Imagination and Critique: Two Rival Versions of Historical Inquiry (Philosophical Studies in Contemporary Culture, 19) 9048138035, 9789048138036

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IMAGINATION AND CRITIQUE

Philosophical Studies in Contemporary Culture VOLUME 19 Senior Editor H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr., Department of Philosophy, Rice University, and Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, Texas Editor Mark J. Cherry, Department of Philosophy, St. Edward’s University, Austin, Texas Assistant Editor Lisa Rasmussen, Department of Philosophy, University of North Carolina, Charlotte, North Carolina Editorial Board Stanley Hauerwas, Divinity School, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina Maureen Kelley, Department of Pediatric Bioethics, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington Terry Pinkard, Department of Philosophy, Georgetown University, Washington, D.C. C. Griffin Trotter, Center for Health Care Ethics & Emergency Medicine, Saint Louis University, St. Louis, Missouri Kevin Wm. Wildes, S.J., President, Loyola University, New Orleans, Louisiana

For further volumes: http://www.springer.com/series/6446

IMAGINATION AND CRITIQUE Two Rival Versions of Historical Inquiry

James R.L. Noland University of Richmond, Richmond, VA, USA

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James R.L. Noland 6417 Kensington Ave. Richmond VA 23226 USA [email protected]

ISBN 978-90-481-3803-6 e-ISBN 978-90-481-3804-3 DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-3804-3 Springer Dordrecht Heidelberg London New York Library of Congress Control Number: 2010920975 © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010 No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher, with the exception of any material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered and executed on a computer system, for exclusive use by the purchaser of the work. Printed on acid-free paper Springer is part of Springer Science+Business Media (www.springer.com)

The vast and shallow philosophies, the huge syntheses of humbug, all talk about ages and evolution and ultimate developments. The true philosophy is concerned with the instant. Will a man take this road or that? – that is the only thing to think about, if you enjoy thinking. The æons are easy enough to think about, anyone can think about them. [16, p. 136]

For Stormy, Ellie, Peyton and Jake

Acknowledgments

I am grateful for, and humbled by, the significant support, guidance, and encouragement I have received in the process of writing this book. I must thank my publisher, Springer Academic Press, and the editors and reviewers who have directed me through this process, for giving me this opportunity and for helping make this book better. The philosophy departments at the University of Virginia and Texas A&M University were instrumental in my development as a philosopher and this project would not have been possible without the instruction these schools offered me. I am particularly grateful to Jim Cargile at UVA and John McDermott at Texas A&M for the time they spent mentoring me and molding me as a philosopher. Many thanks also to Ted George, Colleen Murphy, and Larry Lynn Jr. for serving on the dissertation committee that oversaw the writing of the original version of this book. Without the love and encouragement of my family I would not have had the endurance or the hope to carry this through. I am a philosopher because of my father who first taught me and pushed me and who has served as my editor and sounding board in all of my writing; I would not have begun nor finished this book without his help.

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Contents

1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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2 The Story of the Federal Income Tax: A Case Study . . . . . . . .

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3 Vico and the Faculty of Imagination . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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4 Marx’s Critique of History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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5 Addressing Marx Through Rawls . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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6 Ideology and the Problem of Naming . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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7 Imagination in Practice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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8 What’s the Matter with What’s the Matter with Kansas? . . . . . .

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9 Freeing Anthropology from Critique . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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10 Imagination and the Possibility of Civil Politics . . . . . . . . . .

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References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Chapter 1

Introduction

This book is most easily described as philosophy of history; however, this description may be a little misleading. Truly, this is a work of applied philosophy that was originally conceived not in a philosophy seminar but in a school of public policy. As a philosopher learning about the study of public policy formation, I was frequently struck by what I perceived to be two very different sets of assumptions and methods at work. I found these assumptions and methods to be mutually exclusive conceptually, but they were often employed simultaneously. On the one hand, it was often accepted as given when studying past policy changes and political events that history is shaped by impersonal forces, that people’s actions can, and ought only to be understood as manifestations of their own material interests, and that individuals are to be identified as representatives of their respective demographic categories. Thus, for example, the events in question were explained in terms of the race or class of the various parties. When such an approach was challenged with an appeal to the actual arguments and stated rationales of the participants of the historical moment in question, this was taken to be an option that might be employed either in conjunction with the former method or as an alternative. Which method one chose to emphasize or employ exclusively seemed more a function of inclination or intuition than rational adjudication. Of course, those who chose not to view the characters of the past as free agents, consciously acting as their reason directed them, nonetheless considered themselves to be fully autonomous, rational, and moral participants in the current policy debates. And, when the topic of discussion shifted from the past to the future, it was no longer assumed that events and policies would be determined in the same fashion as the past; instead, the future was deemed wide open, to be shaped by the moral arguments of the individual players. In this context, it was assumed that the reasoning and persuasion of concerned individuals could at least potentially have an effect on the future. The more I observed and read the more I found that in the study of policy and political history generally there are, variations and permutations notwithstanding, two basic but radically different and ultimately incommensurate approaches to understanding history. Furthermore, these two approaches are necessarily implicated in the analysis of current events and contests over the future. These approaches do not really qualify as rival philosophies of history, but are instead what I have J.R.L. Noland, Imagination and Critique, Philosophical Studies in Contemporary Culture 19, DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-3804-3_1,  C Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010

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Introduction

chosen to call rival versions of historical inquiry. Many will notice my allusion to Alisdair MacIntyre’s book Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry; I found that MacIntyre’s treatment of the contemporary state of moral philosophy provided a helpful framework for understanding and addressing the confusion I perceived in the study of policy formation. I also believe that “historical inquiry” is a much more appropriate name for the subject of this book than either “philosophy of history” or “philosophy of social science”. The latter two terms carry with them grand connotations and expectations of precise parsing of terms such as “law” and “explanation” that are beyond the scope of my project. My aim with this book is not to contribute a new “universal history”, nor is it to enter into the fray surrounding the question of whether or not history and related fields truly qualify as sciences. Instead, I want to bring a philosophical analysis to bear on historical inquiry as it is actually practiced by those who study the past in order to understand the present and shape the future. Each of the two approaches I have discerned entails and is founded upon distinct views about human nature, reason, language, and freedom. Therefore, in my attempt to adjudicate between these two approaches, I will direct much of my attention to the coherence and internal consistency of these underlying views. To facilitate this examination I have identified two particular accounts of the method and object of historical inquiry, those of Giambattista Vico and Karl Marx, because I take them to be broadly representative of these two basic approaches to studying human history. I emphasize that I intend to draw on these philosophers’ accounts of the method and object of historical inquiry and not necessarily their conclusions about History writ large. Put very simply, the first of these approaches seeks understanding of human behavior through a process of imagination while the second seeks to unmask the causal forces behind human behavior through a process of critique. Before proceeding with the explication and analysis of the two philosophers, I provide some examples of the type of historical inquiry with which I am concerned in order to illustrate the practical applications and implications of the two rival versions. I begin with a significant, but not currently controversial, historical political event: the ratification of the Sixteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, which gave the federal government the power to tax income. This is a story that began shortly after the War of 1812 and culminated nearly a century later with the amendment’s ratification in 1913. I chose this particular story for several reasons. First, the ratification of this amendment was clearly of great import for the United States. Any change to the Constitution, by definition, changes its identity as a nation, but beyond this fact, this specific change drastically increased the power of the federal government and ultimately made possible such major policy initiatives such as the New Deal and the Great Society. Additionally, without the revenue generated by this tax, the United States would not have had the means for developing the military might that proved necessary during the second World War. It is not overly dramatic to suggest that without the ratification and implementation of the federal income tax, the United States and much of the rest of the world would look very differently today.

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Beyond the significance of its impact, the story of the amendment’s ratification is also interesting to study because of the length of time it took for the idea of the tax to become reality; during the one hundred or so years from beginning to end the idea’s popularity waxed and waned and drew the support and opposition of a variety of factions and interests. The story involves economic, ethical, and political subplots and so many groups and individuals along the way that hope for a perfect explanation is surely in vain. Yet its significance calls for an honest attempt to understand as completely as possible why the federal income tax was ultimately approved and how its enactment affected the populace, for better or worse. After relaying this story, and discussing competing theories about why the amendment was ratified, it should be apparent to the reader what is at stake in the attempt to adjudicate between the two rival versions of historical inquiry. The version one adopts will determine the type of knowledge one seeks, the way one identifies factors as significant, and the methods of observation and data collection one uses. Finally, though this event is clearly important and its story quite interesting, it is not currently the subject of controversy or heated debate. This is important because, as we will see later, my argument does have implications for contemporary topics that are controversial and surrounded by heated debate and whose explanations have significant political and moral implications. Therefore, I want to establish and support my case for identifying these two rival versions in the manner I have, as well as present my argument for adjudicating between them, without the risk of being taken to be endorsing any immediate consequences. This is not a work of history nor is it a position paper advocating any specific policy. This is a work of philosophy whose aim is to identify and analyze the underlying premises of two prevalent versions of historical inquiry and to make the case for one over the other. With the discussion of two current and controversial topics in the latter half of the book – the current US political landscape and the turmoil in the Middle East – I intend only to illustrate the practical and moral significance of adjudicating between these two versions; I argue for a method of investigation, not for the accuracy of any particular historical account or the wisdom of any policy solution. Following the examination of the story of the Sixteenth Amendment and the introduction of the two contemporary cases to be discussed later, I begin my presentation of Vico’s philosophy of history as found in his New Science. Though Vico’s style is somewhat peculiar, and some of his claims literally incredible, his explanation of the object and method of historical inquiry is fascinating and instructive. He contends that human history is much more accessible to us than is natural history or the workings of the physical world because human history is made by humans and can therefore be understood in a way these other fields cannot. His original contribution is to name and expound upon a previously unidentified, though not unused, faculty of the intellect. He calls this faculty “fantasia”, or “imagination” and the knowledge it aspires to “understanding”, specifically the understanding of “what it must have been like” to live, think and act as did particular persons in the past. To attain this insight we need to understand the language and interests of the people we are studying. His “master key” that allows us to see the world as others did is

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the fact that all humans have in common their participation in the three fundamental institutions of religion, marriage, and burial. The fact that we share these institutions, so Vico argues, means that our interests and orientations are similar enough to those of other people that we are able to imagine ourselves in their places and in so doing come to understand their motives and reasons for acting. Importantly, such understanding does not entail sympathy or endorsement of these motives and actions, nor does it preclude judgment of them. Imagination is not to be confused with wishfulness or whimsy, but is instead a most necessary faculty that allows us to interpret and understand the behavior of others, discerning intention according to keys provided by our common participation in the relational framework that provides context for the exercise of rationality and freedom. Imagination is the faculty that allows us to “read letters between members of families from all kinds of times and places, and know what they are about because we ourselves have the same kinds of worries and concerns” [28, p. 11]. This faculty is a function of our common human nature, which nature consists not of a universal property but of certain shared manners of relationality. As we will see, stories are essential for the exercise of imagination as they are the means for rendering human particularity intelligible. Karl Marx also contends that we can know history because history has been made by us, but his justification for why this is so is radically different from Vico’s. Marx holds that we can come to understand the mechanisms that move history because we can discern how consciousness must have arisen and how society must have formed. We accomplish this with the method of critique – shedding all received wisdom, escaping from our given paradigms of consciousness, and pursuing a purely empirical investigation of history. This will enable us to grasp the ways in which human behavior is shaped and directed by material conditions and corresponding modes of production. Critique, as a method of inquiry generally, has to do with liberation or uncovering of some kind. For example, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is an attempt to liberate reason, and therefore science, from the “groundless pretensions” of metaphysical dogma. The exercise of reason, particularly in the Newtonian system, relies on concepts such as substance and causation, but neither of these concepts can be established empirically. The only other alternative seemed to be to establish them by appeal to some metaphysical framework. The problem with metaphysical frameworks is that they can only be established dogmatically, not by experience, and when their flaws are exposed and they crumble, the danger is that reason will be lost in the ruins. Kant’s project was to attempt transcendental examination of pure reason – reason unmixed with anything else – in order to establish necessary a priori concepts. Thus Kant’s first critique is a freeing of reason from received authority and an uncovering of the necessary structure of reason and concepts and categories of understanding. Though Kant’s method of critique is a philosophical ancestor of Marxian critique, for the purposes of this book Marx’s version of critique will serve as the paradigm. Marx’s critique is also an attempt to liberate and uncover, but while the subject of Kant’s critique was pure reason, Marx’s subject was history. Marx wanted

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to liberate not reason but humanity and he sought to expose the causal mechanisms that drive history by identifying as ideology what had been masquerading as reason. Unlike Kant, Marx’s method was not transcendental, but was instead avowedly and determinedly empirical; however, Marx shared with Kant a suspicion of received dogma, which Marx viewed as encompassing communal consciousness. Given this suspicion, Marx’s method of critique eschews stories as contaminated and unreliable sources of information and depends instead on establishing a master key that will enable the identification of the causal mechanisms whose workings explain historical developments. Marx’s master key was labor, but for our purposes, “critique” will identify any historical inquiry that employs this basic method, regardless of the particular master key, whether it be race, or sex, or power. Both Vico and Marx present compelling and persuasive arguments for the proper approach to studying history. Yet, these arguments are built on assumptions about the nature of reason and freedom that are incompatible. Attempting to incorporate both approaches into one large system in the hope that this might allow one to cast one’s nets wider and achieve a more complete understanding than either approach might offer alone would simply result in confusion and contradiction because each denies the truth of the other’s explanation. A choice must be made but this is more easily said than done. Appealing to historical accuracy is not helpful because the disagreement between the two concerns the descriptions and explanations of the same events. Each of these philosophers proposes a comprehensive system of inquiry, that is, these systems prescribe the ends and objects of historical inquiry as well as the means. Thus, neither can be judged according to the standards of the other, and there is no third standard against which both could be measured, at least not one that would be accepted as such by the proponents of either system. To adjudicate between these two rival versions of historical inquiry requires examining their internal consistency and coherence. To do this I first try to identify and describe the accounts of reason and freedom that the two philosophers employ in their own inquiry and which they assume to obtain in those persons they purport to study. I then look to philosophers such as John Rawls and Alasdair MacIntyre, among others, to illustrate and evaluate the accounts of reason and freedom found in the work of Vico and Marx. As we shall see, both sides presented here hold that reason – the ability to think – is the essential identifying feature of personhood; the question at the heart of our attempt to adjudicate between these two rival versions of historical inquiry is whether particularity is necessary for this feature to obtain, or an obstacle to its exercise. My conclusion is that there are some fatal flaws in Marx’s understanding of reason and freedom that call into question the wisdom of accepting his approach. In contrast, we find in Vico’s philosophy a more attractive and coherent explanation of these concepts and I argue in favor of Vico’s version of historical inquiry, or at least something very much like it. Following this philosophical analysis and argument, I return to the practical implications of my argument, examining in detail two recent works, one by a historian and political commentator and one by an anthropologist, to see how these rival versions of historical inquiry are employed and the practical and moral significance of taking these different approaches.

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In the first instance, Thomas Frank’s 2004 book What’s the Matter with Kansas?, which addresses the development of current political conservatism of Kansans, and which laments what the author identifies as “the species of derangement that has brought many ordinary people to such a self-damaging political extreme”, illustrates, among other things, how the stories we tell about the past are necessary for describing the present and prescribing a course for the future [22, p. 9]. Frank’s book also serves as an example of Marxian type critique; its popularity and influence demonstrate the plausibility and widespread acceptance of this approach. Philip Carl Salzman’s 2008 work, Culture and Conflict in the Middle East, makes the case that by failing to take culture seriously, Western observers and policy makers have severely hampered their ability to understand and anticipate the actions and attitudes of individuals, groups, and governments in the Middle East [69]. Salzman not only makes a case for a particular insight about Middle Eastern culture, he also presents this case as a counter-argument to the post-colonial orthodoxy that prevails in the field of Middle Eastern Studies. Salzman’s argument serves as an example of the Viconian method and highlights the extent to which the Viconian and Marxian methods truly are rival versions of historical inquiry, which rivalry is both heated and has high stakes. Through what will be a wide-ranging discussion of philosophy, history, and politics, I hope to show that historical inquiry is a necessary condition for rational interaction and that the method of inquiry we employ, whether we do so consciously or not, will have important moral and practical implications for such interaction. Though rigorous philosophical analysis of the theoretical foundations of each theory is a large portion of this book, by the end it will be clear that the matter at hand is by no means dry nor is it merely academic, but is instead of great consequence for domestic and international politics alike.

Chapter 2

The Story of the Federal Income Tax: A Case Study

Congress passed the Sixteenth Amendment to the US Constitution on July 2, 1909; 3 years and 7 months later, on the morning of February 3, 1913, Delaware became the 36th state to approve its ratification thereby making it the law of the land.1 This amendment, which gave the federal government the power to tax income, was the culmination of almost 50 years of debate about the desirability and legality of such taxation. A national income tax was first proposed in the United States in 1815 by the Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Dallas [14, p. 3]. His proposal was in response to the rising debt caused by the War of 1812. Nothing ever came of this proposal and it was another 50 years before the issue was raised once more. This time debt brought on by war was the impetus again. In 1862 the Union enacted the first national income tax [14, p. 3]. Though the tax was repealed in 1872, 7 years after the end of the War Between the States, almost every congressional session for the next 20 years saw proposals to reinstate some form of national income tax. Finally, in 1894, the passage of the Wilson-Gorman Tariff brought about a 2% tax on income over $4,000 [14, p. 3]. This tax was short lived, however. Charles Pollock of Massachusetts filed suit in response to a notice from Farmer’s Loan and Trust Co. (with whom he was a stockholder) stating that they would be withholding 2% of any income earned over the amount of $4,000 and delivering this money to the Department of the Treasury in compliance with the requirements of the Wilson-Gorman Tariff of 1894. Pollock contended that this tax was unconstitutional insofar as it was a direct tax. Direct taxation by the federal government had been expressly prohibited by Article 1, Section 9 of the US Constitution.2 Although the Constitution does not explicitly define what it means to be a “direct” tax, the precedent set in a 1796

1 AMENDMENT XVI Passed by Congress July 2, 1909. Ratified February 3, 1913. Note: Article I, section 9, of the Constitution was modified by amendment 16. The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration. 2 Article 1, Section 9: No capitation, or other direct, Tax shall be laid, unless in Proportion to the Census or Enumeration herein before directed to be taken.

J.R.L. Noland, Imagination and Critique, Philosophical Studies in Contemporary Culture 19, DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-3804-3_2,  C Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010

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Supreme Court decision established that direct taxes were taxes on property; presumably, indirect taxes are taxes on transactions, such as sales taxes [78, p. 150]. Though the two sides disputed the description of the income tax as direct, ultimately the court determined that the description was accurate and the law was found unconstitutional [62]. The Court’s ruling in the Pollock case led proponents of a national income tax to conclude that for them ever to be successful in instituting such a tax, the Constitution would have to be changed. In 1909, the year the amendment was passed through Congress, there were 46 states. For ratification an amendment needs the approval of three-fourths of the states. This meant that thirty-five states would be needed. Before enough states had voted in favor of the amendment two more states were added to the Union. In 1912 Arizona and New Mexico became states thereby raising the number needed for ratification to thirty-six. Ultimately forty-two of the then forty-eight states would vote for ratification. The first time a national income tax was proposed was in response to the debt accrued during the War of 1812; the first time a national income tax was enacted was in response to the debt accruing during the War Between the States. However, the final push for, and passage of, the Sixteenth Amendment and a new national income tax was not in response to any war. There were significant economic factors, but none as urgent or drastic as war. In the year 1800 public expenditures were just 3% of the national income; by 1900 they had increased to 10% [14, p. 23]. These years saw the national expansion westward, the industrial revolution, the growth of cities, and, following the War, the freeing of slaves and the subsequent changes in the Southern economy. The agrarian South, already at odds with the industrial and urban North before the War, was even more so following its defeat. In the final years of the nineteenth century federal spending increased from $4.84 per capita in 1889 to $7.01 per capita in 1913, during which time the population increased by 85%. A depression in the early 1890s helped contribute to a deficit of $74 million in 1894 [14, p. 23]. During this time the primary sources of income for the federal government were tariffs and excise taxes, both of which raised prices for consumers while enriching businessmen and merchants [14, p. 26]. These tariffs and taxes increased the prices of basic necessities to such an extent it was estimated the average poor family would spend up to 80% of its savings on taxes compared to just 8–10% of earnings for the wealthy [78, p. 123]. As prices increased, wages did not [14, p. 34]. From 1895 to 1910, the richest 1.6% of families in the United States increased their share of the national wealth from 10.8 to 19% [14, p. 28]. The same tariffs that burdened the poor resulted in even greater wealth for the rich. At the same time as the divide between rich and poor grew, wealth became increasingly concentrated in the North. In the first decade of the twentieth century 85% of those who earned over $100,000 a year lived in the Northeast [14, p. 240]. Reflecting on these conditions and trends one might expect the public to respond with some measure either to draw on this wealth to support the government or to redistribute it. It is not hard to imagine why an income tax on the wealthy might

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be popular among the general population, as it in fact was [14, p. 142]. Yet popular support for such a measure does not necessarily translate into a change in policy. In 1908 Republicans had a 214-75 majority in the House of Representatives and a 60-32 majority in the Senate [78, p. 215]. Republicans were, generally speaking, supporters of the tariff system. They were the party of business and industry, not the party of the workers or the poor. Furthermore, politicians in general and those in the Senate in particular tended to be wealthy themselves. Life in Washington, DC was expensive, too expensive to be covered comfortably by a senator’s salary. Thus, only those who were wealthy enough to maintain a home in DC independently of any government salary were capable of serving [14, pp. 61–62]. For an income tax bill or amendment to pass through Congress it would have to be supported by many whose interests would seem to be, at least prima facie, contrary to its passage or ratification. Yet even given these unfavorable conditions in the legislature, supporters of the amendment faced a still larger battle after it had passed Congress. Three-fourths of the states would have to approve the amendment for ratification. It was expected that the Southern states could be counted on to approve (although not all Southern states did approve – Virginia voted against the amendment on states’ rights grounds), but the Northeast, where much of the wealth was concentrated, was a different story. In addition, the amendment would be brought before the state legislatures, not the general public; supporters feared that this made the amendment more susceptible to defeat by powerful special interests [78, p. 234]. State politics were in many cases still controlled by party machines. Gerrymandering was common; often legislatures did not accurately represent the interests of the public. The antitax lobby was wealthy and powerful and had support from prominent newspapers such as the New York Times [14, pp. 140–141]. As it turns out, these concerns were well founded. A number of states, especially in the North, did vote against the amendment. However, two interesting, and in this case crucial, aspects of the ratification process are that there is no time limit and negative votes can be reversed. Alabama, the poorest state in the Union, voted to ratify almost immediately after the amendment passed Congress [14, p. 139]. Yet, other states took more time and in several cases first voted against the amendment and later reversed their votes. New York was particularly conspicuous in doing so [14, p. 150]. Congressional elections in 1910 and 1912, after the amendment had passed Congress, resulted in legislatures more favorably disposed to the income tax. Any amendment to our Constitution, by definition, changes our national identity; that is, it changes what constitutes us as a nation. The causes and implications of any amendment are therefore important topics for study. The Sixteenth Amendment is particularly interesting for several reasons. As noted, it was the culmination of a process that took almost 100 years from the first proposal to ratification. The story involves regional rivalries such as that between the defeated South and the Northeast, class conflict (the New York Times considered the income tax to be a “plot of the poor against the rich” [14, p. 141]), powerful personalities such as William Jennings Bryan and Teddy Roosevelt, and arguments about the nature of justice and the role of government. The institution of the tax, in conjunction with the reductions and removals of tariffs, was a blow to business and a boon to the working class.

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Having once been unconstitutional, the federal income tax is now an essential part of our national government and is used to gather revenue and influence behavior. Steven Weisman, from whose narrative history of the Sixteenth Amendment, The Great Tax Wars, I have drawn heavily, writes in his introduction “if there is one overarching theme to my approach, it probably comes from the incomparably wise and acerbic Progressive Era writer Ambrose Bierce and The Devil’s Dictionary he published in 1911. Here is Bierce’s great definition of politics: A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage”. Weisman identifies “the two basic conflicting principles in our argument over taxes”. These principles are “justice” and “virtue”. He explains that some would argue in favor of the tax on the basis of the justice of either income redistribution or payment by ability, or both. Arguments against the tax often rely on the principle that it is a tax on virtue, that is, a tax or penalty on hard work and self-reliance [78, p. 6]. As he concludes his introduction Weisman is ambiguous as to whether he believes that appeals to these principles are always cover for private advantage or whether they are, or could be, genuine. At times he writes as if forces on either side of the issue were motivated solely by their financial interests. At others he pays close attention to arguments and acknowledges, sometimes with puzzlement, that some of the players seem to be working against their own interests. This ambiguity highlights a significant question: what is the proper focus of the inquiry into the explanation for historical changes such as the ratification of the Sixteenth Amendment? Should we examine the arguments and ideas in the debate leading to this change, or should we look to gather quantifiable data concerning economic and material conditions, working with the assumption that persons always act to further their economic and material interests? Are we to assume that the players in our story were acting freely and rationally and thus examine them, their arguments, and their time and place in order to understand why they believed what they believed and did what they did? Or, do we undertake our investigation with the intention of peeling away the surface layer of rhetoric and posture to discern the true forces responsible for the change? These questions are not simply questions about tactics and effectiveness. If a change to the Constitution is a change in the national identity then the nature and causes of the change will inform our understanding of who we were and who we are. Conversely, our understanding of who we are will inform our inquiry into the causes of such a change. Though Weisman, among others, is ambiguous and at times seems to look at both options, behind these two alternatives are two rival conceptions of human nature and historical change. These two approaches both begin with assumptions about the causes of human action and the nature of human reason. The assumptions of these two methods are incompatible with one another. To choose to examine arguments and ideas necessitates identifying particular individuals and their roles as opposed to focusing on classes. This method rests on the conviction that neither is consciousness simply a manifestation of material conditions nor are ideas and arguments reducible to material interests. Understanding

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the language and the stories that shape the individuals involved in the process of the historical change will be crucial for reaching an acceptable explanation. Implicit in this approach is that we as historians are unable on our own to either recognize or define the significant factors that brought about such an event as the ratification of the Sixteenth Amendment. In other words, though we might guess or anticipate those things that might have influenced the political actors involved in the process, we cannot presume to know a priori what events or conditions would have been relevant to their decisions nor how they would have interpreted these events and conditions. This method involves studying the customs, practices, and stories of a culture in order to understand the rationality of the culture. To assume that we as historians can discern the causes of change by examining economic and material conditions is to assume either that these conditions directly determine human behavior or that these conditions determine the language and consciousness of the populace, thereby indirectly determining behavior. This latter approach allows, to some degree, that people act according to reasons, but assumes both that these reasons are always determined by, and according to, the consciousness shaped by these conditions and that all interests, no matter how they are expressed, are ultimately reducible to economic and material interests. At the foundation of this mode of enquiry is a form of scientific realism regarding the identity and nature of events and conditions; that is, at bottom is the premise that there is a way that events and people “really are” that can be perceived and considered independently of their time or place. Although it is certainly true that arguments can and have been used disingenuously, as a “masquerade” for self-interest, it does not follow that arguments are always so used. Furthermore, while it is possible that an individual might consider both personal financial interest and arguments about principle when considering a course of action, to acknowledge this is not to acknowledge a third, middle option. Explaining why this is the case should help to illustrate the significance of the differences between the two approaches. If we suppose that persons make decisions freely, based on rational consideration of their interests, we need not exclude financial or material concerns from the list of possible interests one might consider. In fact, we might find that persons we are studying are concerned only with finances, for example. At issue, however, is how to answer the question of how we can know what a person’s interests are and how this person understands them and acts on them. The difference in the two approaches does not amount simply to different conclusions about what motivates action. The difference between the approaches has to do with assumptions about how we can know what motivates a particular action, how we identify a particular action as such, and how we identify actions, events, and conditions as significant units of observation. These differences are the components of our two rival versions of inquiry and, collectively, they will be the focus of our analysis. For now, the task is to demonstrate just how these differences are manifested in actual historical inquiry. Discussing the debate over the income tax that took place during the campaign for the 1896 presidential election, Weisman says, “As always, the debate was

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about economics but the terms were moralistic”. Both sides, he writes, “felt that they – more than their political adversaries- embodied the virtues of hard work and sacrifice that formed the foundation of American society” [78, p. 109]. Confronted with such an observation, the historian has a choice to make. This choice is not simply between cynicism and naïve gullibility. Rather, the choice is between rival conceptions of human nature and historical inquiry. One such conception would lead the historian to examine the stories and practices that informed the people and politicians of the day in order to make sense of the terms of the debate. The other conception would lead the historian to discount or dismiss the language of the debate as the expected manifestation of the false consciousness of the time, the result of the self-interest of the powerful. It is easy to find data to support either approach. As detailed above, the years leading up to the ratification of the Sixteenth Amendment saw a growing disparity between rich and poor. As early as 1863, in the middle of the war, the Secretary of the Treasury was observed buying a $3,000 shawl for his daughter; this at a time when one could pay a substitute $300 to take one’s spot in the Union Army. Weisman reports that it was widely noted that the Secretary had paid the equivalent of 10 men’s lives for this shawl [78, p. 80]. That one person, a national leader, could not only afford to, but would even consider paying the equivalent of 10 men’s lives for a luxury item is a clear sign of a great class division between the rulers and the ruled. As the turn of the century neared, the ranks of the millionaires grew; businessmen grew rich while the working class paid extra for basic goods to cover the cost of the tariffs that protected these businessmen. During the first decade of the twentieth century, custom duties supplied 50% of the federal government’s revenue [14, p. 31]. This was a paradigm case of exploitation; the circumstances were right for division and animosity between classes. Buenker notes that it is “hard to find another issue that so united the wealthy” as opposition to an income tax. The fact that the vast majority of the population would pay no income tax makes it seem clear that it would have been in the financial interest of this majority to impose this tax on the wealthy few. Literature such as Andrew Carnegie’s essay “The Gospel of Wealth”, in which he advocated “honest poverty [78, p. 178]”, newspapers’ condemnation of the tax as “class legislation [14, p. 7]”, and a war of the poor against the rich, along with such apparently devious arguments by politicians such as Bourke Cockran of New York all lend support to the notion that any arguments against the tax were just cover for the self-interested exploitation of the working class by the wealthy. Cockran claimed that the poor would be humiliated if the rich were the only ones allowed to contribute to the funding of the government [78, p. 139]. Yet, despite the ability of the wealthy to influence the policy-makers through contributions, their ability to frame the terms of the debate through the media, which they controlled, and the fact that many of the policy makers were themselves wealthy, the income tax finally did become law. Eventually the wealthy passed a tax that only they would have to pay and they removed a tariff of which they were the sole beneficiaries. Why and how did this happen? This is, perhaps, the biggest

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puzzle in the story of the ratification of the Sixteenth Amendment. It is here, in particular, that the differences between the two methods of inquiry become most striking and clear. In attempting to account for this unprecedented political move, there is one critical point that should be kept in mind. Though it is easy and tempting, especially for those who come from the American tradition, to imagine the wealthy powerful of the period in question as constrained by the laws, customs, and Constitution, this temptation should be avoided. Historical inquiry should be as concerned to recognize and explain what did not happen just as much as what did happen. I will return to this point for exposition later. Looking back at the conditions and trends of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries one might have predicted an uprising or a clash of some sort between the working poor and the elite rich. In fact, William Jennings Bryan, in a letter to his wife, predicted eventual conflict between the farmers and workers and the wealthy who benefited from their work [78, p. 126]. In the 1890s there were strikes and uprisings; a depression in 1893 led to 20% unemployment adding fuel to the growing fire [78, pp. 115, 117]. A move by Senator Aldrich of Rhode Island to increase and expand the tariffs when others were hoping to lower the tariffs and quiet the call for an income tax might be seen as highlighting the exploitation and alienation of the working class [78, p. 220]. However, there never were any widespread or large scale revolts. There were no credible threats to overthrow the government. There is evidence that some saw an income tax as a way to placate the poor. Weisman quotes Uriel Hall, congressman from Missouri, describing the tax as “a measure to kill anarchy and keep down socialists” [78, p. 138]. Similarly, Representative Joseph Bailey of Texas saw the tax as in the interests of the rich as it “would do more to silence the envious voice of anarchy than all the benefactions and the charities which they can do” [78, p. 223]. However, more prominent and common than appeals to the self-interest of the rich in placating the poor were arguments about the injustice of the tariff system and the fairness of an income tax. There were several general forms of argument offered in favor of an income tax. Some of these arguments were simply financial, that is, they concluded that tariffs were less efficient than an income tax for bringing in revenue. Others had to do with the greater justice of a tax. The first of these Buenker calls the “faculty” argument. This argument is so named because it was based on the premise that the cost of running the government should be apportioned according to individuals’ ability to pay. Related to this argument was the growing sense that “equality” did not demand an equal contribution in terms of dollars, but an equal share of one’s wealth or income. It was also widely noted that not only were the poor paying a greater share of their income to the government, but they were also paying a greater dollar amount because of their dependence on basic commodities that were so expensive because of the tariffs. The next argument Buenker identifies as the “compensatory” argument. Because the gap between rich and poor had been caused by the government’s tax policy, this argument claimed, a new tax policy should compensate the poor for having borne an unfair share of the burden. Interestingly, one of the groups endorsing this

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argument and advocating the income tax was the National Tax Association [NTA], a group of well-to-do Northern professionals, including “industrialists, financiers, public officials” and more [14, pp. 50–51]. Discerning whether or not the NTA’s arguments were genuine, and, if so, making sense of how this might have come to pass is the sort of project that would be approached differently depending on the method of inquiry with which one begins. A third argument for the justice of an income tax is the “benefit” argument. Since the rich – the merchants – had more for the government and its military and police forces to protect, so the argument goes, they should contribute more to its budget. President Teddy Roosevelt, an important force in the pro-tax movement, endorsed this argument [14, p. 43]. Roosevelt is another interesting case study in this process. Weisman talks about the “evolving attitudes toward wealth and fairness at the center of the issue” [78, p. 136]. Roosevelt’s attitudes certainly changed over the course of his career. He was born into an upper class family, and as Weisman says, was inculcated with a “distrust of the complaints of the working class” [78, p. 182]. Early in his career as a New York state assemblyman he dismissed a bill to reduce working hours for streetcar employees as “socialist” [78, p. 185]. Yet, eventually he became more concerned about the plight of the working class. Apparently, first hand observation of the poverty and slums of New York City had a profound effect upon him [78, p. 188]. By 1906 he was talking about exploitation in speeches and by 1910 he was heading the Progressive party and arguing for concern for “human welfare over property rights” [78, pp. 202, 239]. It is at least plausible that one’s view about the justice of a matter might be influenced by personal encounters with the parties involved. In addition to his own experience, the late 1800s and early 1900s saw a large number of books, both academic and fiction, exposing the poverty of the working class and corruption of big business [78, pp. 180, 198]. Perhaps Roosevelt, always known for being independent, was simply persuaded by argument to change his position. Still, a case can also be made that his shift was strategic, especially as he began his bid to regain the presidency beginning in 1910. Similar interpretations might be offered for President Howard Taft’s support, albeit admittedly tepid, for the income tax amendment. Taft came from a wealthy family and his party (Republican) was officially opposed to an income tax. Jerold Waltman writes that while the government was primarily guided by the interests of the elite, elected officials also had to keep “an eye on the masses” [76, p. 16]. While Roosevelt, Taft, and most of the elected officials of the time had much to gain from wealthy business interests in the form of campaign contributions, not to mention their natural sympathy they felt due to their belonging to the same social and economic classes as the businessmen, they nevertheless relied on the general population to elect them. If public opinion was in fact being influenced by the newspaper reports of corruption and popular literature highlighting the conditions of the working class, perhaps the wiser politicians saw a need to break from the position of their peers to preserve their own power. It is difficult to know exactly what to make of this.

