Here, in the ninth lecture of his course, The History of the World, Richard Bulliet discusses Greece and Iran (1000-30 B.C.E./ India, 1500 B.C.E.-550 C.E. Part II).
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Session Nine: Richard Bulliet on the History of the World
In Academia, Arts & Letters, Eastern Civilizaton, Economics, Historicism, History, Humanities, liberal arts, Pedagogy, Scholarship, Teaching, Western Civilization, Western Philosophy on July 19, 2017 at 6:45 amPart Two: Review of Nathaniel Branden Issue of the Journal of Ayn Rand Studies
In America, American History, Arts & Letters, Book Reviews, Books, Economics, Historicism, History, Humanities, liberal arts, Liberalism, Libertarianism, Philosophy, Scholarship, Western Civilization, Western Philosophy on July 5, 2017 at 6:45 am
This post is the reproduction of portions of a series of pieces originally published at Atlas Society’s website. The original series of posts is available here, here, here, and here.
The inclusion of Branden’s lecture and question-answer session in this collection gives him a voice in his own commemoration. Published here for the first time, and transcribed by Roger Bissell, the lecture was given to the California Institute for Applied Objectivism in 1996. Its tenor can be gleaned from the opening paragraph in which Branden compliments his audience for being “dedicated to the broad philosophical ideas of Objectivism, but not in a religiously constricted and independent-thinking-discouraging way.”
Here Branden echoes his implicit criticism of the ARI camp. Debates between the Branden-ARI factions go beyond the personal disagreements between Branden and Rand to a broader philosophical question: is it better, at the outset of an intellectual movement, to insist upon the purity of a set of ideas at the expense of its slower adoption or to engage in an open dialogue that allows for give-and-take?
This is not a subject that can be answered by labeling either side as “religionists” or “compromisers.” It’s a unique problem elevated to historical significance by the profundity and uniqueness of Objectivism. If Objectivism is the most exceptional philosophy to emerge in over two thousand years and one believes, as Objectivists do, that philosophy is the motive force of history, then the answer could reasonably impact the course of civilization itself. The stakes, in other words, are high for those involved.
The question-answer session thus raises an issue of great magnitude in the Rand-Branden divide: How should Objectivists relate to libertarians? The underlying debate is that, on one side, Rand and ARI reject the label “libertarian” or affiliations with libertarian groups (exceptions such as the Foundation for Economic Education and the Cato Institute exist) because they claim that self-identifying libertarians often embrace a sort of “libertarianism by any means,” foregoing philosophical foundations.
Rand and ARI have argued that because philosophy guides human thinking in all areas of life and constitutes a fundamental, salient force, it is unacceptable to categorize their beliefs under a name that permits just any possible philosophical argument for a political conclusion. Objectivism is not primarily an economic or political calculus but a philosophical system whereby the means by which one arrives at conclusions matters. Branden and others critical of Rand have argued that accepting the libertarian label is unobjectionable and better promotes the popularizing and engagement that Branden values. Disciples of Rand disagree to varying degrees.
Branden speaks about himself in the third person (“you had to know Nathaniel Branden or Barbara Branden, and you had to impress them sufficiently to get an introduction to Ayn Rand”) and with superlatives of the sort employed by the sitting President of the United States (“the wonderfully exciting opportunity to read,” “a very special world, which is very close to being incommunicable,” “it was a very intoxicatingly pleasant and enjoyable way to process experience,” “we are somehow participating in this marvelous, exciting and inspiring reality,” etc.).
His accounts are fascinating; whether they’re entirely true is another matter. His portrayal of a dinner with Rand and O’Connor during which he articulated anxiety about the publication of Atlas Shrugged is telling, as is Leonard Peikoff’s announcement, on a separate occasion, that, as Branden puts it, “in six months of the publication of Atlas Shrugged, we’ll be living in an Objectivist society.” “Now,” says Branden of Peikoff’s comment, “we knew that this was excessive, and this couldn’t be true. . . . But what it also reflects is something of the highly excited, intoxicating mental state of the period.”
Stories like this help those of us who were not alive at the time develop a fuller sense of what these individuals were like. Branden and Rand and their followers set out to form an exclusive community and were often impatient with outsiders who didn’t understand their positions, or so Branden claims. He regrets that their tactic was first to insist on conformity before initiating dialogue with outsiders, rather than initiating dialogue with outsiders to recruit new adherents. “[I]t was very, very tempting to retreat into self-righteousness,” he reflects about his encounters with those who were not yet initiated into his manner of thinking. He also depicts the group—The Collective—as elevating Rand the person over her principles: “In those days, it was made abundantly clear to us that fighting for Objectivism meant fighting for Ayn Rand. Loyalty to Ayn Rand was an issue of the highest possible value in the hierarchy.”
Therein lies much of the controversy surrounding Branden and his legacy. These “fighting words” give the strong sense that battling for Objectivism meant battling for Rand. Those of us who were not present for the conversations, meetings, debates, and interactions of that time cannot speak to the extent to which this is true. However, the accusation seems at odds with Rand’s explicit statements enjoining those who studied her philosophy that thinking for themselves and making their own evaluations of every idea were the only rational means of ascertaining truth. She rejected arguments from authority, even or especially when she was the authority in question. Whether that was conveyed in her personal relationships, though, we cannot know. It is imaginable that someone with such a forceful personality, so certain in her beliefs and ideas, would be difficult to oppose and that the environment of The Collective may have made any but the most resilient participant demure in her presence.
Branden’s stories about Rand are almost invariably unflattering, which is understandable in the context of their personal conflict, but perhaps unproductive in maintaining his broader position of extolling her philosophy and even, in large part, her character. He argues for understanding her as “conflicted” and complex rather than saintly, but he hardly counterbalances his negative portrayals with anything positive. She is, in his renderings, almost universally cranky, rude, aggressive, and bitter—a figure who seems to have gained a following for her ideas despite her horrid persona.
Moreover, he sometimes assumes a condescending tone towards those associated with her. He represents Peikoff and George Reisman, for instance, as being inextricably caught up in her world, coloring Peikoff as an emotional dependent and Reisman as a social hostage. In all cases, however, Branden remains the sound-minded individual who, if a bit naïve in his youth, learned the error of the Randian ways and parted with her. This attitude dismisses some independent and analytical minds as fragile or conformist. One could argue that Branden’s characterizations of events weren’t wrong—again, we weren’t there and so don’t know for sure—but they also gloss over the fact that now, as older men of prominence, Peikoff and Reisman stand by her legacy and take her side in the split.
It’s clear that Branden detested what he portrays as a culture of loyalty that did not admit of dissent or disagreement and that, in his depiction at least, was unwilling to improve upon or revise Rand’s ideas, which some of her associates, again in his view, assumed to be without flaws. Branden locates the origin of this allegedly rigid groupthink in Rand’s early years. Defenders of Rand will disapprove of Branden’s characterization of this period as “the very dark side of the early years,” just as they may wince to hear Branden describe how her closest associates refused or hesitated to acknowledge their errors or ignorance about certain matters, as though they needed always to pretend to possess perfect knowledge. Although Branden criticized what he dubbed “Orthodox Objectivism,” of which he remained critical until the end, he was equally clear that he wished Objectivism to continue spreading, and he offered pointed suggestions about how to accomplish that, namely by gaining credibility and acceptance within the academy and finding publishers within mainstream peer-reviewed journals.
As much as I have hoped to avoid engaging the Rand-Branden split, it is a major part of Branden’s speech and the question-answer session deals with it. Given that Branden delivered the talk in 1996 and that, as he notes, he rarely spoke on Objectivism by then, one could take his comments as at least somewhat representative of his hierarchy of concerns on the subject. The talk and question-answer session reveal that his fallout with Rand remained a considerable part of his legacy and that he felt the need to defend himself by attacking Rand. That would explain why his answers can, at times, seem unfair to Rand. For example, asked why Rand supported Richard Nixon over George McGovern—rather than the Libertarian Party candidate John Hospers—Branden stated that she should’ve supported Hospers, that she was “uninformed” about libertarianism and political issues, and that she associated libertarianism with anarchism, which she despised. In truth, Rand had contempt for Nixon and a well-reasoned argument against Hospers, even citing his campaign views and the Libertarian Party’s platform. If I know this, then Branden certainly should, so his comment reads as if he’s giving her as little credit as possible and characterizing her as an angry zealot.
