charybdis in the so-called long 19th century.
December 18, 2009 at 1:12 am
True enough, there are malthusian conditions under which slavery doesnt turn profit. These conditions are narrower than you describe, though. For one, not all slaves in history were kidnapped at a cost. Slavery helped motivate wars in the past, but assuming no one wanted slaves, there would still be nearly as many wars, and prisoners from them would still be available for slavery at no cost.
Second, you have lower transaction costs with slaves, because they cant quit. You can also kill them if they get sick, which I believe was done in classical times. You could even kill them when they get too old to turn a profit on. To do this to free people was not practicable in the past. Today it is possible for a fascist state, but it could be unprofitable because it is highly demoralizing.
> Oh, and don’t confuse not being up against Malthusian limits with being non-Malthusian or post-Malthusian; it’s not the same at all.
Certainly a distinction must be made between one flush generation of century in ancient Greece (which is superficially but not fundamentally non-malthusian), and Greece in 2008, which is utterly non-malthusian. But the terminology is a matter of taste.
Or maybe you are instead saying that life today is still fundamentally malthusian. Thats not true simpliciter. If societies take steps to prevent the evolution of extremely strong desires to have kids, even only through embryo selection, the current non-malthusian situation on earth can be stable until the end of the universe.
December 18, 2009 at 8:19 am
“Slavery helped motivate wars in the past, but assuming no one wanted slaves, there would still be nearly as many wars, and prisoners from them would still be available for slavery at no cost”.
No cost at the point of collection (though maybe some in transporting and otherwise processing them), but more costs thereafter than the costs of wage labour when would-be workers are competing for fewer jobs (and, there were often provisions against discarding or destroying worn out slaves, if only to reduce unrest – consider it the same sort of cost of control as you noted would happen with putting down free people). Note that at a certain stage of resource constraint, most people have some independent resources but not enough for survival. They then bid wages down to a top up level that is not enough to live off by itself but is enough to make up their personal shortfall (which explains how people in developing countries can live “on” a dollar a day – they don’t, they just need it as a top up). At that point, they cost employers less directly than maintaining slaves, they are more motivated, and they don’t present the on costs of guarding and controlling them.
Slavery has however existed under such circumstances, but only in a limited form to provide specialists; they relied on having a pool of exploited free people to support them, usually being more a form of resource conversion for consumption than value adding production, so they were limited to being only a small part of the economy. The Islamic world offers examples, e.g. eunuchs, concubines, artisans (who were productive, but were still subsidised), soldiers like Janissaries or Mamelukes, etc.
“Or maybe you are instead saying that life today is still fundamentally malthusian. Thats not true simpliciter. If societies take steps to prevent the evolution of extremely strong desires to have kids, even only through embryo selection, the current non-malthusian situation on earth can be stable until the end of the universe.”
I don’t think Malthusian means what you think it means. Malthus never denied that things of that sort would work, he merely said that his limits would always eventually hit in the form of either misery or vice. You appear only to be considering the former possibility in your understanding of his description. Yet, to someone of his values as a clergyman of that era, birth control of any sort would have counted as vice. He never claimed it couldn’t be done, he only considered it a bad outcome – simpliciter.
Oh, and another common misunderstanding these days is one he went to some trouble to clear up: he wasn’t talking about absolute resource limits but rather about the effects of opening up new resources at a long run slower rate than population growth. He was only mistaken in a small way about the parameters, not in a large way about the principle, in thinking that the constraints were fairly close when he wrote.
December 18, 2009 at 9:04 am
Great conversation, guys. I’m convinced that certain problems the U.S. currently suffers from – culturally – are related to the lack of a real class system. We have a class system but it is entirely nebulous and faux-meritocratic. That is, everyone who is upper class gets to pretend like being rich / high class is a matter of personal merit while concealing that a fair part of it is heredity. I think this relates to the progressive eugenics movement which took heredity to a kind of scientific precision – brains, balls, muscles, DNA – which of course resulted in an absurdity. Ever since then everyone has to pretend that it is merit, while secretly believing it is entirely heredity. But since we don’t have any kind of formal hereditary system, we lack a framework to distinguish between genetic characteristics, nurture, and inheritance. Instead this has been bizarrely projected onto – of all things – skin color! As though either man’s self-assigned groupings (Jewishness) or a characteristic shared by a wide group of people (Black skin color) is somehow a lynchpin in the genetic puzzle. Superficial, shallow. At best that is only one leg of the stool, and there are at least three legs!