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Political scientists Thomas Dye and Harmon Ziegler argue that “opinions flow downward from elites to the masses”, and that “public opinion rarely effects elite behavior” [19, pp. 164, 166]. Dye and Ziegler contend that public policy “reflects the interests and values of elites”, not the general public [19, p. 5]. If this is the case then the change in public opinion around the turn of the century must have been orchestrated or at least indirectly prodded by the governing elite. In addition to the question of how they might have managed this are more pressing questions such as why they might have done this and how we might discern that this is, in fact, what happened. One possible explanation for why the wealthy and powerful elite might have moved to institute a tax on their own wealth is that, strangely enough, an income tax may have actually increased and solidified their power and ability to control and exploit the under class. According to Weisman, the Tammany Hall political machine in New York managed to protect the interests of business while at the same time presenting themselves as a defender of the poor by providing them with jobs and occasional handouts. Tammany managed to keep the working class under control by keeping them poor and dependent on the seemingly generous charity of the party bosses [78, p. 134]. It may be that the federal government saw an opportunity to keep the working class dependent by offering them more services. Such a strategy dates back to ancient Rome [59, p. 48]. Weisman says that the “rising expenditures” of the McKinley administration “were the signposts of America becoming a modern social welfare state” [78, p. 176]. It appears that one of the factors in New York’s eventual vote in favor of the federal income tax is that their own social welfare programs were becoming so expensive. Greater revenue for the national government would mean more chance of aid for the state’s programs [78, p. 255]. Dye and Ziegler write, “when the Sixteenth Amendment gave the national government the power to tax incomes, financial power shifted from the states to Washington”. They note that following this shift in power, the federal government started several grant-in-aid programs. Quickly, individuals and local governments became dependent upon these federal programs. As previously noted, federal spending increased from $4.84 per capita to $7.01 per capita between 1890 and 1913; during the same period the population increased 85%. If the politicians endorsed these spending increases they must have understood that a need for greater revenue would follow. One might argue that despite levying a tax that only the wealthy, politicians included, would have to pay, these elites were still acting in their own self- interest. A small percentage of one’s income could be considered a reasonable price to pay to not only gain control over the working class but to also appear generously philanthropic in doing so. An alternative argument proposes that while the Republican dominated congress passed the amendment and sent it out for ratification, and the Republican President endorsed the proposal, the Republicans had no intention of actually bringing about an income tax through these actions. Weisman says that supporters were not optimistic as the amendment went to the states [78, p. 251]. A motion to allow the states to hold popular votes instead of sending the amendment to the legislatures

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was denied. It may be that the politicians who did not want the tax but also did not want to be seen as going against public opinion proposed the amendment thinking that though it would never pass, their actions would be appreciated by the public nonetheless. A defeat for the amendment would settle the matter and have the added benefit of transferring blame away from the Republicans. I highlight these arguments because both interpret the actions and statements of the agents involved in the promotion of the Sixteenth Amendment as necessarily self-interested; and they do so while considering self-interest to be concerned only with material prosperity. Neither account supposes that it is at least possible that the motivations and explanations for the actions of those such as Roosevelt could truly have been a function of having been convinced of the justice of the tax. It is at this point that I return to the stipulation that the student of history must be able to interpret not only that which happens, but that which doesn’t happen. If one assumes that individuals are led to act according to their class interests, which, in turn, are understood in terms of material or financial conditions, one must be consistent in considering these interests to be overriding. My point here is that concerns for democracy, or American traditions, or the Constitution must either be seen to further these interests or be trumped by them. What did not happen in this story is striking. The powerful and wealthy leaders of business and industry and their peers in government did not seek to control the press in order to shape the national consciousness. They did not decide to bring about a new form of government, getting rid of the Constitution. They did not attempt to use force. It does not appear that any of these options were even recognized as such. Yet, just over 100 years prior the wealthy elites of the colonies had organized an armed revolt against their leaders. A few years after that they replaced the Articles of Confederation with the Constitution. Less than 50 years before the ratification of the Sixteenth Amendment the nation had been at war with itself. In the context of the history of civilization the American experiment was still new and unproven; other countries that had flirted with democracy had failed and still others would fail and revert to monarchy or some form of totalitarianism throughout the twentieth century. Why did the powerful work within the system as they did? Why did so many of the wealthy and powerful either endorse the income tax or, even when they did not endorse it, allow it to come to pass and accept it as law? It is in answering specific questions such as these that the differences between the two methods of historical inquiry become clear. Either we interpret the actions of the participants in this event in terms of their classes and self-interest, or we allow that perhaps there are other explanations that will not fit this mold. I am not interested here in proving a particular explanation for the ratification of the Sixteenth Amendment. What I do hope to show, however, are the ways in which Vico and Marx offer two distinct methods of studying and explaining this event that rely on competing theories about how to recognize and interpret the relevant data. I want to examine the epistemological assumptions of each and suggest a way for adjudicating between the two. Both are powerful and persuasive; both can make sense of the facts and even offer an answer to the other. Too often, however,

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inclination and intuition have been the determining factors in choosing between the two methods and the responses each side makes to the other amount to articulations of these inclinations and intentions. My task here is to offer analyses of these two methods on their own terms and standards. Because the two accounts are incompatible and comprehensive, there is no external standard of history by which to judge them. Making a choice between the two is not simply about choosing a view of history; it is also about choosing a view of the present and future. Which method one chooses will affect how one anticipates policy developments in the future, and, more importantly, how one seeks to influence and shape public policy now and in the years to come. Admittedly, at this point the urgency of making this choice may be less than apparent. The foregoing claim that choosing a view of history entails choosing a view of the present and future may also seem uncertain. Therefore, before diving into the philosophies of Vico and Marx, I want to explain why I make these claims about the urgency and implications of the choice before us as well as why I have chosen as my first example a historical event that does not make such claims obvious. I hope the reader has found my outline of the story of the Sixteenth Amendment interesting and that this outline has demonstrated the ways rival versions of inquiry can be employed in describing and explaining the various happenings that make up this story. I expect that the reader can see the plausibility of the assumptions and methods of each version but also expect that the reader might not see either the necessity of choosing – it may seem that both are helpful – or exactly what is at stake. This is intentional. Though I want to make clear that this debate over the relative merits of the two rival versions, and over whether the two versions really are rivals, is not merely academic, it is helpful to present a trial case that may seem merely academic in order to attempt a dispassionate and disciplined analysis. Such analyses, to the extent that they are possible at all, are much more difficult to perform when applied to the two topics discussed at the end of this book. Thomas Frank’s book takes as its starting point the current political conservatism evident in his home state of Kansas and much of the American mid-west. That Kansas tends to elect conservative representatives and vote Republican in presidential elections is not disputed. This observation neither requires nor entails adherence to any particular version of inquiry. We will see, though, that once one begins to understand how this state of affairs came about, one will necessarily employ some version of historical inquiry and this employment will in turn shape any more robust description of the current state of affairs. Frank attributes the conservative turn of the majority of Kansans to be evidence of widespread “derangement”, or false consciousness, resulting from what amounts to fraud perpetrated by the Republican Party and conservative pundits. Thus, the story told about how the present came to be as it is necessarily involves a description of the present. Meanwhile, investigation into how the current state of affairs came to be is both motivated by a normative evaluation of this state of affairs and framed by this judgment.

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Beginning with the view that Kansas’ conservatism is catastrophic for its citizens’ well-being, Frank seeks an explanation for this situation. Given the citizens’ apparent complicity in producing this predicament, the situation is inexplicable without some accounting for how they got things so wrong: either Kansans are intentionally self-destructive, too foolish to know their own good, or victims of widespread deception perpetrated by those who stand to gain from this deception. Thus, from the outset of the inquiry, the potential results are limited by a moral judgment that is taken to be both objective and obvious. Having described the present, Frank pursues the historical explanation from this perspective, which then results in prescriptions for future action. His historical inquiry leads him to diagnose Kansas’ current misfortune as the symptom of derangement. It follows, therefore, that the remedy for this derangement will entail bringing the deranged to their senses, acting in loco parentis in the meantime, and decrying and denouncing those guilty of misleading Kansas’ victims. Frank’s book serves as an example of the Marxian version of historical inquiry, one I am calling, simply, critique. Once again, for the sake of clarity, this is not to associate Frank or his conclusions with communism or any grand view about the inevitable march of history. Rather, as will become clear later, this is just to say that Frank adopts and employs the same basic approach to studying history as Marx does. Philip Carl Salzman’s book represents the rival version, the one exemplified by Vico. Salzman’s focus is broader than Frank’s; he is concerned with a more general phenomena – the failure of democracy to take hold in the Middle East – and what he argues is a flawed conceptual framework that has prevented Western scholars and policy makers from understanding the origins of this failure. He does not begin with the same sort of moral judgment motivating his study, but his project does begin with an acknowledgement of the conflict in and around the Middle East as well as the disputes among Westerners over how best to engage the Middle East. This view of the present then guides his inquiry. Starting with the apparent differences between the Middle East and the West, he looks to discern the differentiating factors; being dissatisfied with the dominant scholarship on this topic he tries to identify the sources of error and provide a corrective model. Salzman contends that the dominance of post-colonial thought in the modern academy has meant that scholars have chosen not to examine the role of culture in shaping the attitudes and behaviors of Middle Eastern peoples. He argues, contra post-colonialist dogma, that understanding culture is both possible and necessary for understanding behavior. He then offers an explanation of a significant aspect of Middle Eastern culture that precludes the flourishing of democracy in the area: “Arab culture in the central Middle East is characterized by a particular form of social control that has a major impact on human experience and social life”. This form of social control Salzman calls, “balanced opposition” [69, p. 11]. From just these brief descriptions it should now be clear that the topics dealt with in these latter two books are surrounded by controversy. Frank’s argument is rejected in toto by American conservatives as they are the ones described as deranged and blamed for the deception. His book is full of bold

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descriptions, accusations and prescriptions and is overtly polemical. Still, Frank is a formidable intellect, a trained historian who provides copious documentation in making a persuasive argument. This argument cannot just be dismissed, nor can its conclusions be softened or diluted by adding to it an alternative account proceeding from a different form of historical inquiry. Such an alternative account would not so much provide additional facts or data as it would provide alternative descriptions and interpretations of the same data Frank has collected. Salzman not only challenges the scholarly orthodoxy of post-colonialism, he also argues for a conclusion that has major implications for the likelihood of the success of Western endeavors in the Middle East. Inextricable from his analysis are the emotionally charged topics of race, religion, and war. It is because they are surrounded by controversy and because so much is at stake that I am interested in discussing these topics. However, my interests at present are to identify and make sense of the ways in which the two rival versions of historical inquiry are employed and to provide a means for adjudication. The books by Frank and Salzman illustrate the importance of this adjudication by demonstrating the assumptions and implications of these rival versions. However, lest my argument about the rival versions of inquiry be lost in the controversy of American political debates and international scholarship and Middle East policy, I have introduced my topic with the relatively uncontroversial story of the ratification of the Sixteenth Amendment. Following my analysis of the two rival versions, I return to this story to demonstrate how the Viconian version might be further applied. With this preparation and example in mind, I then proceed to detailed discussions of Frank and Salzman, hoping the reader will accept with good faith my attempt to analyze their methods of inquiry while refraining from pronouncing on their ultimate conclusions.

Chapter 3

Vico and the Faculty of Imagination

Giambattista Vico’s New Science, first published in 1725, was an attempt to offer a scientific approach to the study of human society and history. Following Isaac Newton’s Principia (1687), which offered a systematic explanation of the physical world, and established “Rules for Reasoning in Philosophy”, there was a demand for a similar accounting of a science of humanity [63, p. 921]. Although Vico is notoriously obscure – he is neither as organized nor as precise as Newton – his work is brilliant nonetheless and we can extract from his work something like Newton’s “Rules for Reasoning in Philosophy” [58]. In this chapter I will draw out and explain the significant features of his work. What will become clear is that Vico offers an original method of historical inquiry with its own standards for knowledge and understanding. Though it is more accurate to say that his method is asserted rather than defended, it will be useful to examine it and its implications in order to contrast it with the rival method presented by Karl Marx, which will be discussed in the following chapter. Later, I will draw on the work of Alasdair MacIntyre in support of Vico’s posited method. In Section III of Book 1 of the New Science, Vico expresses the foundational premise of his method: But in the night of thick darkness enveloping the earliest antiquity, so remote from ourselves, there shines the eternal and never failing light of a truth beyond all question: that the world of civil society has certainly been made by men, and that its principles are theretofore to be found within the modifications of our own human mind. [74, p. 96]

It is important to note several points in this passage. First, that society has been made by men and that we can therefore understand society, is considered a truth beyond question. This appears dogmatic at first, but I hope to show, given Vico’s conception of human reason, such a truth is literally beyond question, that is, this truth is actually the foundation of reason and therefore is not something reason could question. As such it plays a part in Vico’s philosophy similar to the part played by the law of causation in Kant’s philosophy: it is a prerequisite for rendering experience intelligible. A corollary to this point is that the “eternal and never failing light” of reason does not shine beyond the earliest societies. In other words, the world of pre-societal humanity, if such a thing exists, is necessarily shrouded in darkness. Observation, even imagined, of the actions of pre-societal individuals, such as we J.R.L. Noland, Imagination and Critique, Philosophical Studies in Contemporary Culture 19, DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-3804-3_3,  C Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010

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will find in Marx’s work is, for Vico, an inconceivable endeavor because society is what provides the context that illumines and makes intelligible the behavior of individuals. Third, the human mind, its nature and workings, are not fixed. The project of historical inquiry is to examine “the modifications” of the mind. This remains possible because the minds of fellow humans are never altogether different from ours; however, we cannot presume uniformity. As Isaiah Berlin notes, “His [Vico’s] revolutionary move is to have denied the doctrine of a timeless natural law, the truths of which could have been known in principle to any man, at any time, anywhere” [11, p. 5]. This is because there is not, as Berlin explains, “only one structure of reality” [11, p. 6]. For Vico there are no innate ideas as Descartes had argued, nor are there any categories of experience that we can know a priori as Kant would later argue. The epistemological principle implicit in the above extended quote from Vico is expressed in depth in his earlier work, On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians (1710) [75]. This principle is that the true (verum) is the same as what is made (factum). The true, or that which is known, is the same as that which is made because the act of knowing is the act of putting together the elements of the thing that is known. It may be easiest to explain this position by contrasting it with other, more familiar, theories. For example, rationalists such as Plato and Descartes posited that we are able to identify the objects we experience because we recognize these objects as resembling some innate idea of same. Following in this tradition, Kant supposed that the human mind has necessarily various categories and concepts through which and according to which the raw data of experience is ordered and processed. To the contrary, the empiricist John Locke denied any innate ideas or necessary categories, and instead declared that the mind, beginning as a blank slate, was able to cobble together the basic qualities of experience to form ideas of objects. Though he denied the existence of innate ideas, Locke supposed a common capacity for such composition along with the basic reality of entities in the world as such. In other words, it is for us to discover the structure of the world and the objects in it. Vico’s theory is distinct from each of these theories, though perhaps closest to Locke’s. As with Locke, Vico does not appeal to any innate ideas or categories. Unlike Locke, though, Vico did not assume it as given that persons would organize the raw data of experience in a certain way. “Human truth is what man puts together and makes in the act of knowing it” [75, p. 46]. Humans create concepts, or universals, according to which we divide up the world, and thereby know the nature of these things. “God knows all things because in Himself He contains the elements with which He puts all things together. Man, on the other hand, strives to know these things by a process of division” [75, p. 48]. Whereas Locke assumes that experience comes to us in what he identifies as primary and secondary qualities, and it is for us to know the objects in the world through the correct organization or composition of these qualities, Vico argues that knowledge comes through division of the raw data of experience. There are no basic units that we all perceive and which are left to us to reassemble.

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In describing our formation of knowledge and the true in terms of division, Vico is similar to Aristotle. Aristotle argued that through a process he called “abstraction” we perceive the forms of reality. Yet the difference between Aristotle and Vico on this matter is significant. Whereas for both the methods of apprehension might appropriately be called abstraction, the processes are not the same. For Aristotle abstraction is done well when one discerns correctly the natures or forms truly present in matter. For Vico, however, such a performance is something we could never actually achieve. Ironically, Vico’s reasoning for this contention rests on a distinction he shares with Aristotle. Aristotle distinguishes between the ability to name something accurately and the ability to explain what makes a given thing the thing that it is. Though experience can give knowledge, he says, “Men of experience know that the thing is so, but do not know why, while the others know the ‘why’ and the cause”. Wisdom “is knowledge about certain causes and principles” [4]. Vico also associates understanding with grasping causes. For Vico, however, the type of cause one must grasp in order to truly know something is not a material cause but what might be identified with what Aristotle calls a “formal” cause. “For to know is to grasp the genus or the form by which a thing is made” [75, p. 55]. When it comes to natural objects this just is not the sort of knowledge we can have. “Of course, the physicist cannot truly define things, that is, he cannot assign to each its own nature and thus truly make it, for that is God’s right but is unlawful for man. So he defines the names themselves, on the model of God” [75, p. 51]. Since God creates, and creates with intention, only God can truly know the natures and purposes of the things he creates. We can, however, create names, which we can understand because we create them, and then apply them to the world, dividing it up and placing names on the categories we create in so doing. We can know the world only insofar as we know the categories and concepts we create to name the things in the world, which we perceive through abstraction; abstraction is performed in accordance with the concepts. Thus, our knowledge of the external material world is not certain. Still, and this is the point that is most significant for this study, because we do create human institutions, conventions, and customs, and not through abstraction, we can know them and understand them. These institutions, and not just their names, come to be because we create them. They are the product of human action and intention. Vico writes, “Whoever reflects on this cannot but marvel that the philosophers should have bent all their energies to the study of the world of nature, which since God made it, He alone knows; and that they should have neglected the study of the world of nations, or civil world, which, since men had made it, men could come to know” [74, p. 96]. As noted above, the epistemological principle at work here is that we can know that which we make. I can know that which I make because I know my own intentions and purposes. We, as a people, can know that which we make because we know our own intentions. Physicists do not make matter, they do not create motion, biologists do not make plants, and zoologists do not invent animals, but people do create institutions and societies and perform actions and therefore can know institutions

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and societies and actions in a way that other types of scientists cannot know their subjects. Accepting this, one might nevertheless wonder how we, as historians, can know that which was made many years in the past, by peoples and cultures other than our own. The faculty that assists this endeavor Vico calls fantasia, or imagination. Though, as it has famously been argued, we cannot know what it is like to be a bat, we can imagine what it must have been like to be another person in another place and time. As we will see, this ability is neither something innate, nor automatic; it is conditional upon participation in common institutions and practices and may require a good deal of work. Vico says that his New Science is to “be at once a history of the ideas, the customs, and the deeds of mankind” [74, p. 112]. Imagination is what allows us to understand the ideas, customs, and deeds of others. Vico considers imagination to be “nothing but extended or compounded memory” [74, p. 75]. As Berlin explains, a person is able to understand himself because he can “reconstruct imaginatively (in Aristotle’s phrase) what he did and what he suffered, his hopes, wishes, fears, efforts, his acts and his works, both his own and those of his fellows” [11, p. 114]. The means by which we understand ourselves are the same by which we understand others. This is made possible by the nature of language. History is preserved, however obscurely, in “the memories of the communities of the peoples” [74, p. 313]. It is language that unites communities and transmits their memories. Language arises only after the formation of community and it does so because of the “need to explain and be understood” [74, p. 22]. Language and community are intimately bound together and neither is possible without the shared memories that make relationships possible and provide standards for appropriate usage; maintenance of meaning is in turn essential for the maintenance of relationships and community. Vico holds that there are three fundamental institutions that all societies have in common. These institutions are foundational: they tie the community together and provide a framework within which action and intention become intelligible by establishing goods and ends around and towards which the community is oriented. The first of these institutions, and the first form of community, is marriage, which produces families, which in turn are the “seed-plots” of commonwealths [74, p. 8]. The other two institutions are burial and religion. Burial is a necessary institution for society because without it the bodies of the deceased would “remain unburied on the surface of the earth as food for crows and dogs. Certainly this bestial custom will be accompanied by uncultivated fields and uninhabited cities” [74, p. 99]. Burial, then, is necessary for community because without it the community could not maintain cities; the community would have no home. An implicit premise in support of this conclusion is that the living would not want to encounter the decaying bodies of the dead. This presupposes a felt connection between the living and those who go before them. Burial then serves the practical purpose of removing dead bodies from sight, but it also serves the symbolic, ritual purpose of establishing respect for the past.

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Marriage and burial both establish relationships and obligations of service and support between the able and the weak. Because neither children or the dying are able to care for themselves, nor can the dead bury themselves, these institutions are necessary for maintaining and sustaining society for any period of time. Vico’s insight that these institutions are essential for society is a sign that he recognized a basic fact about human life that seems to have gone overlooked in the many and various social contract theories. This fact is that society is made up of many more than able-bodied adult men. Children, the elderly, the sick, the disabled, these make up a greater portion of any society than do the able-bodied adult men. Radical dependence and inequality of ability are inescapable features of any society and, more importantly, every individual life, and for society to survive institutions must be in place to provide for the care of those who cannot offer care in return. Because the nature of such institutions is that they cannot be formed through an agreement between equals, Vico surmises that a third institution is necessary for bringing into being the former two. Religion is essential and universal because it is the recognition of God “which imposed form and measure on the bestial passions of these lost men and thus transformed them into human passions” [74, p. 101]. Vico supposes that religion, providing both a source of goodness and fear of God, is the impetus for self-control and prompts vows of fidelity and responsibility, both to one’s offspring and one’s ancestors. Certainly, pre-societal persons were not completely solitary; the sex-drive did not appear only after marriage. Yet, sex and procreation are neither sufficient for, nor equivalent to, marriage. Without the custom of marriage, “parents, since they are held together by no necessary bond of law, will proceed to cast off their natural children. Since parents may separate at any time, the children, abandoned by both, must lie exposed to be devoured by dogs” [74, p. 98]. Religion is the initial impetus behind both marriage and burial and it is also what sustains them in the face of diversions and distractions. A fourth condition, in addition to these three institutions, is necessary for community. With the formation of community comes the need, as noted above, to explain and be understood. Language satisfies this need. More specifically, the ability to name satisfies this need and naming requires abstraction. To explain and to be understood, to be able to think, one must be able to use general names, not only for objects but also for concepts, actions and intentions, among other things. Because, according to Vico, there are no innate ideas or necessary structures of thought, and because we are not God, the creator of all things, these names, or universals, had to be created; thus, Vico concludes, the first language speakers were poets – creators of names and meanings. This is the “master key of this Science” [74, p. 22]. The first language speakers must have created “imaginative genera” with which to categorize the objects in the world. They were poets insofar as they used metaphor to create a world of intelligible particulars. This is the master key for historical inquiry because it lets us know both the general strategy and the specific tactic for discovery of the past. The strategy it points to is not one of introspection nor of the opposite error, which is a quest for materialistic explanations. Instead, the strategy is one of recreation; the specific tactic for accomplishing this is imagination.

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We can make sense of what people did and why they did so because, as Vico stipulates, “of the indefinite nature of the human mind, wherever it is lost in ignorance man makes himself the measure of all things”. Furthermore, “It is another property of the human mind that whenever men can form no idea of distant and unknown things, they judge them by what is familiar and at hand” [74, p. 60]. All human societies share the three necessary institutions of religion, marriage, and burial; it follows that all humans share “the common sense of the human race” [74, p. 104]. Therefore, we can relate to, or understand, at least in part, how these first poets created their world. With the formation of these institutions people “began to think humanly”, and our imagination therefore is able to extend to them [74, p. 100]. Having been formed through participation in these three common institutions, we are able to understand the basic framework, and orientation within this framework, of those who came before us. Archaeologists and anthropologists are able to conclude that ancient structures such as Stonehenge and various pyramids served as calendars and astrological devices because the moon, the Sun, and the stars still hold their places in relation to these structures. If the orbit of the moon around the earth or that of the earth around the Sun had changed significantly, insight into the purposes of these devices would be impossible for us. It is only because we can place ourselves in the same positions in which the builders of Stonehenge stood, and look to the same sky to which they looked that we can discern their intentions. Similarly, it is only because we can place ourselves in the familial relationships and societal frameworks as ancient people, and appreciate the same ends they pursued, that we can begin to see the world as they saw it and imagine their projects and pursuits. Grasping this point is essential for understanding Vico’s science. Human thought, or, more truly, humanity, begins with these institutions. Biologically, the human race existed before these institutions, but these people are inaccessible to us because “their minds were not in the least abstract, refined, or spiritualized” [74, p. 118]. These institutions, because they shape our communities from which our language springs, provide us with what Vico calls a “mental dictionary”, common to all [74, p. 64]. Again, abstraction follows the creation of concepts; our key to understanding the world as these people saw it is that their abstraction was not random, it proceeded from a model with which we have intimate familiarity because it is the basis for our own thought and self-understanding. What Vico has offered here is something truly brilliant. He has offered a nonfoundationalist foundation for knowledge. Though Vico preceded both Hume and Kant, it will help to illustrate the significance of Vico’s move if contrasted with these two prominent, later philosophers. Hume had challenged both rationalists and empiricists who sought to offer support for certainty. He offered powerful arguments that our descriptions of experience, and our judgments about causation and morality, are simply matters of convention. In response, Kant proposed a transcendental foundation for knowledge. He argued that the structure of our minds necessarily orders experience in certain ways. He thereby tried to establish criteria for judgment and the uniformity

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of human reason. His masterful work, the Critique of Pure Reason, was, at least in part, an attempt to provide a justification for certainty in mathematics and science. Hume famously said, “reason is and ought only to be the slave of the passions”. Hume argued this because he believed that the concepts through which we view the world and according to which reason makes judgments are neither correspondent to objects in the world nor necessarily applied to them. Therefore, our descriptions of the world, and the judgments that follow from these descriptions must be products of passion, not reason. Though Kant conceded the point that we at least cannot know the true nature of the things in the world, our minds necessarily and universally interpret experience through specific categories and concepts and therefore our judgments can follow strictly from reason. For the historian, neither position is attractive. The Humean position limits drastically the potential field of study for the historian. If there is no necessary, universal structure of reality or experience, and all descriptions of the world and all judgments made in the world are matters of custom or taste, the historian is limited to studying the history of his or her own culture. He or she would have no access, no way to grasp the conventions of other, distant cultures because there is no rule or key by which we can understand these conventions. The beginnings or foundations of conventions would be untraceable as they would be random, not admitting of scientific study.1 The Kantian position is different but no better for the historian. This is because the Kantian rational being, insofar as he or she is rational, and therefore free, is stripped of those characteristics that identify him or her as a particular individual. Judgments made by pure reason, that is, reason untainted by passions or contingent factors such as experience or location, are made by a person acting according to his or her essential nature, and therefore uninfluenced by the vagaries of particularity. Much like the self of Descartes’ cogito ergo sum, the person as thinker, as rational being, is essentially (in the literal sense of the word) a bare particular. When the self is identified as such without any relation to the world or others around him or her, and therefore without any reference to duties, roles, or ends, the historian’s task of interpreting actions, or even identifying actions as such is either impossible or must be redefined (which is one way of understanding Marx’s work). With the Kantian understanding there is no way for an observer to determine the nature or proper description of the action because all that the observer can see are the physical aspects, or, for the historian, the consequences. But for the Kantian the action is defined, and thereby judged morally, based on the intention of the actor, not the consequences, which may have nothing really to do with the intention. In the classic case Kant considers of the possible duty to lie to protect another, the act of truth telling could be identified in multiple ways depending on one’s perspective. Given that in this case the actor expects consequences that he neither desires nor 1 It

must be acknowledged that Hume does, at places, refer to some common human sense that leads accounts for similarities in cultures and morality. However, he gives no explanation of this sense or how we could identify it or its workings. Furthermore, given his story about naming and judgment, he leaves no grounds for supposing that this sense is necessary or immutable.

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intends, the historian’s task of identifying the action properly is impossible. He or she cannot know the intentions of the actor and would presumably be examining the consequences to determine the actor’s intentions and character. Thus the historian would either have to study consequences, and not actions per se, or would have to study overt behavior and its material causes. The former is unappealing because it does not provide lessons upon which one might draw for guiding future action, which is a large part of the motivation for studying history; the latter has its difficulties as well, these will be addressed at length in the following chapters. Vico rejects philosophies that seek to identify some necessary essence of humanity which is possessed universally and which particularity only serves to obscure. He is critical, for example, of Descartes for the knowledge of his own existence upon which Descartes builds his epistemology is not knowledge of one’s self, nor is it self-understanding. Certainly it could not be used to explain or even describe one’s own history. Michael Polanyi expresses this point clearly when he writes that the Cartesian and Kantian endeavor reflects, “a passion for achieving absolutely impersonal knowledge which, being unable to recognize any persons, presents us with a picture of the universe in which we ourselves are absent” [61, p. 142]. The “I” of “I think therefore I am”, does not name any full person who has actually lived in this world, it simply refers to some plain locus of thought. What Vico’s work does is provide a way to understand humanity as a universal without losing the ability to appreciate humans as particulars. Because all human thought is shaped by the universal practices of marriage, burial and religion, there are some things about reason and experience that are necessary and hold universally. Yet, the identity of individual persons is incomplete apart from their membership in a particular community in a particular time and place. Much about judgment and experience is conventional, but because of the universal basis for human thought and the necessary conditions for conventions to form, we can through imagination come to understand the actions of persons in other times and cultures. According to this view, the particular participates fully in the universal while at the same time remaining unique. Those features that mark the individual’s particularity are neither extra nor unessential to the identity of the individual. There is difference within the unity of individuals participating in the universal because it is part of the nature of these individuals that they are embodied in particular times and places, formed by and through their experiences that, because of their embodiment, are all necessarily unique. Thus, those experiences that are contingent contribute to the identity of the individual. This difference and particularity does not, then, conflict with, nor do violence to, that which is universal in the individual. Instead it provides the individual with an identity. Rather than obscuring that which is universal and essential in humanity, the particular features of an individual are the means by which the universal is presented. These universals that form and are formed by communities and cultures, which enable communication, expression and understanding, are neither necessary and transcendental, as Kant would argue, nor are they arbitrary or random or inaccessible. These universals are of the sort described by Colin Gunton as

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“avowedly mediated through finite experience whose shape is in part determined by the historical and cultural contexts in which it takes place” [28, p. 132]. This is an unusual understanding of the nature of universals. They are not static, independent ideas; they are not known innately nor through contemplation, but through practice. They are only intelligible given familiarity with, and participation in, certain practices. We can grasp those foreign to us through imagination because despite their being foreign they are nonetheless formed in communities that share the most basic formative practices of marriage, burial, and religion. I have noted above, briefly, how and why these three practices are taken to be the foundations of human thought and community. At this point further explanation is in order. The three foundational institutions serve two purposes in this context. The first is that by bringing about and maintaining community they bring about language. Language allows for reason and judgment, thereby providing an impetus for action other than bodily needs and desires. The second service that these institutions perform is to provide for individual identity in relation to others; with these institutions come ordered relationships with duties, roles, and purposes, thereby providing a context within which one can make judgments and rendering the actions of others intelligible as such. Prefacing his explanation of the necessity of these institutions for the historian’s project, Vico writes, “men, because of their corrupted nature, are under the tyranny of self-love, which compels them to make private utility their chief guide” [74, p. 101]. Pre-societal persons, with no language, and therefore no ability to reason using universals, are unable to recognize any imperatives for themselves other than physical gratification and preservation. They have no duties to others; they can recognize no way they “ought” to act because they lack the necessary framework within which to make categorical judgments. The pre-societal person is essentially an animal and cannot be considered free in any historically or morally significant sense. According to Vico, the necessary first step toward becoming recognizably human, and, as such, free, is recognition of God. Vico is not as helpful as he might be in explaining why this must be the case, yet what he does offer is enough. He posits that the “first men. . . must have done their thinking under the strong impulsion of violent passions, as beasts do” [74, p. 101]. As such, these men were not free, and we cannot accurately consider their behavior to be action. Yet, by examining the earliest poets and the theology present in their poems, songs, and myths, we find a clue that points us to an explanation of their ability to break the causal chain of the passions. Here we can see that their imputing the motions of nature (such as thunder and lightning) to some “frightful” deity gave them a model from which “must have sprung the conatus proper to the human will”.2 It was, for example, the impression that thunder expressed the displeasure of god that gave the earliest people cause to “hold in check the motions impressed on the mind by the body”. These

2 “Conatus”

is defined in On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians as “the power of motion”. Thus, the conatus of the will is the power to move the will.

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people would have already been disposed to look for God because “man, fallen into despair of all the succors of nature, desires something superior to save him” [74, p. 100]. Contrary to Hobbes who supposed that persons in the state of nature would join together in a federation to alleviate their nasty and brutish life, Vico holds that prior to being able to make any such decision, people must have turned to God. He says, “Without religion no commonwealths can be born” [74, p. 70]. Fearing that God was angry with them led them to consider their own actions and control their passions. This was the birth of the will, so to speak, a prerequisite for making pacts and forming alliances.3 The recognition of God brought about the birth of the human will that sought to transform the “bestial passions” into human passions. The emergence of this will and the resulting human passions led to the institution of marriage. As Vico describes it, “bestial lust” brought men and women to seek each other’s company, and “the stern restraints of frightful religions” kept them together and established the family [74, p. 196]. The family is important for several reasons. First it establishes for individuals an identification of one’s own interests with those of others. That is, the man who marries and has children, for example, now identifies the interests of his wife and children with his own interests. As families expand and communities are formed, the man now identifies the interests of the community with his as well. With this institution and the accompanying expansion of interests, come family and community roles that provide individuals with an identity and make the actions of others intelligible as in pursuit of some commonly recognized end. Persons thus never act as persons simpliciter, but as husband, son, brother, father, friend, and so forth. Families, because they produce and care for children, are also important for maintaining and preserving the language and reason of the community. In a sense, burial performs a similar role because, in addition to removing dead bodies, thereby making cities inhabitable, the burial ritual helps to instill a respect for the traditions and customs of the past, strengthens the relationship between generations, and encourages the identification of self-interest with the interests of the community. Burying the dead shows respect for one’s elders and, because burial is something one cannot do for oneself but for which one must rely on others, with no possibility of holding them to their commitment, it necessitates trust and respect between generations and depends for its perpetuation on a sense of duty to others. Participation in these three institutions is what forms community, allows for language and reason, and makes persons human. It is because all persons are formed through these institutions that we, despite our differences, can understand the actions of others in the past. We can make sense of their actions because, with the aid of the faculty of imagination, we can understand their intentions and obligations and how they saw the world. Still, one might ask how, if as Vico says, it

3 Proverbs

1:7 states, “Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom”, though Vico echoes this he makes no reference or allusion to this passage.

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is “beyond our power to enter into the vast imagination of those first men” who lived before these institutions were formed, we can truly understand the significance and nature of these institutions. Explicit in Vico’s story is the premise that we cannot understand the behavior of people prior to their participation in these institutions. Therefore, it looks as if the formation of these institutions cannot be understood as intentional activity; at the very least it seems that we could not claim to be able to recreate imaginatively their birth. How, then, can we understand these institutions and the role they play in our lives if we did not intentionally make them? This is a serious objection to Vico’s theory. As Bruce Mazlish asks, “how can we really claim that man consciously ‘makes’ his history?” [54, p. 29]. In addition to Vico’s recognition that the mind of pre-societal man is inaccessible to us, he repeatedly acknowledges that the objects of history are often the unintended consequences of human action. He says his New Science is a “history of the institutions by which, without human discernment or counsel, and often against the designs of men, providence has ordered this great city of the human race” [74, p. 102]. If what is made is made accidentally, can we still know that which is made? A parallel and potentially more damaging objection is, allowing that we can know that which we make, how can we know ourselves if we are not responsible for making ourselves? Vico says in On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians, “For the mind does not make itself as it gets to know itself, and since it does not make itself, it does not know the genus or the mode by which it knows itself” [75, p. 52]. This is potentially more damaging because this calls into question the reliability of the faculty necessary for historical knowledge, imagination. If we do not make ourselves, it is not immediately clear how can know ourselves; and if we cannot know ourselves, how can we really know our intentions and thereby know that which we make? This last question is fundamental for historical inquiry and is logically prior to any endeavor in this field. I contend that there are two general paths one can take from this point. In other words, there are two basic ways of answering this question. These two ways are the ways of Vico and Marx and their versions of historical inquiry are the two referenced in the title of this present work. I say that this question is fundamental for historical inquiry because how it is answered will determine the units of observation, the method of study, and the types of conclusions one draws. I say that there are two basic ways of answering this question because one either posits that humans act freely and thus seeks to understand their intentions, as Vico does, or one posits that human actions are not free and therefore seeks determining material factors to explain behavior, as Marx does. I shall try to make clear in what follows that this question is the point of divergence for these two philosophers. Marx writes in Capital that he agrees with Vico that “the essence of the distinction between human history and natural history is that the former is made by man and the latter is not” [54, p. 21]. He therefore agrees that human history should be more accessible to us than natural history. But how and why this is the case is much different for Vico and Marx.