Whatever one thinks of Branden, there’s merit and perhaps a degree of honor in his hope that “there is a tremendous area of work that needs to be done, that will be done, … that is nowhere to be found in the Objectivist literature.” His disagreements with other Objectivists did not lead him to give up on Objectivism or abandon its central tenets. He remained ever devoted to this philosophy even if his commitments to knowledge and learning lost him friendships and widened the gulf between his ideas and those of other followers of Rand. It is worth asking whether Branden, despite his implicit discounting of the early years as too preoccupied with “fighting for Ayn Rand,” did not spend much of his remaining years fighting against Rand. Did his autobiographical writings and the writings of Barbara Branden on their relationships with Rand take up too much of his post-Rand career as a psychologist and philosophical thinker?
The American Bar Association Stifles Legal Education
In Academia, American History, Arts & Letters, Economics, History, Law, Law School on June 28, 2017 at 6:45 am
This piece originally appeared here at the Library of Law and Liberty.
The Accrediting Council on Education in Journalism and Mass Communications is a nonprofit accrediting agency for journalism programs. Bradley Hamm, the dean at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, has called the council’s accreditation-review process “flawed,” “superficial,” “extremely time-consuming,” and “sort of a low bar.”
So he’s gotten out. Northwestern University has effectively terminated its relationship with the council, calmly embracing its new status as unaccredited.
The online journal Inside Higher Ed, which points out that the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, has done the same, quotes Dean Hamm as saying that, “as we near the 2020s, we expect far better than a 1990s-era accreditation organization that resists change—especially as education and careers in our field evolve rapidly.”
This is a tremendous blow—when two of the most prominent and celebrated journalism programs in the country refuse to acknowledge the authority and legitimacy of an accreditor, it’s tough for the accreditor to argue that the resistant institutions are merely upset about their ability to maintain accreditation. If other journalism schools are frustrated with the council’s obsolete standards, and its tendency to micromanage curricula, more of them will likely follow the example of Northwestern and Berkeley.
The social and financial costs of burdensome accreditation standards and procedures are even more pronounced in the field of law. Small businesses and Americans of modest income struggle to afford the high costs of hiring an attorney or litigating a case. Access to justice or quality representation is a constant concern within the legal profession.
Meanwhile, the American Bar Association, which remains the only accrediting body for law schools in the United States, regulates legal education in a way that drives up costs for law students, and for the consumers onto whom those costs are eventually projected.
The ABA restricts innovation by fixing the number of credit hours necessary for law students to graduate, effectively eliminating the possibility of a shorter program than the standard three years. It discourages law professors from honing their practical skills by narrowing the designation of “full-time” faculty to exclude those who maintain an ongoing remunerative relationship with a law firm or business. Its requirements regarding equipment and technology mean, in practice, that many schools are buying expensive computers and furnishing computer labs that students may never use.
ABA scrutiny of attrition rates has also contributed to a change in law-school culture and practices. There was a time when law schools could accept a high percentage of applicants who, as students, had to prove their competence in the classroom and stand or fall on their academic merit. Those who couldn’t cut it flunked out. They didn’t incur three years of debt only to take and retake a bar exam they weren’t equipped to pass.
The ABA position penalizing schools for high attrition—the result of a new interpretation of Standard 501(b) that prohibits law schools from admitting applicants who aren’t “capable” of completing a Juris Doctor or passing a bar exam—now arguably causes law schools to seek to retain students who can’t cut it. To that end, it encourages grade inflation and heavier use of student loans.
Law schools recently came under criticism for hiring their own graduates as a way to boost their post-graduation employment statistics. In response, the ABA instituted procedures to prevent the spread of misleading data. What seemed like a good-faith effort to enhance transparency and accountability has led, instead, to flawed incentives. Law schools have taken to promoting “JD-required” and “bar-passage-required” jobs to their graduates more strongly than corporate or financial positions that pay higher salaries but don’t require either a law license or bar membership.
If you graduated from law school today and became the CEO of a large, multinational company tomorrow, you would skew your school’s data in an unfavorable direction.
This changed emphasis neglects the realities of a marketplace in which the availability of traditional law jobs remains stagnant. To best serve their students, law schools should feel free to guide them toward alternative careers based in new technologies and businesses that would benefit from the knowledge and leadership that legal education supplies.
The ABA’s ministrations also help drive up the price of legal education, forcing law schools to direct time and resources toward ABA compliance that could be put toward student scholarships or improving the curriculum. And a higher price tag means that members of the legal profession, and young lawyers in particular, in order to pay debts or compensate for opportunity costs incurred during law school, pass these costs on to consumers in the form of higher legal fees.
The bottom line is that, when a substantial portion of the population cannot afford to hire an attorney, or at least feels that way, the legal system has failed in its chief purpose: to ensure that wrongs are righted and justice is served.
Unintended harm, however, is nothing new for the ABA.
Founded in 1878 by “leading” or “representative” lawyers who were selected by an elite group of men from states along the East Coast, the ABA sought to nationalize professional and ethical standards with these goals: “to advance the science of jurisprudence, promote the administration of justice and uniformity of legislation throughout the Union, uphold the honor of the profession of the law, and encourage cordial intercourse among the members.”[1]
Noble ambitions indeed. But the organization soon became a fraternal guild that sought to enforce rigid barriers to entry into the legal profession with the assistance of independent bar associations in the 50 states. “For many years,” explained legal scholar Philip J. Wickser in the 1920s, “the Association fought hard to retain its selective quality, and not to forget that a relatively small homogenous group could get the most done.”[2]
The ABA officially excluded African Americans for 66 years, according to Susan D. Carle in her 2013 book Defining the Struggle. Its ouster of three African Americans in 1912 on the basis of their skin color drew protests from the newly founded National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. That same year, the ABA issued a resolution stating that “it has never been contemplated that members of the colored race should become members of this Association.”[3]
Although the ABA has since sought to make up for its racist past by increasing the ethnic diversity of its membership, creating a commission on sexual orientation and gender identity, and strengthening its rules prohibiting racial harassment or discrimination, part of its purpose historically has been to regulate entry into the profession and decrease the number of low-income, immigrant, and minority lawyers[4] (though in recent decades such decreases have been a consequence, not the purpose, of ABA regulation).
No matter how hard the ABA attempts to distance itself from its origins, it cannot escape the fact that its function is to exclude certain groups from membership to enable a monopoly on legal services by its members. Such exclusion has tended to fall along racial lines. One law professor has thus complained that “all of the ABA’s diversity efforts ring hollow” because the ABA “caused blacks to be excluded from the profession in the first place.”[5]
Given its racially charged beginnings and racially dividing regulations and standards, it’s surprising that the ABA is still considering revising Standard 316, which addresses the bar-passage rates of law-school graduates. Compliance with the revised standard would require bar passage by 75 percent of the graduates of a currently approved (as opposed to provisionally approved) law school in at least three of the last five years.[6]
A few months ago, Lawrence P. Nolan, the president of the State Bar of Michigan, penned a letter to ABA delegates to point out, among other things, that minority organizations—and even the ABA Council for Racial and Ethnic Diversity in the Educational Pipeline—were against the proposed revision to Standard 316. “The collective judgment of those committed to [reducing] the . . . racial disparity in the legal profession,” he said, “is reflected in their unanimous opposition to this amendment.”
Nolan also stated that the ABA’s own data “confirms the large gap for African-American bar passage rates, which are lower than overall rates, particularly on the multiple-choice test.” Statistics cited by Nolan show that African Americans pass the bar exam at a lower rate than whites and that the percentage of white repeat takers of the bar exam is 3.2 percent whereas the figure for black repeat takers is 14.1 percent. If those statistics are accurate and predictive, then the effects of the revised standard would fall disproportionately on those schools with higher numbers of African American students.