One of the most bizarre cruelties of our system is that either you succeeded because of your merit or you failed because of your genes. Nowhere is *how* you were raised discussed nor the fact that few if any person could succeed at all if someone else had not helped them out (inheritence, favor, etc.) Virtue is lost from the discussion; men are beasts of will and flesh.
The most lucrative profession? Actor, Athlete or CEO. The ‘best’ profession? What does best even mean?
Sorry for the rant. Very enlightening discussion!
December 18, 2009 at 7:56 pm
Michael, I haven’t read Macaulay, Gardiner or Hill’s account. I’m primarily relying on David Hackett Fischer & others who cite him. I’m not terribly shocked that a Parliamentary general was among the Tidewater planters, a single exception doesn’t refute a generalization.
flenser, that interpretation mostly boils down to “I don’t like conservatism”. If you consider conservatism irrational, no form it takes can ever be good enough.
P. M. Lawrence:
Again, I haven’t read Smith in the original but my recollection is that he described the division of labor in a pin factory to be intellectually deadening in contrast to the work of artisans who carry out the entire production process. All that is beside the point however because Coase says nothing about whether workers are skilled or unskilled, only whether they are part of a larger firm or merely interfacing through a marketplace. Smith’s pin factory constitutes a firm, so it is not different from what Coase was discussing.
December 18, 2009 at 8:04 pm
I meant, if someone comes along and comments on Smith’s hypothetical pin factory using words like “artisan” to describe the workers, that’s actually within the range covered by the term and not a nonsense – because matters hadn’t yet developed to the point where they were just the now more familiar machine operatives. That it was on the way there, that the moral and efficiency issues of specialisation had grown, isn’t in dispute; but they were still (just) artisans in the late 18th century.
December 18, 2009 at 8:16 pm
I’ll agree it’s not nonsense in isolation, but it is nonsensical to use as a contrast to Coase.
December 19, 2009 at 2:03 pm
Of course a single exception doesn’t refute a generalization, but it is wrong to generalize that Virginia was Anglican and therefore royalist, while New England was Puritan and therefore roundhead. While Anglicanism was the established faith in Virginia, it was poorly supported by its mother church, both before and after the interregnum. The main consequence of the establishment of Anglicanism in Virginia was that the colony was tolerant of other types of Protestantism, in contrast to the Bay Colony, which tolerated only Puritanism. There were probably as many non-Anglicans as Anglicans in Virginia. For example, some Scottish Presbyterians fled the Caroline persecution of the Covenanters and settled in Virginia. Some old Covenanters became commonwealth’s men, others were loyal to the king. You cannot generalize about the religious or political loyalties of colonial Virginians at this period.
And, with the exception of the Bay Colony, neither can you generalize about the New Englanders’. Rhode Island, for example, was settled by Baptists who were banished thence in the time of Roger Williams. Maine and parts of New Hampshire fell under the patent of Sir Ferdinando Gorges, who was induced to colonize part of New England in the name of Laudian Anglicanism. One of my ancestors was an Anglican parson affiliated with the Gorges expedition. These people cannot be presumptively assigned to the roundheads’ camp merely because they settled in New England.
December 23, 2009 at 3:54 pm
PM Lawrence, what about the Spartans and their Helots. Are you saying they were not resource-limited, or that slavery had limited impact on their economy? I dont think it did; it freed the Spartiates (“real” Spartan citizens) for full time military training: the latter does not produce anything marketable, but it is productive in the context I am discussing — that of a polity at ecological carrying capacity which has to defend itself from other such polities, and probably wants to attack other polities when that is canny, in a world where war was profitable and desirable for anyone who could, to an approximation, find someone sufficiently weaker than themselves to attack. Slave soldiers, mentioned by you, are also highly productive as understood here. Also, in terms of your statement that slaves were mostly employed in resource conversion, well, if they made weapons that would certainly also be very productive (but creating monumental tombs as in egypt, or finely worked mirrors and combs, would be counted here as a waste). Further, this page by Columbia Univ Press mentions agriculture as one typical employment of slaves, which is productive as well as not being resource conversion:
http://www.infoplease.com/ce6/bus/A0861124.html
Also, you are overlooking the fact that it is possible to “consume” a population of slaves: you need not treat them well enough (expensively enough) to maintain a constant population size.
The fact that free peasants own property should not be very germane, except for housing. Greg Clark suggests on page 42 of his book that in pre-industrial times 90.66% of income went to expendable items, including 75% for food and drink, some for soap, heat, light, etc. I am treating “clothing and bedding” (10% of expenditures) as 33% expendable, on the assumption that 33% is inherited, which might be too optimistic.