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The preliminary premises for the study of human history are quite similar for these two philosophers. In fact, one can cite passages from the two that are strikingly alike. Vico stipulates that, “Men first feel necessity, then look for utility, next attend to comfort” [74, p. 78]. Later he explains, “In search of these natures of human institutions our Science proceeds by a severe analysis of human thoughts about the human necessities or utilities of social life” [74, p. 103]. Marx argues in The German Ideology, “The premises from which we begin are not arbitrary ones, not dogmas, but real premises from which abstraction can only be made in the imagination. They are the real individuals, their activity and the material conditions under which they live” [42, p. 149]. And again, “life involves before everything else eating and drinking, a habitation, clothing and many other things. The first historical act is thus the production of the means to satisfy these needs, the production of material life itself” [42, p. 156]. However, the similarities end here because Marx does not trust Vico’s method of historical inquiry. Whereas Vico is undaunted by the objection that the faculty of imagination might not be trustworthy because we do not make ourselves and our actions often have unintended consequences, Marx seeks different units of observation and a different faculty for making judgments about history. Marx thinks that the language and consciousness that emerge from the foundational institutions obscure rather than illuminate human history. Despite this objection, Vico maintains that, “history cannot be more certain than when he who creates the things also narrates them” [74, p. 104]. Marx could not be more certain that this is not the case, writing, “Whilst in ordinary life every shopkeeper is very well able to distinguish between what somebody professes to be and what he really is, our historians have not yet won even this trivial insight” [42, p. 175]. Marx proceeds to describe language, consciousness, and human institutions as following from the quest of individuals, in the settings in which they find themselves, to meet their physical necessities. For Marx, human nature is observed, or assumed to obtain, in these pre-societal individuals; human history is the story of this nature being obscured and hindered by society and its institutions. Vico, however, holds that human nature only emerges after the formation of society following the appearance of the three primary institutions. Whereas Marx does not consider the individual in society to be truly free and therefore looks for material causes to explain behavior, for Vico, individuals can only be considered free once they are members of society. It is then, and only then, that reason can be understood as guiding the movements of persons and only then that there is a framework within which the historian can identify these movements as actions and render them intelligible. The following chapter is devoted to describing and explaining Marx’s method; the remainder of this chapter will focus on the reasons for Vico’s persistence in the face of this objection. There are two strains of argument that we can find in Vico’s writings that help us understand why he is untroubled by the role of chance, or divine providence, in the formation of human institutions and society. The first has to do with his understanding of the nature of freedom. He thinks freedom is only possible in the context of a society. The second reason has to do with his conception of the nature of reason

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and scientific inquiry. Vico contends that historians are bound necessarily by their own particularity; there are no concepts available to the historian that are intelligible independently of place and time.4 There is no way to view the past through a lens wiped clean of the framework of tradition. Furthermore, apart from tradition, the concept of “law” that is necessary for scientific thought is absent. Thus, as imperfect as imagination may be, it is our only hope for historical insight. For Vico, freedom is more accurately described as autonomy; a person is free when he or she truly governs him or herself. Persons become truly human when they “hold in check the motions impressed on the mind by the body” [74, p. 101]. There are several necessary conditions for autonomy. First, there has to be a self; before there can be self-governance, there must be a self to be governed. Second, there must be a law according to which the self is governed. Third, this law must be chosen or accepted; a body that behaves in a law-like manner that could not behave otherwise is not autonomous. Fourth, following from the third, this law must have authority; in other words, the individual choosing the law must have some reason to do so. Independently of society, none of these conditions obtain. The pre-societal person is governed by “bestial passions”. He or she has no concept of will, no concept of choice, movement follows pursuit of the fulfillment of these passions. As detailed above, it is only with the sense of a displeased divinity, a displeased, powerful other, that the concept of self begins to emerge along with the concept of law. In fact, Vico traces the concept of law to the first concept of God, or “Jove”. He notes that the Latin “ius”, meaning “law” was a “contraction of the ancient Ious (Jove)” [74, p. 125]. The awareness of self as self is only possible when defined against something over and above the self. Without an other, there is no impetus for defining or examining the self. Without something not only distinct, but also different and greater than the self, there is no impetus to recognize the self as limited or to understand others that are distinct but not different as such. In other words, for Vico, without the concept of God, an individual person would not have the necessary framework for recognizing other persons as the same as oneself. Prior to this awareness of the divine, then, persons were not self-conscious and could not, therefore, be self –governing. This initial concept of law is necessary for the ability to think using universals. Universals are names. Names are types of signs that operate in a law-like way, always used to designate the same thing, or the same property in distinct things. The word “name” derives from “nomos”, the Latin word for “law”. The ability to use names and think with universals is necessary for judgment. Judgment is necessary for obedience to a law. Without judgment and law, movements would be driven by passion and impulse and would not be free. The transition Vico describes here is the transition from mythos to logos as the guiding principle according to which

4 Though

Marx makes similar contentions, we will see below that he does not find himself bound by this restriction but, to the contrary, appeals to an ability to step outside of the consciousness of his age as he makes his historical observations.

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the world is perceived and understood. His argument is that prior to any perception of order and assumption of coherence or non-random conformity or regularity in nature, one must first have a primitive conception of law. This, he thinks, is necessarily subsequent to an awareness of divinity and the properties of persistent power and constant will. When, with the formation of society, persons begin to “think humanly”, they do not lose their bodily urges and “bestial passions”. Obedience to the law, then, is always a choice no matter how much it may also be a matter of custom. Persons looking back in time at the actions of other humans, or at the actions of their peers, can recognize actions as the result of obedience to a law because they know of their own capacity for choice and for obedience or disobedience. Finally the choice to obey law and control one’s passions must follow from some recognition of the authority of the law. Persons cannot create the law for themselves for two reasons. First, to do so would nonetheless require acceptance of concepts, which are laws in themselves, according to which judgments are made, and which emerge from the practices of society. Without concepts with which to legislate and without some sense of justice to guide legislation, any law legislated by the self could only have its origins in the natural passions of the individual and therefore would neither be truly human nor freely chosen. In order for something to be an object of choice it must exist before the choice is made; it must be given. As Iris Murdoch writes, “I can only choose within the world I can see” [57, p. 329]. The world within which we see is created through the concepts following from practice. Furthermore, to be chosen an object must be recognized as being good. Vico says, “When a truth owes its existence to the mind that knows it, then the true coincides with the good” [75, p. 52]. The authority of God comes from His being the “author” of the concept; God is authoritative concerning marriage, for example, because He is the creator of the concept and its goodness. It is important to appreciate Vico’s conception of human freedom in order to understand his reliance on imagination and his remaining unperturbed by the obscurity of the exact nature of the origins of society. For Vico, as for Kant, freedom and reason are necessarily tied to each other. Humans are only free insofar as their actions follow from the use of reason. Yet for Vico, unlike Kant, the use of reason does not preclude the use of emotion; actions from reason and actions from emotion are not necessarily distinct. In this sense, Vico is again similar to Aristotle. In fact, looking at some of Aristotle’s writings can help elucidate and support Vico’s position. Aristotle explains in the Nicomachean Ethics [3] that moral excellence has to do with pleasure and pain, and that moral education is education in feeling pleasure and pain at the “proper things”. Such moral excellence requires, then, among other things, self-control. Self-control is a virtue and allows us to be free from the “bestial and slavish” passions that humans share with the animals [3, p. 78]. The person who has self-control can abstain from bodily pleasures and enjoy doing so; self-control and exercise of the virtues lead to specifically human pleasures and are pursued for this reason.

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The exercise of these virtues requires wisdom, the ability to judge properly and to recognize the good. The good for a particular thing is determined by its function. Humans only have discernible and definable functions within the context of a society and its institutions. So, freedom requires self-control, and self-control is only possible when the person in question has some good towards which to orient himself, some means of judging properly with the goal of feeling properly. Reason is made possible only in society because society provides the framework for naming and the context for making judgments. Reason is used both in the choice to cultivate the individual’s enjoyment of the right things and in the actual pursuit of this enjoyment. Thus, reason is not a slave of the passions, as Hume said, but, one might say, the chooser and cultivator of the passions. In “The Iliad or The Poem of Force”, Simone Weil defines “force” as “that x that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing” [77]. A person who becomes a thing is no longer free; his or her movements are no longer intelligible as actions with intentions, but movements caused by force. We are moved by forces outside of us and by the force of our natural, animal passions; self-love can also be an overwhelming force. “A moderate use of force, which alone would enable man to escape being enmeshed in its machinery, would require superhuman virtue” [77, p. 235]. This virtue is what Aristotle calls self-control, and what Vico considers to be what makes us human, that is, what allows us to rise above the level of animals. Freedom from the force of our passions, the ability to choose and control them, is only possible within the context of a society that provides institutional roles and, thereby, an orientation to the good. A free action is one chosen in accordance with reason, but this does not entail for Vico, as it does for Kant, the absence of emotion. Actions motivated by emotions properly felt at the proper occasions are the product of reason and virtue. Virtue allows for a choice between animal and human passions. Imagination is a reliable faculty, allowing us to understand our own past actions as well as those of others, because the three institutions, which in their original form were not made by men, are nevertheless the foundation, or basis, for all choice and thought. They are the prerequisites for human thinking. We cannot understand pre-societal humans, and we did not create the three institutions in their original form. Still, because there is no human thought before or apart from these institutions, there is no human nature for them to obscure or distort. Admittedly, accessibility to the distant past may admit of degrees, with more remote times being less clear to us, but the initial opacity does not block inquiry because as soon as humans participate in these institutions and practices, they begin to shape them to their particular circumstances and basic needs, and in so doing become the authors of the particular incarnations of these institutions. Though the initial making of these institutions may not be understood as intentional, these institutions are forever being remade and each subsequent creation can be recognized and understood as intentional. Because families play a foundational role in society, children are raised with the customs and concepts of the society. Each person is shaped by the stories, customs and concepts of their community. Thus, as Charles Wood describes them, “concepts. . .

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are creatures of history: they come into being, are molded and occasionally transformed through their complex and flexible relationships to other concepts and to the particularities of human existence” [81, p. 76]. So, the object of study for the historian can be the actions of individuals and societies as they understood them and reported them. These actions can rightly be understood as being free and, therefore, the historian need not seek elsewhere for causal explanation. Because, and only because, the actions were free can we truly call them actions; this gives us a means for naming properly and restricts us from renaming according to some perceived universal or eternal standard. Furthermore, because these actions are free and can be understood in themselves, as they are, and need not and could not be explained more accurately with other concepts, the faculty the historian must use to grasp the framework within which these actions took place is imagination. Failure to appreciate the necessity of employing imagination will lead to the anachronistic application of concepts and assumption of intentions. The ability to call action following from emotion or passion “free” is essential to Vico’s project. Without it, there is no way for the historian to understand what “it must have been like” to be those persons in the past the historian is studying. If freedom is understood only in the Kantian sense, or if the possibility of freedom is denied completely, the historian has no need to study particular individuals, for they are all just role players and interchangeable, and the project of history now becomes much more like the reconstruction of some past physical event than an attempt to know “what it must have been like”. “Without some ability to get into the skin of others, the human condition, history, what characterizes one period or culture as against others cannot be understood” [11, p. 107]. This conception of freedom is radically different from the one we will find in Marx’s writings and which is expressed with illuminating clarity by Hegel. Hegel writes, “When I will what is rational, I act not as a particular individual, but in accordance with the concepts of ethics in general, in an ethical act I vindicate not myself but the thing. But a person who does something perverse gives the greatest prominence to his particularity” [31, p. 49]. Working with this understanding of freedom and particularity, and operating from the observation that persons are blinded by their particularity and as such are not free, Marx seeks the causal determinants of human activity. That is, he seeks to understand the perversions of the universal essence of humanity and their causal efficacy. Marx declines to attend to thoughts and ideas in themselves in seeking explanations for historical events because he follows Hegel who held that “this process whereby the particular is superseded and raised to the universal is what is called the activity of thought”. And, “here is the point at which it becomes clear that it is only as thinking intelligence that the will is truly itself and free” [31, p. 53]. In other words, a person qua particular is not really free; his or her action does not proceed exclusively from his or her essence as a person but is influenced, perverted, by this particularity. To the contrary, Vico argues that it is only insofar as one is a particular that one is fully a person. Both sides presented here hold that reason, the ability to think, is the essential identifying feature of personhood; the question at the bottom of our

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quest to adjudicate between these two rival versions of historical inquiry is whether particularity is necessary for this feature to obtain or an obstacle to its exercise. Vico’s philosophy directs us to identify events and individuals as unique, as particulars, and therefore as the proper objects of study. Yet it also allows us a way to compare these unique individuals and events and to apply the knowledge we gain about them to our own endeavors in shaping current and future events. His historical method is, therefore, a method for a science of particulars, which is really a remarkable feat. By proposing a way to study human history that does not deny human freedom in particularity he enables historians to tell stories about persons whose lives are familiar to us and with whom we can identify. This recognition of freedom, though, does not prevent the historian from making generalizations or finding lessons applicable to the present and future. This science may not generate laws and it may not produce predictive certainty, but it does offer a uniform method for finding understanding. Its goal is a different type of knowledge than is sought after in the physical sciences and its method is therefore appropriately distinct.

Chapter 4

Marx’s Critique of History

Karl Marx never devoted an entire work, or even an extended portion of a work, to explaining his philosophy of science or exactly how history could be studied scientifically. In order to grasp the nature of Marx’s method one has to extract his thoughts on the matter from his various works and piece them together, drawing further on his practice of this science to form a coherent picture [20, p. 106]. This piecing together is the project of this chapter. I will not be concerned to explain in detail the results of Marx’s observations, but rather the approach he takes to his study. Marx is especially interesting as a philosopher of science because though he calls for a purely empirical investigation, he does not trust appearances. As Adrienne Fulco writes, “For Marx. . . it is reality and illusion that are the true opponents in history” [25, p. 137]. Marx’s unique contribution is to offer a system of inquiry into the essences behind appearances without appealing to gnostic insights, rationalist premises, or extensive metaphysical commitments. Such appeals are not necessary for Marx because the problem to be overcome is not the fallibility of our senses, nor the incomplete reality of the things we encounter in the world, but rather the given framework through which we perceive the world. Thus, Fulco’s characterization is apt; illusion and reality really are opponents in Marx’s view and the illusion is man-made. The competition is for acceptance; in this competition illusion actively obscures reality. The problem is not that all we have access to is illusion, nor is it that our senses necessarily distort reality; reality is always present and perceivable but perception of reality requires discernment. The term Marx uses for this discernment is “unmasking”, the procedure for unmasking is “critique”. Marx’s skepticism results from a distrust of the authority of tradition and he therefore calls for a “ruthless criticism of everything existing” [43, p. 13]. Previous accounts of history have been built on metaphysical, that is, religious, assumptions and attempted to fit historical data into an assumed framework. Instead, “In direct contrast to German philosophy which descends from heaven to earth, here we ascend from earth to heaven” [42, p. 154]. Marx will begin with observable, concrete data and build his theory from the data, not interpret his data according to an assumed theory.

J.R.L. Noland, Imagination and Critique, Philosophical Studies in Contemporary Culture 19, DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-3804-3_4,  C Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010

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Criticism of existing thought or explanations consists of refusing to take historical explanations on authority, instead questioning them, putting them to the test by performing one’s own observations. To do so one must strip away the given framework and begin with the raw data of unfiltered observation. Marx writes, “the reader who on the whole desires to follow me must be resolved to ascend from the particular to the general” [44, p. 3]. The given framework that must be stripped away is that of ideology and received assumptions about social reality. It is the story that is told about society and its members that obscures or denies reality and thereby keeps individuals from freedom. In order to explain the nature and origin of ideology it will help first to begin where Marx does, with the first premises of the study of history. Marx strives for a purely empirical approach to the study of human history. “Where speculation ends – in real life – there real, positive science begins” [42, p. 155]. This study must begin with the observation of individual persons rather than ideas or institutions because individual persons are both ontologically and temporally prior to ideas and institutions. This notion is repeated throughout Marx’s writings. “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness” [44, p. 4]. This is echoed in “The German Ideology” where Marx discusses this at greater length. “We do not set out from what men say, imagine, conceive, nor from men as narrated, thought of, imagined, conceived, in order to arrive at men in the flesh”. This is because these thoughts and conceptions are produced by men; they are the “efflux of their material behavior”. In the same way, institutions are also the product of “the life process of definite individuals” [42, p. 154]. Persons produce ideas, not the other way around, and institutions are only abstractions, persons are concrete [45, p. 18]. Ironically, these very abstractions ultimately serve to shape consciousness. Individuals then end up being bound and constrained by the concepts that were in the first place produced to serve them. Therefore, The premises from which we begin are not arbitrary ones, not dogmas, but real premises from which abstraction can only be made in the imagination. They are the real individuals, their activity and the material conditions under which they live, both those which they find already existing and those produced by their activity. These premises can thus be verified in a purely empirical way. (emphasis added) [42, p. 149]

Historical inquiry must begin with the observation of individual humans and the material conditions in which they find themselves. There are two reasons for this. The first is that only such observation can be purely empirical and, therefore, trustworthy. To study ideas and institutions in the hope of understanding human behavior would be to bestow upon them an independent ontological status that is just not empirically warranted. The second has to do with the implicit Aristotelian notion that one can only understand something if one knows its cause. Ideas and institutions cannot be understood in abstraction from their causes, which are individuals and their interaction with the material world in which they find themselves. This initial interaction with the world in which they find themselves is intelligible because of the basic, empirically verifiable fact that “men must be in a position to

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live in order to be able to ‘make history.’ But life involves before everything else eating and drinking, a habitation, clothing and many other things” [42, pp. 155–156]. Thus, a critique of the prevailing story of humanity and society begins with a stripping away of all that is theory-laden, all that is given, and builds a new story starting with those basic premises that are purely empirical. Through this stripping away Marx finds the key to understanding the nature of society and consciousness. Whereas Vico understood the project of history to be understanding the free actions of men and women in the past and found the key to this to be the faculty of imagination, Marx understands the project of historical inquiry to be possible only because men and women are not truly free. It is through the recognition and appreciation of life’s necessities that the historian can trace the story of history. Were it the case that nature provided all that people needed, removing the need for labor, there would be no history [17, p. 23]. For Marx, then, human history begins with labor, not consciousness; labor is Marx’s master key. “The first historical act”, that is, the first act that we as historians can identify, recognize, and explain, “is thus the production of the means to satisfy these needs [eating, drinking, habitation and so forth] and the production of material life itself” [17, p. 156]. This initial production of the means of survival simultaneously produces new needs. Then, “men, who daily remake their own life, begin to make other men, to propagate their kind”. Thereby the family is created. The production of the means of survival, the production of new needs, and the family, all “have existed since the dawn of history and the first men” [17, p. 157]. As Terrence Ball notes, once the historian begins with the Marx’s first premise of human history, “everything else follows from the need to produce means of subsistence” [6, p. 128]. These definite human individuals whose existence is the starting point for the study of history immediately begin to organize themselves in cooperative ventures for survival. Labor is the master key for deciphering history because these individuals have to labor to survive. A purely empirical approach must begin with just human individuals and their physical surroundings. Theory must follow from observation so it cannot be used to explain observations of the first actions of these individuals. The recognition of the necessity of labor provides a way to interpret and explain these initial observations without using non-empirical theories of motivation and intention. The form of labor and the way the first individuals organize themselves is determined by the material conditions in which they find themselves. This organization requires language. According to Marx, “Language, like consciousness, only arises from the need, the necessity, of intercourse with other men” [42, p. 158]. The form or nature of this consciousness will be the result of the nature of this intercourse; it will follow from the structure of the organization, or society, that forms around labor. If labor and labor relations determine consciousness and language then the actions of individuals and societies can be explained and predicted with empirical data and without appeal to metaphysical entities such as universals and concepts such as justice or goodness or spirit.

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The causal relationship between labor and consciousness is not perfectly law –like; consciousness is not merely an epiphenomenon of labor. As Franz Jakubowski describes it, the relationship is that of base to superstructure and though the superstructure is dependent upon the base, it also influences the base [33, p. 57]. It has already been noted above that Marx distrusts consciousness, he considers his project to be aiming at a reform of consciousness. In fact, he says that consciousness presents the world to us as does a camera obscura, that is, upside down [42, p. 154]. At this point it remains to be explained both how labor produces this deceptive consciousness and how the careful observer, i.e. Marx, could become aware of this. The first task is to explain how consciousness develops in such a way as to obscure reality. Consciousness begins as “merely consciousness concerning the immediate sensuous environment and consciousness of the limited connection with other persons and things outside the individual who is growing self-conscious” [42, p. 158]. Quickly, as individuals organize themselves and work together to produce their means of survival, labor roles are divided. This is seen initially in the natural and necessary division of labor in sex and childbearing. Later, labor is divided according to accidents of individual difference such as strengths and needs. The critical division is the division between mental and physical labor. This is critical because “From this moment consciousness can flatter itself that it really is something other than consciousness of existing practice, that it really represents something real” [42, p. 159]. This is the beginning of theology and philosophy, the beginning of theoretical thought in general.1 Jakubowski explains that it is this “separation of mental from physical labor that permits the existence of a consciousness which believes itself to be independent of material factors. Ideology, i.e., false consciousness, originates from this circumstance” [33, p. 83]. Not only does this division of labor result in the illusion that consciousness is something distinct from actual being and practice, it also results in what Marx calls “the contradiction between the interest of the separate individual or the individual family and the communal interest of all individuals” [42, p. 160]. So, there are two ways in which consciousness becomes false or illusory and the second way builds upon the first. The mistaken belief, which follows from the division of mental and physical labor, that consciousness is independent of material factors, or as Marx might put it, independent of being, leads individuals and societies to look for the true meanings of words and concepts. People begin to ask, for example, what “goodness” really is, or begin to assume that, because thought is distinct from practice or being, the aspect of persons that does the thinking must be distinct from the physical body. In other words, moral philosophy, metaphysics, and religion arise from this mistaken notion, namely, that consciousness is independent of material factors. Once one recognizes this phenomenon, it is easy to anticipate the second way in which consciousness is falsified. Following the advent of questions about the true meanings of moral concepts and the true nature of the self are those who offer

1 Though

Marx does not mention this, he may have in mind the conditions in ancient Greece that made Socrates possible.

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authoritative answers to these questions. Because mental labor is already divided from physical labor, those involved in mental labor become the authorities. This class already rules over the physical laborers, now the answers they give to these questions serve to strengthen and perpetuate their rule. Marx writes, “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas”, and “The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships” [42, p. 171]. What this means, as Terrence Ball explains, is that the ruling class does not rule by force alone, rather, another factor is even greater, “its ability to influence, if not control, the thoughts, the beliefs and ideas – the ‘consciousness’ – of the working class” [6, p. 130]. It is not necessarily the case that the ruling class plots and purposefully puts forward a false consciousness, though this may indeed happen in some cases. Instead, following Marx’s explanation for how consciousness develops, those whose lives are dedicated to thought and are not actively involved in physical labor will not only have the time to engage in abstract thought, but will have their consciousness shaped by their own practices and conditions. The ideology that develops will confirm and affirm the lives of those producing the ideology. The working class will tend to accept the illusions put forward by the ruling class because the working class is simply too busy to devote time to thought and will accept the authority of those already designated as thinkers. “Once the ruling ideas have been separated from the ruling individuals and, above all, from the relationships which result from a given stage of the mode of production,. . .it is very easy to abstract from these various ideas ‘the idea,’ the notion, etc., as the dominant force in history” [42, p. 174]. Ideas are taken to have an existence of their own, philosophy develops to study these ideas, and history becomes understood to be driven by these illusory entities. The historian who attempts to explain historical eras and events by examining the leading ideas of the time, perceiving them as causally efficacious, will actually have mistaken cause for effect. Again, “It is not the consciousness of men that determine their social being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness”. It is out of these conflicts of interests between the individual and the community and between the thinking/ruling class and the working class that the State emerges [42, p. 160]. Marx explains that, “the State is the form in which the individuals of a ruling class assert their common interests” [42, p. 187]. Although “The state is an abstraction. The people alone is what is concrete”, because the state is granted an independent existence through abstraction, the good of the state is set in opposition to the good of the individual [45, p. 18]. In fact, as Jakubowski notes, “the emergence of the state presupposes that there is already an opposition between individual and social interests” [33, p. 41]. Marx’s explanation of political thought and discourse follows the same pattern explained above. Although it is truly nothing more than the form society takes on according to its material conditions and methods of production, because of the divorce of being and consciousness, it comes to be seen as an abstract entity. Theories about the origin and nature of the state arise, as do arguments about sovereignty and legitimacy.

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The division of labor that begat the separation of practice and thought and the granting of independent existence to predicates sets individuals at odds with one another and makes these individuals beholden and subject to illusory entities like the state. People, and peoples, become bound by laws and political systems. Therefore the lesson for the historian is that the state is just the superstructure, “the form in which class struggles occur” [33, p. 50]. If the state is “the form in which the individuals of a ruling class assert their common interests”, all of the institutions within the state are the means by which this class creates the ideology, that is, the false consciousness that binds the working class. Concepts such as “law” and “justice” are merely abstractions, part of the ideology that allows the state to suppress its subjects. The ideological superstructure is “the form in which men become conscious” of the class struggles that are manifested in the political and legal superstructures. Once again, if the historian attempts to explain political events by reporting on the dominant or emerging ideas about law and justice, he or she will fail to recognize the true forces of change in human society, for “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles” [46, p. 473]. Changes in society do not follow from changes in ideas, instead, changes in ideas, or consciousness, follow from, and are expressions of, changes in material conditions and in social relations [46, p. 489]. The historian should not study what men have said and written about themselves and their time but should instead study the economic conditions and changes. The latter can be studied “with the precision of natural science”, while religious, moral, and philosophical conflicts are just the “ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out” [47, p. 5]. These ideological forms are necessary for the state’s existence and survival. As Jeffrey Reiman says, “Ideology refers to ideas that represent society in its best light, as if it were the highest expression of universal ideas” [67, p. 158]. These ideas are perpetuated by the state and become institutionalized and entrenched. The citizens or subjects of a state, then, necessarily live in a condition of false consciousness. This false consciousness is not simply a state of error or misunderstanding about the nature of the world and state, it is more than this. This false consciousness is also false self-consciousness. The stories or traditions that inform the self-understanding of the citizens and the conditions in which they live and work distort or obscure their true essence. This condition of false self-consciousness is called alienation. Alienation, or estrangement, results from labor, and, in turn, ideology, and is a condition of separation of an individual from his or her essence. Erich Fromm explains that “the concept of alienation is based on the distinction between existence and essence” [23, p. 47]. The division of labor results in the alienation of being and thought. Labor in general results in the alienation of an individual’s body from himself. A man’s body becomes an object, a tool, and his life becomes something he “has”, and something he works to preserve, leaving the man in opposition to himself [53, pp. 79–87]. “The alienation of self-consciousness establishes thinghood” [53, p. 114]. Man’s essence as subject is estranged from his existence as object. Alienation is an important concept in Marx’s theory of history and not just in the sense that it is a diagnosis of a pervasive condition. It plays two additional significant

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roles. The first is eventual catalyst for the communist revolution that will bring about the end of history. When alienation reaches its highest stage, when man as subject is completely separated from man as object, this alienation will become recognizable, the alienated man will become conscious of his essence and his situation and this will lead to revolution [33, p. 114]. If the first role is mechanistic, the second is explanatory. The condition of alienation helps to explain why, as Marx claims, “History must. . . always be written according to an extraneous standard” [42, p. 165]. The apparent and felt motivations of historical agents are not reliable because these individuals are alienated from themselves; their own essences are hidden from them. Alienation is the key to understanding why, despite the “illusion of free will”, history can still be studied with scientific precision [42, p. 187]. For Marx, if historical changes were truly the results of free will, they could not be explained by empirical observation. The end of alienation, then, will mean the end of history. It will also mean the end of philosophy. Marx understands his role as helping to bring about this end. One of the most often quoted passages in all of Marx’s writings is the eleventh, and final, of his “Theses on Feuerbach”. This thesis states, “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it” [48, p. 145]. Philosophers have only interpreted, and reinterpreted ideology, consciousness alienated from reality, and therefore have neither changed nor improved the world. Heretofore philosophy has just been “empty talk about consciousness” [42, p. 155]. Philosophical problems only arise because of the divorce of being and essence that causes and perpetuates false consciousness. “When reality is depicted, philosophy as an independent branch of knowledge loses its medium of existence” [42, p. 155]. Philosophy is in the service of history, when philosophy depicts reality, when it unmasks the truth, its job will be done and the progression of history will be complete. The aforementioned revolution that will follow from the proletariat’s recognition of their alienation as such will “bring their ‘existence’ into harmony with their ‘essence’ in a practical way” [42, p. 168]. The concept of alienation is the linchpin in Marx’s science of history. Without this concept there is nothing to move history and, more importantly for the purposes of the present project, no way to account for the historian’s ability to trace and explain the movement of history. Therefore, at this point I will begin a closer examination of alienation. There are several reasons alienation allows the historian to trace and explain the movement of history. One reason is that the alienated individual is not free. Though this individual has the illusion of free will, the individual’s actions are determined by his or her consciousness, which is a function of the class to which the individual belongs. The fact that the alienated individual is a member of a class allows the historian to identify and understand the actions of a given individual without having to observe the individual directly. The nature of the historian’s endeavor is such that he or she cannot actually observe the actions of his or her objects of study (because they happen in the past and are only recognized as objects of interest after the fact). Identifying a person as a member of a class allows the historian to treat

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this person as an instance of a universal and not as an indeterminate particular. Thus the historian can maintain an empirical approach to the science without direct observation and without having to rely on the reporting of untrustworthy witnesses (such as the historical actor himself). There are some implicit premises that are necessary for these conclusions about alienation to be warranted. These premises have to do with the nature of freedom and human essence. We can discern the presence of these implicit premises if we look closely at what is stated explicitly. First, if only alienated actors are potential objects of historical study (because these actors are not free), it must be the case that free actions are not possible objects of scientific explanation. Second, if persons can be recognized as alienated from their essences, it must be the case that there is a human essence and that this can be known. Third, if empirical observation is the only reliable method for gaining knowledge, then this knowledge of the human essence must have been gained empirically. These three implicit premises need to be discussed because none of them are obviously true. G. A. Cohen writes that for Marx, “history is a substitute for nature” [17, p. 24]. What this means is that human history, the story of labor and labor relations, introduces necessity into human behavior and thought. Because men have to work to survive and their consciousness is determined by the particularities of this necessity, their lives and actions become determined and predictable, though not necessarily in a perfectly law-like way. The physical and mental development of an individual is not determined by the individual but by the vagaries of his or her particular circumstances. Nature, or the natural world, is a possible object of scientific study because natural things do not move with intention, rather they are moved; they do not have free will and therefore their movements can explained by the scientist through empirical observation alone. Free actions, because they cannot be explained through empirical observation alone, are not proper objects of scientific study. This position is plausible, but on closer examination one finds that it entails positions that are less so. To begin to explain why this is the case I refer briefly to Vico’s position. Recall that Vico held that only free human actions are possible objects of scientific knowledge. This is because the faculty of fantasia allows us to recognize and understand the actions of others. Events in the natural world are beyond our complete understanding because there is just too much about them and the rest of the world that we do not know and cannot perceive empirically. But, contrary to Marx, Vico held that it is only when persons act as particular persons that their actions are free and are therefore intelligible to us. Yet Marx considers such persons, acting according to their given societal roles, as not free. In “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte” he writes, “The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living” [49, p. 595]. Because any actions that are intelligible only within a given tradition are by definition products of the consciousness of this tradition, these actions are not free. Again, this may seem plausible and simply a restating of the position. But formulated in this way it becomes clear that any action that could qualify as free would be unintelligible to the observing historian. A free actor would be one who existed independently of any particular tradition, whose mode of existence was not dependent

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on any received consciousness or on the circumstances of the individual’s place and time. Marx says, “A being only considers himself independent when he stands on his own feet; and he only stands on his own feet when he owes his existence to himself” [53, p. 91]. Of course, this sort of independent existence is just what Marx sees as the end of history, following the revolution of the proletariat. However, because free actions, under this conception of freedom, are necessarily unintelligible to those of us who stand within a tradition, and because such free actions are never intelligible through empirical observation, two conclusions seem to follow. The first is that this understanding of freedom could not be the result of empirical observation, thus making its admissibility questionable given Marx’s stipulations about scientific rigor. The second, a corollary of the first, is that freedom is really an empty concept, defined apophatically, its referent is unknown. Because it is not something we can experience or observe, it cannot be known. Neither is it something that we can understand through imagination because it is unlike anything we can experience. It differs from anything we might experience not in degree but in kind. Therefore, we literally cannot imagine what would motivate free action or how a free individual might choose to act. Two further points seem to follow from this last conclusion. Lack of freedom, or unfreedom, can no longer be explained simply in contrast to freedom. If a concept is empty, explaining a second concept as being the opposite of the first is unhelpful. This is a difficulty for Marx’s theory because of the centrality of the concept of alienation. If alienation is explained, at least in part, in terms of lack of freedom, and freedom is an empty concept, then alienation becomes unintelligible. If the essence from which the individual trapped in the prison of particularity is alienated is one that is unintelligible, one must question not only how the historian could properly describe the condition of the individual as one of alienation, but also how the proletarian could be expected to recognize his own condition as one of alienation and dependence. It just is not clear how one could understand what the true essence of humanity is. Marx considers activity to be free activity when it is creative, productive activity done for its own sake, and not for the satisfaction of some other need [53, p. 76]. Yet the ability to recognize free activity as such seems impossible based on empirical data alone because this judgment is a judgment about intention and state of mind. The activities of free individuals will not necessarily be different from the activities of alienated individuals, what will be different is the motivation for the action. In The German Ideology, Marx says that in the communist society it will be “possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic” [42, p. 160]. Hunting, fishing, and shepherding are neither free nor alienated types of labor in themselves. It is the intention and consciousness of the actor that makes these actions free or alienated. Is it the case, then, that Marx’s science of history relies on an empty concept and premises that by their nature cannot be known through empirical observation?

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If so this would present a devastating blow to his theory. I suggest, though, that the situation might not be so dire for Marx. By reexamining his starting point, and by supplementing our analysis of his system with an appreciation for the way in which he understands reason to work, we see that Marx’s conclusions about freedom and human essence are not without foundation. We begin again with the “first premise of all human history”, namely, “the existence of living human individuals”. If we take Marx at his word and suppose that his science builds from this first premise using only empirical observation, we must pay attention to what Marx says about the distinguishing characteristics of humans. The observer of human history can determine that humans “begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence, a step which is conditioned by their physical organization” [42, p. 150]. This production is not the same thing as crude labor. As Marx tells us in Capital, Volume One, “Labour is, in the first place, a process in which both man and Nature participate” [50, p. 344]. Other animals build things, for example, spiders build webs and bees build hives, “But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. At the end of every labour-process, we get a result that already existed in the imagination of the labourer at its commencement” [50, pp. 344–345]. Marx builds his conception of human nature from observation of the behavior of individual persons. He does not develop a definition or theory about human nature and then name as human all entities he encounters who fall under this definition or theory. Nor does he abstract an essence from the actual being and practice of individual humans. In other words, he does not choose some aspect of human existence, such as thought, and, having separated it from the physical practice of production to which it is naturally wedded, deem it the essence of humanity. Instead, Marx finds that what distinguishes humans, what can be called their essence in the sense that it is the characteristic that must be present for an entity to be called human, is intentional productivity. This is derived plausibly from empirical observation. Still, the determination of the essential property of humans, intentional productivity, which might also be called creativity, is not enough as stated to develop the concept of alienation. This is the point at which we need to examine Marx’s understanding of reason. Marx recognizes in each individual this property of creativity. Yet he also recognizes that each individual he observes is located in a particular place and time and faced with particular material conditions. These particular conditions account for the differences in ends pursued by these individuals and in the means and methods of their pursuits. This observation of difference is evidence of the potential latent in each individual. The fact that each individual’s particular circumstances are not the result of his or her choice shows Marx that the particular potentialities that a particular individual makes actual cannot be the result of that individual’s essence alone, but also of the given particularities of his or her existence. If the actions of each individual truly were the result of the individuals’ essences alone, this would mean that each individual was a species in him or herself, thereby making scientific study of them impossible. Science requires both universals and particulars.

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Because the potential actualized by each individual does not emerge from his or her human essence alone, that is, because it does not follow from the individual qua universal, but from the individual qua particular, it must be that the ability of each individual to actualize his or her potential is restricted or modified in some way. The level of restriction or modification may be different for different individuals or groups of individuals (classes) but all are affected nonetheless. Furthermore, this affectation results from, and contributes to, the opposition of these individuals to one another. The interests of one individual or group conflict with the interests of another individual or group. That this is the case cannot follow from human essence itself because this would mean that human essence conflicted with itself. It is illogical that an object qua universal could have interests opposed to another object of the same kind because this would entail that a single universal could have two opposite and exclusive properties (the interests) at the same time. It must be, then, that the opposing interests follow not from human essence but from those particularities that distort or obscure this essence. The existence of real, observable people is thereby recognized as alienated existence because the true, pure essence of humanity is alien, foreign, to these individuals. In none of these individuals does the full human essence exist. Thus, the concerns raised above about the content of the concept of freedom are assuaged somewhat. The state of unfreedom that Marx recognizes does not require for its recognition an understanding of what freedom entails exactly. It is not known simply in contrast to freedom. Rather, the existence that Marx considers to be lacking in freedom is the condition of being limited in one’s expression of, or participation in, one’s essence. Freedom is understood in contrast to the lack of freedom, instead of the other way around. Freedom is the ability to exercise one’s full, pure humanity. The person whose existence coincides with his essence Marx calls a “speciesbeing”. A species-being lives “as a universal and therefore a free being” [53, p. 75]. The state of freedom that will ensue with the emergence of communism “will only be complete when the real, individual man has absorbed himself in to the abstract citizen, when as an individual man, in his everyday life, in his work, and in his relationships, he has become a species-being” [52, p. 46]. The species-being is an individual whose thoughts and actions and interactions are not determined or limited by his existing in a particular time and place or by his being defined by particular roles. As Fromm tells us, the important freedom of the species-being is not just being “free from, but also free to” [23, p. 38]. The “freedom to” is creative freedom. A person, as opposed to an animal, produces even when “free from physical need and only truly produces in freedom therefrom” [53, p. 76]. Marx also describes this production in the absence of physical need as “human energy which is an end in itself, the true realm of freedom” [51, p. 441]. Particularity, then, is truly a barrier to human existence and it is particularity that Marx thinks history will eventually overcome. Though Marx says of the individual person that it is “precisely his particularity which makes him an individual, and a real individual social being” what Marx means by particularity is quite different

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than that which plays such an important role in Vico’s science of history. This is made clear by the way Marx finishes the preceding quote. It “is just as much the totality – the ideal totality” that “makes him an individual” [53, p. 86]. Each individual human, as species-being, possesses and expresses the “totality” of human essence. Each person is truly a person insofar as he or she embodies the universal essence. Thus, it may be more accurate and helpful for purposes of further discussion to refer to Marxian free persons as individuals and Viconian free persons as particulars. This distinction helps to capture the nature of the difference between the two philosophers’ theories of the science of human history. The Marxian individual is a distinct, independent person, but he represents and possesses the “totality” of what it means to be human with all of the potential for creativity that goes with it. This person has no commitments, obligations, burdens or ends that are not specifically and freely chosen by the individual himself; all possible paths are open for this individual. The Viconian particular enters into the world with specific roles, commitments, obligations and ends already given in virtue of his place within a family and community. He depends on the education and nurturing provided by his family and community to develop the self-control necessary to act freely. The ends he discovers waiting for him, as it were, are made intelligible by his particularity and it is within the framework provided by this particularity that he exercises his freedom. It remains for us, in the attempt to adjudicate between these two rival versions of historical inquiry, to examine closely these two conceptions of human freedom and their underlying assumptions about the nature of reason. This chapter now ends with the beginning of this examination of the conception of freedom found in Marx. The Marxian free individual chooses and acts having awakened from the “nightmare” of tradition and his exertion of energy is an “end in itself”. We might ask, as hinted above, how this individual makes his choices. That is, how does such an individual determine his own ends or assign value in the absence of any value that is given? We might also ask how an observer could properly or accurately name such free actions. Without a known framework or context, how might an observer recognize the end of any particular action and thereby name it? Even the naming of a simple action such as shaking hands requires knowledge of context and intention on the part of the observer. If energy is an “end in itself”, can any action have a more specific name than just “free”? Can any action that is truly an end in itself be named accurately with reference to some typical end? Actions are often named according to their function in a pursuit of an end. In the case of shaking hands, an ostensibly neutral description becomes applicable only to a certain type of action in a given context with a given function. These questions are of interest not only in making sense of the freedom of the Marxian individual in the communist state, they are also of interest in assessing the success of Marx’s attempt to begin his science of history with purely empirical premises. The reason this is the case is that Marx describes himself as ascending from the particular to the general, beginning with individual men and their actions,

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not with any theories about their actions. Surely some such purely empirical observation is possible. The observation that these individuals would need to eat in order to survive, for example, can be discerned empirically without unwarranted theory. An interpretation, then, of an action as pursuit of food would be empirically pure. An action that might not so qualify is the formation of the family. One of the “three aspects of social activity” that are primary and “have existed simultaneously since the dawn of history and the first men” is the family [42, pp. 156–157]. Marx’s observation that men begin to propagate is certainly straightforward and not theoryladen. His observation that men and women and their children form families is not so obviously possible without some non-empirical justification for this appellation. It is possible to propagate or procreate without forming a family. Although an interpretation of an action as pursuit of food might be empirically pure, an interpretation of an action as a wedding, or of a relationship between individuals as a family, is not possible using empirical data alone. These designations entail recognition of context, imputation of ends, and the prior existence of societal norms to provide some criteria of correctness. Similarly, Marx’s assumption, much like Hobbes’, that individuals must have come together to cooperate for mutual advantage prior to a mutually conceived consciousness or language is not clearly coherent. That pre-societal individuals might understand the concept of cooperation or commitment to cooperation without any societal norms or practices to provide such a concept is questionable as is the possibility of an observer recognizing such co-operation as such absent any theoretical framework. Membership in a family might be thought to provide an individual with such concepts or at least analogous ones on which to build, but if the possibility of family commitments without such concepts is also problematic, this appeal will not help. What these criticisms amount to is a questioning of the possibility and plausibility of reason divorced from tradition and theory. These criticisms challenge Marx’s contention that consciousness freed from any tradition can perceive reality as it “really is”. Assessing the force of these criticisms is the task of the following chapters. G. A. Cohen suggests that to Marx’s famous last thesis on Feuerbach that says the point of philosophy is to change history, we should add, “to change it so that interpretation of it is no longer necessary” [17, p. 339]. Interpretation is no longer necessary when pure empirical observation is sufficient for naming objects and actions as they “really are”. Were such conditions to obtain, individuals could freely and rationally choose their ends free of any unchosen tradition or framework. John Rawls imagines and defends the possibility of emancipated and unencumbered reason and choice. His work is the subject of the following chapter.