Supporters of the proposed revision portray law schools as exploiters of racial minorities that have been admitting underqualified applicants to make up for diminishing admissions applications. There’s truth to this characterization. Law-school admissions standards have dropped precipitously as enrollment has declined.
But why trust the organization that caused or at least exacerbated many of these problems to fix them? We need imagination and rational risk to move forward constructively and creatively. Proposals as wide-ranging as abolishing the bar exam or developing non-JD curricula in law schools ought to be seriously considered. Another idea would be to strip the ABA of its accrediting powers altogether, something the U.S. Department of Education might consider.
During this moment of social unrest, when rancorous partisanship seems to permeate all fields of discourse, faculty and administration all along the political spectrum can agree on one thing: The ABA is systematically harming ethnic minorities and becoming as obsolete as its counterpart in journalism education.
It may well be time for top-ranked law schools to follow in the footsteps of the J-schools at Northwestern and Berkeley. Only if several leading law schools joined to seek an end to the ABA’s accrediting function would this reform stand a chance. Law schools with lower rankings may lack the credibility to resist, given their stake in the accreditation process. Their administrators already, in my view, avoid speaking out against the ABA due to their reasonable fear of retaliation. (My own trepidation almost prevented this piece from reaching print.)
Granted, it might give the law schools pause that in most states, admission to the bar (by authority of the state bar or the state supreme court) is conditioned on holding a degree from an ABA-accredited law school. Still, the journalism-school revolt demonstrates that a mass rebuff of the ABA’s accrediting legitimacy is neither extreme nor absurd. Prominent law schools are already experimenting in other areas, such as considering GRE scores (rather than just LSAT scores) for admissions purposes. Such experimentation is all to the good.
The legal profession is, in the words of Benjamin Barton, “facing a major retrenchment” and remains mired in outmoded tasks that artificial intelligence may replace. It’s stuck in a bygone period when lawyers felt threatened by entrepreneurial upstarts who breached longstanding protocols such as prohibitions on advertising or contingency fees. It’s time for an energetic rethinking of the goals and purpose of legal education and the legal profession.
Ending ABA accreditation authority would be an exciting first step. It would enable administrators to reallocate resources to lower the costs of legal education and, consequently, of legal services. And it would allow them to focus on their true mission: not lining the pockets of accreditation agencies and bureaucratic guilds but educating prospective lawyers and bringing justice and order to rich and poor alike.
The views expressed herein are solely the author’s, and do not reflect those of Faulkner University’s Thomas Goode Jones School of Law or its Blackstone and Burke Center.
[1] Simeon E. Baldwin, “The Founding of the American Bar Association,” The American Bar Association Journal 3 (1917), 659-62, 695.
[2] Philip J. Wickser, “Bar Associations,” Cornell Law Quarterly 15 (1929-30), 398.
[3] Susan D. Carle, Defining the Struggle: National Organizing for Racial Justice, 1880-1915 (Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 281-82, and 541-43.
[4] Jerold S. Auerbach, Unequal Justice: Lawyers and Social Change in Modern America (Oxford University Press, 1976), p. 65: “During the second decade of the twentieth century the American Bar Association began to assert itself aggressively as a professional protective organization. Its purpose was twofold: to preserve its own exclusiveness (and the status that accompanied its preservation) and to exert professional leverage upon the political process.” For admission of minorities, see Auerbach, pp. 65-66, 71, 107, 131, 159-60, 200, 216, and 295.
[5] George B. Shepherd, “No African-American Lawyers Allowed: The Inefficient Racism of the ABA’s Accreditation of Law Schools,” Journal of Legal Education 53 (2003), 104.
[6] The ABA Council and the Accreditation Committee of the Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar operate independently of the ABA pursuant to regulations of the U.S. Department of Education, which recognizes these bodies as authorized accreditors. For ease of reference and understanding, and because of the connection between these accrediting bodies and the ABA, the taxonomy I have adopted simply lumps these bodies together under the heading of “ABA.”
What Is the Rule of Law, Anyway?
In America, Civics, Economics, History, Humanities, Jurisprudence, Law, Libertarianism, Philosophy, Western Civilization, Western Philosophy on June 7, 2017 at 6:45 am
This piece originally appeared here in The Intercollegiate Review.
“Donald Trump Could Threaten U.S. Rule of Law, Scholars Say.” So declared an ominous headline in the New York Times roughly one year ago. MSNBC likewise ran a suggestive interview in January entitled, “Will the ‘rule of law’ survive under Trump?”
Such alarming commentary presupposes the existence of the rule of law in the United States and appears designed to portray Donald Trump as a threat to that rule. In March, however, Reason republished and retitled a curious piece that first appeared in The Week: “The Immoral ‘Rule of Law’ Behind Trump’s Deportation Regime.” The implication of this revised title (the original read, “How today’s pro-immigrant activists are adopting the tactics of abolitionists”) is that Trump is staunchly committed, rather than antagonistic, to the rule of law.
So which is it? Does Trump jeopardize or safeguard the rule of law?
The answer, if we assume the rule of law is in full force and effect in the United States, is probably situational: In some cases, Trump undermines the rule of law, while in others he reinforces it. But to know for sure, and to appreciate the difference, one must first understand what the rule of law is.
The rule of law encompasses multiple legal principles, chief among them is that the rules that govern society apply equally to all individuals within the prescribed jurisdiction. No person, not even the king or the president, is above the law. Law, not the arbitrary commands or categorical dictates of human rulers, is supreme.
Thus, the opposite of the “rule of law” is the “rule of man,” or the idea that the formal, discretionary imperatives of a powerful sovereign necessarily bind his subjects and subordinates.
The rule of law is a philosophical concept and a liberal ideal that gained ascendency during the Enlightenment (think Locke and Montesquieu) but that can be traced to antiquity (think Aristotle). The British jurist Albert Venn Dicey listed as its prime characteristics:
- “the absolute supremacy or predominance of regular law as opposed to the influence of arbitrary power”;
- “equality before the law, or the equal subjection of all classes to the ordinary law of the land administered by the ordinary Law Courts”; and
- “a formula for expressing the fact that with us the law of the constitution, the rules which in foreign countries naturally form part of a constitutional code, are not the source but the consequence of the rights of individuals, as defined and enforced by the Courts.”
These suggest that the rule of law is a bottom-up rather than a top-down system of governmental ordering based on already enunciated and widely accepted precepts. The operative rules that regulate the normative order of human activity in a free society under the law are rooted in custom and tradition. A ruler or judge is, in such a happy jurisdiction, responsive to the controlling principles that are antecedent to his or her political election, appointment, or empowerment.
F. A. Hayek identified the rule of law as a defining attribute of the common-law system, which, in his view, stood in contradistinction to the civil-law system that instituted vast codes and complex administrative agencies to superintend the unvigilant populace. Legislatures, of course, are accountable to the people through elections; thus, their enactments must reflect extant social practices and beliefs to satisfy voters. Administrative agencies, with their extensive rulemaking powers, are not so accountable. They are by design removed from legislative procedures and thus isolated from voters.
Hayek saw the common law as a decentralized form of social organization, and civil law as centralized planning and design. The rule of law, he thought, inhered in the former system but not in the latter. “The possession of even the most perfectly drawn-up legal code does not, of course, insure that certainty which the rule of law demands,” he warned, “and it therefore provides no substitute for a deeply rooted tradition,” which the common law embodied.
The rule of law encapsulates other seminal concepts as well: the predictability, consistency, reliability, neutrality, and clarity of working rules, for instance. These, however, are in some way derived from the principal teaching that, in Hayek’s words, “all rules apply equally to all, including those who govern.” By any appreciable standard, the United States has not lived up to this high ideal in light of the growth of sovereign immunity and qualified immunity for government officials, the disparate treatment of individuals based on their political power and connections, and, among others, the rapid rise of the administrative state.