Chapter 5

Addressing Marx Through Rawls

In this chapter I will introduce an argument that will culminate in the next chapter. With this extended argument I hope to make a case for preferring Vico’s version of historical inquiry over that of Marx. Ultimately, and put simply, the basis for this contention is that the conception of reason found in Vico is more plausible than that found in Marx. I begin my argument by pointing out some significant weaknesses in Marx’s account of the faculty of reason. To illustrate and highlight these weaknesses I compare the understanding of reason at work in Marx with that found in John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice [66]. In this chapter, I am primarily concerned with Rawls’ theory as presented A Theory of Justice. I understand that his position changes in later works but I am concerned with his arguments in this work, not with Rawls himself as a philosopher of historical interest. If we were to construe the model of moral reasoning Rawls presents in A Theory of Justice more broadly as a general model of the conditions for, and process of, free reasoning, we would find a model strikingly similar to that assumed and employed in Marx’s historical inquiry. The primary difference between the two models is simply that the Rawlsian model is much more explicit and robust. Thus, the purpose of drawing the parallel between Marx’s account of reason and what I will refer to as a Rawlsian account of reason (which is not necessarily the same as Rawls’ account of reason) is to provide a means of evaluating Marx’s views by proxy. Examining the Rawlsian model will allow us to consider Marx’s model as magnified for closer inspection. After discussing the implications of such accounts of reason, I raise several objections and proceed in the next chapter to explain their significance in greater detail. I conclude the following chapter by showing how Vico’s explanation of reason meets the objections raised against Marx’s account. Because my approach in this chapter may strike some readers as unusual, a careful introduction is warranted. Marx’s version of historical inquiry involves assumptions about the way the faculty of reason is exercised both by those persons who are the objects of the historian’s study and by the historian himself. By “faculty of reason” I mean that faculty of the intellect that makes judgments, both in the sense of choosing actions and in the sense of subsuming a particular unit of observation under a universal concept or name. In my discussion of Marx and Rawls I will be concerned with this faculty as it is at work in their theories rather than the specific conclusions they draw or ends their theories pursue. J.R.L. Noland, Imagination and Critique, Philosophical Studies in Contemporary Culture 19, DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-3804-3_5,  C Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010

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The pairing of Karl Marx and John Rawls will seem strange to many readers, and rightly so. Their projects are vastly different and their conclusions seem to be at odds [55, pp. 206–230]. Allan Bloom suggests that Marx’s historicist arguments cast doubt on the very possibility of Rawls’ project [12, p. 648]. It does seem as if Marx’s claims about false consciousness and the dependence of history on material conditions and class relations call in to question the plausibility of deriving principles of justice through the use of reason. Yet in this chapter we will see that there are some striking similarities between the conceptions of reason and freedom discernible in Marx’s historical method and remarks Rawls makes about reason in his experiment involving the original position. Taking what Rawls says about reason in the context of his moral argument, and construing it as an account of reason in general, the reader will notice some assumptions about human nature, freedom, and reason that sound much like those found in Marx’s philosophy that was discussed in the previous chapter. Examining Rawls’ work will be helpful because much of that which is implicit in Marx is detailed directly by Rawls and is therefore more easily assessed. Furthermore, there is a body of literature discussing Rawls’ original position from which we can draw in our critique of Marx. Though their projects are vastly different and their conclusions at odds, we can find in both an assumption that the faculty of reason can be exercised ahistorically and apart from any consciousness of the particular reasoner’s place within a tradition. It is this similarity that I will describe and critique. In A Theory of Justice, John Rawls defends two primary principles of justice. The nature of these two principles is not of concern for my project. I am not interested in assessing the specific normative content of Rawls’ philosophy, though that is certainly a worthwhile endeavor. What is of interest to me here is the thought experiment he employs to derive his two principles of justice. In his famous thought experiment suggesting a metaphorical state of nature, Rawls imagines that individuals situated in what he calls the “original position”, behind a “veil of ignorance”, would agree to the aforementioned principles of justice. It is my contention that the conception of reason assumed in this thought experiment is relevantly similar to the conception of reason employed by Marx in his historical observations. Rawls believes that the faculty of reason can be exercised by persons in this original position. This belief and its implications are what are of concern to me; my intent is to show that if we construe Rawls’ claims about moral reasoning as applying to reason in general we will find a fleshed out description of the faculty of reason as found in Marx’s work. Before I begin my exposition of the relevant parts of Rawls’ philosophy I think it is important to respond to an objection I anticipate will be brought against my project. As I noted above, Rawls’ work is one of moral philosophy, specifically it is a work of moral philosophy that proposes a method for reaching moral agreement by avoiding contentious metaphysical and religious arguments. It is his goal, and many think he is largely successful in this goal, to reason about moral guidelines without venturing into these other areas of philosophy. Whether or not Rawls is successful in his project, my aim here is to argue that were his project meant to

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prescribe a method of reasoning generally, it would entail certain propositions about personhood and freedom that are questionable. I anticipate that despite my acknowledgement that I am construing Rawls’ work more broadly than he intends, some will still take me to be misunderstanding the goal of his proposed method, or failing to notice the limits he places on the scope of his experiment. Such an objection is expressed nicely by Stephen Mulhall when he writes, “the structure of the original position. . . does not embody a general empirical claim that persons can (phenomenologically) detach themselves from all their roles, character traits and ends at any one time, or a general metaphysical claim that one’s identity as a person is not bound up with such matters. The veil of ignorance is a morally driven epistemic limit in politics, not the manifestation of a phenomenological or ontological hypothesis” [56, p. 208]. I present this objection at this point in my argument simply to ask the reader to bear with me and allow me to make my case. It is precisely this goal of presenting an account of reason without committing oneself to any metaphysical or epistemological entailments that I aim to address. Though it is true that this story about the nature of reason does not include the claim to be presenting phenomenological or ontological hypotheses, it nevertheless does. Specifically, it is the ontological hypothesis that the faculty of reason can function independently of, or unconnected to, any particular embodied existence that I will be addressing in this chapter. What I intend to show is that what the Rawlsian account takes to be metaphysically neutral in fact is not and that the manner in which he suggests reason can be employed necessarily commits him to certain conclusions about personhood and freedom. Rawls’ original position is a purely hypothetical situation characterized so as to lead to a certain conception of justice. Among the essential features of this situation is that no one knows his place in society, his class position or social status, nor does any one know his fortune in the distribution of natural assets and abilities, his strength, and the like. . . the parties do not know their conceptions of the good or their special psychological propensities. [56, p. 11]

The Rawlsian denies, as would Marx, that assuming an ability to exercise the faculty of reason under these conditions entails “any claims to universal truth, or claims about the essential nature and identity of persons” [65, p. 235]. The point of reasoning in such a position is not to arrive at something that might be called “the truth”, instead it is simply to provide the necessary conditions for truly free decisionmaking. This latter point is understood and I do not suggest otherwise. Still, though it does not claim to achieve what might be called metaphysical truth, I will show that this thought experiment does entail some assumptions about reason and the essential nature of persons, if not about the essential identity of a person. The key similarity between the Rawlsian version and Marx’s that I hope will become clear is that both assume that reason is a faculty whose exercise is not only not dependent upon the particular identity of the person exercising it but is actually hindered or distorted by the particularity of this individual. Rawls says that persons are by nature free and equal rational beings [66, p. 225]. The role of the original position is to facilitate the derivation of principles of justice

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that are true to this nature by isolating that which is essential and preventing all nonessential features from playing any role in this process. This is necessary for “To express one’s nature as a being of a particular kind is to act on the principles that would be chosen if this nature were the decisive determining element” [66, p. 222]. Following Kant, a free action is understood to be that which an individual would choose as “the most adequate expression of his nature as a free and equal rational being” [66, p. 222]. Thus, it is important that the principles of justice be derived by persons situated in the original position because, “If a knowledge of particulars is allowed, then the outcome is biased by arbitrary contingencies” [66, p. 122]. An important distinction between one’s nature as a human being and one’s identity is implicit in this formulation. Though there is no attempt to address what is essential to a person in the sense having to do with personal identity through time, he is clearly operating on specific assumptions about what is essential to a person qua human being. One way of putting this would be to say that all persons possess the universal property “humanness” and that which is essential to the specific identity of an individual is some further property. The faculty of reason is something that is included in the essence of persons qua human beings and when exercised by persons acting as such its conclusions can be expected to be uniform. That the preceding is an apt characterization of the Rawlsian view follows from the contention that a person can reason from within the original position and in so doing choose principles of justice that would express his or her nature as a human being, yet not be contingent upon his or her identity as a particular human being. In other words, if I can reason as a human being, without at the same time reasoning as Jake Noland, that which makes me Jake Noland must be some property I possess in addition to the property of being human. I say “in addition to” because when the knowledge of that which makes me Jake Noland is excluded, that which remains is my awareness of my nature as a human being, according to which I choose the principles of justice. Because knowledge of that which makes persons the particular persons they are is excluded, the original position is a position of freedom in which persons express their true, essential nature. “Men exhibit their freedom, their independence from the contingencies of nature and society, by acting in ways they would acknowledge in the original position” [66, p. 225]. On this view, contingent or accidental qualities distort that which is universal and thereby impair the ability of an individual to act freely. In this context, then, freedom is not understood simply as the ability to do otherwise. Instead, freedom is autonomy – self-governance – and the law that one legislates for oneself must emerge purely from oneself; it may not be the product of accidental, and therefore non-essential, qualities or characteristics. Principles of justice chosen by individuals not divested of their particularity would be, and have been historically, heteronomous. In other words, the principles chosen would be and have been varied. As such it must not be the case that they are the products of freely made choices. If freely made choices are those which express the true nature of the chooser, and the principles of justice chosen by individuals throughout history are so different from each other, it must either be the case that

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these principles have not been chosen freely or the individuals making these choices have all had different essential natures. The latter conclusion is dismissed implicitly and a priori as it would render the project moot. It follows, therefore, that the original position is necessary for rendering truly free choices. Because individuals in the original position are ignorant of any distinguishing characteristics, which means they can choose autonomously, the original position is not truly a place where deliberation between persons takes place. There is no disagreement behind the veil of ignorance because the knowledge and interests of all parties are the same. The conclusions reached in the original position are not affected by the number of individuals imagined to be in this position. Any and all rational persons in the original position would produce the same principles of justice because the nature that is expressed in the choice of these principles is the same for all. This illustrates the critical point that particularity is not necessary for the exercise of reason. Rawls imagines not only that persons in such a position could use reason to determine the principles of justice, but that we, who are not actually in such a position, can know what these imagined persons would conclude.1 He proposes that we may “simulate the deliberations of this hypothetical situation, simply by reasoning in accordance with the appropriate restrictions” [66, p. 119]. It is possible for anyone at anytime to reason as from behind the veil of ignorance [66, p. 120]. Note here that Rawls does not say that everyone does reason as such all of the time or even ever. As mentioned above, because people have not reasoned this way the principles of justice that have emerged in the past have been as varied as the philosophers and institutions from which they have emerged. Interestingly, no explanation is offered for why people are not, in general, inclined to reason in this fashion. Nor is there an explanation of how one might come to recognize that reasoning while still encumbered with the accidents of time and place is not an exercise of freedom. Nevertheless, it is supposed that it is possible for anyone at anytime to escape his or her particularity and reason freely. Each of us is able, given sufficient reflection, to recognize the conclusions of autonomous reason as such, as well as to appreciate the fact that reason as usually practiced is enslaved to contingency. The original position is a “point of view removed from and not distorted by the particular features and circumstances of the all-encompassing background framework” of a particular individual [66, p. 120]. This device is a “device of representation” but its use “does not imply that the self is ontologically prior to the facts about persons that the parties are excluded from knowing” [65, p. 238]. That both of these conditions could be true entails that which is represented in the original position is not any particular self, but rather something like a universal human essence.

1 This

point is important. Though Rawls does not say that the original position is a real position, he nevertheless assumes implicitly that it is possible to think as if one were in this position. This assumption runs directly counter to Mulhall’s attempt to downplay the boldness of Rawls’ project.

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The reader can begin to see now that the claim that, “To express one’s nature as a being of a particular kind is to act on the principles that would be chosen if this nature were the decisive determining element” captures perfectly the type of expressive freedom possessed by Marx’s species-being. In addition, the ability, which is necessarily assumed to obtain, to reason as if one were in the original position is the same ability Marx must exercise in order to recognize the condition of alienation and false consciousness in which the masses live. Marx’s method of inquiry into history requires this ability to free oneself from tradition-bound consciousness and reason freely. Without this ability his attempt at a purely empirical science of history is doomed to failure. Marx the historian must be freed from any particular paradigm of consciousness for him to describe the world as it “really is”. For the Rawlsian, the agreement reached through this experiment is “hypothetical and nonhistorical”. Allan Bloom echoes this point, albeit with critical intentions, when he says, “there is nothing in the original position that corresponds to any man’s real experience” [12, p. 652]. The conflicting intuitions about the felicity of such a formulation match the fundamental disagreement between Vico and Marx. Vico would deny the possibility of the nonhistorical exercise of reason; Marx would hold that only when reason is exercised nonhistorically is it exercised purely and freely. For Vico, the device of the original position would be representative of “No-man”, whereas for Marx it would be representative of “Every-man”. Thus, though the Rawlsian would be right to protest that his theory does not pretend to offer a metaphysical account of justice, and would be right to deny that his theory entails that the self is ontologically prior to any particular facts about it, this theory does, nonetheless, entail that reason can be exercised nonhistorically and that the property of being human is ontologically prior to, and distinct from, any particular person’s identity. The idea of a universal, free self with the ability to create and enjoy a course of life must be coherent and intelligible for Marx’s conclusions about persons’ alienation from their essence to be convincing. Without the strength of these conclusions, his contentions about the proper objects of historical study are unsupported.2 Furthermore, such freedom must be possible and conceivable if his thesis about the end of history is to be plausible. If my proposed similarities hold, then we can use the more explicit and elaborate Rawlsian explanations of these accounts of reason and freedom as well as the substantial commentary on Rawls’ original position to aid our appraisal of Marx’s position. A brief review of Marx’s writings on freedom and essence, when presented alongside Rawls’, broadly construed, serves to highlight the important parallels. Marx writes in Capital, Volume Three, “the realm of freedom actually begins where labour which is determined by necessity and mundane considerations ceases” [51, p. 441]. Necessity does not come only in the form of immediate physical need, but also in the form of tradition and false-consciousness. Certainly a person might, for

2 This

is because it is the supposed insights concerning alienation and false consciousness that establish material conditions as the proper objects of the historian’s attention.

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example, be bound by necessity to patch a roof to provide shelter from the elements. But a person might also experience the yoke of necessity as the obligation that comes with an inherited institutional role or the duty one has as a member of society to honor the ideal of patriotism. Until there is a “sphere of society which claims no traditional status but only a human status”, freedom is not possible [45, p. 64]. Tradition limits the individual’s ability to express his or her true nature by determining the individual’s roles and ends independently of, and prior to, the individual’s choice. When men make their history, Marx explains, they do so not “under the circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly found, given, and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living” [49, p. 595]. A sphere of society that claims a “human status” as opposed to a “traditional status” would be one in which the individuals live as “species-beings”, that is, as humans qua humans, with each expressing the full, universal essence of the species as opposed to that of a limited, or encumbered tradition-given role. As such, these individuals choose their ends and projects for themselves freely, unburdened by necessity. Their existence, their way of being, is therefore free because it is chosen independently of anything external to the individual [53, p. 91]. Marx believes that this mode of existence will be made possible when existence is “brought into harmony” with essence “by means of a revolution” [42, p. 168]. He also believes that this freedom from tradition and false-consciousness is practiced in his scientific method that allows him to observe and describe how individuals “really are” [42, pp. 154–155]. Marx’s species-being, his universal free person, is much like the Rawlsian “noumenal self”3 who has “complete freedom to choose whatever principles [he or she] wish[es]”, and thereby exhibits “what it means to be a free and equal rational being” [66, p. 225]. Marx’s professed ability, despite his being situated in a time and place before the revolution of the proletariat, to observe and think independently of tradition and any given consciousness, closely resembles the Rawlsian technique of shedding his particularity to reason as if he were in the original position. The question before us now is whether this shared conception of reason, removed from the context of tradition and history, is truly intelligible. Is it possible to exercise reason independently of awareness of context and place and time? Marx and Rawls both offer compelling reasons to distrust inherited consciousness and unchosen principles and ends. Yet, when given close attention, the idea of persons reasoning free of any tradition and choosing their own principles and ends is also seen to be problematic. At the heart of the problem is the task of making sense of the way these unencumbered selves might make choices. There are at least two reasons this is difficult. The first has to do with explaining how this individual might recognize and acknowledge reasons for action as such. That is, if the self exists prior to any ends it affirms,

3 It

is interesting (ironic?) that Rawls uses this terminology, which he borrows from Kant, when Kant believed that the noumenal self was unknowable.

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as Rawls says it does, then the initial choice of an end cannot itself be a strategic choice. In other words, the reason for choosing cannot be the recognition of a hypothetical imperative because for such an imperative to obtain implies some other end, the accomplishment of which this imperative advances. Neither can there be any unchosen obligations or designations of value making a claim on this individual. Duties and norms cannot carry the weight of reasons unless they are themselves freely chosen or accepted. For the Rawlsian, free individuals are “self-originating sources of valid claims” [64]. Given what Marx has to say about the “nightmare of tradition”, it seems this quote reflects Marx’s position as well. Being subject to a claim is compatible with freedom only when the claim is itself freely chosen. The second difficulty has to do with the way the noumenal self in the original position could identify activities and ends, not in the sense just mentioned, but in the sense of recognizing them for what they are. How, for example, could an individual, lacking all knowledge of his distinguishing features, properly recognize the celebration of the Eucharist, or a child’s first birthday party, or the writing of a dissertation, or a baseball game? None of these activities can be described as such without an awareness of context, tradition, and history that can only truly be gained through participation, in one form or another, in a particular way of life. All of these activities are practices that are constitutive parts of courses of life and ways of being, each of which are potential choices for the individual in the original position. This second difficulty is precisely that which must be confronted in the attempt to offer purely empirical historical observation. In Marx’s case the historian is not called to choose one of these ways of life, but he must still be able to identify and describe them properly and he must do so from outside of any particular tradition in order to recognize their connection to labor and the manner in which they are manifestations of false consciousness. These two difficulties are closely related; a close look at the first will make this relatedness apparent. For insight into the nature of this first difficulty, the work of Michael Sandel is instructive. In his work Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, Sandel discusses Rawls’ thought experiment and examines its implications [71]. Whether or not they are truly fair to Rawls’ actual views, Sandel’s comments articulate succinctly the nature of the problem posed above and are thus applicable to that to which I have been referring as the “Rawlsian” account of reason in general. He writes that on the Rawlsian view, “what is most essential to our personhood is not the ends we choose but our capacity to choose them” [71, p. 19]. If all contingent, particular features must be removed in order to provide for the expression of a person’s essential nature, and this nature is to be free and rational, it follows that what best expresses this nature is the act of choosing. The greater the potential for choice, the greater the freedom of the chooser. As Milton Fisk puts it, the nature of the Rawlsian free individual is to have “unrestricted antecedent choice” [21, p. 66]. For the Rawlsian, “the self is prior to the ends which are affirmed by it; even a dominant end must be chosen from among numerous possibilities” [66, p. 491]. Because the self is prior to any ends affirmed by it, its freedom is complete. This also entails that the self’s identity is fully distinct from that of others; any association with others that might provide the self with identity, such as a family or community,

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must also be the product of choice. Though the self may simply find himself with associations, they must ultimately be accepted freely in order for any ends or obligations following from this association to be binding. Sandel calls this the “priority of plurality over unity” [71, p. 133]. Given that the essence of the individual person is the capacity to choose, and even dominant ends must be chosen, Sandel says, “it remains to be seen what exactly this choice consists in and how I come to make it” [71, p. 162]. He acknowledges that Rawls says that this choice “often rests on our self-knowledge”, but contends that this self-knowledge can really only be an awareness of wants and desires. “Such a ‘choice’ would involve less a voluntary act than a factual accounting of what these wants and desires really are” [71, p. 162]. This act of choosing is not voluntary because these wants and desires are simply given, not chosen. Rawls does not envision persons in the original position choosing specific, immediate ends, but because Marx’s free persons are not participating in a thought experiment, but actually living freely, Sandel’s criticisms of the intelligibility of such acts of choosing are relevant and applicable to Marx’s conception as well. Keeping in mind that the purpose of establishing a parallel between the accounts of reason in the work of Marx and Rawls is to allow us to bring objections to a Rawlsian view to bear on Marx’s, a further exposition of Sandel’s argument helps to make clear my concerns about Marx’s position. According to the stipulations of the original position, the individual chooser has no knowledge of his status, affiliations, history, or conception of the good. Therefore, any wants and desires the individual has in this position must, if they are not themselves products of choice, be simply given. They must be dispositions or inclinations specific to the individual. If this is the case, Sandel says, the individual’s act of choosing an end “amounts to nothing more than an estimate or psychic inventory of the wants and preferences he already has, not a choice of the values he would profess or the aims he would pursue” [71, p. 162]. Thus, “deliberation about ends can only be an exercise in arbitrariness” [71, p. 180]. Whatever end is eventually chosen will be so chosen due to the given mental and physiological make-up of the individual. The choice, then, is either an expression of some particular characteristics that are not themselves part of the essence of the person, or, if they are essential, they are part of the essence of an individual who is a species unto himself. For this reason Sandel concludes, “While the notion of constitutive attachments may at first seem an obstacle to agency – the self, now encumbered, is no longer strictly prior – some relative fixity of character appears essential to prevent the lapse into arbitrariness which the deontological self is unable to avoid” [71, p. 180]. To understand how and why a Rawlsian would take this position on the priority of the self over the ends affirmed by it, we must examine Rawls’ reading of Kant. Rawls is a self-described Kantian and considers himself to be adopting and building upon Kant’s conception of autonomy [66, p. 222]. He writes, “Kant held, I believe, that a person is acting autonomously when the principles of his action are chosen by him as the most adequate possible expression of his nature as a free and equal rational being” [66, p. 222]. This is an accurate paraphrase of Kant. Yet, the interpretation of this position is flawed. We see a hint of his misreading of Kant when

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he says he cannot understand why for Kant the “scoundrel does not express in a bad life his characteristic and freely chosen selfhood in the same way that a saint expresses his characteristic and freely chosen selfhood in a good one” [66, p. 224]. That one would ask such a question shows that one is not working with the same conception of freedom as Kant. That one would describe the individual’s selfhood as “freely chosen” also suggests a mistaken understanding of Kant’s view of human nature. Rawls thinks that what is missing in Kant’s work is an “argument showing which principles, if any, free and equal rational persons would choose” [66, p. 224]. This shows that Rawls’ free chooser is, unlike Kant’s, free of any framework within which to choose, unaided by the metaphysical moorings that in Kant’s philosophy prevent the individual from being swept along by the apparent determinism of the phenomenal world. Below I will show that Rawls’ reading of Kant is mistaken, or at least incomplete. Contrasting Kant’s conception of autonomy with Rawls’ shows that Rawls’ is ultimately empty. It will become clear that, as Allan Bloom has said, “a true Kantian interpretation of Rawls’ man in the ‘original position’ is that he is neither free nor rational” [12, p. 657]. The choices of an individual in the original position are not free but arbitrary; the Rawlsian individual is not an agent but a vessel. This will require a brief exposition of Kant’s philosophy, but this excursion is necessary. It is necessary in order to show that an account of reason operating independently of any particular tradition must offer some explanation of judgment, or, in other words, an explanation of how we name things. Such an explanation must necessarily make some metaphysical commitments of the sort both Marx and our Rawlsian would hope to avoid. An explanation of judgment is necessary not just for an account of freedom but also for the possibility of the sort of scientific observation that Marx attempts in his purely empirical recounting of history. Kant explains that judgment is necessary for experience, assumption of uniformity is necessary for judgment, and laws are necessary for the assumption of uniformity. As he writes in the Critique of Judgment, “We find in the grounds of the possibility of experience in the very first place something necessary, viz. the universal laws without which nature in general (as an object of sense) cannot be thought” [34, p. 19]. Laws, such as the law of causation, are necessary for judgment, as are certain other concepts that allow us to order the phenomena of experience. One has to understand this in order to understand why it is that for Kant a free will is one that is nonetheless law governed. All actions, as objects of experience, must be understood as subject to some law. This is why autonomy for Kant cannot mean legislating a different law for oneself in different circumstances. Free actions can only be judged as such if they are all understood as following, or issuing from, some cause. How is it, then, that freedom is considered at all possible in Kant’s view? It is Kant’s contention that appearances do not give us knowledge about things in themselves that allows him to posit freedom of the will. The “principle of the causal connection of appearances” is what allows for the possibility of experience. But all this does is allow us to make judgments about appearances. It does not allow us to

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make judgments about things in themselves [34, pp. A536, 537, 36, p. 421]. What we might call the external world is known only through the senses and therefore everything in the external world is considered to be subject to the principle of causation. However, we know ourselves not only through our senses, but also through what Kant calls “apperception”. We are perceptible, or sensible, to ourselves but we are also intelligible. “In its intelligible character (though we can only have a general concept of that character) this same subject must be considered to be free from all influence of sensibility and from all determination from appearances” [35, p. A540]. The intelligible character of the subject is not sensible and can be understood independently of sensible causes and therefore can be considered free from the influence of sensible causes. The intelligible character has only to do with concepts, ideas and ideals [35, p. A569]. Marx and Rawls are both in concert with Kant in his attempt to render the individual self intelligible independently of any particular sensible context. Where the later two diverge from Kant is in their attempt to define the individual self independently of all concepts, ideas, and ideals, all except freedom and reason, that is. For Kant, a free action is one that is free from the causal influence of sensible objects or events, but not one that is uncaused. As Kant writes in the Grounding, “Everything in nature works according to laws. Only a rational being has the power to act according to his conception of laws, i.e., according to principles, and thereby he has a will” [36, p. 412]. An action free from the causal influence of sensible objects or events will still be subject to a law, but it will be the law of reason, otherwise known as the moral law. “Thus a free will and a will subject to moral laws are one and the same” [36, p. 447]. For Kant there is only one way to be free, only one way to be moral. A free action is one caused by a will acting in accordance with reason, that is, one that does not will contradictions or make false judgments. This is why Kant believes that the formulation of the Categorical Imperative in terms of willing a universal law is equivalent to the formulation in terms of treating persons as ends in themselves. For it to be possible to will that a maxim become a universal law the maxim must be such that when universalized no contradictions ensue. Treating persons as ends in themselves is a matter of making a proper judgment about persons, i.e. subsuming them under the proper concept. Treating persons as means only involves a false judgment about persons, which, if re-worded the right way could be expressed in the form of a contradictory maxim.4 Autonomy truly is self-legislation for Kant. The moral self must follow a law, otherwise its actions would be unintelligible, but it cannot follow the law of causation of the sensible world because then it would not be free and it cannot follow a law imposed in some other way. This autonomy is self-legislation in the sense that the self adopts the law as binding for itself, yet the self does not create the law ex nihilo, as it seems it must in Rawls’ story. It must choose to follow the moral law, 4 The

principle is the same one that explains why one cannot will that a triangle have 4 sides, nor can one treat a triangle like a square.

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but if it does so it will follow the same law as all other rational moral beings. What Kant’s metaphysical story provides, and which is lacking in the work of Marx, is an account of a potential object of choice, the moral law in this case, and categorically applicable reasons, neither of which are accidental or contingent upon custom or coercion. Rawls foregoes making appeals to a metaphysical framework because, he says, reasonable people will disagree about such frameworks and there is no way to establish such a framework by reasons and standards accepted by all. Marx rejects any metaphysical claims on the grounds that they necessarily result from alienated consciousness and cannot be discovered empirically. Both reasons are prima facie reasonable, yet because they both also reject reasons derived from inherited or received customs and standards as incompatible with freedom, neither has a way to explain free actions. It appears Sandel’s criticism of Rawls’ notion of freedom, when construed to apply generally, as really being an exercise in arbitrariness is apt. When Rawls wonders why the scoundrel does not express his freedom through his actions in the same way the saint does through his actions, the significance of the absence of any metaphysical story becomes clear. Because Rawlsian freedom requires “unrestricted antecedent choice” and the free individual is a “self-originating source of valid claims”, a truly free act is one in which the agent gives value to the object of choice merely through the act of choosing rather than choosing according to this value. This means that any attempt to give reasons for a choice, or to understand how a choice was made, must necessarily result in an infinite regress. Ultimately, there can be no explanation for a free action. If the individual self is the original source of value it becomes unintelligible to speak of reasons why a particular value is chosen or attributed.5 The Rawlsian is subject to this criticism because of his failure to provide any explanation of judgment. This criticism is equally applicable to Marx. His description of the “realm of freedom” and the “development of human energy which is an end in itself” is subject to the same accusations of arbitrariness leveled against the Rawlsian view [51, p. 441]. His story about the freedom of the species-being and the lack of freedom of historically situated individuals, which is understood in contrast to the freedom of the species being, is now shown to be incomplete. To be charitable, one can imagine that a defender of the conceptions of reason and freedom found in Marx and Rawls might respond that the Kantian notion that actions following from basic desires and inclinations are not free is simply too strict. Certainly, this defender might say, holding Marx and Rawls to such strict standards does result in rendering free actions unintelligible. However, the Marxian and Rawlsian conception of freedom is one in which basic desires and inclinations, rather than being obstacles to freedom, are instead constituent qualities of the human nature to which freedom is intended to give expression. After all, both Marx and Rawls consider the provision of certain staples, Rawls calls them primary goods, to

5 Marx

tacitly and unabashedly acknowledges this point when he writes that under communism, when individuals are free, history will no longer be possible or necessary.

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be valuable to all persons regardless of specific interests and concerns. Perhaps it is fair to allow that there might be a range of potential objects of choice, or, for Marx, inspirations for creativity, which range is the same for all persons given the universal dispositions of human nature. Thus one might, it could be argued, make sense of reasons for ascribing value in these systems despite their rejection of tradition or metaphysics. Maybe, just as saltiness and sweetness are universally appreciated qualities of food, and softness a universally appreciated quality of places to rest, desires for companionship or creative expressions of love, for example, are part of human nature and acting on such desires is not only compatible with acting freely, but is what gives freedom its high value. Such a response might be a plausible defense to the objections of arbitrariness and unintelligibility of freedom, though it must be admitted that drives and impulses are not the same things as reasons. Granting the initial plausibility of this defense, further examination reveals that this, too, is susceptible to a serious objection. This objection was identified above as the second difficulty for Marx and our Rawlsian, namely, the difficulty of accounting for the ability to recognize given activities or practices for what they are. Ronald Dworkin explains that, “parties to the original position certainly have, and know that they have, an interest in general liberty, because general liberty will, pro tanto, improve their power to achieve any particular goals they later discover themselves to have” [18, p. 48]. What I will now argue is that individuals who are truly free in the Rawlsian sense cannot discover themselves to have particular goals, only general goals. T. M. Scanlon defends the Rawlsian original position as providing “an Archimedean Point partly in virtue of the fact that this conception of a person is taken to be prior to any particular independently-determined conception of his good” (emphasis added) [72, p. 178]. Scanlon’s characterization of the person’s identity as being prior to any independently-determined conception of the good highlights the reason that such a person can have no particular, or specific goals. This is because any particular, specific practice that might be a good for an individual will only be intelligible from within a particular context. This is true for several reasons that I will first list and then explain in detail below. All of these reasons have to do with the prohibition of any received conception of the good. First, to be able to recognize any particular activity, such as marriage, for what it is requires membership in the community in which the activity is practiced and an identification of the individual with this community for participation in this activity to be a living option for the individual. Second, it is necessary to name properly one’s desires and passions before one can choose activities and practices that would satisfy these desires and passions. To do this one must be formed by the common stories and practices of a given community. Third, participation in the sorts of practices constituent of a full life of the sort Rawls describes requires certain character traits, or virtues, that can only be developed by an individual who trusts a received conception of the good. This is true because these character traits require discipline and denial of natural appetites and desires. They cannot be known except by witnessing their embodiment and they cannot be chosen except on trust.

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I choose marriage as a paradigmatic example of a particular good because of its central role in the philosophies of Vico and Marx and because it is such a common practice, frequently considered to be a part of a good life or at least a legitimate option in the quest for a good life. In order for something to be an object of rational choice, it must first be identified by the chooser. My contention is that it is only possible to recognize marriage as such from within a specific tradition. To identify two persons as being married one must understand them to be in certain relation to one other, having made a certain commitment with specific intentions. But more than this, one must also understand these persons to be living and acting within a specific community with specific norms. This is because marriage, while it is a relationship between two people, is also a public institution. There is no such thing as marriage simpliciter. There is only marriage as it is practiced and understood within certain communities. The couple, in deciding to wed, decides to engage in a practice already extant in and endorsed by the community and, though they make a promise to each other, they do so in a ceremony in front of the community or representatives of the community, thereby receiving sanction from the community. This sort of understanding and recognition of intention is only possible for someone within a tradition. Just as one might observe a group of people running alongside a larger group of people yelling, while at the same time be unable to identify the scene as the 100-Meter dash at the Olympics without knowledge of context, one cannot observe the relationship between two people and describe it as marriage without the requisite familiarity with context. Because intention cannot be observed, only inferred, familiarity with context and appropriateness is necessary for proper identification of intentional activities and practices. Unlike our ability to discover the properties of saltiness or sweetness in the foods we encounter, our recognition of specific practices as goods depends on abilities we cannot have prior to communal experience. In addition, in order to have the particular desire for marriage one must have the general desires which marriage might fulfill. For example, one must first have the general desires for companionship, love, and family, before one could decide on marriage as a way to satisfy this desire. Yet, being able to recognize these desires as such, that is, to name them as desires for companionship, love, and family, requires an awareness of, and sympathy with, the narratives of others.6 I have to see these desires felt and named in the stories of others with whom I can identify to be able to name them and plot a course for satisfying them. This sympathy, this fellow-feeling, depends upon imagination that comes with familiarity, and, more importantly, education. Neither this fellow-feeling nor the faculty of imagination which makes it possible are necessary for one to be conscious of a desire for saltiness or sweetness. Furthermore, the recognition of certain desires as good and healthy and worth pursuing, and others as inappropriate and wrong to pursue or insignificant no matter

6 The naming of passions and desires is one of the important roles of good art, literature and music,

and is one of the bases of therapy.