Lately the rule of law has become associated with a law-and-order mentality that emphasizes punishment, severity, and rigidity as touchstones of the legal system. The rule of law, on this view, is the instantiation of brute force or the execution of raw power, or perhaps an ideological construct meant to condition the populace into servile submission to government authority.
This understanding of the rule of law has some merit: John Hasnas’s article “The Myth of the Rule of Law” explains how rule-of-law rhetoric indoctrinates people into casual acceptance of the harmful government monopoly on the institutions of law. He decries the gradual acquiescence of ordinary people to, in his words, “the steady erosion of their fundamental freedoms” in the name of the rule of law.
But the rule of law as an ideal, rather than a felt reality, aims to preserve rather than imperil fundamental freedoms. Perhaps there are those with ulterior motives who champion the rule of law to achieve concealed goals; perhaps government in its current form cannot actualize rule-of-law ideals. When rule-of-law discourse does serve the repressive function that Hasnas describes, it is unduly coercive and abusive. In its proper form, and as it was originally understood, however, the rule of law aspired to restrain government power.
In the minds of yesteryear patriots like Thomas Paine, the United States epitomized the rule of law. He averred that “in America the law is king,” whereas “in absolute governments the king is law.” He said, as well, that “in free countries the law ought to be king; and there ought to be no other.”
If the law is no longer king in America, it’s not because of Trump. That he enjoys immense and immeasurable power is evidence of the extent of the decline of the rule of law in this country.
Having flouted and subverted the rule of law for decades, the radical elements of the progressive left in the United States now face the inevitable consequence of their concerted activity—namely, that their coercive methods and institutions may be turned against them, and the authoritarian structures they created may service policies at odds with their own.
We can all learn a lesson from this revealing irony.
Free Exchange with Dr. Donald Livingston of Emory University
In America, American History, Arts & Letters, Books, Conservatism, Economics, History, Humane Economy, Humanities, Law, liberal arts, Liberalism, Libertarianism, Philosophy, Politics, Scholarship, Southern History, The South, Western Civilization, Western Philosophy on January 18, 2017 at 6:45 amIn 2014, Dr. Donald Livingston sat for an interview for “Free Exchange,” a program of the John W. Hammond Institute for Free Enterprise at Lindenwood University. The interview appears below. Dr. Livingston is Professor Emeritus in the Philosophy Department at Emory University, President of the Abbeville Institute, and Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of Edinburgh.
Deidre McCloskey and the Enrichment of the World
In Arts & Letters, Austrian Economics, Book Reviews, Books, Creativity, Economics, Fiction, Historicism, History, Humane Economy, Humanities, liberal arts, Liberalism, Libertarianism, Literary Theory & Criticism, Literature, Philosophy, Politics, Property, Scholarship, Western Civilization, Western Philosophy on October 26, 2016 at 6:45 am
The following excerpt is adapted from my review of Deirdre McCloskey’s book Bourgeois Equality; the original review, which appeared in the Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics, is available here.
If it’s true that Wayne Booth inspired Deirdre McCloskey’s interest in the study of rhetoric, then it’s also true—happily, in my view—that McCloskey has refused to mimic Booth’s programmatic, formulaic methods and boorish insistence on prosaic succinctness. Bourgeois Equality is McCloskey’s third volume in a monumental trilogy that began with The Bourgeois Virtues (2006) and Bourgeois Dignity (2010), each published by the University of Chicago Press. This latest volume is a Big Book, alike in kind but not in theme to Jacques Barzun’s From Dawn to Decadence (2000), Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae (1990), or Herald Berman’s Law and Revolution (1983) and Law and Revolution II (2006). It’s meandering and personal, blending scholarship with an essayistic style that recalls Montaigne or Emerson.
McCloskey’s elastic arguments are shaped by informal narrative and enlivened by her plain and playful voice. At times humorous, rambling, and deliberately erratic, she gives the distinct impression that she’s simply telling a story, one that happens to validate a thesis. She’s having fun. Imagine Phillip Lopate articulating economic history. McCloskey is, in this regard, a latter-day Edward Gibbon, adopting a mode and persona that’s currently unfashionable among mainstream historians, except that she’s more lighthearted than Gibbon, and unashamedly optimistic.
Writing with an air of confidence, McCloskey submits, contra Thomas Piketty, that ideas and ideology—not capital accumulation or material resources—have caused widespread economic development. Since 1800, worldwide material wealth has increased and proliferated; the quality of life in poor countries has risen—even if it remains unequal to that of more prosperous countries—and the typical human being now enjoys access to the food, goods, services, medicine, and healthcare that, in earlier centuries, were available to only a select few in the richest parts of the globe. The transition from poverty to wealth was occasioned by shifting rhetoric that reflected an emerging ethical consensus. The rhetorical-ethical change involved people’s “attitudes toward other humans” (p. xxiii), namely, the recognition of shared experience and “sympathy,” as Adam Smith stated in The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Attributing human progress to ideas enables McCloskey to advocate the norms and principles that facilitated economic growth and social improvement (e.g., class mobility and fluidity) while generating extensive prosperity. Thus, her project is at once scholarly and tendentious: a study of the conditions and principles that, in turn, she promotes.
She argues that commercialism flourished in the eighteenth century under the influence of ideas—such as “human equality of liberty in law and of dignity and esteem” (p. xxix)—that were packaged in memorable rhetoric and aesthetics. “Not matter, mainly, but ideas” caused the Great Enrichment (p. 643). In other words, “[t]he original and sustaining causes of the modern world […] were ethical, not material,” and they included “the new and liberal economic idea of liberty for ordinary people and the new and democratic social idea of dignity for them” (p. xxxi). This thesis about liberty and dignity is clear and unmistakable if only because it is repetitive. McCloskey has a habit of reminding readers—in case you missed her point the first, second, or fifty-seventh time around—that the causes of the Industrial Revolution and the Great Enrichment were ideas, not “narrowly economic or political or legal changes” (p. 470). She maintains, to this end, that the Scottish Enlightenment succeeded in combining the concepts of liberty and dignity into a desirable form of equality—not equality of outcomes, of course, but of opportunity and treatment under the law. And the Scottish model, to her mind, stands in contradistinction to the French example of centralized, top-down codification, command, planning, and design.
A perennial villain lurks in the pages of her history: the “clerisy,” which is an “appendage of the bourgeoisie” (p. 597) and often dubbed “the elite” in regular parlance. McCloskey calls the clerisy “the sons of bourgeois fathers” (p. xvii) and “neo-aristocratic” (p. 440). The clerisy includes those “artists, intellectuals, journalists, professionals, and bureaucrats” who resent “the commercial and bettering bourgeoisie” (p. xvi). The clerisy seeks, in different ways at different times, to extinguish unfettered competition with exclusive, illiberal, irrevocable grants and privileges that are odious to free society and offensive to the rights of average consumers. “Early on,” says McCloskey, referring to the period in Europe after the revolutionary year 1848, “the clerisy began to declare that ordinary people are misled in trading, and so require expert protection and supervision” (p. 609). The clerisy since then has been characterized by paternalism and a sense of superiority.
Because the clerisy is shape-shifting, assuming various forms from time to time and place to place, it’s a tough concept to pin down. The word “clerisy” does not appear in the book’s index to permit further scrutiny. By contrast, McCloskey’s general arguments are easy to follow because the book is separated into parts with questions as their titles; subparts consisting of onesentence headings answer those questions.
In a massive tour de force such as this, readers are bound to take issue with certain interpretive claims. Historians will find McCloskey’s summaries to be too breezy. Even libertarians will accuse her of overlooking manifest wrongs that occurred during the periods she surveys. My complaints are few but severe. For instance, McCloskey is, I believe, either careless or mistaken to announce that, during the nineteenth and early twentieth century, “under the influence of a version of science,” in a territory that’s never specifically identified, “the right seized upon social Darwinism and eugenics to devalue the liberty and dignity of ordinary people, and to elevate the nation’s mission above the mere individual person, recommending, for example, colonialism and compulsory sterilization and the cleansing power of war” (p. xviii).