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their momentary strength, also depends upon an acceptance of the received wisdom and norms of the community. The choice to participate in a practice such as marriage is a choice to sacrifice certain desires for the sake of others. It is a choice to change one’s identity and sense of self. One must have developed certain character traits, such as perseverance and selflessness, self-denial and integrity, to even be in a position to consider marriage a live option. The development of such character traits is possible only within a community and through acceptance of communal norms because by their very nature they result from stifling and denying other, more basic, desires and traits. The willingness to develop such traits follows from trust in commonality with others and in their wisdom. I have to believe that what has been good for another will be good for me because we are relevantly similar, and I have to trust that this will be so even though, as in the case of the development of character traits necessary for marriage, it seems contrary to my own inclinations and basic desires. An individual in the original position is by definition unable to rely on this trust. Finally, the independent self would have no grounds for choosing between particular goods or of participating in them in a rational purposeful way because apart from a received tradition there would be no way of recognizing excellence or correctness in participation. Even allowing that this individual might have, and understand himself to have, a desire for a particular good such as marriage, because such a good requires participation – it is, in other words, a practice – the individual must have some criterion for directing his performance. He must have some standard of excellence. Once again, such a standard relies upon communal norms and established ends for a practice of which this individual must be, by stipulation, unfamiliar. All of the foregoing is important for the overall problem my project seeks to address, which is to determine if it is possible to adjudicate between the two rival versions of historical inquiry represented by Vico and Marx. The reason the foregoing is important is because if the similarities that I suggest between Marx’s philosophy and the Rawlsian position hold true, then the criticisms just brought against the intelligibility of the conceptions of freedom and reason found in the thought experiment of the original position give some direction for an assessment of Marx’s science of history. C. Fred Alford declares that “Rawls’ concept of the self is actually remarkably substantial”, and says that Rawls’ description of the original position comes close to capturing the state of nature [1, p. 140]. I have argued in this chapter that such a conception of the self is not substantial enough for rational choice on the part of this self to be plausible or intelligible. Yet Alford’s claim that the original position represents the state of nature is useful in distilling the essence of the dilemma presented by Vico and Marx. As discussed in previous chapters, the foundation for the differences in the methods of historical inquiry for these two is what they make of the state of nature as an arena for historical observation. The reader will recall from previous chapters that for Vico the state of nature is opaque to the historian; for Marx it is transparent and provides the key to understanding all subsequent human behavior. It is in the state of nature that Marx finds the “real individuals” that are

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the premises with which historical inquiry begins and in the state of nature that the “first historical act” takes place setting history in motion. If Alford is accurate in his comparison of the Rawlsian original position with the conditions of choice in the state of nature, then the analysis above calls into question the conceivability of Marx’s foundational premises for historical inquiry, not to mention the plausibility of his vantage point that allows him to make his observations from outside any particular paradigm of consciousness. The next chapter will, through a discussion of the thought of Alasdair MacIntyre, among others, develop more fully the role of particularity and tradition in reason and observation.

Chapter 6

Ideology and the Problem of Naming

In the previous chapter, I argued that an important similarity obtains between the philosophies of Karl Marx and John Rawls. Both philosophers rely on a supposed ability to divest oneself of the limitations and lenses of particularity in order to reason freely. This similarity, I noted, might strike readers as odd given that it seems as if Marx would deny the very possibility of Rawls’ project due to the obstacle of ideology standing in the way of such reasoning. Yet, it was my contention that this similarity nonetheless holds because it is this same ability to escape the false paradigm of ideology that allows Marx to recognize the existence and nature of ideology and to understand the true forces at work in history. As Alasdair MacIntyre explains, a theorist of ideology such as Marx “is claiming that, in his own case at least, he can separate the ideologically contaminated element from the rest of his theorizing” [38, p. 321]. To be able to recognize that consciousness is false, one must be able to identify the truth. In other words, “to identify ideological distortion one must not be a victim of it oneself” [38, p. 322]. Given the foregoing observation one might anticipate that the charge I intend to level against Marx is one of hypocrisy. Such a charge has the appearance of being low-hanging philosophical fruit; the path is well worn but the wisdom of going down it is, in my view, illusory. Marx knew, as MacIntyre acknowledges, that as an observer of history he necessarily understood his own behavior as an “expression of his own rational autonomy and not the mere outcome of antecedent conditions” [40, p. 85]. Focusing one’s attention on this supposed weakness not only disregards the case Marx makes for the legitimacy of this understanding but also fails, in the nature of ad hominem criticisms, to consider whether or not Marx’s claims about history and human nature are actually true. Granting Marx his exemption, I want to consider the plausibility of his method. MacIntyre’s insights about the theorist of ideology serve to frame the question that the first part of this chapter seeks to address. At issue is whether or not Marx can, as MacIntyre puts it, “separate the ideologically contaminated element from the rest of his theorizing”. Above, in my discussion of Rawls’ original position, I tried to show that the concept of choice from behind the veil of ignorance is unintelligible. In this chapter, I want to continue this line of argument and show that for the same two reasons that choices made in the original position are unintelligible, Marx’s “first premises” cannot function as the foundation for his historical inquiry. His attempt J.R.L. Noland, Imagination and Critique, Philosophical Studies in Contemporary Culture 19, DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-3804-3_6,  C Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010

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to offer a purely empirical, non-ideological science of history must fail because the characterization of the behavior of pre-historic individuals is impossible. The first of these two reasons is that, given Marx’s description of the circumstances in which these individuals live, there is no way to account for intention on their part. This problem is the same as accounting for choice in Rawls’ original position. The second reason characterization of the behavior of these individuals must fail is that there is no way the unencumbered observer could recognize the movements of these individuals and render them intelligible as intentional actions. Selected arguments made by MacIntyre will serve as a springboard to help me begin to build my case, which will proceed to draw on the wisdom of a wide range of philosophers. I will then reconsider Giambattista Vico’s method of historical inquiry in light of these criticisms of Marx. In order to follow my argument, it will be important for the reader to recall the following points. First, Marx declares that his method “starts out from the real premises and does not abandon them for a moment. Its premises are men, not in any fantastic isolation and rigidity, but in their actual, empirically perceptible process of development under definite conditions” (emphasis added) [42, p. 155]. He says, “In direct contrast to German philosophy which descends from heaven to earth, here we ascend from earth to heaven”. This means that he begins with raw empirical observation of particulars and proceeds from there to build theory. Second, one circumstance of this process is the family, which, Marx explains, “from the very outset, enters into historical development” [42, p. 156]. The family is the “first social relationship”, having existed “since the dawn of history”. Third, Marx defines “social” as involving the “co-operation of several individuals” [42, p. 157]. Finally, consciousness is “from the beginning a social product;” it is the “direct efflux of their material behaviour” [42, pp. 154, 158]. Together these four points form the foundation for Marx’s historical inquiry. This purely empirical observation of individual men, before they form society and before consciousness arises, provides for Marx the key to understanding consciousness and ideology, and, therefore, human behavior. This foundation is what allows Marx to see past the illusion of speculation and philosophy and depict reality. These points are important to keep in mind for understanding my argument because what I hope to show is that, given point number four above, cooperation and formation of the family by pre-societal and pre-conscious individuals cannot properly be described as intentional or free actions. Just as significantly, the nontheory-laden observer would not have the necessary tools to be able to describe the behavior of individuals as the formation of a family or as cooperation. In other words, neither the formation of a family nor cooperation between individuals is the sort of event that can be recognized as such through pure empirical observation. The observations upon which Marx builds his theory of history are simply not possible. This does not mean that his insights regarding alienation and exploitation, and even false consciousness, to some degree, are without worth. It does mean, however, that his master key for understanding and interpreting history now lacks support. The philosophical seed-germs for both lines of my argument are found in the writings of David Hume. In the first instance, Hume criticizes the social contract

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theory of Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes famously had contended that men in the state of nature were pre-social and came together to form society through a mutual agreement or contract. Hume’s objection is that the societal convention of promising, which is necessary for contract making, cannot itself arise with the contract because, as he says, “The observance of promises is itself one of the most considerable parts of justice, and we are surely not bound to keep our word because we have given our word to keep it” [32, p. 306]. Language and conventions cannot first emerge from cooperation because they are necessary conditions for entering into cooperation. In the second instance, Hume’s argument that we cannot judge the morality of an action on the basis of observation alone shares with my argument the premise that the bare physical facts of an event do not provide sufficient information by themselves for moral judgment. Though, to use Hume’s example, Oedipus killed Laius and Nero killed Agrippina, we only call the latter event criminal because we ascribe certain intention and knowledge to Nero that we do not to Oedipus. As Hume explains, observation of an act of killing cannot, by itself, provide the necessary criterion for naming the action murder because, “While we are ignorant whether a man were aggressor or not, how can we determine whether the person who killed him be criminal or innocent?” [32, p. 290]. At the heart of these Human arguments is the premise that in order to describe events as actions, mere empirical observation is not enough. MacIntyre develops this premise saying, “In order to identify an action as distinct from a bodily movement, the intention embodied in the action and the meaning the agent attaches to what he is doing must be understood” [38, p. 323]. It is not simply that, as Hume noted, we need to know about intention, among other things, to make moral judgments. Rather, we need to know, or at least have grounds for assuming, intention in order to name actions as such. This is because “the same overt behavior may be the expression of quite different beliefs, intentions, attitudes, and emotions” [38, p. 328]. The task of the observer in rendering this overt behavior intelligible as a given action is to identify the beliefs, intentions, attitudes, and emotions that are, or were, determinative. That is, the goal of the observer is not just to assign any one of a range of possible descriptions to an action, but to assign the one that as accurately as possible captures the agent’s own understanding of the action. Though the theorist of ideology might insist that he can more accurately characterize an individual’s actions than can the agent himself given the agent’s embeddedness in the ideology of his time and place, such insistence is not available for application to Marx’s initial, foundational observations of the actions of pre-societal individuals. Ideology and false consciousness arise from the actions of these individuals; these actions are the key to understanding ideology and false consciousness and therefore cannot themselves be influenced by these distorting factors. Thus, to describe accurately and appropriately the actions of these first individuals as cooperation and the formation of families, these descriptions must not only be intelligible to the observer as such, they must also be determinative for these individuals.

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MacIntyre’s concern in making the above points is to show that in naming certain events as actions we are both assuming something about these events and engaging in a purposive practice ourselves. What we are assuming about these events is that they are directed toward some specific end rather than simply following from a certain cause. The practice we are engaging in is rendering the action intelligible for ourselves so that we can name it properly and perhaps respond accordingly. As I hope to explain, this practice is different both in content and purpose than basic description. In arguing for this distinction MacIntyre responds to J.B. Schneewind who had offered a challenge to it, saying, “We may adequately explain some movements by saying (e.g.) that the person is dancing a jig and we can explain what a jig is without telling a story”. Schneewind was arguing, in effect, that it is possible to give basic descriptions of actions that are neither evaluative nor dependent on context for intelligibility. Yet, contrary to his intentions, his use of this example actually helps to make MacIntyre’s point that “rendering a particular sequence of actions intelligible always presupposes some degree of assumption about the narrative context of that sequence” [39]. Though we (some of us anyhow) may be able to understand what sort of bodily motions a person means to describe in saying that so-and-so danced a jig, it is nevertheless not at all clear that this would always constitute an adequate explanation of these movements. This description may be help to paint a mental picture for someone, but this alone does not make it an adequate explanation of the action. Part of the reason for this is that in naming the event an “action” we ascribe intention to the actor. When MacIntyre writes, “Someone’s dancing a jig during a philosophical discussion, for example, is prima facie unintelligible”, it may seem as if he has just proved his opponent’s point for him. After all, we (some of us) may be able to picture exactly what this might look like and we might conclude, therefore, that if someone were to say, “Smith danced a jig in the seminar today”, he would have given an adequate explanation of the day’s events. However, given that this sort of behavior is entirely inappropriate for a seminar, and no extenuating circumstances render it temporarily appropriate, and no one dances jigs in this community at any time anymore, naming the behavior as the dancing of a jig may be inaccurate however well it evokes the right image. Let me offer three examples to illustrate why this is so. It might be that Smith’s behavior was the unfortunate result of some sort of seizure that caused his body to convulse in a way resembling the dancing of a jig. In this case, as the behavior was involuntary, it is both inaccurate and inadequate to ascribe intention to Smith by naming the behavior as the specific act of dancing a jig. Or, it might be that Smith had a strong dislike for the lecturer and decided to protest the lecture by disrupting the seminar with the most absurd behavior he could imagine. In this case, it would perhaps be accurate to describe Smith as dancing a jig, but it would still be inadequate. A more accurate, and intelligible, description of Smith’s behavior would be to say that he protested the speaker by disrupting the seminar with the dancing of a jig. Describing his behavior as the dancing of a jig would be accurate but only secondarily so. Instead, naming his action a protest

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would be a more accurate and intelligible description because the protesting was the determinative intention for the agent and protest is intelligible in such a context, however unusual it may be to do so by dancing a jig. Naming an action adequately requires both that the actor intended to act so, in other words, that he understood himself to be performing this act, and that so naming the action renders it intelligible to others. Thus, in a third example, it might again be the case that, unbeknownst to all observers, Smith just decided to get up in seminar and dance a jig. It would, therefore, be accurate to name his action as the dancing of a jig. However, it would still be inadequate for an observer to so name his action because given its inappropriateness and the observer’s lack of relevant information, it remains unintelligible. A third party, upon hearing of this strange behavior, might be able to picture the scene if it were described as “Smith dancing a jig in seminar”, but this third party would not be able to understand this behavior. In fact, if his disruption were to remain unexplained, it might be the sort of thing that would lead us to describe Smith as insane and therefore refrain from considering his behavior as rightly called an action because of his lack of any intelligible intention.1 As Wittgenstein writes, “a great deal of stage setting in language is presupposed if the mere act of naming is to make sense” [80, p. 257]. Given the inappropriateness of dancing a jig in a seminar setting, without more information than can be obtained through simple observation, naming this odd behavior as the dancing of a jig is premature and cannot accomplish the purpose of the practice of naming, which is to render intelligible the recipient of the name. Augustine makes a parallel argument in The Teacher, and his approach may help to illuminate the issue. In this section, Augustine is discussing words and signs and how we come to know things. He makes the point that “I do not know that any sound I may hear is a word until I know what it means. Knowledge of words is completed by knowledge of things, and by the hearing of words not even words are learned” [5, p. 31]. Words are signs for things and can be used to signify a thing. However, as Augustine notes, “If I am given a sign and I do not know the thing of which it is a sign, it can teach me nothing”. So, at least two conditions are necessary for the use of a word to signify successfully. The hearer or reader of the word must know that the sound or scribble is a word, and he or she must already be conscious of the thing signified. Just as words signify, actions can communicate intentions. G.K. Chesterton puts it well when he writes, “action implies in its nature that one thing is greatly preferable to another” [16, p. 133]. Chesterton echoes Aristotle who famously began his Ethics by noting the uncontroversial premise that all action aims at some desired end. This end must be preferable to the status quo to an extent sufficient to inspire the change necessary to achieve this end.2 Thus, not only must the agent in question 1 Andy

Kaufman’s humor was often like this. Observers did not know how to name his actions even though on a certain level they were quite ordinary; because of lack of context the otherwise ordinary behavior seemed strange and unintelligible. 2 Discussing the Aristotelian view, Elizabeth Anscombe writes, “But now we can see why some chain must at any rate begin. As we have seen, this does not mean that an action cannot be called

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be able to identify a state of affairs as desirable in order to form an intention and act, so also must any observer, near or distant, be able to recognize this aimed at state of affairs and conceive of it as desirable in order for the action to be intelligible as such to the observer. For an observer to grasp the intention signified by an action, he or she must recognize the action as such, that is, as intentional behavior, and he or she must be familiar with the particular intention that is signified. So, for example, in order to recognize an eye closing as a wink, I must perceive that this is intentional behavior, and not involuntary blinking, and I must be familiar with the practice of subtly communicating common recognition of some otherwise hidden fact, or of slyly communicating attraction. In the passage cited above, Augustine is only concerned with the signifying of objects, which can be perceived as such through simple observation, but following his reasoning can be instructive in thinking about the signifying of actions. Before I can understand “dog” to be a sign of something, I have to have first identified the object that is signified and at least given it a place-holder name such as “that thing”. I do not, however, have to have any special knowledge or experience to pick out a dog as a thing. But as the preceding example shows, recognizing an action as such requires more than simple observation. Picking out an action as such requires experience and knowledge of context. One fluid movement might encompass several distinct actions. For example, in one motion of my hand I might succeed in waving, smoothing my hair, and scratching my ear. If I am a third-base coach in a baseball game all of these apparent actions might actually be described more accurately as putting on the hit-and-run. None of these actions can communicate intention to an observer unless the observer recognizes them as distinct actions and is able to place them in the context of normal practices. Naming is, then, a normative practice. The reader will recall that Vico argued that the ability to name follows from an appreciation for the concept of law, that is, from having the concept of regular, determinative behavior, either of things or persons. If this account of the practice of naming is accurate, it calls into question Marx’s attempt to find the key to seeing beyond or through ideology by means of a purely empirical examination of pre-social and pre-conscious individuals. Not only is there no way to account for the ability of these individuals to act intentionally given their own freedom from any context giving tradition, there is no way to account for the ability of the ideologically free historical observer (i.e. Marx) to recognize the

voluntary or intentional unless the agent has an end in view; it means that the concept of voluntary or intentional action would not exist, if the question ‘Why’, with answers that give reasons for acting, did not. Given that it does exist, the cases where the answer is ‘For no particular reason’, etc. can occur; but their interest is slight, and it must not be supposed that because they can occur that answer would everywhere be intelligible, or that it could be the only answer ever given”. Anscombe, G.E.M. Intention. New York: Cornell University Press, 1985, 34. I concede Anscombe’s objection and agree that, especially for the purposes of the historical inquiry with which I am concerned, the interest of such exceptions as she has in mind would be slight.

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actions of these individuals as such or to name them as cooperation or the formation of families. MacIntyre writes, “the social scientist will either accept what ordinary agents say about their actions or he will insist that he is able to characterize their actions in ways not available to them, and superior to them” [38, p. 335]. This captures to some degree the opposing approaches of Vico and Marx. I have argued against the plausibility of Marx’s foundational premises that provide Marx with his key to characterizing the actions of historical agents in ways (allegedly) superior to their own. Without his philosophical Rosetta stone, Marx has no grounds for claiming interpretive superiority. If one accepts this conclusion there are three apparent remaining alternatives for the would-be historian or social scientist. The first is despair. I will address this option briefly below. The second apparent alternative is to supplement empirical observation with an appeal to some sort of metaphysical framework. I will show that such an approach is only apparently an alternative because it remains susceptible to the same criticisms to which Marx’s method succumbs. The final alternative is Vico’s, or at least something very much like it. Supplementing empirical observation with a metaphysical framework may, if one finds the framework plausible, be helpful in accounting for the naming of objects, but, unless the metaphysical framework includes a stipulation of hard determinism, will not aid in the recognizing and naming of actions. By “metaphysical framework” I have in mind something like Plato’s theory of the forms, Cartesian clear and distinct ideas, or Kant’s story of the necessary conditions and means of judgment. Though such metaphysical frameworks might purport to account for our ability to name objects by judging them to be instantiations of a certain universal, or concept, or form, they cannot provide a criteria for naming actions. This is because, as shown above, in order to name an action one must perceive or deduce the determinative intention, observation of overt behavior is not sufficient. Metaphysical frameworks help to account for judgment concerning objects of experience by providing an object of knowledge or a necessary structure of thought our awareness of which explains our ability to recognize and classify these objects of experience. Yet recognition of, or familiarity with, a particular form of overt behavior is insufficient for judging the behavior to be a particular action because it is the agent’s intention that gives the action its name. The same overt behavior may properly be described as the performance of different actions in different circumstances just as the same action may be performed through different manners of overt behavior. Kant shows awareness of precisely this inefficacy of metaphysical frameworks for enabling the naming of actions in the Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals [36]. In this work Kant argues for a metaphysical foundation for defining good behavior and offers his famous categorical imperative in its various formulations. A morally good action, he says, is one motivated solely by duty. Though he argues with confidence that this is the case, he is less confident in our ability to recognize good actions as such. Even when, in our examination of our own actions, we can find no other motivation than duty, “there cannot with certainty be at all inferred from this that some secret impulse of self-love, merely appearing as the idea of duty, was

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not the actual determining cause of the will” [36, p. 19]. I might be able to define what it means to be a morally good action with the aid of reason alone, but I cannot recognize a morally good action when I see one, or perform one myself, with the aid of reason alone because such a judgment requires me to perceive intention.3 Though it may not be so hard to identify our intentions when we do not purport to act in accordance with duty, the significance of this passage is to show that even Kant, who offered a justification for naming objects of perception, did not claim that his metaphysical framework could account for the naming of perceived behavior as specific actions. The ability to make these sorts of judgments comes only with experience; persons do not possess this capacity for judgment of actions qua persons, but only as particular persons situated in particular times and places and, most importantly, context providing communities. Having dismissed the possibility of supplementing empirical observation with a metaphysical framework to provide for the naming of actions, we return to the remaining two options: despair or Viconian imagination. Reflecting on Kant’s pessimism about discerning one’s own true intentions and finding his description of the persistence of selfishness and the human capacity for self-deception to be uncomfortably familiar, one might consider the obstacle of discerning the intentions of others to be insurmountable and despair of ever having confidence in one’s interpretation of others’ actions. This could take several forms. The first would be a radical skepticism, an acceptance of the impossibility of understanding others. Such skepticism would mean more than just admission of fallibility. Without any standards or guidelines for even approximate interpretations, there would be no way to judge interpretations as probable, let alone certain. The second form this despair might take I call epistemological relativism. Believing there are no set, consistently reliable criteria for interpreting behavior, one might conclude each person’s interpretation is true for them, or at least as good as anyone else’s. A less drastic variation of relativism would be what I call epistemological cultural relativism. On this view there would be a reasonable chance of success in interpreting the actions of others within one’s own culture, but no basis for confidence when interpreting the actions of those outside one’s culture. None of the above is truly a live, practicable option. Neither radical skepticism nor epistemological relativism is feasible because to adopt either would be to give up all hope of interacting successfully with others. MacIntyre is surely accurate when he writes, “If we did not constantly impute intentions, purposes, attitudes, and emotions to others, we should be at a loss to know how to frame our own. Agnosticism would paralyze us in many situations where we cannot refuse action” [38, p. 329]. Much of what we do is in reaction or response to the actions of others or intended to provoke a reaction or response from them. Without imputing intentions to others we would not know how to react and respond, nor would we know how

3 One might respond that Leibniz, for example, offers a metaphysical framework that would provide

for the naming of actions. However, as his system is deterministic and is therefore not concerned with the naming of free actions, I do not consider him to be engaging in a similar project to my own.

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to express our intentions and provoke responses. Epistemological relativism would be no more helpful than skepticism; if either were actually practiced, the choice of one’s means of expression would necessarily be arbitrary. Cultural epistemological relativism may initially appear more plausible, but because cultures are neither geographically discrete nor is cultural membership exclusive, and because cultural practices fluctuate and change over time, this apparent plausibility is chimerical. Such a position would rule out the possibility of learning from previous cultures or other current cultures and would certainly rule out the ability of members of various cultures to interact with each other. Each of these ways in which despair might manifest itself share the implicit conclusion that others, whether all others, or just others in different times and places, are dissimilar to us to such a degree that their behavior must remain unintelligible to us. Though this conclusion may seem to correspond to at least some of our experiences and may seem plausible, albeit unfortunate, if the foregoing arguments concerning the requisite conditions for choice and naming hold, it follows that we shall have to forfeit any claim to finding our own actions intelligible if we despair at the possibility of naming the actions of others. We are able to characterize our own intentions and we choose the means of expressing our intentions according to the social contexts within which we find ourselves. If the actions of our contemporaries are unintelligible, then we will have no criteria for understanding or framing our intentions. We will have no basis for naming impulses, for choosing which impulses to indulge or curtail, and no model according to which we determine how to give expression to these impulses. Furthermore, the standards and practices of a society that provide a framework for naming and expressing intentions are necessarily historical. In other words, they necessarily are understood properly only when recognized as constituent parts of a larger story of a people. As MacIntyre explains, “Narrative history of a certain kind turns out to be the basic and essential genre for the characterization of human actions” [40, p. 208]. The points of the preceding paragraph are essential to the argument of this book. I am not only making a negative argument about the viability of historical inquiry using Marxian critique, I am also making a positive argument about the promise of historical inquiry using Viconian imagination. Others have made the case that a privileged, objective vantage point on history of the kind Marx purports to enjoy is impossible. But, as we will see in more detail later, they have then gone on to draw various conclusions from this common beginning. Some have argued that because each of us necessarily perceives the world from our own temporally and culturally situated perspective, the observations and judgments about other times and cultures are impossible. Some who make this argument go on to argue that because of this impossibility, any attempt to make such observations and judgments is necessarily a violent imposition of foreign frameworks and norms and can only result from an impulse to subsume and control the “other”. Thus, it is not enough to challenge the Marxian approach; I must also make the case for a viable alternative. In so doing I want to emphasize that the argument

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for the necessity of narrative for understanding history does not simply serve as a defeater of the argument for a purely empirical critique, it also serves to illustrate that our way of understanding history just is our way of understanding the present – the very same present in which we act, all instances of which are guided by expectations about the future. If we conclude that people of other times and places are wholly unintelligible to us, the logical implications of our conclusion are that our contemporaries and therefore ourselves are also unintelligible. This is because the differences between our ability to understand distant times and places and our ability to understand ourselves have to do with the quantity and quality of information available to us, not the means or manner of processing the information we have. Therefore, as I explained in the introduction, this book is not really presenting a philosophy of history or social science in the usual sense of the terms, instead its object is the basic historical inquiry we all employ in understanding people’s choices and behavior whether recent or distant past, whether vastly consequential or relatively insignificant. Despair is not practical and espousing it is disingenuous because interpreting actions and imputing intention is unavoidable. Yet, concluding that the alternative is unattractive is insufficient evidence that the actions of others, and ourselves, truly are intelligible. The basis for the method or means for rendering actions intelligible remains to be explained, just as it remains to be shown how this method of inquiry is to work. We must also establish standards for authoritative judgment. Such explanation and demonstration are found in the work of Vico. He offers an explanation of how this form of inquiry works and provides an account of how this skill and efficacy in its pursuit might be developed. I return now to a second look at Vico’s version of historical inquiry and an assessment of what it allows us to do and how it allows us to do it. What his method allows us to do is precisely what MacIntyre argues a method of inquiry into human action must: it allows us to name actions by interpreting behavior and imputing intention. Secondly, his method allows for consistency. We are not forced, as observers, to exempt ourselves from generalizations and explanations we apply to others; we are not required to alternate between descriptions of persons as agents and objects; we do not have to consider historical inquiry, and the practice of social science in general, to involve a distinct type of knowledge, different from the knowledge we tacitly employ in day to day life. Finally, we are able to engage in ordered conventions of reliable, although admittedly not fool-proof, observation and inquiry that are dependent upon, rather than in conflict with, the premise that individual persons can and do act freely. What we find in Vico’s aptly named New Science is a way to study human societies and human behavior that allows us to maintain, to borrow a phrase from Rawls, reflective equilibrium. Rawls uses this description in an entirely different context but I borrow it for use now because it is appropriately evocative. Reflective equilibrium refers to a balance or relative equivalence between one’s intuitive conceptions and intentions prior to inquiry and the conclusions one reaches through the inquiry. In this specific context, when I say that Vico’s way allows us to maintain reflective equilibrium I mean that it does not present us with a picture of the world in which

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the very objects which we set out to study are absent. It does not lead us to deny in one setting those things that we know most certainly in another. Clearly, inquiry should lead to greater knowledge than that with which one begins; it would be neither honest nor helpful if it ruled out a priori the possibility of discovering that one had been mistaken. Thus, I am not suggesting that reflective equilibrium requires simple confirmation of received truths. What I am suggesting, however, is that if we begin an examination of past events or current practices in the hope of gaining a greater understanding of ourselves, our communities, and the communities of others, but find the results of our examination depict persons and communities who are unrecognizable to us because we find therein no individuals who are intelligible to us as agents, this is a sign of a misstep. We study history, both ancient and recent, to understand our world; if our method presents us with a world in which persons are not free, in which behavior is not named according to intention, where the particularities of place and time and community are obstacles instead of keys to understanding, then our project has failed because we have not gained any insight into our world: we haven’t come to understand the world in which we actually live and think and act. We have, then, in effect described a different world and all that makes our lives intelligible to us and that provides our identity is simply denied in this other world; the name “I” is not intelligible in this other world. Michael Polanyi writes, “when we comprehend a particular set of items as part of a whole, the focus of our attention is shifted from hitherto uncomprehended particulars to the understanding of their joint meaning”. This is one way to describe our goal in studying history, that is, to grasp the connections between various individuals and groups and their influences on each other. However, Polanyi continues, “this shift of attention does not make us lose sight of the particulars, since one can see a whole only by seeing its parts, but it changes altogether the manner in which we are aware of the particulars. We become aware of them now in terms of the whole on which we have fixed our attention” [60, pp. 29–30]. This change in awareness can be instructive and helpful, but it can also lead us astray if, instead of changing the way we are aware of these particulars, by rendering these particulars intelligible, it renames them as beings other than those we set out to study. If, instead of illuminating the particulars with which we were concerned initially, our shift of attention causes these particulars to disappear, then the shift has not aided our project. Vico’s method maintains the desired reflective equilibrium by starting with a close examination of how it is that we actually do make sense our own history. His inquiry begins with, and is motivated by, the basic assumptions that we can know ourselves and that other persons are similar enough to us to be understood by us. Because the faculty he employs and the procedure he follows for learning about others are the same as those employed and followed by individuals reconstructing their own pasts, he thereby avoids the potential for creating a new world of objects by treating each unit of observation as a subject. Importantly, this avoidance does not entail that the inquiry is restricted to particulars isolated in their particularity. Such a result would also fail the test of reflective equilibrium because of its failure to appreciate the assumption of commonality that motivates the inquiry.

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What allows Vico to navigate between these poles of error is his conception of freedom. He arrives at this conception of freedom through an appreciation of his own freedom, not as he might abstractly imagine it to be, but by reconstructing how he actually has experienced it. He does not invent an unfamiliar type of freedom; he neither conceives of free behavior as indeterminate, as Marx seems to, nor as necessarily uniform, as does Kant. The self-knowledge upon which he draws in articulating this conception is recognizable and experienced in and for its particularity; the self that is known is not a stripped down, abstract Cartesian ego to which the name “I” has never truly been applied. The following typically bold passage from G. K. Chesterton penetrates to the crux of the matter: “The vast and shallow philosophies, the huge syntheses of humbug, all talk about ages and evolution and ultimate developments. The true philosophy is concerned with the instant. Will a man take this road or that? – that is the only thing to think about, if you enjoy thinking. The æons are easy enough to think about, anyone can think about them” [16, p. 136]. The “instant” is where each of us lives, thinks, feels, and decides; the “instant” is where action happens. If Polanyi whispers, Chesterton shouts; but his hyperbole aside, the point is an important one. Just as each of us instinctively and immediately looks for ourselves in any group picture, we imaginatively place ourselves in history. In the grand systems of universal history, as in the purview of the theorist of ideology or the social scientist seeking causal mechanisms in history, we are unable to place ourselves. This is because we only know ourselves through the stories of which we are a part and in the systems of universal history and processes of the social scientists, stories are conspicuously absent. Writing about the dehumanizing effects of living under totalitarianism, Vaclav Havel explains the necessity of stories. “The destruction of the story means the destruction of a basic instrument of human knowledge and self-knowledge” [29, p. 330]. Because the totalitarian system under which he lived mandated and manifested the belief in “the existence of one central agent of all truth and all power, the institutionalized “rationale of history”, it was, therefore, “in essence (and in principle) directed against the story” [29, p. 333]. Stories, Havel says, all presuppose “a plurality of truths, of logics, of agents of decisions, and of manners of behavior”. Such pluralities by their very nature have no role in a universal history, no role in any inquiry that presumes to identify or uncover the causal mechanisms that move history along. Because of these pluralities, “mystery is a dimension of every story”. Mystery is the bane of science, but it is fundamental to human experience; thus, “When the story is destroyed, the feeling of historicity disappears as well” [29, p. 333]. The self, whatever else it may be, is an agent, and agency requires the type of freedom possible only within a story, enabled by mystery. This is what Marx, Rawls, and others who define rationality such that it can only be exercised freely when divested of particularity, fail to appreciate. If the agents entering into a story can fully manifest their individuality only as the story unfolds, in other words if individuality requires a story to become what it is, then by the same token a story assumes and requires individuality. Without unique – mutually

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distinguishable – individuals, the story could never get off the ground. Individuality and story are therefore like Siamese twins that cannot be separated. [29, p. 340]

The experience of freedom is the experience of choice, but it is not the experience of a bewildering obligation to create objects of choice and assign them value, nor is it the experience of being unencumbered by any particularity. The latter description is not even intelligible because experience is something that happens in time and place to some specific person: I can only have my experiences and I always exist in a given place at a given time. My experience of freedom is always my considering how I am to act in the circumstances in which I find myself. Realizing this, we will see that in order to understand others’ free choices we will have to find some insight into how others see themselves and how they conceive of their circumstances. Colin Gunton articulates this truth about our experience, saying, “our human freedom is in large measure what we make of our particularity; it is what you and I do, or would do, as distinctly ourselves, and not as some one else” [28, p. 62]. This deliberation can only take place within the context of my life and the world that I am able to see. When MacIntyre writes, “I can only answer the question ‘What am I to do’ if I can answer the prior question ‘Of what stories am I a part,’ he makes explicit one of Vico’s fundamental insights [40, p. 216]. My knowledge of myself consists of an understanding of the stories of which I am a part. I can understand my own past actions by reconstructing my own thoughts, intentions, projects, and so forth according to their place in my story and its connection with the stories of others. The fact that, as MacIntyre notes, in life “we enter upon a stage which we did not design and we find ourselves part of an action that was not of our making”, does not mean that we are not free. Instead it is what makes freedom so valuable and choice intelligible [40, p. 213]. Hamlet’s soliloquy is only so powerful and poignant because it captures both the inescapable and nearly unbearable particularity of his place in a story he did not start and the freedom he must exercise as the co-author of this story. The significance of Vico’s insight for this project is his recognition and designation of the faculty of the intellect that leads to the type of knowledge that we have of “what it must have been like to be Hamlet”, as the appropriate means of historical inquiry. Vico named and explained a faculty of the intellect and a type of knowledge that had been universally used but not universally recognized. The faculty of fantasia is that which we use in remembering our own past, which is essential for understanding who and where we are in the present, and which in turn allows us to name our options and decide on action. It is the faculty upon which we rely in our interaction with others; it is essential for moral judgment [27].4 Fantasia names the faculty that is instinctively engaged whenever we endeavor to understand the exercise of freedom, either by ourselves or others. Just as the science of optics has helped us understand our faculty of sight by identifying the distinct

4 Fantasia is what Graham Greene’s whisky priest is talking about when he says that “hate is just a failure of imagination”.

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parts of the eye and their tasks, the New Science identifies the necessary conditions for the exercise of our faculty of fantasia. Vico’s method presents a third way, an alternative to the false dichotomy presented by Marx. As I have described above, Marx adamantly declared that his science would not proceed from the heavens downward, but from the ground up. The contrast he meant to draw was between his approach and science that begins with abstract reasoning about universals and continues by naming objects in the world according to these universals. The alternative, which he takes and seems to recognize as the only alternative, is to begin with pure empirical observation and form conceptions of universals according to perceived patterns and laws. I have presented arguments against the plausibility of the latter method, as well as explained how the former fails to appreciate sufficiently the significance of particularity. Thus, I want to emphasize that Vico does not accomplish this reflective equilibrium in his science by appealing to some vague concept of reason, a convenient deus ex machina. Instead, he identifies and explains a hitherto unnamed, but not unused, faculty of the intellect, as well as the type of knowledge towards which this faculty is properly directed. Fantasia is the faculty that is employed in rendering actions intelligible. The fruit of its exercise is not the equivalent of standard Enlightenment conceptions such as Descartes’ “clear and distinct ideas”, or Voltaire’s le bons sens, which are question begging in their simplicity and admit of no standards for authoritative judgment. Rather, the end it pursues is knowledge of “what it must have been like”. Fantasia is essential for human thought, but is not an ontological certainty, necessarily attached to the substance of humanity. Rather, it is something that humanity has gained through participation in community and is something that could be lost; it is also not something that allows for easy, obvious judgment. Possession of the faculty does not entail authority or expertise; fantasia admits of degrees. In fact, Vico suggests that this method of inquiry may be quite difficult and criticizes Descartes for seeking to “know everything in the shortest possible time and with the least possible effort” [13, p. 54]. Crucially, Vico’s contribution goes beyond the mere naming of this faculty. Merely naming this faculty would have left it ungrounded and subject to the same objections that are so devastating to systems of inquiry that appeal simply to a faculty called “reason”. Specifically, such systems are confronted with questions about how to account for authority, for difference, for error, and about the nature of the objects of knowledge. Platonists have to explain the existence of the forms; Kantians have to explain the anthropological findings that challenge his claims of the necessity of certain categories of thought; enlightenment rationalists have to explain their own disagreements about the nature of reason and philosophes such as Voltaire have to explain why so many people just don’t seem to possess the ability to reason well and how one can tell the difference between those who do and those who do not. What enables him to avoid these types of objections is that Vico’s explanation of the faculty of fantasia depends upon his treatment of personhood as a way of being rather than a property a thing has. Understanding personhood, then, is also

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a way; it is a way of relating and interacting with persons that is itself an aspect of personhood. In contrast, it is Marx’s quest to identify empirically the property of personhood that leads him to make the same metaphysical mistakes for which he rightly criticizes others. This mistake results in the effort to isolate this property of personhood from its particular embodiment in an attempt to see personhood as it never actually is or could be. This effort in turn results in the neglect of all of the apparently accidental features of personhood that Vico correctly recognizes as necessary for understanding the behavior of any given person. Additionally, this understanding of personhood as a way of being, as opposed to a property, is what alleviates the formidable problem of establishing through hypothetical empirical observation the basis for claims about the qualities of personhood. The inevitable question that arises in response to a theory such as Vico’s is that of how these practices began in the first place. Vico offers a story about the response of early humans to God’s commands. Yet, the plausibility of such a story is not critical for establishing the efficacy of the overall system of inquiry because the plausibility of the system is provided by actual personal experience and not by evidence about the origins of society. Whereas in Marx’s philosophy, the premises about the actions of the first individuals provide the key for understanding the subsequent behavior of persons and societies, in Vico’s philosophy, his speculation about the first individuals does not function as a necessary premise in his argument for his method. Because Vico recognizes personhood as a way of being rather than a property, he is able to recognize the dependence of fantasia on participation in specific ways of life, or institutions. The three specific institutions are marriage, burial, and religion. The significance of these institutions, which Vico says are common and essential to all communities, is that they provide a system of ends and roles, thereby supplying a basis for naming, for normative judgment, and for identifying individuals according to their relations with others.5 Participation in the practices associated with these institutions results in a common orientation that, despite the admittedly great differences in the particular ways these practices are performed, allows us to see the world that others see; it allows us to see both from where they see and with the same categories. The extent to which we are able to achieve this common vision with any ease or accuracy will be a function of the degree to which our participation in the fundamental institutions resembles that of our subjects. Developing this ability to see as others do requires first an appreciation of difference, which is necessary for approaching one’s inquiry with the appropriate caution and humility. It also calls for experience and wisdom; the greater the breadth of one’s own experience the greater the possibilities one can imagine and the greater vocabulary one will have for naming the projects of others. The desired end is what Isaiah Berlin describes as, “the exercise of judgment, a form of thinking dependent on wide experience, memory, imagination, on the sense of ‘reality,’ of what goes with what,

5 See

Chapter 2 for an account of how this works.