Let’s hope that it’s innocent negligence rather than willful distortion that underlies this odd, unqualified, categorical assertion. Adam Cohen’s Imbeciles (2016) and Thomas C. Leonard’s Illiberal Reformers (2016) describe how, in the United States, social Darwinism and eugenics were adopted primarily, though not exclusively, by the Left, not the Right. These recent books come on the heels of several scholarly treatments of this subject: Thomas M. Shapiro’s Population Control Politics (1985), Philip R. Reilly’s The Surgical Solution (1991), Joel Braslow’s Mental Ills and Bodily Cures (1997), Wendy Kline’s Building a Better Race (2001), Stefan Kuhl’s The Nazi Connection (2002), Nancy Ordover’s American Eugenics (2003), Christine Rosen’s Preaching Eugenics (2004), Christina Cogdell’s Eugenic Design (2004), Gregory Michael Dorr’s Segregation’s Science (2008), Paul A. Lombardo’s edition A Century of Eugenics in America (2011), and Alexander Minna Stern’s Eugenic Nation (2016). These represent only a small sampling.
Is McCloskey unware of these texts? Probably not: she reviewed Leonard’s book for Reason, although she did so after her own book reached press. At any rate, would she have us believe that Emma Goldman, George Bernard Shaw, Eugene Debs, Marie Stopes, Margaret Sanger, John Maynard Keynes, Lester Ward, and W. E. B. Du Bois were eugenicist agitators for the political Right? If so, she should supply her definition of “Right,” since it would go against commonly accepted meanings. On the matter of colonialism and war, self-identified members of the Old Right such as Albert Jay Nock, John Flynn, and Senator Robert Taft advocated precisely the opposite of what McCloskey characterizes as “Right.” These men opposed, among other things, military interventionism and adventurism. The trouble is that McCloskey’s muddying of the signifiers “Left” and “Right” comes so early in the book—in the “Exordium”— that readers may lose trust in her, question her credibility, and begin to suspect the labels and arguments in her later chapters.
Other undefined terms only make matters worse, ensuring that McCloskey will alienate many academics, who, as a class, are already inclined to reject her libertarian premises. She throws around the term “Romanticism” as if its referent were eminently clear and uncontested: “a conservative and Romantic vision” (p. xviii); “science fiction and horror fiction [are] … offshoots of Romanticism” (p. 30); “[Jane Austen] is not a Romantic novelist … [because] [s]he does not take Art as a model for life, and does not elevate the Artist to a lonely pinnacle of heroism, or worship of the Middle Ages, or adopt any of the other, antibourgeois themes of Novalis, [Franz] Brentano, Sir Walter Scott, and later Romantics” (p. 170); “Romanticism around 1800 revived talk of hope and faith and a love for Art or Nature or the Revolution as a necessary transcendent in people’s lives” (p. 171); “Romantic candor” (p. 242); “the late eighteenth-century Romantic literary critics in England had no idea what John Milton was on about [sic], because they had set aside the rigorously Calvinist theology that structured his poetry” (p. 334); “the nationalist tradition of Romantic writing of history” (p. 353); “Romantic … hostilities to … democratic rhetoric” (p. 510); “[i]n the eighteenth century … the idea of autonomy triumphed, at any rate among the progressive clerisy, and then became a leading Romantic idea, á la Victor Hugo” (p. 636); and “the Romantic conservative Thomas Carlyle” (p. 643).
To allege that the clerisy was “thrilled by the Romantic radicalism of books like Mein Kampf or What Is to Be Done” (p. xviii) is also recklessly to associate the philosophies of, say, Keats or Coleridge or Wordsworth with the exterminatory fantasies of Hitler and Lenin. McCloskey might have guarded against this misleading conflation by distinguishing German idealism or contextualizing Hegel or by being more vigilant with diction and definition. Her loose language will leave some experts (I do not profess to be one) scratching or shaking their heads and, more problematic, some non-experts with misconceptions and misplaced targets of enmity. One imagines the overeager and well-meaning undergraduate, having read Bourgeois Equality, setting out to demonize William Blake or destroy the reputation of Percy Shelly, about whom Paul Cantor has written judiciously.2 Wouldn’t originality, imagination, creativity, and individualism—widely accepted markers of Romanticism—appeal to McCloskey? Yet her unconditionally derogatory treatment of Romanticism—which she portrays as a fixed, monolithic, self-evident thing—undermines aspects of that fluctuating movement, period, style, culture, and attitude that are, or seem to be, consistent with her Weltanschauung.
But I protest too much. These complaints should not diminish what McCloskey has accomplished. Would that we had more grand studies that mapped ideas and traced influences across cultures, communities, and eras. McCloskey takes the long view, as we all should. Her focus on rhetoric is crucial to the future of liberty if, given the technological advances we have made, the “work we do will be more and more about decisions and persuading others to agree, changing minds, and less and less about implementation by hand” (p. 498). Equally significant is her embrace of humanomics—defined as “the story [of] a complete human being, with her ethics and language and upbringing” (p. xx)—which materializes in casual references to Henrik Ibsen’s plays, challenges to the depiction of John Milton “as a lonely poet in a garret writing merely to the starry heavens” (p. 393), analyses of Jane Austen’s novels, and portrayals of Elizabethan England. Her historical and narrative arc enables us to contextualize our own moment, with all of its troubles and possibilities.
Best of all, her book is inspiring and exhilarating and brimming with rousing imperatives and moving calls to action. “Let us, then,” she says at one point, “not reject the blessings of economic growth on account of planning or pessimism, the busybody if wellintentioned rationalism of some voices of the French Enlightenment or the adolescent if charming doubts of some voices of the German Romantic movement, fashionable though both attitudes have long been among the clerisy. As rational optimists, let us celebrate the Great Enrichment, and the rhetorical changes in freer societies that caused it” (p. 146). At another point she encourages her audience to guard against “both cynicism and utopianism” (p. 540), and elsewhere to heed “trade-tested cooperation, competition, and conservation in the right mix” (p. 523). These little nudges lend her credibility insofar as they reveal her true colors, as it were, and demonstrate that she is not attempting—as is the academic wont—to hide her prejudices and conceal her beliefs behind pretended objectivities.
Poverty is relative and, hence, permanent and ineradicable, despite McCloskey’s claim that we can “end poverty” (p. 8). If, tomorrow, we woke up and the wealth of each living person were magically to multiply twentyfold—even fiftyfold—there would still be people at the bottom. The quality of life at the bottom, however, would be vastly improved. The current manifestation of global poverty shows how far we as a species have advanced in the last few centuries. McCloskey is right: We should pursue the ideas that accelerated and achieved human flourishing, that demonstrably brought people out of distress and destitution. Hard sciences and mathematical models are insufficient in themselves to convey the magnitude and splendor of these ideas and their accomplishments. Hence we should welcome and produce more books like McCloskey’s that undertake a “rhetorical-ethical Revaluation” to both examine and celebrate “a society of open inquiry,” one which not only “depends on rhetoric in its politics and in its science and in its economy,” but which also yields intellectual creativity and political freedom (p. 650). In McCloskey’s approach, economics and the humanities are not mutually exclusive; rather, they are mutually illuminating and, in fact, indispensably and inextricably tied. An economics that forsakes the dignity of the human person and his capacity for creativity and aesthetics does so at its own peril and to its own disgrace. All economics is, at its core, humanomics. We could do without the latter term if we understood the former.
REFERENCES
Barzun, Jacques. 2000. From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present. New York: HarperCollins.
Berman, Harold J. 1983. Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003.
——. 2006. Law and Revolution II: The Impact of the Protestant Reformations on the Western Legal Tradition. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Braslow, Joel. 1997. Mental Ills and Bodily Cures: Psychiatric Treatment in the First Half of the Twentieth Century. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Cantor, Paul. 1997. “The Poet as Economist: Shelley’s Critique of Paper Money and the British National Debt,” Journal of Libertarian Studies 13, no. 1: 21–44.
Cantor, Paul, and Stephen Cox, eds. 2009. Literature and the Economics of Liberty. Auburn, Ala.: Ludwig von Mises Institute.
Cogdell, Christina. 2004. Eugenic Design. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Cohen, Adam. 2016. Imbeciles. London: Penguin Press.
Dorr, Gregory M. 2008. Segregation’s Science. Charlottesville, Va.: University of Virginia Press.
Kline, Wendy. 2001. Building a Better Race. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Kuhl, Stefan. 2002. The Nazi Connection. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Leonard, Thomas C. 2016. Illiberal Reformers. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Lombardo, Paul A. 2011. A Century of Eugenics in America. Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press.
McCloskey, Deirdre. 2006. The Bourgeois Virtues. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
——. 2010. Bourgeois Dignity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Ordover, Nancy. 2003. American Eugenics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Paglia, Camille. 1990. Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press.
Reilly, Philip R. 1991. The Surgical Solution. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Rosen, Christine. 2004. Preaching Eugenics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Shapiro, Thomas M. 1985. Population Control Politics. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Stern, Alexander Minna. 2016. Eugenic Nation. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
The Problem With Socialism
In Arts & Letters, Austrian Economics, Book Reviews, Books, Economics, History, Humane Economy, Humanities, Libertarianism, Politics, Western Philosophy on September 28, 2016 at 6:45 am
This review originally appeared here in The Daily Caller.
If you’re looking for a short introduction to socialism that rewards rereading, Thomas DiLorenzo’s The Problem With Socialism is it.
Perhaps your son or daughter has returned from college talking about collective control of the means of production and sporting Bernie Sanders t-shirts. Perhaps you’re a political novice looking for informed guidance.
Perhaps you’re frustrated with America’s economic decline and deplorable unemployment rates. Perhaps you listened with bewilderment as some pundit this election season distinguished democratic socialism from pure socialism in an attempt to justify the former.
Whoever you are, and whatever your occasion for curiosity, you’re likely to find insight and answers from DiLorenzo.
A professor of economics at Loyola University Maryland, DiLorenzo opens his book with troubling statistics: 43% of millennials, or at least those between ages 18 and 29, view socialism more favorably than capitalism, and 69% of voters under 30 would vote for a socialist presidential candidate. Socialism—depending on how it’s defined in relation to communism—may have killed over 100 million people and impoverished countless others over the course of the 20th Century.
So why have the youth (full disclaimer: by certain measures, at 33, I’m considered a millennial myself) welcomed this ideology that’s responsible for mass killings, organized theft, war crimes, forced labor, concentration camps, executions, show trials, ethnic cleansing, disease, totalitarianism, censorship, starvation, hyperinflation, poverty, and terror?
Why have death, destruction, and abject destitution become so hip and cool? Because of effective propaganda and utopian promises of “free” everything.
The problem is, as anyone who’s ever studied economics knows, there’s no such thing as free stuff. Somebodypays at some point.
“What socialists like Senator Sanders should say if they want to be truthful and straightforward,” DiLorenzo thus avers, “is not that government can offer citizens anything for free, but that they want healthcare (and much else) to become a government-run monopoly financed entirely with taxes. Taxes hide, but do not eliminate, the cost of individual government programs.”
And these programs are far more expensive to society than they would be on the free market.
The predicable rejoinder to such a claim — repeated ad nauseam by television personalities—is that socialism works, nay thrives, in, say, Sweden. DiLorenzo corrects the record: “Socialism nearly wrecked Sweden, and free market reforms are finally bringing its economy back from the brink of disaster.”
Strong language, but DiLorenzo maps the history and supplies the data to back it up. “The real source of Sweden’s relatively high standard of living,” he explains, has “everything to do with Sweden avoiding both world wars and jumping into the industrial revolution when its economy was one of the freest, least regulated, and least taxed in Europe.”
Other common binary assumptions are reversed in these pages: socialism causes pollution whereas capitalism protects the environment; socialism leads to war whereas capitalism is peaceful; socialism consolidates power among an elite few whereas capitalism decentralizes and disperses power, which ultimately resides with individual consumers making small economic adjustments based on their particular needs.
Even socialized medicine proves more inequitable than market-based alternatives. Proponents of Canadian-style healthcare ignore the fact that “Canadian health care is actually far more expensive, and the quality far lessthan it would be if doctors and hospitals had to compete for patients on the basis of quality and price.”
Coloring his analysis with references to the Austrian economists Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, and Murray Rothbard, DiLorenzo undertakes a variety of other issues implicated by socialism: egalitarianism, fascism, income taxation, wage and price controls, monopolies, public schooling, and more.
Had I been his publisher, I would have insisted that he also include disturbing, graphic, and gruesome images of real, dead human bodies stacked on real, dead human bodies, of ransacked churches, and of confiscated property—alarmingly tangible consequences and horrifying illustrations of pure, realized socialism.
Senator Sanders and most of his followers mean well, of course, and genuinely and in good faith advocate policies they believe to be in the best interests of the United States. Yet the history of the cause they champion is fundamentally at odds with their desired goals.
DiLorenzo has the courage to call socialism what it is: “the biggest generator of poverty the world has ever known.” For young students especially, his concise primer could make the difference between feeling the Bern, and getting burned.
Bond and Bonding in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice
In Arts & Letters, Austrian Economics, Books, British Literature, Economics, Essays, Fiction, History, Humane Economy, Humanities, Law, Liberalism, Libertarianism, Literary Theory & Criticism, Literature, Philosophy, Politics, Scholarship, Shakespeare, Western Civilization, Western Philosophy on April 6, 2016 at 6:45 am
A bond is an agreement, the unification of individuals or groups under mutual terms. Parents may bond affectionately with their children just as friends may bond affectionately with one another. Marital bonds join spouses in a sacred contract that confers conjugal rights and duties.
A bond is also a security for a debt. Banks may issue and underwrite bonds with fixed interest rates or correlative maturity dates in exchange for the promise of repayment. Bonds may be defeasible, high-yield, low-yield, covered, subordinated, or perpetual. They may be backed by liens or mortgages. There are government bonds, municipal bonds, fiduciary bonds, war bonds. A bond may be an instrument or the name for a type of covenant between persons. Love is not just a bond but something within a bond, if we believe the Countess in Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well.
In light of this rich multiplicity of meaning, the referent for the isolated term bond is not immediately clear but, instead, contextual. Serviceable explanations for bond depend upon the situation in which it is employed and the circumstances with which it is surrounded. The diverse meanings for bond have in common a reciprocal obligation or indebtedness that is voluntarily undertaken: a bond, whatever else it does, secures a promise or duty.
Sometimes that promise or duty is implicit, as with romantic bonds between monogamous lovers. The term bond is thus pregnant with possibility, yielding manifold associations. “The word itself,” submits Frederick Turner, “contains a fascinating amalgam of positive and negative connotations.”
My essay “A Time for Bonding: Commerce, Love, and Law in The Merchant of Venice,” which may be downloaded at this link, considers the role of bonds and bonding in William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice to undermine the notion that Shakespeare was, to employ a term by Ian Ward, “anti-market” in the play. The Merchant of Venice is instead as multifaceted and polysemous as the term bond and open to an array of interpretations favorable to commerce and business. This essay is part of this collection of essays edited by Edward W. Younkins titled Capitalism and Commerce in Imaginative Literature (2016).
The Moral Case for Property Rights
In Arts & Letters, Books, Conservatism, Economics, Ethics, History, Humane Economy, Humanities, Jurisprudence, Law, Liberalism, Philosophy, Property, Scholarship, Western Civilization, Western Philosophy on March 9, 2016 at 8:45 am
This review originally appeared here at the Library of Law and Liberty.
The James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University has become a hub of conservative constitutionalism and natural law theory, a forum where mostly likeminded scholars and public intellectuals can come together for constructive dialogue and critique. Directed by Robert P. George, the McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton, the program has hosted established and emerging scholars alike. Adam MacLeod is one of the latter—a figure to watch, a fresh and tempered voice in the increasingly ideological field of jurisprudence and legal theory. During his James Madison fellowship, with the support and advice of his colleagues, MacLeod wrote Property and Practical Reason, his first book.