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which may need constant control by, but is not at all identical with, the capacity for logical reasoning and the construction of laws and scientific models” [9]. The development of this ability is very much akin to the development of Aristotelian intellectual virtues. It is appropriate, then, that in approaching historical inquiry we follow Aristotle and “first agree that any discussion on matters of action cannot be more than an outline, and is bound to lack precision; for as we stated at the outset, one can demand of a discussion only what the subject matter permits, and there are no fixed data in matters concerning actions and questions of what is beneficial any more than there are in matters of health” [3, p. 35]. With this in mind, I will proceed in the final three chapters to consider how an acceptance of Vico’s method might inform an approach to sorting through the data and arguments surrounding the three cases presented in the first chapter, returning first to the discussion of the ratification of the Sixteenth Amendment. As we will see, this discussion will lead us to identify a fourth, thoroughly modern institution, appreciation for which may be necessary if we are to begin to understand our two more controversial topics.

Chapter 7

Imagination in Practice

After beginning with a discussion of a concrete historical development of considerable import, namely the ratification of the Sixteenth Amendment to the Constitution, and the circumstances surrounding this development, I proceeded to offer arguments that have been largely technical and theoretical. I want now to display some of the practical implications of these technical and theoretical arguments for the study of this historical event as well as for framing current public policy debates. I shall begin by returning briefly to the history of the Sixteenth Amendment and reframing the basic challenges before us in our attempt to understand how and why it came about as it did. I’ll then explore some ways in which Vico’s approach illuminates this story. Following this demonstration, I will turn to the two current, controversial topics to show why the method of inquiry one uses to understand these cases has great practical and moral significance and how Vico’s method is, therefore, our best option. As discussed at length in the opening chapter, the story of the national income tax in the United States begins many years before the ratification of the Sixteenth Amendment. The process was a long one, involving many people, ideas and factors. Even a modicum of humility would lead a historian to deny any hope of providing a definitive, comprehensive explanation. As Isaiah Berlin writes in The Hedgehog and the Fox, such an explanation is for us impossible because the number of causes upon which events turn is too great for human knowledge or calculation. We know too few facts and we select them at random and in accordance with our subjective inclinations. . .The more we know about the circumstances of an act, the farther away the act is from us in time, the more difficult it is to think away its consequences; the more solidly embedded a fact is in the actual world in which we live, the less we can imagine how things might have turned out if something different had happened. For by now it seems inevitable: to think otherwise would upset too much of our world order. [10, pp. 27–28]

On first reflection, that an event such as the ratification of the Sixteenth Amendment would come to pass when and how it did seems almost necessary, as if it clearly follows from those selected factors that we know preceded it. Still, if we are honest, we know that there must be innumerable unknown events and circumstances and persons that were critical in the process, many of which might seem banal and which, if their significance were fully appreciated, might remove some of J.R.L. Noland, Imagination and Critique, Philosophical Studies in Contemporary Culture 19, DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-3804-3_7,  C Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010

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the luster from the event and some of the glory from those players we have identified as influential. Seemingly inconsequential events such as someone catching a cold, or a letter being lost in the mail may have had more to do with the way our story played out than some grand speech which we would like to think was of crucial importance. Pessimism is certainly warranted if we understand the task of the historian to be that of discovering the exact causes of not only the eventual occurrence of some great event, but the occurrence in the precise manner, place and time that it actually happened. If we want to know why the Sixteenth Amendment was ratified on the day it was, and exactly why each voter in each state voted the way he did, we shall search in vain and without end. But what if we are less ambitious and seek merely to identify the decisive factors that made the difference between the event happening and not happening? Though such an endeavor might not satisfy fully the curiosity of the professional historian, perhaps it would suffice to aid current political actors and observers by providing lessons applicable to current and future policy initiatives. This sort of approach to history, seeking to discern parallels between the past and present that would inform decision making today is what Hegel calls “pragmatic history”. He is dubious about the potential of even this less ambitious approach. He writes Rulers, Statesmen, Nations, are wont to be emphatically commended to the teaching which experience offers in history. But what experience and history teach is this—that peoples and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it. Each period is involved in such peculiar circumstances, exhibits a condition of things so strictly idiosyncratic, that its conduct must be regulated by considerations connected with itself, and itself alone. Amid the pressure of great events, a general principle gives no help. It is useless to revert to similar circumstances in the Past. The Pallid shades of memory struggle in vain with this life and freedom of the Present. Looked at in this light, nothing can be shallower than the oft-repeated appeal to Greek and Roman examples during the French Revolution. Nothing is more diverse than the genius of those nations and that of our times. (emphasis added) [30, p. 49]

If each period truly is involved in circumstances peculiar to the time and if conditions of things are so idiosyncratic as Hegel claims, then perhaps it is a fool’s errand to look for lessons in history. Searching for a general principle to follow and apply must be a wasted effort if Hegel’s description of the difference between periods is accurate. Even if we could discern a principle from study of the past, it would only be applicable to the unique situation from which it was drawn. I want to suggest, however, that the study of history is not in vain, and that a pragmatic approach to history is worthwhile and can be fruitful. Although we may not be able to find a general principle to follow when trying to reproduce events of a certain kind, there may be other important things we can learn from history to help us today. Applying lessons we find in Vico’s work can help us salvage such a project, though to appreciate how this might be we will have to change the questions we ask as well as the method we follow in pursuit of answers to these questions. To demonstrate this change of focus, and how it truly requires us to apply our imagination to the problem, I will proceed with a sketch of the nature of, and means for,

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study of the Sixteenth Amendment, informed by my understanding of what Vico has to teach us. A critical point to make in this sketch is that our object of study should shift from the event of ratification itself, to the people surrounding the event. We should remember that the type of knowledge we are to seek in historical inquiry is not precise knowledge of cause and effect, but understanding, specifically understanding of “what it must have been like” for the people we are studying. Rather than viewing the ratification of the Sixteenth Amendment as a discrete event whose exact causes we hope to uncover, it may be more useful to see it as a sign of a change in the attitudes and thought of the American people. Ratification of an amendment to the Constitution is a vote of approval of change. Our project, then, will be to come to understand the change as they saw it, to understand why they made the change, and how the change affected these people in the years following. We will want to know the changes that made such an amendment possible, and why they happened, not necessarily the precise factors that led to its ratification on February 13, 1913. Our first step, and part of avoiding the pitfalls of which Berlin warns, is to see the ways in which our object of study was not inevitable, not to be expected, and somewhat peculiar. For example, income taxes had been levied in other countries at other times, but never before in a democracy. It might be unremarkable that a dictator would impose a tax on the incomes of his people; but it is a different matter for people to impose such a tax on themselves. We should also ask how it is that something that was apparently unthinkable, and evidently unthought, at the time of the country’s founding, and which gained little popular traction the first few times it was proposed, came to be something that was accepted and desired by most of the country. When Secretary Dallas suggested a national income tax in 1815 the response was silence. Less than a century later Congress approved an amendment to the Constitution and over 80% of the states supported this change that would allow for a federal income tax. What changed in the way people thought about themselves and their government that made them first consider and then approve taxation according to one’s ability to pay rather than according to one’s purchases or behavior? As both Buenker and Weisman tell us, an important factor influencing the acceptance of this tax was the newly popular view that fairness in taxation did not demand precisely equal contribution of dollars but contribution of an equal share of one’s income. In fact, prominent advocates of this amendment such as William Jennings Bryan and Theodore Roosevelt appealed to the fairness of the income tax and their overall concern for social justice, which itself was a relatively new concept. Thus, understanding the ultimate change in the method of taxation will entail explaining the shift in the use and understanding of words like “fairness” and “justice” that made previously unsuccessful arguments into convincing, persuasive cases for change. A further observation that seems readily apparent, yet is not so easily explained, is that there seems to have been a change in the general population’s sense that a federal income tax was in their best interest, in addition to its being the fair way to raise money. It is not hard to see why the average, non-wealthy person would find the income tax financially preferable to the tariff system; the income tax would be

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much easier on the pocketbooks of the working class. This fact about the tax was not new, however, and therefore cannot alone explain their change in attitude. Still another point to notice is that a federal income tax would give greater power to the government in Washington. Though one can understand why the lawmakers and executives in Washington might favor the tax for this reason, it is not immediately clear why the people in the state legislatures would determine that this tax was in their interests as well when for so long they had felt differently. One factor that we know did change in the years immediately prior to the ratification of the Sixteenth Amendment was the federal government’s per capita spending. This spending increased sharply as the nation’s population did the same. That this was a factor is intuitive, but the way in which it was a factor is less certain. An equally conceivable response to the increases in spending would have been a demand to cut back rather than a call for new taxes. It seems as if a change in the way people viewed the role of government in their lives had something to do with their acceptance of the government’s greater spending and corresponding need for revenue. If we can come to understand the changes in the way people thought about fairness, self-interest, and government, among other things, we might begin to understand those factors that made the Sixteenth Amendment possible. What we discover might also guide us in our study of how the income tax affected the populace. If, for instance, we find that changes in Vico’s three fundamental institutions led to changes in the way people thought, this will direct us to examine how the result of these changes, namely the ratification of the Sixteenth Amendment, in turn affected these institutions, with one possible outcome being a better understanding of other events and changes in the past century. Having framed our project of understanding the ratification of the Sixteenth Amendment as, fundamentally, an attempt to understand why popular opinion about certain basic concepts changed, a quick look at alternative approaches to this attempt will illustrate the attractiveness of Vico’s method. One of our choices for explaining these changes in thinking is that the people’s ability to reason changed: for better or worse, their ability to reason using the basic concepts of fairness, self-interest, and government, changed. Perhaps they came to recognize the true meanings of the concepts of fairness and self-interest and finally understood the correct role of government. Or, perhaps their previous understanding was more accurate and they forgot what they had known. Maybe the true meanings of these concepts, previously obscured in some fashion, came to be obscured differently because of changes in the modes of production. On any of these accounts, one proposing such a story would have to provide some explanation for the independent ontological status of these concepts as well as claim some privileged understanding of these concepts unavailable to those persons who are the objects of our study. Objections to these sorts of positions have been detailed in previous chapters. Vico’s method has in its favor fewer ontological commitments and more humble estimations of the observer’s intellectual prowess and perspective. This method seeks explanations for changes in ways of thinking by examining changes in the contexts and settings in which the concepts in question were used and understood.

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The faculty we must employ in our application of Vico’s method is imagination; we must try to see the world as our subjects saw it. We must search for those factors that altered their vision and with it their thought about fairness, taxation, and the role of government, among other things. The key to exercising our imagination, that condition which provides a window into the minds and lives of the people we are studying, is our participation in the three fundamental institutions of human society. The fact that we share with the citizens of the late 19th and early 20th centuries a similar framework of consciousness and moral orientation shaped by our participation in the institutions of marriage, burial, and religion allows us a starting point for understanding the world as they experienced it. This also gives us some guidance in our search for understanding differences between their vision and ours insofar as it directs us to look into changes in the practices constitutive of these institutions as bellwethers for changes in ways of thinking. What I must make clear at this stage is that this call for using our imagination is not a suggestion that historians retire to the armchair to daydream or speculate about the Sixteenth Amendment. History is unquestionably an empirical endeavor. The role of the imagination is to guide empirical investigation and to inform our understanding of the significance of empirical findings. I suspect that many of the items identified by historians as significant factors in the ratification of the Sixteenth Amendment have been identified accurately. Where I think Vico’s insights can help is in our ability to grasp the ways in which these factors were influential. When scientists came to understand the process of photosynthesis, their discovery was not that sunlight was a factor in the growth of plants. That plants need sunlight had been known for ages; what was new about the discovery of photosynthesis was the appreciation for the way in which sunlight helped plants grow. I propose that what we can learn from Vico about studying history is analogous to what scientists learned about plants in their discovery of photosynthesis. It is likely that historians have been exactly right in identifying industrialization, economic developments, and population shifts, among other things, as major factors leading to the eventual acceptance of the federal income tax. The contribution I hope to make with this project is to describe a way of understanding the connections between such factors and the thoughts and reasons that move people to choose and act. Once we recognize and appreciate the relationship between reason and practice, and grasp the significance of the role of our participation in basic human institutions, such as the family, in shaping our thoughts and concepts, we can begin to see the manner in which those factors that our intuition identifies as significant actually influence change. Rather than being forced to choose between an assumption of determinism and study of material conditions on the one hand and a commitment to human agency and the study of reasons on the other, the arguments I have made in the preceding chapters provide the basis for a method of historical inquiry that traces the development of reasons to changes in the structure and practices of fundamental human institutions. Because we too are shaped and formed by our participation in these institutions, we can, through the exercise of the faculty

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of imagination, understand how factors such as urbanization, for example, might affect the family structure and its practices. With some effort we can also imagine how changes in family structure and practices might, in turn, change the nature of relationships and familial roles that inform people’s concepts of duty, obligation, fairness, responsibility, and self-interest, for example. The insights we gain through such inquiry may not always, or ever, supply neat explanations for the events we study; we cannot hope our conclusions will rise to the level of certainty attained in some other fields. Still, as we develop our method and improve our imagination, perhaps our capacity to devise effective policy, influence change, and anticipate the consequences of particular policies will also improve. Improving our ability to anticipate the consequences of policy may be the most valuable result of adopting this approach to historical inquiry. Directing our attention to changes in the practices of the basic institutions in search of an explanation for political or moral change may condition us to consider the influence of potential policies on these same institutions, thereby giving us a key for anticipating unintended consequences of said policies. With this in mind, I want to use the remainder of this chapter to demonstrate the practical application of these principles of historical inquiry I have advanced to the study of the ratification of the Sixteenth Amendment. In what follows I will summarize some findings detailed in a demographic report titled Theory of Fertility Decline by John C. Caldwell [15]. This will likely strike readers as an odd place to begin, but this just serves to highlight the extent to which applying Vico’s principles systematically and intentionally will require rethinking categories of relevance. I have three reasons for using this particular study. The first is that it demonstrates how changes in policy can bring about changes in family practices and family roles thereby changing people’s understanding of self-interest, the family, and the government. The second reason is to suggest a possible connection between the types of changes described in this study and the changes in American society that set the stage for the ratification of the Sixteenth Amendment. Finally, this study presents a contrast between critique and imagination that makes clear why there are moral implications accompanying these rival versions of historical inquiry. Caldwell’s book is long and full of empirical data and sophisticated arguments; I cannot do justice to his entire thesis in my space here. However, I do think that even a brief exposition of some of his main points will help to explain the practical import of his findings. Caldwell’s topic is fertility decline; specifically he is interested in explaining the regular occurrence of falling birth rates in societies as they become modernized. “The mainstream arguments”, explaining declining fertility arguments, he says, “are that fertility is high in poor, traditional societies because of high mortality, the lack of opportunities for individual advancement, and the economic value of children”. There are some reasons to question these arguments, though. Of these, “the most fundamental issue is whether the theory actually deals with reactions and accommodations to material circumstances. There is a persistent strain in demographic transition theory writings that claims that rationality comes only with industrial, urban society” [15, pp. 118–119]. Caldwell quotes the United Nations

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Population Studies to support his characterization, “The entire process of economic and social development. . . itself changes people’s outlooks from traditions and fatalism towards modern concepts and rationalism” [15, p. 120]. This approach is inadequate, he thinks, and he attempts to show why. Caldwell identifies one of the sources for this mistaken approach as a failure to appreciate the rationality of the community prior to the change that these theorists are seeking to explain. A criticism he repeats throughout the book is that too often these observers have studied only the change itself and the resulting conditions and not the conditions prior to the change. The result is a failure to appreciate that certain concepts form and new options emerge as objects for consideration only after certain other changes happen. Let me give an example: discussing popular theories about the transition from family-based communities to the emergence of a State, Caldwell says, “It sounds as if an interest within the traditional family in national and international affairs produces a new economy and new state apparatus. . . rather than a non-familial economy bringing employees out into a world where these matters are now important to them” [15, p. 283]. Because they do not take the time to understand the communities prior to their modernization, such theorists are not able to perceive that those ends which seem rational after modernization are often not even intelligible to members of these communities prior to certain changes in practices and institutions. It is mistaken to attribute changes in fertility rates to newly improved reasoning capabilities; instead changes in fertility rates are signs of changes in perceived options and ends. Another way of stating this claim is Caldwell’s observation that “If much of the behaviour and attitudes measured are merely what the actors do or say in a specific economic context, then the social change scales are meaningless except as evidence of that context” [15, p. 293]. In other words, presentation of such data leaves unanswered the question of why the context changed. I hope that the reader will begin to see now why I have chosen Caldwell’s book to illustrate the practical implications of my more theoretical argument. The approach he criticizes is an example of the method of the theorist of ideology, that is, critique. The quote from the UN captures perfectly how this approach, in order to explain behavior that fails to conform to the observer’s expectations, inevitably attributes faulty, or altogether absent, rationality on the part of the subject(s). Having declined to adopt this critical stance, Caldwell’s insight is to look for data to identify the nature of, and the explanation for, the change of context that takes place in modernizing cultures that leads its members to identify as rational behavior that previously would have been irrational. The specific factor Caldwell identifies is mass formal education. “The primary determinant of the timing of the onset of the fertility transition is the effect of mass education on the family economy” [15, p. 300]. It is not that through education previously ignorant people come to understand birth control and the rationality of reducing birth rates. Literacy, for example, is not the issue. Instead, “The greatest impact of education is not direct but through the restructuring of family relationships and, hence, family economies and the direction of net wealth flow” [15, p. 305]. Participation in mass education changes the family in such a profound way that “the

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first generation of mass schooling appears to be enough to initiate fertility decline” [15, p. 305]. Evidence shows that the relevant change is not that children become more expensive with the onset of mass education, though they do to some extent. Nor is it the case that through education parents are made aware of just how expensive children are. The important factor is the direction of something called “net wealth flow”. In very basic terms, fertility declines as mass education increases because the wealth that parents invest in their children no longer comes back to them, or to their extended families in the same way as before. High fertility rates persist in communities where there is a strong family morality, where the family unit, including what we would identify as the extended family, is in many ways self-sufficient. In these families children work and contribute to the family economy. Members of these families are dependent upon each other for all manners of support. Identity is tied very closely to family membership and such concepts as duty and obligation and justice are shaped accordingly. In such families the costs of raising children are offset by the expectation that children not only contribute to the family while they are children but, when they are older, they will care for their parents and grandparents. In communities where modernization takes place but without mass schooling, fertility rates do not decline. Mass education changes this because, “Schools destroy the corporate identity of the family” [15, p. 322]. They do this by teaching students to understand themselves as citizens, broadening their horizons beyond those of the family, and leading them to see the “immorality of putting family interests first” [15, p. 312]. This sounds like a pejorative description, but I do not think Caldwell intends it this way. Instead, the goal is to relate the change in family relations that takes place when, “it becomes clear that the society regards the child as a future rather than a present producer, and that it expects the family to protect the society’s investment in the child for that future” [15, p. 305]. The family and the child now become dependent upon the society and the society is dependent upon the child. Thus, it is not necessarily that the state seeks to deceive children about moral truth or undermine traditional morality. Rather, the communal understanding of moral terms such as “obligation” change as the practices that provide the context for such terms change. Once these changes take place, the net wealth flow is no longer positive for parents raising children and having fewer children becomes a rational thing to do. I am afraid that I cannot do justice to the full persuasive force of Caldwell’s data and arguments in this context. I hope that I have at least provided a glimpse of how empirical historical research might be guided by, and through success lend support for, my conclusions about historical changes following from changes in the ways people think, which are themselves generated by changes in fundamental human institutions. These changes in the fundamental institutions may be brought about unintentionally and by factors that are prima facie innocuous. Above I noted that I had three reasons for discussing Caldwell’s book. I have just explained the first; the second reason is that the very changes he details in his study may have some explanatory value in the quest to understand the Sixteenth

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Amendment. I have already characterized this quest as, in very general terms, an attempt to understand why people changed their minds about the fairness of an income tax and the desirability of giving more power to the federal government. The types of changes that follow from mass schooling are the types of changes that I have suggested might explain the increase in popularity of the federal income tax that led to its eventual enactment. Caldwell explains that with universal schooling, the traditional family morality is supplanted by a “new, community morality” [15, p. 302]. Societies with strong family structures and family-based morality “could be stable without central governments; indeed the demands of governments posed some threat to the familialbased morality that justified the family structure” [15, p. 282]. As the family-based morality is weakened, a stronger central government is necessary to maintain order. This moral system is affected by mass schooling because “it becomes clear that the society regards the child as a future rather than a present producer, and that it expects the family to protect the society’s investment in the child for that future” [15, p. 305]. The society is dependent now on the child and the family, but in different ways. Also, because the child is expected to be in school, and not contributing to the economy of the household, the child’s sense of responsibility to the family is diminished. This ultimately leads to lower fertility rates because children provide fewer returns to the family; it also leads families to be less self-sufficient and more prone to develop some dependency on the government. What we see, then, with the onset of mass education is changes in the way individuals understand their own identity, changes in the way people understand their responsibility to their family and to their society, and in the way they view their society’s responsibility to them. It brings about a need for, and an expectation of, a stronger central government. These changes are among those that set the stage for the ratification of the Sixteenth Amendment. Interestingly, the proportion of students attending school daily in the US was 35% in 1870, 41% in 1890, and 53% in 1910, a steady increase on its way to 68% in 1930 [15, p. 310]. 1909 was the year the amendment passed Congress, 1913 was the year it was ratified. If Caldwell’s thesis is on the mark, it could very well be that changes in education policy were indirectly responsible, along with other factors to be sure, for the eventual acceptance of the federal income tax. As I wrote above, we should not expect Vico’s method to provide us with neat explanations for political events. Even if my hypothesis about the relationship between changes in education policy and the ratification of the Sixteenth Amendment is accurate, the relationship certainly is not one of direct causation, nor is it the only important factor we might hope to discover. Certainly, more research would need to be done to confirm my hypothesis, but if such confirmation were achieved, this would be a significant step towards a new way to study history, particularly political history. It would also give us good reason to examine common institutional structures and practices of various groups in the hope of understanding why they take the stances they do on certain issues. It might also help us to anticipate the way policies might affect society by guiding us to think about how they would affect institutions such as marriage.

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The third reason I listed for using Caldwell’s book was because of the moral implications that are made evident by the contrast he presents between the assumptions underlying the methods of critique and imagination. The reader will notice that both Caldwell and the theorists whom he challenges examine the same basic empirical data to reach their conclusions; they all look at fertility rates and income rates and key indicators of modernization. However, the theorists Caldwell criticizes, exemplified by the quote from the UN report, begin with the assumption that those pre-modern peoples, lacking “economic and social development”, are also pre-rational. There are several ways one could interpret this claim that the pre-modern peoples are pre-rational. It could mean that they do not understand the true meanings of important concepts and their applications. It may be, for example, that they do not understand what “justice” really is. Or, it could mean that they do not fully understand their own self-interest and therefore behave in ways detrimental to their well-being. It could also mean that their lives and society are not ordered to achieving some specific final end and are therefore dysfunctional. Any of these interpretations, and probably others, might be included in the observation that these pre-modern peoples are not yet rational. Regardless of the precise meaning, though, it is not difficult to grasp what is entailed by this observation. One need not to attribute any malice to these theorists nor is it necessary or even helpful to introduce accusations of any of the possible “-isms” that one could imagine such assumptions might generate in order to notice the moral and practical implications of this starting point. If a group of people is not rational, then it is neither free nor responsible for itself; benevolence would indicate such a group requires help. Though the people may not know they need help, and may even resist this help, they need it nonetheless. Argument and rational explanation will not be sufficient for demonstrating to them that they need help or for showing them the “right” way because it is their very lack of rationality that is the cause of their predicament. It follows that coercion will be the only recourse for those wishing to help. Even if we assume the best of intentions on the part of those who come to their aid, such aid is necessarily paternalistic and, by its very nature, must employ either deceit1 or force since it cannot use reason. Such paternalism requires hyperconfidence in one’s own rationality and perception of the truth, which confidence has historically been a precursor to much worse things than paternalism. Furthermore, imagining for the moment that the pre-modern peoples in question are not victims of false consciousness but are fully rational, though they do perceive the world and themselves in a different manner than do the enlightened moderns, the likelihood of any successful manipulation by the moderns is very small. Not

1 This

deceit need not be malicious. For example, one can imagine such paternalism attempting to influence behavior by providing truly desirable incentives for change, but this would still count as dishonest manipulation because the ostensible reasons for change are not the real reasons motivating those attempting to bring about this change.

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only will the subjects’ behavior be less predictable given their own distinctive rationality, one might reasonably expect them to be, at the very least, resentful of the interference. I want to emphasize here that I am not suggesting a necessary equality of all worldviews, nor am I suggesting that one group or culture may not accurately judge another group or culture as mistaken about the world or their place in it. I am most definitely not arguing that the world is however it appears to be to whomever is perceiving it. Peter Manicas worries that the type of concerns I express above about the judgment of another group’s rationality tend “to undermine an appearance/reality distinction”. He agrees that “it is true that the social world is constituted by agents and has meaning in virtue of this”, still, “it may be the case that the understandings that agents have of their social world is incorrect” [41, p. 268]. This view is entirely consistent with my argument. In fact, I think this view is exactly right. My concern, however, is with the way observers might come to reach the conclusion that “the understandings that agents have of their social world is incorrect”. And, again, my concern with this is because the way one reaches such a conclusion has implications for what one does upon reaching this conclusion. In the following chapters, I will develop this issue in much greater depth in my analysis of the books by Frank and Salzman. For now, though, I want to examine a little more closely the significance of the proposed connection between Caldwell’s conclusions about mass education and the change of attitude that was eventually made manifest in the ratification of the Sixteenth Amendment. I’ve suggested that changes in what Caldwell calls “family morality”, produced by the spread of mass education, may help explain why attitudes about a federal income tax changed to such an extent that the amendment proposing this tax finally passed. If the family, as one of the three fundamental human institutions Vico identifies, changed to the degree Caldwell describes, one would expect this to have a significant effect on the overall worldview of the society. If the three fundamental institutions are responsible for shaping the societal consciousness, a major change in one institution will have an impact on this consciousness. The institution of the family clearly changed, and this, in turn, changed the societal consciousness, but there is more going on here. Both Wittgenstein and MacIntyre use the metaphor of a stage to describe the role stories play in shaping an individual’s identity. Expanding upon this metaphor, the “restructuring of family relationships” Caldwell describes as a result of mass education, amounts to a reorganization of the stage set, and as such affects the way individuals understand their own identity, and, in turn, perceive their ends. I suspect, however, that what Caldwell’s particular example reveals is not simply a change in one of the fundamental institutions, but the emergence of a new, fourth fundamental institution: the state. When Caldwell writes that one effect of mass education is that society “expects the family to protect the society’s investment in the child”, the “society” of which he speaks is not simply the community within which the family has lived all along. Instead, it is the state, which now acts as an agent, making this investment in the form of education. The obligation the family incurs is not to the people collectively, but to the state.

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Certainly states existed long before the development Caldwell describes and certainly many factors in addition to mass education brought about its establishment as the fourth fundamental institution. What I mean to argue here is just that in Caldwell’s description of the changes in the family brought on by mass education it is apparent that the state has become sufficiently pervasive and prominent in the lives of individuals to play the role of a fundamental institution in Vico’s version of historical inquiry. We can see in Caldwell’s story that mass education has not only changed the size of the family, but that it has changed the family members’ conceptions of themselves as a family and as individuals. It has also changed the role of the family in the life of an individual, diminishing the role of the family as a source of order and authority and increasing the role of the state in these areas. The state does not replace the family entirely, but it supplants the family to the extent that it fills these important roles. Currently, at least in the United States and the West generally, the state touches almost every part of an individual’s life; the presence of the state is almost always felt. In any given sphere of life, the individual stands in some relation to the state and to this degree the individual’s identity is necessarily shaped by the state.2 What we see in the long story of the ratification of the Sixteenth Amendment is a glimpse of the concurrent emergence in American history of a fourth institution that shapes and informs the American consciousness. If I am correct in this judgment, there are several lessons we can draw from this development that should inform our approach to historical inquiry. First, this reinforces the fact that unintended consequences abound in history. This reminder, however, should not serve to discourage us but, on the contrary, should illustrate that as we come to understand the ways in which changes to fundamental institutions have affected consciousness in the past, we are thereby provided with more keys to anticipating the effects of future changes. Next, because our example shows us a significant change to a fundamental institution as well as the emergence of a fourth such institution, we should be better able to appreciate both the magnitude of the role this fourth institution plays and the fact that this fourth institution has not been and (as I will argue in a later chapter) is not currently, universally present in human communities. I believe, as argued previously, that Vico’s case for the universality of the three institutions he identifies is convincing. However, because we have seen how a fourth fundamental institution can become manifest, it is apparent that it – the state – is not a necessary human institution. Appreciating this fact will be important as we study past societies, but

2 I must explain that I don’t mean to describe this existence as resembling Orwell’s Big Brother nor

do I even mean to suggest necessarily that this presence is anything but positive. What I mean to describe is just this: upon being born, an infant is provided with a state issued birth certificate and given a Social Security number; immediately, a schedule of mandatory immunizations is provided the parents, which parents also receive some tax relief in return for caring for their child; transporting this child is only allowed in a state approved manner; in a few years, enrollment in school is obligatory, with regular testing to monitor progress; employment of any sort requires notifying the government and paying taxes; at age 18 one must register for the Selective Service; and so on.

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will be even more important as we seek to understand the behavior of other societies today. Realizing that the consciousness and rationality of those of us in the United States and, more generally, the West, is shaped by these four institutions, one of which is neither necessary nor universal, ought to rein in the tendency to assume a common rationality across all cultures. This realization entails neither condescension towards different rationalities nor despair at incommensurability. On the contrary, this realization should be encouraging because it provides some explanation of previous failed attempts at understanding and presents a course for future attempts. Because we can grasp the types of changes in institutions and rationality detailed above, we should be hopeful that we can achieve some insight into the perspectives of other communities in which the state has not had such a pervasive presence. Finally, it should not be overlooked that the changes to the institution of the family and the influence of the state were not uniformly manifest in the US population. Individual communities and their members are and were still unique; our method of inquiry only purports to provide a framework according to which we can imagine the perspectives of others. Though the overall opinion shifted sufficiently to bring about the ratification of the Sixteenth Amendment when its prospects initially looked dim, neither opposition nor support was ever unanimous and within the two groups various reasons for membership were determinative. The imaginative use of the framework provided by the fundamental institutions only facilitates the understanding of the expressed beliefs and arguments of the agents we study, it does not relieve us of the task of uncovering these beliefs and arguments. It would be quite disappointing to argue against a mechanistic view of human history and for free, rational human agency only to be taken to be providing a new schema for identifying the causal determinants of thought and motivation. In his book Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy, Michael Polanyi approvingly interprets Augustine as saying, “the process of examining any topic is both an exploration of the topic, and an exegesis of our fundamental beliefs in the light of which we approach it; a dialectical combination of exploration and exegesis” [61, p. 267]. This describes our method. If we can appreciate the way our history has both shaped and been shaped by our thought, using the (now) four fundamental institutions as signposts, we should be able to achieve a better understanding of those communities and cultures with whom we must interact. What we will be achieving, thereby, is knowledge that neither meets the critical standard of pure objectivity (which standard is impossible), nor merits dismissal as “subjective”. In other words, our knowledge will be neither Marxian nor Protagorian; instead it will be personal. This is the understanding of emotions, motives, and reasons, both our own and otherwise, on which we must constantly rely if we are to avoid the paralysis of which MacIntyre warns. This understanding is also that which we must seek intentionally and intently if we are to engage others as free, rational agents and engage them with the respect such agency deserves.

Chapter 8

What’s the Matter with What’s the Matter with Kansas?

In What’s the Matter with Kansas? Thomas Frank engages in just the sort of historical inquiry that interests me. In this book Frank responds to a situation he finds curious by attempting to understand how it came to be, and in so doing to diagnose it properly. This is historical inquiry not simply for its own sake but for the sake of understanding the present in order to prescribe an appropriate course of action. Here we see an important example of how the naming of the present is really an interpretation of the past. We also see, therefore, how the method of historical inquiry one uses to interpret the past also shapes one’s reaction to the present and one’s expectations about the future. In the Introduction, Frank describes the puzzling circumstances that motivated him to write the book. He recounts reading that in the 2000 presidential election the poorest county in the US voted overwhelmingly for George W. Bush, a Republican. He found that this county’s political behavior was not unusual; poor, working class people throughout the country were voting Republican. This struck Frank as odd: “For [me] it is the Democrats that are the party of workers, of the poor, of the weak and the victimized. Understanding this, [I] think, is basic; it is part of the ABCs of adulthood” [22, p. 1]. The question of how so many people could get “their fundamental interests wrong” is, he says, the “preeminent question of our times”, and it is the question he sets out to answer in this book [22, p. 1]. Frank grew up in Kansas and tells us that because of his concern for his home state, as well as the fact that it falls in the middle of most relevant demographic categories, he chose Kansas as the focus of his investigation. However, the puzzling situation he seeks to understand is “not just the mystery of Kansas; this is the mystery of America, the historical shift that has made it all possible” [22, p. 76]. Frank is a journalist trained as a professional historian and in this book it is apparent that he is not only widely read in history and sociology, but that he is also a diligent and inquisitive observer.1 His story is well researched, full of economic

1 Frank

received his Ph.D. in History from the University of Chicago in 1994. His dissertation was published as The Conquest of Cool University of Chicago Press, 1997.

J.R.L. Noland, Imagination and Critique, Philosophical Studies in Contemporary Culture 19, DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-3804-3_8,  C Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010

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and demographic data, local and state political history, and many interviews with people who represent those who have “gotten their fundamental interests wrong”. Featuring both biting criticism of those he holds responsible for the situation he sees as troubling, and evident concern for those who are suffering its effects, What’s the Matter with Kansas? is entertaining and, to a degree, compelling. Published in 2004 in the midst of the election cycle that culminated in the reelection of George W. Bush, it was also widely acclaimed. It became a New York Times Bestseller and received rave reviews from the elites in the “chattering class”. The Boston Globe called it “A searing piece of work. . . one of the most important political writings in years”. Nicholas Kristof, writing for the New York Times, called it “the best political book of the year”.2 It is because Frank’s book is so well written, so well received, and so clearly manifests the form and function of historical inquiry discussed here that I have chosen it as a contemporary, relevant example of historical inquiry by way of critique. My hope is that my analysis of Frank’s observations and arguments will illustrate the theoretical, moral and practical flaws of this method of inquiry detailed in the previous chapters. The first point in this illustration is to establish that Frank’s method is quite clearly that of critique. This is evident from the outset when he tells us his intent is “to understand the species of derangement that has brought so many ordinary people to such a self-damaging political extreme” (emphasis added). This derangement, he says, has been “carefully cultivated” by “the forces that have pulled us so far to the right” [22, pp. 9–10]. Throughout the book such language as “delusion”, “trap”, “panorama of madness”, and “plague”, is used to describe the situation that Frank means to explain. Even allowing for some hyperbole (it is, after all, not strictly an academic work and is meant to be partisan and motivational), it is fair to say that Frank’s method of historical inquiry is to unmask the forces that, in his view, have created widespread false consciousness underlying a large-scale political shift. Frank does not just think that the poor working-class Kansans who have become ardent Republicans have simply made a factual or logical mistake; no, he thinks they have been caused to misinterpret entirely their own self-interest and led willingly to their own financial ruin. As we will see, this initial evaluation of the situation shapes his investigation, prevents him from truly understanding his subjects, and leads him to draw conclusions with unappealing moral and practical implications. Before delving into this further, I want remind the reader of my intent to address only the method of historical inquiry at hand and not to make any effort to adjudicate partisan disputes or to offer political commentary. I will be accepting, for the sake of argument, Frank’s reporting of the economic conditions in Kansas as well as his claims that the policies promoted and implemented by Republicans are directly responsible for these economic conditions. I will even be granting that the policies

2 http://us.macmillan.com/whatsthematterwithkansas January

5, 2009.