MacLeod frames his normative claims and pleas within the common law context. And he gives us his thesis in his crisp opening sentence: “This book makes a moral case for private property.” He adds that “institutions of private ownership are justified.”
That institutions of private ownership are now jeopardized is upsetting. Before the 18th century, it was simply taken for granted in most Western societies that private property rights incentivized both work and custodianship and served moral ends. Leaders of advanced nations understood that the opportunity to own land or goods motivated people to work; that work, in turn, contributed to the aggregate health of the community; and that once ownership was attained, owners preserved the fruits of their labor and likewise respected the fruits of others’ labor as having been dutifully earned. There were, of course, violations of these principles in Western societies, which is why the law protected and promoted private ownership.
Even absolute monarchs across Europe centuries ago understood the instinctual drive for personal ownership and, consequently, allowed their subjects to obtain at least qualified possession of land and real property. During the Enlightenment, however, philosophers such as John Locke awakened the Western intellect to the stark reality that private property rights were routinely violated or compromised by monarchs and sovereigns at the expense of morality and at odds with the natural law. Because humans own their bodies, Locke maintained, any object or land they removed or procured from nature, which God had provided humanity in common, was joined to those people, who, so long as no one else had a legitimate claim to such object or land, could freely enjoy a right of possession exclusive of the common rights of others.
It’s surprising that Locke isn’t mentioned in MacLeod’s defense of reason and private property, since Locke more than any other figure in the Western tradition—let alone the British tradition in which the common law emerged—made the reason-based case for the morality of private property ownership. “God,” Locke said, “who hath given the world to men in common, hath also given them reason to make use of it to the best advantage of life and convenience.” On this score MacLeod echoes Locke without giving him attention.
MacLeod advocates the type of mediated dominion of private ownership that, he says, existed at common law. Under the common law, he argues, dominion was mediated because it was restrained by the normative guides of “practical reasonableness.” He does not fully delineate what unmediated dominion looks like. But presumably it has something to do with “many contemporary accounts” that, he claims, “view property as an individual right” and facilitate an “atomization of private property” that’s “unnecessary and unhelpful.” An example might have polished off this point, since in the opening chapters it’s not always obvious to which property arrangement mediated dominion is allegedly superior.
He does, however, supply helpful examples of mediating private institutions under the common law: families and family businesses, religious associations such as churches or synagogues, civic associations, and other such cooperative forms that exercise modest control or otherwise influence a person’s claim to outright ownership. For instance, one’s community may reasonably insist that my absolute ownership of a weapon does not permit one’s use of that weapon to threaten or injure another except in self-defense. It may likewise restrict the profligate use of scarce resources, or the reckless use of intrinsically dangerous resources to the manifest detriment of one’s immediate neighbors.
The author submits that, under the common law, which illustrates constructive administration of property rights, private ownership is never total or unqualified but always subject to reasonable restraint as prescribed by custom and community. He intimates that one thing that makes private ownership reasonable is its promotion of reasonable behavior; the very reasonableness of private property is self-perpetuating. The owner of property who’s confident his ownership is legally honored and enforced will pursue future gain; as the number of such owners multiplies, the corporate prosperity of society increases.
MacLeod rejects consequentialist arguments for private property and seeks to justify private ownership on the basis of morality. He shows that private ownership is not just optimal by utilitarian standards but is practically reasonable and morally good.
In so arguing, he navigates around two anticipated criticisms: first that his defense of private property and promotion of common law standards and conditions are remedies in search of an illness, and second that beneath his proposed remedy is the sickness he wants to cure.
By discussing the work of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Jeremy Waldron, J. E. Penner, and Larissa Katz, among others, MacLeod proves he’s not remonstrating against straw men but engaging actual thinkers with real influence on our working perceptions of property rights. The problems he confronts are palpable: regulatory takings, trespass, taxation, riparian-right disputes, adverse possession, and waste, among others.
In depicting mediated dominion as a form of voluntary “plural ownership” that excludes state coercion, moreover, he reassures readers that a common law property regime does not contravene private ordering, despite the fact that the common law dates back to periods when English monarchs retained total and ultimate control of the land within their jurisdiction under the Doctrine of the Crown; forced owners to hold property rights in socage; confiscated property from rivals and dissidents; redistributed property in exchange for loyalty and political favors; and permitted and at times approved of slavery and villainy.
These unreasonable elements of the common law tradition do not square with the case that MacLeod makes for practical reasonableness; yet the common law tradition he invokes is sufficiently flexible and adaptive to modify or eradicate rules that perpetuate unreasonable practices and behaviors. He reminds us, too, that “slavery was for a long time unknown at common law, and its rise in positive law derogated common law rights and duties.” In other words, the rise of the English slave trade “is a story of lawmakers first departing from, then returning to, common law norms.”
Following if not synthesizing John Finnis and Joseph Raz, MacLeod recommends in the property-law context something akin to perfectionist liberalism and value pluralism. The pluralism championed by MacLeod involves multiplying the options for deliberating agents: the more room there is for rational choice, the more diverse and numerous are the opportunities to exercise human reason. These opportunities may be circumscribed by the morality of the community that is inherent in the rules that reflect basic values. The law is by nature coercive, but it is good to the extent it enables practical reason and restricts bad behavior, as determined by the net, collaborative efforts of non-state actors. MacLeod calls these combined actors members of “intermediary communities.”
The trope of individualism and community is for MacLeod a framing device for advocating mediated dominion as an incentivizing force for moral action. He skillfully and meticulously affirms that private ownership, which is conditional on the reasonable limitations established by collective norms, is reasonable not only for instrumental purposes (because it works well and facilitates constructive social relations) but also because it is good in itself. Summoning the commentary of Thomas Aquinas, William Blackstone, James Madison, Alexis de Tocqueville, Joseph Story, Georg Friedrich Hegel, F.A. Hayek, Neil MacCormick, Ronald Dworkin, Richard Epstein, and Robert P. George, MacLeod also manages to work in unexpected references to writers who do not immediately spring to mind as jurisprudents: Richard Weaver, Wendell Berry, Charles Murray, John Tomasi, and Milton Friedman. This range demonstrates the importance of property law across disciplines and in broad contexts.
To profit from this book you must, I think, hold in abeyance any assumptions or readymade generalizations you have about the nature and function of private property. You’d benefit as well from a prior familiarity with the field and discourse of property jurisprudence, not to mention the new natural law theories. I make this observation as an outsider myself. If you can’t immediately define terms like “usufruct,” either because you’ve never heard of them or because it’s been too long since you studied for a bar examination, you’ll likely need Black’s Law Dictionary and other resources close at hand as you piece through MacLeod’s rationale. Readers in other disciplines might find that the chapters presuppose an awareness of, say, the essentialist debate over whether exclusion or use defines property norms, or might question the meaning and import of “personalist” approaches to private property that emphasize the doctrines of positive liberty and personal autonomy.
Such disciplinary specificity isn’t a bad thing. One hopes, in fact, that it would motivate curious readers to undertake further study and inquiry. Yet specialization limits what a book can accomplish.
MacLeod exhibits a disposition to be philosophical rather than sociological, adopting as he does a neutral, academic tone free of animus and personal pique, arguing from logical deduction rather than concrete data or statistics. Whether this approach redounds to his advantage depends on what he wants to achieve. If he’s writing only for an academic audience of philosophers and political theorists, he’s succeeded admirably, but if his goal is to reach beyond the narrow confines of the academy, spreading his influence as widely as possible, he has fallen short. The prose is accessible to scholars and advanced graduate students, but the average lawyer will find no practical instruction in the book and might even question the at times challenging syntax and vocabulary that can obscure basic points. If economists ignore the book for its rejection of consequentialist arguments, however, it’s to their disadvantage.
No common reader, I’m afraid, will read this book from cover to cover, and that’s a pity because the subject is important, especially given the spread of eminent-domain abuse and the general embrace of egalitarianism, redistributivism, and Rawlsian notions of social justice by Americans today. The desire for private ownership is a primordial fact. We need more books and treatises that examine at a fundamental level how and why we alienate, possess, and exchange property. At around $100, Property and Practical Reason is prohibitively expensive for curious undergraduates, and also for courses in graduate studies. Moreover, the law schools may well ignore it due to its focus on abstract jurisprudence.
All that said, this book should be read—and will be, by the people who know about and are sympathetic to the work of the James Madison Program. Unfortunately, that’s not many people. Not enough, anyway. There’s no cottage industry for the philosophy of practical reasonableness. Yet there ought to be, and the reception of MacLeod’s work might tell us whether there can be. Those of a philosophical bent will delight not just in the conclusions MacLeod reaches, but in the way he reaches them: framing and reframing his sinuous arguments until his central theses become refrains. This reviewer found it a delightfully industrious, hard-won defense of private property, and well worth the high sticker price.
Adiós, Richard Posner
In Arts & Letters, Austrian Economics, Book Reviews, Books, Economics, Humane Economy, Humanities, Law, Libertarianism on December 23, 2015 at 8:45 am
Translated by and available here at Mises Hispano. Publicado el 21 de diciembre de 2009, Traducido del inglés por Mariano Bas Uribe. El artículo original se encuentra aquí.
Con su último libro, A Failure of Capitalism, Richard Posner ha estado a la altura de su habitual mala fama como provocador. Viniendo de un hombre que es el fundador del movimiento del análisis económico del derecho y miembro electo de la Sociedad Mont-Pelerin, la sensacional declaración de que el capitalismo ha fracasado sin duda generará arqueos de cejas. Pero las reflexiones de Posner, además de prematuras, a menudo apestan a salidas falsas y grandes mentiras.
Los libertarios deberíamos elogiar a Posner, uno de los pensadores más originales de nuestro tiempo, por su permanente rechazo al pensamiento en grupo y a adecuarse a las ideologías trilladas. Sin embargo también deberíamos despedirle. Este último libro, una media vuelta en su carrera, hará poco para ayudar a los afectados por la crisis. Incluso puede que les haga más daño.
Posner sugiere que, en lugar de andarnos con eufemismos, llamemos espada a una espada: la crisis financiera es una depresión. Insiste en el desagradable término “depresión” porque los problemas actuales exceden con mucho cualquier caída modesta de las recientes décadas y ha producido una intervención gubernamental sin parangón desde la Gran Depresión. Posner probablemente tenga razón en este punto.
También tiene en general tazón en su crítica a la burbuja inmobiliaria, incluso sin llegar a atribuir la culpa real al papel del gobierno en las hipotecas subprime: promocionando exageradamente la propiedad de la vivienda, rebajando drásticamente los tipos de interés, canalizando una demanda artificial hacia el sector de la vivienda, etc. La tesis de Posner (de que la depresión representa un fallo del mercado producido por la desregulación) pivota sobre el mito de que los reguladores realmente regulan en lugar de servir a los intereses de los beneficiarios del Leviatán (es decir, ellos y sus compinches).
En cuanto a este último punto, Posner sí reconoce, entre otras cosas, que la SEC estaba vinculada a agentes del sector de los valores privados a pesar de su obligación de hacer cumplir las leyes federales de valores. De todos modos, no se ocupa correctamente de este problema o siquiera de los problemas relacionados que afectan a empresas patrocinadas por el gobierno (como Fannie, Feddie y similares) que privilegian los intereses de una élite pequeña a costa de la mayoría. En plata, Posner ignora el corporativismo. No tengo tiempo ni especio para ocuparme de este asunto ahora. Para saber más, recomiendo leer Meltdown, de Thomas E. Woods, un libro corto y bien razonado que es accesible para cualquiera (como yo).
La propuesta de Posner de que “necesitamos un gobierno más activo e inteligente para evitar que nuestro modelo de economía capitalista no descarrile” parece como mínimo quijotesca. Porque un gobierno inteligente (si existe algo así) minimizaría en lugar de aumentar las imposiciones estatales en la economía y permitiría a los recursos fluir de los sectores en declive a los que estén en expansión de acuerdo con las fuerzas naturales del mercado.
Cargado de referencias y apoyos implícitos a la economía keynesiana (cuyo poder reside, afirma Posner, en su “lógica sencilla y de sentido común”), este libro es un tour de force estatista. Mario J. Rizzo ha escrito extensamente acerca de la conversión keynesiana de Posner. Basta con decir que Posner argumenta por un lado que el gobierno puede prevenir las depresiones y por el otro que el gobierno ha fracasado en frenar la reciente crisis económica. Esta desconexión genera la pregunta ¿Más burocracia y regulación del gobierno habría ocasionado una respuesta más oportuna y coherente? ¿No es arriesgado poner tanto poder en algo con un historial tan imprevisible?
Posner sostiene que los “conservadores”, un término asombrosamente vago que deja sin definir, argumentan que el gobierno trajo la crisis con “presiones legislativas a los bancos para facilitar la propiedad de la vivienda facilitando los requisitos y condiciones para las hipotecas”. Este verdad que muchos autodenominados conservadores adoptaron esta postura. Pero Posner, aparentemente para calificar a estos “conservadores” como hipócritas, acusa al ex Presidente Bush de promocionar la propiedad de viviendas como parte de la agenda del conservadurismo compasivo.
Que Posner designe al Presidente Bush como el rostro de la “economía conservadora” (una categoría curiosamente equívoca en sí misma) no es sólo revelador, sino también francamente ridículo. Pues Bush (que defendió rescates masivos por parte del gobierno mucho antes que Obama) difícilmente pudo ser conservador en cualquier sentido del pequeño gobierno. Aumento los déficits presupuestarios mucho más que sus predecesores, nos llevó a dos costosas guerras y dobló la deuda nacional. A la luz de estos fracasos del gran gobierno, parece escandaloso que Posner afirme que “el camino estaba abierto para una ideología doctrinaria del libre mercado, pro-empresas y antiregulatoria que dominara el pensamiento económico de la Administración Bush”.
Posner consigue su objetivo de un “examen analítico conciso, constructivo, libre de jerga y acrónimos, no técnico, no sensacionalista y enfocado a la anécdota”, pero su apresurado análisis es totalmente defectuoso. Sorprende poco que este libro haya recibido poca atención. Muy probablemente escrito aprisa y corriendo por tener plazos estrictos, se lee como varios artículos de blog ajustados chapuceramente (Posner admite en el prólogo que ha incorporado varios artículos de blog).
Aunque no podemos reprocharle por las restricciones temporales de su proyecto, podemos y deberíamos apuntar que el prisa se ha cobrado su peaje. Por ejemplo, en un momento Posner afirma que los demócratas se apuntaron un tanto ante el público estadounidense al rescatar la industria del automóvil; poco después afirma que el público estadounidense se opuso al rescate de la industria del automóvil. En momentos como estos, Posner, al guisárselo y comérselo, defrauda una y otra vez.
Flirteando aparentemente con partidarios de ambos partidos políticos mayoritarios, se equivoca ad nauseam explicando un argumento falsamente conservador, un argumento falsamente liberal y luego su propio argumento, una cómoda posición entre ambos. Como otro gesto ante las audiencias masivas, evita las notas a pie de página y critica a la profesión económica (que considera un grupo de élite de académicos y teóricos financieros) por su aparente laxitud e ineptitud. Sin embargo, el populismo recién descubierto de Posner no es convincente.
Incluso los lectores simpatizantes se aburrirán pronto del estilo gallito de Posner. Posner es (por lo que yo sé) una persona magnánima, con una verdadera preocupación por la vidas de millones de estadounidenses, pero su libro, si se le hace caso, sólo empeoraría las condiciones actuales.
La Sociedad Mont Pelerin declara que sus miembros “ven peligrosa la expansión del gobierno”. Si Posner sigue compartiendo esta opinión, tiene una forma divertida de demostrarlo.
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