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proposed by the Democrats would be better for the state economically [7].3 As I am neither a political scientist nor an economist, these are not my concerns. Rather, my focus is on the assumptions underlying Frank’s observations and analysis, and with the (in)ability of his method to support the conclusions he reaches. As we saw with Marx, Frank begins with assumptions that both support and entail his method of inquiry, and these assumptions are problematic. If we pay close attention to his starting point, we find that the initial observation that motivates his inquiry is not just an observation. In fact, it is a description that entails a certain form of explanation. Frank does not begin with the observation that the poor in Kansas have voted for Republicans rather than Democrats and that this has had a negative effect on the economy, making these people worse off than they would have been otherwise. Instead, the starting point for his study is a question begging interpretation of this bit of data: these people have gotten their “fundamental interests wrong” and their voting Republican has had the effect of being “self-denying”. The distinction between this basic observation and the interpretation Frank provides is subtle but important. There are at least two assumptions at work in Frank’s ostensibly neutral starting point. The first assumption is that one’s economic or financial interests are, in themselves, entirely equivalent to one’s fundamental or essential interests. The second assumption is that the Kansans at issue here did not simply make an error, whether factual or logical, in their determination of the best way to achieve these fundamental interests, but that they misidentified these interests. In other words, the claim is not that they chose the wrong means to the right end, but that they chose the wrong end. Neither of these assumptions is warranted a priori, nor can they be determined through pure empirical observation alone. Having made these assumptions, the method Frank undertakes to explain the situation (as he has interpreted it) follows logically; as do the conclusions he reaches. This method, though, prevents him from being able to achieve any imaginative understanding of the people for whom he is concerned. Frank does not seem to think that the first assumption is really an assumption. He writes as if it is an obvious, established fact, which one could only fail to appreciate if one were either deranged or duped. He takes as given that “most of us think about politics as a Machiavellian drama in which actors make alliances and take practical steps to advance their material interests” [22, p. 121]. “Us” here names those who have not, as he says, “rejected all the accepted social science methods for understanding how things work” [22, p. 134]. To this clear-headed group, Frank writes, “ignoring one’s economic self-interest may seem like a suicidal move” [22, p. 168]. Thus, that the Kansans he observes do not see this is surely evidence of their “derangement”. If ignoring one’s economic interest amounts to suicide – to killing one’s self – it follows that one’s self is essentially a being whose paramount end either is economic

3 Larry Bartels disputes Frank’s contention that the working poor are more concerned with cultural

issues.

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well-being or requires economic well-being. Though I disagree with this view, it is not my concern here and now to dispute it; rather, my question is: how this could be known with such confidence as to lead one to pronounce others who do not hold this view as deranged? As we saw previously in the examination of Marx’s account of human nature and freedom, Frank’s assumption about ultimate ends cannot be established through empirical methods alone, and he clearly wants to avoid any appeal to religion or metaphysics to support his claims. Attempting to establish his view empirically would entail either begging the question or committing the naturalistic fallacy. That is, he would simply have to identify those who do pursue their economic self-interest above all else as sane and those who do not as deranged, or he would have to say that because most people do place their economic self-interest first it is, therefore, worthy of being so placed. It is certainly possible to make the case that economic well-being ought to be viewed as a fundamental human end, or at least as necessary for achieving any fundamental human end. Aristotle, for example, argued that a certain amount of wealth was a component of the good life. However, one would need to make an argument for such a position based on more than pure empirical observation, and making such an argument would presuppose that those whom one is trying to persuade are rational rather than deranged. Thus, the significance of these assumptions for his project is not simply that Frank has these views about proper human ends, but that these views are put forward as given. Had he observed the voting behavior of Kansans and said to himself something like “This is interesting, these people keep voting for the party that, of the two, seems to be the worst for them economically, I wonder why this is the case?” he would have then left open any number of possible explanations he might have pursued in his research. Included among these possible explanations would be the conclusion that his subjects truly are deranged, or just unfortunately unintelligent. There are, after all, people who suffer both conditions. But by beginning with his assumptions, he ignores any other possible explanations. These assumptions are important to note because they are what necessitate employing the method of critique. Critique, in any of its forms, seeks to unmask or uncover the truth about a given situation or action. What is masking or covering the truth is some form of false communal consciousness, or in other words, a widely believed, but false, story that a community takes to describe and explain some aspect of their lives. As we saw earlier, in order to perform this unmasking, the critic needs a “master key” of some form. This tool serves to identify the nature of the false consciousness, uncover the truth, determine the mechanism that produced the false consciousness, and track down the culprit. For Marx the master key was labor; for Frank it is social class. Both, however, identify their master key on the basis of assumptions about human nature, freedom, and rationality. I have already detailed the flaws in Marx’s assumptions and by now the flaws in Frank’s assumptions should be apparent. Still, a little more needs to be said about how Frank came to identify his master key. This is an important story because, if we are paying close attention, we will catch three telling mistakes in his reasoning.

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Frank says the cause of this derangement that has ordinary people working and voting against their own self-interest is a “style of conservatism” he calls the “Great Backlash”. The Great Backlash “mobilizes voters with explosive social issues – summoning public outrage over everything from busing to un-Christian art – which it then marries to pro-business economic policies. Cultural anger is marshaled to achieve economic ends” [22, p. 5]. The backlash leads to false consciousness because it provides, as Frank explains in an interview, a “fake vision” of politics and people’s own self-interest. It produces this fake vision by using “fake language” which depicts social class as a matter of cultural allegiances rather than economics; this in turn causes poor, working class people to mistakenly align themselves with the wealthy upper class. If rationality is understood as choosing the best means to one’s ends, and one’s paramount ends are economic, and one’s economic ends are a function of one’s class, it follows that one can only act rationally if one accurately identifies one’s class membership. This fake vision is not only a vision of society and its workings, but of individual identity: “it provides a ready-made identity in which the glamour of authenticity, combined with the narcissism of victimhood, is available to almost anyone” [22, pp. 157–158]. Failing to identify accurately one’s social class leads to irrational behavior. The poor as a class, in Frank’s view, have fallen under the spell of a political and economic version of the Stockholm Syndrome.4 And just as a psychologist would rename the behavior of a person suffering from the Stockholm Syndrome, Frank’s grasp of the nature and cause of this fake vision enables him to identify the irrationality of those who suffer from the delusions of conservatism. Frank has special insight into the way the Great Backlash works – how it is perpetrated, how it provides this “ready-made identity” and its emotional power – because, he tells us, he once succumbed to it himself. His story of how he fell under its power, and then was brought to his senses, is important because it is evident that he thinks that the (weak) reasons he had for espousing conservatism as an adolescent must be the reasons others hold to it today. Frank initially came under the spell of the backlash as “a way of expressing teenage anomie” [22, p. 143]. He was “earnest and idealistic”, and bought into complaints about national decline and the intrusion of government. He calls his views about business, taxes, government, and everything else “fantasy”, saying that these views were “strictly theoretical”, not based on any personal experience. For example, “Businessmen were average, authentic people by definition, since they accounted for all of the adults I knew” [22, p. 148]. Frank considers himself to have been a victim of false consciousness; his view of the world was not the result of clear-eyed observation but was instead a fantasy that “arose from [his] peculiar perch in life” [22, p. 151]. He was saved from this life of fantasy when he went to college and “finally learned about social class”. There he learned that economic interests are what move individuals and society; this he learned through his classes in history and sociology as well as through his experience of being excluded from

4 Interview

with Charlie Rose July 14, 2004. www.charlierose.com/view/interview/1353.

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fraternities and group leadership positions by those whom he observed to be much more wealthy than he. Once he had this awakening he started voting Democratic and moved away from Kansas. Frank’s story is interesting and it helps the reader understand his point of view; the problem is that he neglects to consider that others who hold the types beliefs he once did might not all have the same basic story. In form, his reasoning seems to go like this: 1) I once believed X 2) I now believe X is false 3) I believed X because it was emotionally compelling and I was not aware of the real facts of the matter Therefore: It must be the case that others who now believe X only do so because it is emotionally compelling and they are unaware of the real facts of the matter.

This reasoning is, of course, faulty. While it may be the case that Frank was wrong to have held the beliefs he did on insufficient evidence, it does not follow that all who hold such beliefs must do so for the same reasons or that no possible evidence could be sufficient for such beliefs. The result of this unwarranted generalization is that it renders him unable to imagine that others might hold conservative beliefs, either about culture, abortion, or economics, based on reasoning and evidence much more solid and substantial, or even just different, than his was. As we will see, when he meets and observes some vocal conservative Kansans, he is unable to conceive of their stories as revealing anything other than false consciousness. The second mistake we discern in his conversion story is related to the first. Just as it does not follow that all who hold a certain set of beliefs must do so for the same set of reasons, it is also fallacious to conclude that a belief is false if a person came to hold this belief in an epistemically improper manner. For example, I may believe P to be true for any number of bad reasons. Perhaps I came to believe P rather than Q as a result of a coin-flip performed on Mondays and I believe my Monday coinflips are always accurate predictors. Or, perhaps I came to believe P rather than Q because P being true is in my best interest and my constant wishing for P to be true caused me to eventually believe it to be true. Neither of these examples is a good reason for believing P. Were I to try to convince others of the truth of P on the basis of either of these reasons, others would be right to withhold judgment. However, none of this tells us anything about the actual truth or falsity of P. Frank’s story tells us how he came to endorse a certain set of (conservative) political beliefs. It also tells us that he came to realize that many who put forward these beliefs, arguing for them in books and on television, stood to benefit financially from the implementation of these beliefs. What his story does not tell us is anything about the truth or falsity of any of the specific beliefs in the set of beliefs he ultimately rejects. This is an important point because this mistake is not unrelated to his method. In fact, it is one of the more significant implications of critique that, because it assumes beliefs and behavior follow either from false consciousness or material interest, it dismisses as irrelevant questions about truth. I will return to this point later on in this chapter and it will be prominent in the next chapter as well.

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The third mistake revealed in his conversion story is of a different nature than the first two, but it serves to reinforce those unfortunate conclusions. Frank tells us that he saw the truth about politics when he learned about social class. What he learned, apparently, is that economic interests are, at least for clear thinking, rational people, of paramount concern and that they therefore drive political action and shape political views. People who endorse parties or politicians on the basis of non-economic considerations, such as religion, culture, or morality, must only do so because they are deranged. It seems, however, that in drawing this conclusion Frank overlooked at least one very good counter-example to these claims: himself. Now, as I have already recounted, he uses himself as an example of a person who held views for some time that were contrary to his own economic interests and he explains that he did so because he was duped by those whose interests were served by the propagation of such beliefs. It is not in this capacity that Frank is a counter-example to his own generalization. No, it is the current version of Frank, the best-selling author and journalist who serves as the counter-example. One does not have to view his bank statements to conclude that Frank – who, as he tells us never really was workingclass to begin with, having grown up in a comfortable, gated community in Kansas – is most certainly not now someone who would benefit financially from a higher income tax rate for top earners, to choose just one example of a Democratic policy initiative. Frank’s motives in writing this book are, by all evidence, altruistic. That is, he seems to have undertaken the project out of concern for those less well-off than himself; at any rate it would be an act of bad-faith to contend that in writing this overtly political book Frank was engaging in what he calls the “Machiavellian drama” of politics with the purpose of advancing his own “material interests”. It would be unfair to Frank if I were to criticize the views put forward in his book as a sign that he has gotten his “fundamental interests wrong”. Not only would it be unfair, but if I were to conclude that it is evident to me that because he has gotten his fundamental interests wrong he must deranged, this line of criticism would then give me license to avoid the difficult task of evaluating the accuracy of his observations, determining the validity of his generalizations from these observations, and of parsing his arguments based on these generalizations. This would give me license to dismiss his self-told story and consider him as an object of manipulation or a victim of derangement rather than an agent whose perspective I might come to understand, though perhaps not accept. In short, if I were to take Frank’s book as a sign that Frank has gotten his fundamental interests wrong, it would give me license to treat him just as he treats the conservative Kansans who are the subject of the book. And, I expect this would result in my failing to understand Frank just as he fails to understand the people he writes about in the book. In saying that Frank fails to understand the people he writes about in his book, I am not claiming some special insight that grants me the ability to know what these people are really like and what they really think. In making this claim I am just saying that Frank fails to understand these people because he does not actually try to understand them. Though, as he says in the interview mentioned above, he tried

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to meet these people, to sit down with them to understand where they were coming from – tried to get inside the populist conservative “mindset” – he does not show any evidence of having succeeded. This is not to say he does not show evidence of sitting down with them and talking with them – he clearly did do this – what I mean is that though he listened to them and wrote down what they said, he did not do many of the things one would need to do to “get inside their mindset”.5 Because he assumes these people are deranged (to suggest that they are all too simple-minded to know their own interests would just be too uncharitable) he rules out the possibility that they might reasonably have different ends in life, or that they understand their community and the role of politics and government differently, or that they read the economic data differently. In other words, he rules out understanding the people and instead, as he says, he seeks to understand their derangement. He takes their words and their thoughts as symptoms of this derangement rather than as rational expressions of a competing view of the world, which view one might be able to imagine were one to take the appropriate steps. Choosing this course foreordains confirming the derangement and entails looking for its cause. And, because he begins with victims, he will end by declaring villains; this is necessary, all that remains is to identify these villains and their specific methods of manipulation. My objection to this is not that his conclusions are necessarily false – it is possible that Frank is right – my objection is that, even if he is right, his method is such that, on the basis of his findings alone, one cannot know whether he is right. This inevitable uncertainty is especially troubling because his conclusions about victims and villains entail paternalism, coercive measures, and allegations of serious moral wrongdoing. As we saw previously, the theorist of ideology necessarily claims to be able to understand the persons he studies better than these people can understand themselves. Frank is unequivocal about his ability to do this. In fact, he concludes that one of the reasons the Democratic Party has failed to counteract this cultivated derangement is that “Democratic political strategy simply assumes that people know where their economic interest lies and that they will act on it by instinct”. He suggests that his observations and interviews have made it apparent to him that “people don’t spontaneously understand their situation in the great sweep of things” [22, p. 245]. It is apparent, however, that this view was not the result of his observations and interviews; it was the presumptive starting point that provided the framework for interpreting all his findings. This is confirmed when he recounts his interviews with various Kansans. Though he frequently finds them to be pleasant, seemingly bright people, he ultimately finds them unintelligible because his starting point has tainted all of his observations. One of these people is Tim Golba. Golba, Frank explains, is the leader of an antiabortion political group called “Kansans for Life”. Though Golba works full-time as a bottler at the local Pepsi plant, and has only a high-school education, Golba

5 Frank

interview with Charlie Rose.

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has made his group a powerful force in the Kansas political arena. Specifically, this group has worked to make sure the Republican Party stays solidly committed to the pro-life cause [22, pp. 166–168]. Frank describes Golba as humble, neat and polite. Golba explains straightforwardly why he does what he does: “If you’re like me, consider yourself a born-again Christian, then the issues are black and white. There’s not much room for gray area. You’ve got to take a stand”. Though he appears clear-headed and rational based on the little Frank tells us about him, given Frank’s framework we know Golba must be one of the deranged victims of the backlash. Thus, despite the fact that Golba understands himself to be devoting his time to promoting the defense of innocent life, Frank knows better: “Golba is deeply religious, utterly dedicated to his task, toiling selflessly every day of the year – all to make the powerful even more powerful. . . He denies himself so that others might enjoy their capital gains and never have to work at all” [22, p. 169]. Kay O’Connor is another conservative Kansan we learn about. O’Connor is an outspoken state senator whom Frank is surprised to find “genuinely charming”. In fact, she even “gives the impression of intelligence”. That this must only be an impression of intelligence and not the real thing can be deduced from the fact that O’Connor and her husband “are not wealthy people”, yet she represents a political party whose policies “can only leave people like her worse off”. Frank wonders what could bring someone such as O’Connor to work so hard without any material incentive and concludes that it must be that the beautifully simplistic conservative worldview has captured her imagination [22, pp. 172–173]. Frank is to be commended for doing the hard work of tracking down and interviewing people such as Golba and O’Connor, and I should note that he interviewed many more than just these two. Highlighting his treatment of these two, however, will suffice to demonstrate that, given his initial premises about human nature and rationality (that is, that economic interests are paramount and that rationality freely exercised thus pursues economic interests), and his consequent employment of critique to investigate the political developments in Kansas, any attempt to understand the people he studies will be superficial. This is because an essential aspect of critique is that once it has been determined by the observer that his subjects are victims of false consciousness, the stories these people tell about themselves can only be further evidence of this false consciousness. These stories only serve to provide the details of the workings of this false consciousness and perhaps help identify the perpetrators of this illusion; they are useless for understanding the people themselves because the very basis for employing this method is that one already knows their story better than they do. This knowledge of the meta-narrative of which the individual victims of falseconsciousness are merely a part is what allows Frank to blithely rename what Golba and O’Connor are doing. Golba sees himself as obeying his religious and moral obligation to defend innocent life. O’Connor sees herself as promoting individual freedom and fighting cultural decline. But Frank knows that what they are both really doing is “making the powerful more powerful” and “help[ing] the CEO of Westar pile up the pelf”.

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It is not that Frank is commenting that their actions have these results in addition to their intended results. No, Frank is able to describe what they are “really doing” because he understands that they are merely pawns in a much larger story to which they are blind. How, again, does he know this? He knows it because he knows what people’s true interests are and what politics is really about. When people do not act accordingly, they are, ipso facto, acting irrationally. If they are not acting rationally it follows that something other than rational free choice accounts for their actions. Once one knows what force is accounting for their behavior one then knows how to name it properly. In the chapter of his book that includes the interviews with Golba and O’Connor, it might not be apparent that all this is the case; the very fact that he interviews conservatives and asks for their stories makes it seem as if his project is one of understanding. Though the title of the chapter, “Happy Captives”, ought to give some indication, from reading this chapter alone one might not be able to identify Frank’s method as critique. This apparent similarity with the alternative version of historical inquiry – imagination – is one reason why close analysis of specific examples of these two versions – in addition to the foregoing analysis of the versions themselves – is so important. These two versions of inquiry are not simply two different ways of getting at the same basic facts; in fact they produce very different results with significantly different implications. Frank’s treatment of these interviews begins to be more explicit in a later chapter, thus enabling us to see exactly what role the interviews play in his larger narrative. When it is time to explain how the false consciousness was created, he describes his efforts up to this point in the book as “enumerating the ways in which Kansas voters choose self-destructive policies”. He asks, “Who is to blame for this landscape of distortion, of paranoia, and of good people led astray?” [22, p. 242]. It is now obvious that stories of Golba, O’Connor, and others are not meant to help us understand them, instead they are meant to demonstrate the nature of their derangement. Having concluded that his subjects are neither rational nor responsible for their choices, Frank proceeds to provide the real explanation for their behavior. The reason these people have devoted themselves to conservative causes, placing their concern for moral values over their own economic interests, is that Democrats have failed to explain to these people where their true interests lie. It is not, Frank says, that Democrats are monolithically pro-choice or anti-school prayer; it’s that by dropping the class language that once distinguished themselves sharply from Republicans they have left themselves vulnerable to cultural wedge issues like guns and abortion and the rest whose hallucinatory appeal would ordinarily be far overshadowed by material concerns. (emphasis added) [22, p. 245]

I said earlier that Frank’s master-key is class and here we see precisely how it works. Because people should, if they understand their own interests, identify themselves with, and vote with, members of their own economic class, it must be the case that, when people do not do so, they are victims of some false vision of the world. This false vision must be the result of some intentional deception and

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not a mistake. We know this because Frank tells us that “American conservatism depends for its continued dominance and even for its very existence on people never making certain mental connections about the world, connections that until recently were treated as obvious or self-evident everywhere on the planet” (emphasis added) [22, p. 248]. Conservatives have been able to prevent people from making these connections because they have created “their own class-based language”, which, because liberals did not actively fight against it (because, mistakenly, they assumed people know their own interests), has led people to misunderstand themselves and the world they live in. Thus, Tim Golba’s story about being born-again and taking a stand for what he believes in is interpreted as a sign of his false consciousness. Frank knows that if Golba had not been tricked into thinking that working to end abortion was more important than his own financial well-being, he would be a devoted Democrat. The conservative worldview that Kay O’Connor finds so attractive is a fairy-tale made possible by a fabricated lexicon designed to prevent its users from accurately describing the world. What deserves special emphasis at this point is that Frank is not arguing that these working class conservatives are mistaken about the best way to achieve their ends. He is arguing that they are so deluded that they do not even know what their ends are. Frank does not present an argument that happiness is to be found in the pursuit of different ends than these conservatives pursue (this is not a modern day version of Platonic debate about happiness), he doesn’t think an argument needs to be made. He finds it self-evident that these people completely misunderstand who they are and what is in their own best interest. If there is any remaining doubt that this is his position, it is allayed decisively when Frank marvels at the way labor union membership “inoculates them against the derangement of the backlash. Here values matter almost least of all, while the economy, health care, and education are of paramount concern” [22, p. 246]. Belonging to a union helps people to see who they really are and the way the world really is. On the other hand, the conservative view of the world and politics is a virus that causes good people to hallucinate, to see values that are not really valuable and to pursue ends that are suicidal. So, this is a contemporary example of historical inquiry by critique. We see that, though its subject is the past, its implications are for the present and future. Our first subject of historical inquiry, the ratification of the Sixteenth Amendment, fit more neatly into the category of pure history. Our second example, however, does not fit so neatly there – with this example the lines between history and politics are nebulous. With this example the stakes are higher and the subject is more sensitive. This is why I wanted to present my analysis of the two rival versions of historical inquiry and give (as much as possible) an apolitical example before tackling this second example. If I had not taken this approach it might have been difficult – and it still may not be easy – to distinguish between an argument against Frank’s method and an argument against his politics. While I have approached Frank’s book as an example of historical inquiry, it is also quite clearly a book about politics, advocating certain policies and railing against others. Before I proceed with my objections to Frank’s method of historical

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inquiry I want to reiterate that I do not intend to endorse or dispute Frank’s political views. It is not that I am uninterested in them or find them unimportant; to the contrary, I find them both interesting and important. My intention now, however, is to demonstrate that the understanding of human agency and rationality both assumed and entailed by the method of critique is not conducive to fruitful political debate.6 One reason why the identification and analysis of the versions of historical inquiry is so important is that failure to do so can result in an inability of rival political perspectives to establish any common ground from which dialogue can begin. We can only see this clearly if we distinguish the historical inquiry from the politics. I will try to maintain a clear distinction between Frank’s political and historical views as I proceed; one of the ways I hope to do this is by suggesting ways Frank might make a case for his political views while at the same time arguing against his method of inquiry. To begin this next section it will be helpful to present thumbnail sketches of both his historical and political views side by side. As I understand it, Frank’s political position includes the following views. First, government regulation of big business is necessary to protect the interests of smaller businesses and lower income working-class people. Second, some form of progressive income tax is necessary to redistribute wealth in order to prevent too great a disparity between the upper and lower classes. Third, people are better served voting according to their own economic interests rather than pursuing cultural change through politics. As we have seen, his view of history is that members of the lower economic class in Kansas and elsewhere in the United States have been rendered delusional by a concocted vision of the world and a corresponding language to describe it such that they have willfully worked against their own best interests. This false vision of the world was fabricated by members of the wealthy upper class in order to further their own economic ends and secure their powerful status. I have argued that Frank’s method of historical inquiry, critique, suffers from defeating internal flaws, just as Marx’s does. Frank simply cannot establish his master key for interpreting the actions of others through empirical means alone. The problem with Marx’s account was his inability to make sense of his imagined observations of the behavior of pre-societal persons. Frank’s problem has to do with establishing economic ends as paramount, and obviously so, in order to identify those who do not value these ends above all others as deranged. Without this foundational premise about the priority of economic ends, Frank’s evaluation of the current situation and his explanation of its cause are unsupported. Notice, however, that his foundational premise is not necessary for his political position and thus my argument against his method of historical inquiry is not an argument against his political position. Instead, my argument against Frank’s historical method is

6 Examining

recent political best-sellers (i.e. books by Ann Coulter and Al Franken) will reveal polemics from both ends of the political spectrum that make no pretense of hoping to foster debate; to be sure, arguments are offered, but presuppositions of the opposition’ intelligence and good faith are exceedingly rare.

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intended to show that the assumptions embedded therein preclude the possibility of rational engagement with alternative political views. Together, Frank’s historical method and the conclusions it produces entail that politics may only be understood as a clash of wills. This is because they do not enable the type of understanding of others that is a necessary condition for dialogue, argument, and negotiation. When these latter types of engagement are removed from the list of options, all of the remaining forms of engagement fall somewhere on the spectrum from manipulation to force. I certainly do not think this is where Frank intends his argument to lead, but given the conception of reason with which he operates, this is where it has to lead. Previously I introduced the Rawlsian concept of reflective equilibrium in my argument for the attractiveness of imagination as a method of historical inquiry. I argued that though we should not expect our inquiry to confirm our suspicions, we should expect it to present a better understanding of ourselves and the world in which we live. Failure to maintain this equilibrium indicates a mistake somewhere in our thinking. Frank’s critique does not meet this standard because, according to his conceptions of rationality and human ends, his own behavior in writing What’s the Matter with Kansas? would qualify as deranged, irrational, and therefore unfree. In arguing that others must be deranged because they do not pursue their own economic self-interest through politics, Frank is advocating policies that would be contrary to his own economic self-interest. In arguing that values should matter least of all when forming a political position, he makes implicit appeals to values such as fairness and equality. This internal contradiction, this failure to maintain reflective equilibrium, is not incidental. In fact, it is closely connected to the method of critique and the desire to unmask. One of the characteristics of science in modernity was the denial of teleology, the rejection of final causes in nature to explain the movements of physical objects. This is widely taken to be a hallmark of scientific objectivity. When applied to the study of human behavior this same objectivity is manifested in the denial of moral forces in themselves as sufficient motivation for action. A scientific, objective approach to studying human behavior, then, will look behind the appearance of moral motivation to uncover, or unmask, the true causal forces at work. We see evidence of this quest for scientific objectivity repeatedly in Frank’s book. He writes critically of those who reject “all the accepted social science methods for understanding the way things work”, of which one such way is social class. He contrasts the “blunt instruments of propaganda” – which is the label he uses to dismiss the observations of political commentator David Brooks – to the “precise metrics of sociology” [22, p. 19]. He laments that before his awakening to the truth, he “craved the solid rock of certainty, and. . . set about finding it without benefit of history, sociology, theory or philosophy” [22, p. 145]. As I’ve argued in previous chapters, the sort of purely empirical, objective knowledge of human behavior that Frank pursues through the social sciences is not actually possible. The ability to recognize others’ behavior as the pursuit of specific ends depends upon the observer’s particularity as a subject. Such ends count

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as moral just to the extent that they are recognized as valuable and rational and therefore chosen by the agent from within the narrative framework that provides the agent’s identity. Thus it should not be surprising that even while Frank rejects the importance of values, and even identifies others’ justification of their political positions by appeal to values as evidence of their delusion or deception, he is at the same time clearly motivated by moral concerns. He quite literally could not act otherwise. Michael Polanyi discusses this tendency common to practitioners of critique, noting, “Since this analysis of moral claims in terms of material interests applies quite generally, it might be thought to discredit also the moral motives of those who do the unmasking. But those motives are safe against unmasking, since they remain undeclared” [61, p. 230]. Polanyi wrote this about Marx and the Marxists, years before Frank wrote his book, yet it applies just as well to Frank. Polanyi contends, “these supposedly scientific assertions are, of course, accepted only because they satisfy certain moral passions” [61, p. 230]. Frank never claims to be making a moral argument, but his language reveals his moral passion and judgment. For example, he refers to the conservatives who promote the Great Backlash as “villains” and refers to the false consciousness of poor Kansans as “sad” [22, pp. 61, 102]. Because his moral language is put forward in the context of an objective, scientific account of the situation at hand, and because he never makes an argument for a particular moral viewpoint or judgment, it is easy to mistake his evaluation as mere description. Another factor that obscures the moral aspect of critique is the vigor with which the critic attacks the moralist. The critic’s moral language goes unnoticed because all attention is directed at the accused, and the accused is too busy trying to respond to accusations that his moral justification is cover for his material interests. Such accusations are impossible to counter directly because built into them is the claim that the accused’s words are always cover for something else. Taken on their own terms, as statements of scientific fact, they are unfalsifiable because defeating them entails proving a negative. As Polanyi explains, “A utilitarian interpretation of morality accuses all moral sentiments of hypocrisy, while the moral indignation which the writer thus expresses is safely disguised as a scientific statement” [61, p. 232].7 Hypocrisy can point us to different conclusions depending on the specific case. Sometimes, as in the case of a strident moralizer found guilty of immorality, hypocrisy can be taken as evidence that the guilty party does not really believe what he professes. Other times, as in the case of the social scientist who denies the reality of moral forces yet at the same time makes an implicitly moral argument for or against some state of affairs, the hypocrisy can reveal the truth of that which is 7 Here

“utilitarian” does not refer to the moral philosophy of John Stuart Mill, but rather to what might better be understood as an emotivist account of morality. In other words, what Polanyi means to describe with “utilitarian” is the view that moral utterances are really just expressions of emotion in the guise of statements of fact. As such, their effect, whether intentional or not, is to manipulate rather than to offer rational argument.

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denied. A conclusion of the latter type is suggested by the divergence of Frank’s behavior from his theory. One need not attribute bad faith to the critic – Frank, for example, may sincerely believe that which he professes – to conclude that his actions belie his claims. Polanyi calls this phenomenon “moral inversion” wherein “a writer who has proved his hard-headed perspicacity by denying the existence of morality will always be listened to with especial respect when he does moralize in spite of this”. In such cases, as Polanyi rightly notes, this moral inversion is a demonstration of the true power of moral motives [61, p. 234]. In other words, this moral inversion shows us that despite the critic’s claims to the contrary, moral ends, rather than economic forces, are the key to understanding behavior and naming action. This is not to say that all actions are praiseworthy or innocent, nor is it to say that ends must never be economic. It is just to reiterate the point argued in Chapter 6 that actions are so named because they are understood to be undertaken in the pursuit of some end recognized as valuable – good – by the agent. The specific act of recognition or assignation of value is not causally determined by, say, some innate pursuit of economic achievement, but is performed freely and rationally within the agent’s given identity shaping framework. The acknowledgement of the power of moral motivation is implicit in the naming of Frank’s project as anything other than one of self-promotion in the pursuit of material gain. Similarly, this acknowledgement is what calls the reader to treat his book as an argument and to assess this argument in terms of soundness and truth. Taking his argument seriously and on its own terms, we are able to recognize Frank’s self-proclaimed objective, scientific description and history of the current political landscape for what it really is: a set of moral assertions and accusations. Based on this recognition, we are able to make two important observations. First, moral arguments will need to be made for these moral conclusions. Second, given that Frank’s explanation of the political views of conservative Kansans must now be taken to be, at the very least, evidence of a profound misperception on his part, a serious effort to understand their perspectives and motivations will be necessary before he will be able to engage in a fruitful dialogue or offer compelling counterarguments. Among Frank’s moral assertions is his foundational view that economic success is, or ought to be, of paramount concern politically. There are several ways he might make an argument for such a view. He could make an argument for ethical hedonism and try to demonstrate that economic success is, at least usually, a necessary condition for ensuring sustained access to an individual’s preferred pleasures. A more likely approach would be to adopt a version of the Rawlsian argument that a minimal level of economic success, combined with as much economic equality as possible, is necessary for the requisite access to such primary goods that are universally recognized as essential to a good, free life. He could make either of these arguments, and perhaps others, but he would have to actually make arguments, and he would have to respond to counter arguments employing rival conceptions of the good, freedom, and justice. He would have to respond, for example, to Aristotelian arguments about the good life, or Nozick’s arguments about freedom and justice.

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We can see the full force of Frank’s moral claims and the necessity of providing arguments for them if we take seriously for just a moment some of his language. Frank describes working class Kansans who support conservatives as “paranoid” and “deluded”; he says their values are “hallucinatory”, and their behavior is suicidal. What would be the appropriate way to treat these people if these descriptions were accurate? People who are paranoid, deluded, hallucinatory, and suicidal are in need of psychiatric help. In fact, their need is usually deemed so great as to justify their detainment until they can be healed. It would be negligent and immoral knowingly to allow people in such a state to continue moving freely in society as they would pose a danger to themselves and others. Frank says that unions seem to “inoculate” their members against this illness; perhaps union membership could be mandated and strictly enforced for all adults who register to vote, much like mandatory vaccines for school age children. Of course, those who suffer from these conditions, according to Frank, do so as a result of an elaborate conspiracy to deceive. Co-conspirators to such a diabolical plot that caused widespread mental illness and economic devastation would certainly qualify as criminals. Some sort of commensurate punishment, as well as measures of deterrence, would certainly be justified given the magnitude of the harm caused by this conspiracy. Frank does not advocate such measures, but, in fairness, they do seem to follow logically from his conclusions. One might respond by calling for some allowance for hyperbole and poetic license. Charity is always in order, to be sure, but to consider Frank’s language as other than literal is to acknowledge his claims as moral judgments rather than scientific observations. Imagine, for example, I respond to someone’s political statements by saying, “you’re crazy!” If I don’t mean to be taken literally, I can only be taken to be expressing my complete opposition to the person’s statements. What I clearly do not mean is “you are a little less than sane, but not enough so to be considered truly crazy”. If one wants to dismiss the suggestion that we take Frank’s language at face value and follow his accusations to their logical conclusions, one must offer an alternative interpretation of this language. The only reasonable alternative interpretation is that his language ought to be taken as expressing strong moral dismay and disapproval. Such an alternative interpretation is charitable insofar as it tends to make Frank’s conclusions seem more palatable. That is, one may accept them without committing oneself to the unattractive implications, such as detention of the delusional and conviction of the criminal, that attach to the literal interpretation. However, this alternative interpretation places a substantial burden on Frank to support his moral conclusions with moral arguments. His argument as it stands presents what is purported to be a scientific argument for what have been revealed to be moral conclusions. For those who, like Frank, are baffled by the moral convictions of those they deem conservative, these scientific arguments have gone unchallenged because they carry the force of the moral disapproval while maintaining a more seemly scientific demeanor. Yet even without the intrinsic flaws in his argument, Frank offers no support for his moral judgments.

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Again, one need not attribute the attempt to support moral claims with a scientific argument to bad faith; instead, I suspect Polanyi is on to something when he explains, Today our moral judgments are quite generally without theoretical protection. They may disguise themselves as a sociology of ‘aggressiveness’ or ‘competitiveness’ or of ‘social stability’, etc., and may advocate in these terms more kindness, generosity, tolerance, and brotherhood among men. The public, taught by the sociologist to distrust its traditional morality, is grateful to receive it back from him in a scientifically branded wrapping. [61, p. 234]

To support his moral conclusions and justify his moral passion, Frank will have to provide some solid theoretical foundation. Serious discussions of “justice” and “moral obligation” are notably absent from Frank’s book, though the concepts this language names are employed implicitly throughout. Some robust development of these concepts and others is needed. To do this would require more than just finding the moral or political theory that matches his pre-theoretical moral intuitions and passions. This approach, though it might result in the adoption of some apparently objective deontological or consequentialist theory, for example, would nonetheless be an implicit assumption of emotivism and as such would entail and accept the very same unbridgeable moral divide that led to his bewilderment detailed at the beginning of his book.8 But this condition of mutual unintelligibility is not acceptable if there is to remain any semblance of deliberative democracy. I’ve maintained throughout the book that historical inquiry is not only about understanding the past, but is also about understanding the present and shaping and anticipating the future. The truth and importance of this is made plain by Frank’s book. I expressed my many disagreements with Frank in the course of this chapter, but I am in complete agreement with him insofar as we both believe the circumstances that motivated him to write his book demand attention. The fact that the political views and behavior of so many of his fellow Kansans, and Americans for that matter, are simply unintelligible to Frank as anything other than evidence of derangement should be concerning. The divide between conservatives and liberals that Frank describes is no simple disagreement about means to agreed upon ends, it suggests profoundly different worldviews marked by dissonance and discord. In order to make a moral argument that may actually meet the standards of rational argument as opposed to emotive manipulation, and which might actually be received as such by those whom he wishes to convince, Frank would have to engage in historical inquiry that would offer understanding – not understanding in the sense of 8 Here

I use “emotivism” as defined by MacIntyre to be “the doctrine that all evaluative judgments and more specifically all moral judgments are nothing but expressions of preference, expressions of attitude or feeling, insofar as they are moral or evaluative in character”. After Virtue, p. 22. “Emotivism” so defined is what Polanyi describes when he talks about morality as “utilitarian” (see The Great Tax Wars, p. 178). As MacIntyre explains, and as we have seen thus far in this chapter, “emotivism entails the obliteration of any genuine distinction between manipulative and non-manipulative social relations”. After Virtue, p. 23.

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sympathy, or tolerance, or relativistic acceptance – but understanding of perspective, through systematic imagination, that would enable him to present reasons that actually count as such to those with whom he is in conversation. Earlier in this chapter, I relayed Frank’s self-described “conversion story”; that is, the story of how he discovered social class as the master key to interpreting history. This conversion story parallels in interesting ways Vaclav Havel’s description of the development of the totalitarian system: It began with an interpretation of history from a single aspect, then made that aspect absolute, and finally reduced all of history to that one aspect. The exciting variety of history was discarded in favor of an orderly, easily understood interplay of “historical laws,” “social groups,” and “relations of production,” so pleasing to the eye of the scientist. [29, p. 335]

This does seem to capture both the way Frank explains history according to force of social class as well as the way this explanation appeals to his obvious affinity for scientific precision and order. One interesting point of divergence, though, between Havel’s description and Frank’s actual development is that if we think carefully about Frank’s conversion we will see that prior to his discovery of social class he had already adopted a view of history from “a single aspect”. His conversion was simply a matter of exchanging one single, privileged historical vantage point for another. Prior to his change, he tells us that he was convinced that “we were living in some political equivalent of the biblical end times. . . it was obvious that our civilization was in decay. . . We were clearly approaching the end” [22, p. 146]. It was through this lens that he viewed all of the political and cultural developments of the time. The unfortunate effect of adopting this view of history from a “single aspect” and of making this aspect absolute, regardless of the specific content of this aspect, is that doing so “expel[s] from history the very thing that gives human life, time, and thus history itself a structure: the story. And the story [takes] with it into the kingdom of unmeaning its two essential ingredients: uniqueness and ambiguity” [29, p. 335]. In other words, we might say that stories are abandoned for The Story. This would be one way of describing the treatment Frank gives the stories of Tim Golba and Kay O’Connor; their personal, unique stories are reinterpreted to fit neatly into The Story. As detailed previously, if we conclude that history consists only of distinct stories then we also fail the test of reflective equilibrium. Some meta-story, for lack of a better term, is necessary to account for mutual intelligibility of each other’s stories. But this meta-story must leave space for the type of individual, unique stories, and the accompanying ambiguity, that Havel accurately describes as essential. These stories are the means of transmitting the knowledge Polanyi calls “personal” and for which the faculty of imagination is directed. Vico’s identification of this faculty, its object, and his explanation of the necessary conditions for its exercise provide this meta-story. For those who may incline towards skepticism regarding the importance of philosophical analysis for the study of history and the practice of politics, it should now be clear the extent to which such skepticism is misguided. I hope that it should

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also be clear just how important it is to provide a positive account of rationality and intelligibility in addition to offering counter arguments against various forms of critique. Failure to offer such a positive account will likely result in the exchange of one mistaken Story for another. As Frank’s conversion tale illustrates, “singleaspect” views of history are not exclusive to a particular political party or place on the political spectrum. In the domestic arena, the philosophical assumptions of critique are incompatible with those of a deliberative democracy. As the next chapter will demonstrate, even in the international arena, where no such political system or agreement obtains, the implications of critique have unwelcome results and hinder the type of understanding that is essential for wise and just decision-making.

Chapter 9

Freeing Anthropology from Critique

In Chapter 6, we saw the theoretical problems with critique as a method of historical inquiry. The foundational assumptions are such that the observations necessary to establish a master key for interpreting human behavior are just not possible. In Chapter 7 and Chapter 8 we saw the way critique’s theoretical problems manifest themselves in actual historical inquiry in such a way as to have concerning moral implications as well as to present a serious obstacle to resolving political conflict. Because critique involves identifying both the victims of false consciousness and the villains responsible for its perpetration, when employed in the attempt to understand the present, logical entailments of critique include taking paternalistic and prosecutorial action. By attributing false consciousness to the subjects of his inquiry, the critic denies the validity of their stories as well as the validity of the language they use to describe their world and their place in it. Thus the critic precludes any understanding of the subjects themselves and therefore removes any possibility of making arguments in terms that might be compelling to these persons. As we saw, these moral and political implications are particularly unwelcome in the context of a democratic polity. Now I want to turn our attention to the equally contentious and important arena of international politics, specifically the engagement of the West with the Arab Middle East. The Middle East is a notoriously tumultuous region, perpetually plagued by wars and rumors of war. Engaging the various states and peoples of the Middle East – responding to their pleas, overtures, complaints, accusations and attacks, both verbal and military – is unavoidable for the states and peoples of the West. Responding wisely and justly requires accurate discernment of the conditions and intentions of these states and peoples. This discernment involves not only the discovery of such things as financial and military events and living conditions, but also the understanding of perceptions and ends. Historical inquiry is vitally important for guiding interaction with, and decisions about, the Middle East. The version of inquiry one uses will have profound effects on the conclusions one reaches, and therefore on the stance one takes. A survey of scholarship regarding the Middle East and its conflicts over the past few decades reveals a division between those who would look to culture to aid in understanding and those who would denounce this method as committing the intellectual sin of “essentialism”. While the former group proposes that cultural

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differences between Western and Middle Eastern peoples can help explain conflicts and communication failures, the latter group lists the very project of such scholarship as one of the causes of conflict. In response, those who insist that understanding a people’s culture is necessary for understanding their behavior contend that by denying culture’s significance – and impugning the motives of those who assert this significance – the latter group has severely damaged any possibilities for resolution and reconciliation that might result from increased understanding. So, the debate over the appropriate method for studying the Middle East is not merely academic, it is also moral and political, and urgently so. Neither side can be content to let the other proceed with their scholarship, waiting patiently in the hope that over the years the debate might be resolved with some new discovery or synthesizing meta-theory, because both sides consider the other to be exacerbating the very problems and conflicts that make this field of study so important. Philip Carl Salzman, an anthropologist, belongs to the former group, the group that argues for the necessity of understanding culture for understanding individuals. As I shall demonstrate later in this chapter, Salzman’s scholarship is both an illustration of, and an argument for, historical inquiry by way of Viconian imagination. In his book Culture and Conflict in the Middle East Salzman explains Arab culture, like all cultures, is a way of construing the world, the universe, society, and men and women. It is, at the same time, a matrix of meaning, a framework for understanding, and a plan of action. It defines desirable goals, appropriate means, and the broader values to be honed in human action. [69, pp. 9–10]

This may strike the reader as an entirely uncontroversial claim. In certain academic and political circles, however, it is not. To understand why this is the case we must spend some time studying a peculiar form of critique known as postcolonialism. I say that post-colonialism is a peculiar form of critique because its primary focus is not some group of people suffering from false consciousness but is instead anthropologists, historians, and other social science scholars. The fountainhead of post-colonialism was Edward Said’s 1978 book Orientalism [68]. Donna Robinson Devine calls it “the foundational text for a scholarly approach that has worked a powerful effect across the humanities and social sciences” [70, p. 1]. Curiously, Orientalism is not really about the Orient, or what we might more regularly call the Middle East. It is actually a critique of the history of the field of study known as Orientalism, and is meant to uncover the pervasive racism of this field as well as its instrumentality in the systematic oppression of Middle Eastern peoples. Said’s critique differs in many of its details from Marx’s critique. Said does not identify labor as his master key, nor does he offer any broad perspective on history. His critique in Orientalism nonetheless rests on the same basic assumptions about human nature, reason, and freedom. Like all critiques, Said hopes to uncover the truth that has been hidden and which will, once exposed, bring with it freedom. He explains that his critique is a “humanistic” endeavor whose aim is “to open up the fields of struggle, to introduce a longer sequence of thought and analysis to replace the short bursts of polemical thought-stopping fury that so imprison us in labels” [68, p. xxii]. What makes the critique “humanistic”, he says, is its

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attempt “to dissolve Blake’s mind forg’d manacles so as to use one’s mind historically and rationally for the purposes of reflective understanding and genuine disclosure”. The “mind forg’d manacles” to which he refers are “the reductive formulae and the abstract but potent kind of thought that leads the mind away from concrete human history and experience and into the realms of ideological fiction, metaphysical confrontation, and collective passion” [68, p. xxiii]. In short form, Said’s argument proceeds as follows. The West, over many generations and ages, has identified itself and asserted itself over against the East, or the Orient, by depicting the peoples of the Orient as “other”. This has been achieved through all forms of literature, scholarship, and policy that have reduced these peoples from rational human agents to mere representatives of primitive, exotic cultures. This vast collection of literature, scholarship, and policy, which comprises the oppressive stance known as “Orientalism”, has not been a quest for truth and understanding but has instead been a manifestation of the West’s urge to dominate and subjugate the Orient. Culture, race, ethnicity and even religion are simply abstractions, creations of the mind. They are “supreme fictions” with no “ontological stability” [68, p. xvii]. Persistent use of these fictional categories to describe and think about the people of the Orient results in mental imprisonment not unlike that described in Plato’s famous allegory of the cave, hence Said’s reference to “Blake’s mind-forg’d manacles”. Focusing on culture, which Said considers abstract, and therefore fictional, necessarily distracts the mind from “concrete human history”. This echoes Marx’s accusation in The German Ideology that German philosophy had descended from the heaven to the earth and had thus served to obscure the truth about particulars. The reader will remember that Marx pledged to uncover the way things really are by proceeding from the ground up, ascending from the particular to the general and not the other way around. Said, again echoing Marx, asserts that this philosophy based on abstractions is not merely mistaken but malignant, serving to imprison both thought and persons, and is perpetrated as part of a larger quest for power. The intellectual habit endemic to Orientalism that serves as the vehicle for all of the ideological fictions and reductive formulae of Orientalism Said decries is essentialism. Essentialism is the tendency to look for some essence of a culture, race or religion, and then use this essence to explain the behavior of all members of these groups. As such, essentialism obviates the study of real individuals. For this reason Said feels compelled to remind us that, “the study of man in society is based on concrete human history and experience, not on donnish abstractions, or on obscure laws or arbitrary systems” [68, pp. 327–328]. As an anti-essentialist, Said claims to be “radically skeptical about all categorical designations such as Orient and Occident” [68, p. 331]. In fact, he suggests in several places that there can be no naming of anything that does not, by the simple fact of placing a label, necessarily essentialize the object, reducing it to an instantiation of some abstract, constructed universal. He writes, “the real issue is whether indeed there can be a true representation of anything, or whether any and all representations, because they are representations, are embedded first in the language and then in the culture, institutions, and political ambience of the representer” [68, p. 272].

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It is not immediately obvious that Said’s disjunction is necessary. That is, one might allow that any representation would be in some sense dependent upon the language of the observer, which is in turn a part of the speaker’s culture, and so on, and yet still consider true representation possible.1 However, we see shortly the reason Said posits the disjunction as necessary; “Representations”, he says, “have purposes,. . . they accomplish one or many tasks. Representations are formations, or as Roland Barthes has said of all the operations of language, they are deformations” [68, p. 273]. Though Said is not explicit about this, he is apparently operating on the notion, espoused in various forms by Nietzsche, Foucault and others, that reality consists entirely of particulars and all attempts to name the objects one encounters can only be attempts to impose one’s will upon the world. Because, in this worldview, there are no essences, there are also no innate final ends, this means that any exercise of the will is ultimately and only an exercise of power. That Said is assuming this view is the only charitable explanation for his repeated accusations that Orientalists misrepresent the Orient while at the same time avowing that he is not interested in supporting this charge with a demonstration of the misrepresentation’s variance from the truth because no true representation is possible. Though it might seem to the uninitiated that the possibility of misrepresentation depends logically upon the possibility of accurate representation, for the Nietzschean, all naming is like plotting the coordinates of a cloud. Said’s additional objection that “Orientalism approaches a heterogeneous, dynamic, and complex human reality from an uncritically essentialist standpoint”, and therefore “hides historical change”, suggests a Hericlitean heritage as well. But surely one need not attribute Parmenidean permanence to culture to talk generally about cultures’ differences and characteristics. I suspect it is nearly, if not completely, impossible to think and write with consistency and coherence if one holds these views about language and truth. Symbols are necessary for thought and communication, and symbols by their nature represent other objects. Said demonstrates this difficulty many times over by representing Orientalism and Orientalists. As Irfan Khawaja notes, “if Orientalism lacks an essence, Orientalism lacks a thesis. To the extent that the book has a thesis, it is inescapably a thesis about the essence of Orientalism. If so, Said is committed to essentialism about doctrines – at least with respect to Orientalism” [70, p. 21].2 Said

1I

might, for example, represent Said’s book as an example of literary criticism. The concepts of “book” and “literary criticism” are embedded in my language and culture and its institutions. To see that this is the case, imagine a person living before the printing press, or prior to the practice of academic criticism. That these concepts would not be available to such a person does nothing to diminish the truth of my representation. Said seems to be assuming that unless we can describe particulars as participating in something like Platonic forms we have no legitimate basis for using universal names. 2 “Essentialism, Consistency and Islam: A Critique of Edward Said’s Orientalism” Irfan Khawaja. Khawaja’s article is a thorough and devastating demonstration of Said’s inconsistencies and logical contradictions, to repeat more of his argument here would be unnecessary.

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uses many universals to refer to doctrines, people, ideas and intentions; he could not do otherwise and hope to be intelligible. As a whole, the argument presented in Orientalism is poor. However, its claims have been widely and deeply influential; moreover, an argument may have many flaws and still contain some truth. Charity requires us to look for such truth as can be found and practical wisdom suggests the necessity of understanding the book’s power and influence. Said is certainly right that the history of the West’s dealings with the Middle East is full of unjust actions, unfair and inaccurate representations, dehumanizing subjugation and slavery, and imperialistic conquests. Said is also certainly right that Western literature, scholarly and otherwise, about the Middle East has served to perpetuate and enable these evils. Past and present characterizations of Middle Eastern peoples may have often been more accurately described as caricatures. To the extent that Said’s efforts to expose elements of racism and imperialism, both latent and overt, in this literature have alerted scholars to their presence and prompted self-examination and sustained vigilance, they are to be applauded. Furthermore, it is likely that in his concerns about essentialism Said is on to something. In previous chapters, I discussed the (unfortunate) conception, common to many philosophers of modernity and later, of the unencumbered, rational individual. This conception, which we find in philosophers as varied as Descartes, Locke, Kant, Marx, and Rawls, of the self as free only when “disengaged”3 [73] from its particularity is perhaps the most significant common element of modern and postmodern philosophy. For authors writing from within these traditions, such as they are, to describe a people as culture-bound would likely have connoted some measure of irrationality. This is especially likely were this people to appear particularly susceptible to, and expressive of, violent passions. For example, if we think for just a moment about the Kantian understanding of freedom and moral goodness as expressed in the Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals and the Critique of Pure Reason, it is not difficult to see how from this perspective a description of Arabs as deriving their identity from their culture would be derogatory of their freedom, rationality, and moral worth. To the extent that Orientalists operated with such modern conceptions of freedom and rationality, it is probably fair to attribute to their work the effect, and possibly the intent, of essentialism as Said defines it. Yet, what is fascinating and lamentable about Said’s condemnation of essentialism is that rather than rejecting the modern conception of the self as free and rational when unencumbered, or disengaged, he simply denies the legitimacy of attributing any significance to culture, and in the process, as we saw above, rejects the possibility of accurately using universals of any kind. This is fascinating because in denying essentialism and repeatedly calling for an appreciation of the concrete reality of “human experience”, referring to his critique as “humanistic”, and demanding that the rationality of the Oriental peoples be affirmed, he has simply substituted one essence for another. Just as Marx rejected previous German philosophers’

3 This

term is Charles Taylor’s.

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characterization of the human essence as too abstract and metaphysical, and then went right ahead and defined the essence of the species-being as “universal” and therefore free, Said rejects the essentialism of the Orientalists as abstract rather than concrete and then adopts the exact same understanding of freedom and reason that serves as the conceptual foundation of this essentialism. Colin Gunton describes this seemingly paradoxical behavior as the “pathos of the modern condition”, which is, “after rejecting what it rightly sees to be the oppressive forms of unity deriving from the past, it has succumbed to various false universals that replicate or even exacerbate the bondage from which it has hoped to free itself” [28, p. 34]. In other words, in the attempt to free reason from magisterial authority and metaphysical dogmatism, the self was deemed intelligible and identity deemed complete independently of its particular embodiment in time and place [79, p. 159].4 This resulted in the expectation that reason exercised purely and freely should be homogenous as well as the conclusion that the world, and everything and everyone in it – because they have no necessary relation to the self – can only be instrumentally related to the self. It is no coincidence that a survey of philosophy and related social sciences in the two centuries or so since these ideas became widespread reveals a trend of critiques of just about everything; it seems that any and all labels are oppressive, restrictive of freedom – from race to religion to sex to age – as are traditions, systems and stories. Because no real, existing individuals ever are actually unencumbered, no critic will ever be unemployed – everyone, everywhere, is always in need of liberation of some kind from something. This pathos is manifest in Said’s thought when he questions the possibility of accurately categorizing anything and when he explains his understanding of identity. “The construction of identity – for identity whether of Orient or Occident, . . . is finally a construction in my opinion – involves the construction of opposites and ‘others’ whose actuality is always subject to the continuous interpretation and reinterpretation of their differences from ‘us’” [68, p. 332]. This understanding entails that the only possible relationship between individuals or between peoples is one of instrumentality; any characterization of the other will necessarily be an attempt to exercise power, whether or not this intention is conscious. Thus, we find the logically consistent, but nonetheless remarkable, pronouncement that “Once we begin to think of Orientalism as a kind of Western projection onto and will to govern over the Orient, we will encounter few surprises” [68, p. 95]. As we saw with Frank, once one accepts the basic assumptions of critique, no particular stories will present an obstacle to reaching one’s foreordained conclusions. Above I described Said’s condemnation of essentialism as lamentable, even though it contains some truth, because rather than furthering understanding between cultures, he just removes one obstacle and replaces it with a bigger one. As we can see, his basic working assumptions about human nature and reason render 4 Bernard

Williams describes this as the idea of the “characterless self”. He writes, “That idea is implicit in the aspiration to a total critique. If the aspiration makes sense, then the criticizing self can be separated from everything that a person contingently is – in itself, the criticizing self is simply the perspective of reason or morality”.

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inconceivable any honest attempt to understand and engage other cultures with respect. This becomes painfully apparent during the course of reading his book as one realizes that despite his constant refrain about the inaccuracy of the Orientalists’ depiction and his expressions of hope that his humanistic critique will bring about greater understanding and sympathy between East and West, he offers no corrections to the Orientalists’ accounts and maintains that accurate and non-oppressive generalizations about either side are impossible. It may seem curious that Said writes about Orientalists in such a morally reproachful tone for their essentializing, objectifying, and manipulating the people of the Orient when his own foundational assumptions about reason and freedom are such that they could not have done otherwise. However, if we recall Polanyi’s observations about the tendencies of amoralist critics to moralize, perhaps Said’s stance should be expected. Polanyi’s insights may also help us to understand Said’s widespread influence across the various social science disciplines. The moral passion with which he writes appeals to those who rightly recognize the history of injustice in the West’s dealings with the Middle East. At the same time – though his moral passion is palpable – by denying objective truth and staying away from overtly moral language, he avoids appearing hypocritical when discussing the ways in which the West often used moral language to justify oppression and coercion. Once again, this moral inversion demonstrates the truth of that which the critic denies: that is, the real motivating power of moral ends and beliefs. Upon reflection, those who are so moved by Said’s moral passion should realize that the moral ends of understanding and justice cannot be furthered through Said’s method. This is because to accept the post-colonialist critique of all attempts to understand the peoples of the Middle East, or anywhere else for that matter, by means of studying culture as necessarily entailing essentializing exercises of power is to despair of any possible understanding between cultures. This is not only theoretically unsound; it is also practically unacceptable. I have argued at length against the conceptual coherence of the unencumbered self and for the necessity of particularity and participation in stories for understanding personal identity and rationality. I have also argued that one’s ability to act is predicated on one’s ability imaginatively to understand the actions and intentions of others. This holds true for our collective ability as cultures and nations to act and interact with other cultures and nations. Though it may be the case that some accounts of Middle Eastern cultures and peoples have only served to obscure and oppress, it does not follow that all such accounts must do so. Furthermore, accusations of inaccuracy do not contribute to understanding when they offer no corrections. The current geo-political climate is such that understanding, communication and cooperation between the West and the Middle East is necessary for peace in either region. I have argued against the post-colonialist form of critique, it is now time to turn to an example of historical inquiry that offers some hope for actual understanding. The opening lines of Salzman’s book offer the simple contention that, “Arab culture, the dominant culture of the central Middle East and the founding culture of Islam, is both a brilliant construction of human creativity and a practical response

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to many human problems” [69, p. 9]. The “human problems” to which Salzman refers are common to all societies and easily recognizable as such. For example, all societies need some means for keeping order and maintaining security. Order entails “a predictable repetitiveness of behavior, such that members of the society can count on a reliable result for any of their acts”. Security, Salzman says, “is confidence that persons, rights, and property – however defined in a particular culture – will be respected” [69, pp. 10–11]. These basic needs are easy for all persons to understand, even when the specific means for meeting them are unfamiliar. Implicit in this perspective is the premise that even for those to whom Arab culture is thoroughly foreign, some amount of understanding is possible because it is a human creation. Though Salzman makes no reference to Vico, it is apparent that the two share this basic premise. As Vico shows, we can imagine the reasons for, and intentions of, such creations because all humans participate in some basic institutions that provide a framework within which we are oriented. It is not the case that we can understand human creations because all humans share some universal form of reason, but rather that they all reason within these frameworks. Exercising the faculty of imagination with the aim of understanding “what it must have been like” requires us to examine the particular form and structure these basic institutions take in particular cultures. This also requires enough self-awareness to appreciate fully the extent to which we are shaped by the form and structure of these institutions in our own cultures. This self-awareness is important because it will allow us to recognize not only those institutional aspects that are uniquely present in other cultures but also those familiar aspects that are absent in other cultures. In emphasis of this latter point, Salzman highlights Ernest Gellner’s observation that “Men and societies frequently treat the institutions and assumptions by which they live as absolute, self-evident, and given” [26, p. 9, 69, p. 11]. At the end of Chapter 7, I suggested that given the pervasiveness of the state in the lives of contemporary Western people, we might be wise to consider it as a fourth basic institution in addition to the original three Vico lists. As we proceed it will become apparent that a major obstacle to understanding the rationality of Arab Middle Easterners will be the tendency Gellner cites to assume as given the presence and role of the institution of the modern state. Indeed, Peter Manicas contends, “it may be but a slight exaggeration to say that Hegel’s concept of the state is, by now, part of the background of almost all ‘social science’” [41, p. 86]. This insight deserves exposition and explanation, and I will devote more time and attention to it later in the chapter, but for now it will suffice for the reader to keep this point in mind as we proceed with Salzman’s analysis of Middle Eastern culture. According to Vico, the foundational interpersonal ties that provide the structure and norms necessary for the realization of personal identity and action have their origin in the institution of the family. Salzman makes a persuasive case that one can make progress toward understanding Arab culture through studying the way individual identity is a function of membership in what anthropologists have termed a “segmentary lineage system” [69, p. 79]. This system amounts to a multilayered extended family that provides order, security and identity by prescribing roles and protocols in various settings and conflicts. This system is radically different than

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anything generally found in the West, and to the extent that one can begin to understand this system, one can gain insight into some of the behaviors and attitudes of the people whom it shapes. In this segmentary lineage system, “everybody is a member of a nested set of kin groups from very small to very large”, the largest of which is the tribe. “Collective responsibility” describes the responsibility each member has to other members of his group [69, p. 11]. Individuals are obligated to come to the defense of group members and are held responsible for group members’ transgressions. “The operative principle in such segmentary lineage systems is that, in any conflict, between whatever tribes or tribal segments, people owe political solidarity and support to those closer in genealogy and are obliged to oppose those more distant” [69, p. 58]. This principle results in what Salzman calls “balanced opposition”. Brothers may fight against each other individually, but when one is in conflict with a cousin, the brothers are united; when the cousins come in conflict with more distant relatives, the cousins are united; and so on. As Salzman explains, this form of social organization is “brilliant in a number of respects”. Primarily, this system ranges over thousands of people “on a totally decentralized, nonhierarchical, egalitarian basis.5 No officials or centralized institutions are required” [69, p. 79]. Balanced opposition and the segmentary lineage system provide order and security and deter aggression and violence while at the same time maintaining individual autonomy and “demographic fairness”. All of this is managed without the extensive, expensive, intrusive and complicated governmental apparatus found necessary in the West. To help illustrate the significance of this system as well as its distinctiveness, Salzman recounts an exchange he had with some tribal members in Baluchistan a number of years ago One of the first questions asked of me by the Baluch was how big my lineage was. . . When I said that we had no lineages, the Baluch were incredulous. What did we do then, they asked, when there was trouble, when we were threatened, when we needed support? Why, we went to the police, I said. They laughed; they roared. Then they looked at me pityingly. Oh, no, no, no, they said; only your lineage mates will help you. [69, p. 176].

As we can see from this anecdote, of the two general types of strategies, as identified by anthropologists, which cultures employ to maintain security, “self-help” and “authority”, balanced opposition is clearly a form of self-help. Self-help strategies are decentralized and more egalitarian and require all individuals to participate in providing security. Relying on authority is necessarily a more centralized strategy with power conferred on specific persons or sets of persons rather than being spread across the populace. The distinction between these two strategies is fairly intuitive, their properties easy to imagine; they are worth noting, however, because 5 This system certainly is not “egalitarian” in a sense familiar to most Western readers. Importantly,

for example, women are often not recognized as equals to men. The system is egalitarian just in the sense that no individuals have higher office than another; none are given official power or authority over others, as, in the West, police are given authority to use force, judges are given authority to sentence criminals, and so on.

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of what they reveal about the assumptions of the respective societies that employ them. “‘Self-help’ is characteristic of band and tribal societies; ‘authority’ is characteristic of the state” [69, p. 51].6 This is not to say that tribes only exist where states do not, the two have existed side by side for centuries; however, self-help strategies prevail where the state is not seen as an institution whose existence is made legitimate by the consent of those it governs and whose purposes include security. As Salzman rightly notes, the majority of states, past and present, have been despotic rather than democratic, bullying rather than benign.7 Given the relatively recent emergence of the modern state, as well as its relative rarity in the world even today, it is remarkable that so many in the West should take for granted its presence as protector and provider. Yet, I suspect that Salzman’s response to the query from the Baluch tribesman is precisely that which most Westerners would give. I also suspect that most Westerners view the emergence of the modern state and our ability to rely on its strength and security, as well as its non-discriminatory benevolence, as definitive evidence of cultural progress. Among other things, it is Westerners’ tendency to this latter judgment, and its apparent obviousness to those making the judgment, that motivates critics such as Said to argue that projects such as Salzman’s merely serve to establish and enforce the West’s sense of cultural superiority over the Middle East. As we have seen, from this perspective attribution of cultural determinants of behaviors and beliefs, which behaviors and beliefs are considered primitive and inferior, can only be attempts to “essentialize” and thereby dehumanize the anthropologist’s subjects. It would be both philosophically and historically naïve to argue that no such anthropological projects have had either this intent or effect. It is, however, possible to make the argument that such projects need not have such intent or effect and that to hold otherwise, as Said does, is to show that one has accepted the very modern conceptions of rationality and history one is denouncing. Salzman allows that, “In anthropology, one conventional way to look at bands, tribes, and states is as an evolutionary sequence”. Certainly from the modern perspective, especially as represented by Hegel and Marx, a change from a tribal, lineage system to the modern state would be a sign of progress. Salzman contends that following this conventional way is not his intention, and I think that his tone and argument support this contention. The challenge for the Western reader, however, is not to read this conventional perspective into Salzman’s reporting, his protestations notwithstanding. This is

6 “Authority”

here should be understood as official, that is, as a function of office, as opposed to age, or wisdom, or some characteristic that might qualify one as an authority in a different sense. 7 This should not be taken as implying that these tribal systems are not also either potentially, or in fact, despotic or abusive. The significance of this point is simply to remind those in the West who have been fortunate enough to live in times of freedom and prosperity under the protection of representative governments that, historically speaking, such states are the exceptions rather than the norm. One should not, therefore, expect that any rational person would prefer the state system to that of self-help.

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important not simply because it would be unjust to impugn the motives of Salzman and his colleagues as imperialistic, nor is it important just because as readers we ought to obey the contemporary mantra that it is always and everywhere wrong to judge another culture. The reason this is important is that failing to do so will result in a failure to understand the actions and attitudes of those with whom we must interact. Failure to appreciate the distinct rationality embodied in Middle Eastern culture not only results in a tendency to condescension and paternalism, it also results in an expectation of the inevitability of “progress” towards modern rationality and the welcoming of the modern state. As Bernard Williams says, “If we think of the history of Western ethical experience in Kantian or Hegelian terms, we shall structure it around such contrasts as between the religious and the secular, or the prerational and the rational; we shall look for the emergence of autonomous human reason” (emphasis added) [79, p. 163]. Thus we must make ourselves aware of the range of these influences and work to imagine alternatives. Said fails to meet this challenge and we have seen the results of this failure in his work. Despite our best intentions, it may be difficult for us to meet this challenge as well just because it is always difficult to appreciate fully the extent to which one’s fundamental assumptions about such concepts as rationality and freedom are neither universally shared nor obviously true. To demonstrate the significance of this difficulty, it will be helpful to return our attention to Salzman’s exchange with the Baluchistan natives. The anecdote Salzman relates about his conversation with the Baluch tribesmen is ostensibly about security. We can see, though, that it is also about identity. When asked about his lineage, Salzman is being asked about who he is, where he comes from; the tribesmen are sizing him up. When he responds that he has no lineage he is, from their perspective, effectively telling them that he is a nobody. Seen from the perspective of modernity, however, Salzman’s response is an indication of achievement. That is, Salzman is indicating his identity as an individual; his identity is self-contained, so to speak, not received, not intertwined with others. That his response is automatic, as it would be for most in the contemporary West, indicates the extent to which the assumptions of modernity about personal identity and freedom have pervaded the cultural consciousness and are now commonplace. I am not suggesting that Salzman understood himself to be making a philosophical pronouncement about identity. Nor am I suggesting that he suffers from some form of false consciousness that hides from him the true causes of his behavior. What I am suggesting is that his response reflects the now intuitive conception of the self as essentially an individual, as potentially fully rational and free when “disengaged” or “unencumbered” from any particularity. This is the conception of the self that, despite their many important differences, is shared by philosophers from Descartes to Kant, Hegel, Marx, Sartre, and later Rawls. The modern Western individual tends to understand his or her identity as ultimately something that is entirely dependent on him or herself to make or remake, and supposes that one’s time, place, and family and cultural heritage are merely accidental properties. That Salzman would intuitively present himself as having no lineage indicates the pervasiveness

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of this modern conception of the self as well as the triumph of the modern state in providing the space for this conception to flourish.8 If, from the modern perspective, Salzman’s answer to the tribesmen indicates achievement, their question indicates their lack of achievement. That is, their assumption of the necessity of lineage for personal identity and significance indicates that in their culture personal identity is determined by the past. From the modern perspective freedom just is freedom of the individual to will and reason independently of history. It is clear that the Baluch tribesmen conceive of their own identities as inextricably intertwined with their fellow tribesmen and entirely determined by the past. Their duties and obligations and, as we will see shortly, their honor, are a function not of their universal humanity but their particular lineage and their own past behavior. Part of the explanation for the perception of an evolutionary judgment implicit in the designation of peoples as “tribal” is surely to be found in the description of Western perspectives and culture as “modern”. To contrast tribal organization with that of the “modern” state suggests that the former is not only historically prior but also primitive. Of course, the very fact that a whole philosophical movement and attitude would be named not by its content or progenitors but chronologically is a clue of the extent to which this movement was so widely seen to follow not so much from argument but from inevitable progress. But I think a greater part of the explanation for this perception, of which Said is guilty and from which we must escape if we are to achieve the imaginative understanding necessary to engage tribal cultures respectfully and responsibly, is captured in Manicas’ insight I quoted earlier. Manicas claims, “it may be but a slight exaggeration to say that Hegel’s concept of the state is, by now, part of the background of almost all ‘social science”. To understand what this might mean we need to look at what Hegel had to say about the state. According to Hegel, “The state in and for itself is the ethical whole, the actualization of freedom, and it is the absolute end of reason that freedom should be actual” [31, p. 279]. Furthermore, “subjective freedom, which must be respected, requires freedom of choice on the part of individuals” [31, p. 286], and it is the state that carves out the space within which individuals can have freedom of choice. In Hegel’s view, the modern state is the result of evolutionary progress from a tribal system insofar as it enables individuals to free themselves from the very historical encumbrances evident in the Baluchi tribesmen’s self-understanding. In Chapter 4, we saw that, for Hegel, for an act of willing to be rational the agent must not act “as a particular individual, but in accordance with the concepts of ethics in general” [31, p. 49]. In contrast, “a person who does something perverse gives the 8 I do not intend here to suggest that the modern state is the sole factor responsible for this concep-

tion of the individual or its flourishing. To the contrary, the development of this conception has a long and complicated history that involves religious, artistic, technological, and economic factors. The modern state is itself a product of these factors and more. Nonetheless, the state has, as I say, provided the space for this conception to flourish and has, through its laws and practices, cultivated it and pushed rival conceptions to the periphery.

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greatest prominence to his particularity” [31, p. 53]. We have seen that this general view of freedom and rationality is a common assumption of critique and specifically of the version founded by Said called post-colonialism. To say that Hegel’s conception of the state is part of the background of all social science is not to say that all social scientists are Hegelians, or even that there is one such property of being a Hegelian [2, p. 68].9 Neither is it to say that all of social science is in agreement about the precise role and purpose of the state. It is just to say that contemporary social science is characterized by general agreement that states are necessary conditions for individual freedom, that they ought to be neutral as to any particular view of the good in order to allow for this freedom to flourish, and that they should provide not only protection from crime and foreign invasion, but also financial security and education, among other things. Absent the state, individual lives are to a large degree determined by their particularity. That is, their opportunities, beliefs, privileges and obstacles are functions of the particular conditions into which they are born. Furthermore, without the benevolent presence and provision of the state, individuals are forced to rely on, and therefore identify themselves with, particular groups such as families, local communities, or tribes. The particularizing encumbrances that come with necessity and chance limit individuals’ potential to develop into fully free rational persons because their choices are always limited and their ends are received as given, being attached to their particular identities. It is therefore taken for granted that because persons are essentially free, rational individuals, all persons, if given the chance, would choose to live under a modern state that enables the realization of this essence. Evidence of this underlying Hegelianism is widespread and diverse. We find it, for example, in Rawlsian liberalism’s assumptions about reasoning from the original position, and in documents such as the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the EU constitution.10 The assumption of the obvious universal attractiveness of the modern state that embodies this philosophy is articulated explicitly in contemporary social science works such as Francis Fukuyama’s widely discussed book The End of History and the Last Man [24]. Fukuyama’s book offers a complex, detailed argument and many insightful observations and it is not my intention here to address them all nor to endorse or oppose his conclusions. What I hope to show by citing his book is that, of all the 9 Hannah

Arendt puts the same point thusly, “To think, with Hegel, that truth resides and reveals itself in the time-process itself is characteristic of all modern consciousness, however it expresses itself, in specifically Hegelian terms or not”. “The Concept of History” in Between Past and Future. New York: Penguin Books USA, 1993. 10 Article 1 of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights states “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in spirit of brotherhood”. Article 26 lists the right to free education, the early years of which is to be compulsory, and decrees, “Education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality”. The European Union Constitution explains in its preamble that, “the Union is founded on the indivisible, universal values of human dignity, freedom, equality and solidarity. . . It places the individual at the heart of its activities, by establishing the citizenship of the Union and by creating an area of freedom, security and justice”. (emphasis added)

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claims for which Fukuyama feels the need to support with evidence and argument, he makes certain pronouncements about rationality that he presumes need no argument at all insofar as they are, if not self-evident, at least analytic. The extent to which we would tend to agree with his presumption is ultimately the extent to which we will have difficulty appreciating the intellectual effort and agility necessary to implement Viconian imagination. The thesis of Fukuyama’s book is that “As mankind approaches the end of the millennium, the twin crises of authoritarianism and socialist central planning have left only one competitor standing in the ring as an ideology of potentially universal validity: liberal democracy, the doctrine of individual freedom and popular sovereignty” [24, p. 42]. In support of this thesis he offers the view that thymos, the need for recognition, is the true driving force of history. In this he is avowedly Hegelian, and for this he offers extended argument because he recognizes the need for such argument. For other claims, however, he offers no argument at all. For example, he writes, A religious believer, for example, seeks recognition for his particular gods or sacred practices, while a nationalist demands recognition for his particular linguistic, cultural or ethnic group. Both of these forms of recognition are less rational than the universal recognition of the liberal state, because they are based on arbitrary distinctions between sacred and profane, or between human social groups. (emphasis added) [24, p. xix]

And again, later, “The desire for recognition based on nationality or race, however, is not a rational one. . . The distinction between one human group and another, on the other hand, is an accidental and arbitrary by-product of history” [24, p. 201]. Fukuyama supposes, probably correctly, that while his larger argument about the movement of history and the current geo-political state of affairs will meet with objections and counterarguments, the lines just quoted will be accepted as enlightened, but nonetheless quite basic. However, in taking these positions, too, Fukuyama is thoroughly Hegelian and the degree to which they are presented without any call for argument demonstrates the accuracy of Manicas’ observation. Fukuyama refers to distinctions between persons as being arbitrary and accidental. All persons are essentially the same insofar as they are persons and this universal property of personhood is what we should care about in ourselves and recognize and respect in others. This point is fundamental because it is the supposed ultimate irrefutability of this position that allows us to expect that everyone, if free to do so, would eventually choose to live in the modern state. We can expect this because, Fukuyama says, “Liberal democracy replaces the irrational desire to be recognized as greater than others with a rational desire to be recognized as equal”. Empirically, these claims about arbitrariness, accidental properties, and equality are both actually unsupported and in principle unsupportable. In other words, no empirical data we have gathered or could imagine gathering could possibly support these claims.11 Rather than support them with appeals to metaphysical origins (as 11 What

empirical data might we gather, for example, that would demonstrate equality, or allow us to identify and distinguish between accidental and essential properties of personhood? I do not

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in the US Declaration of Independence), or more explicitly with appeals to religious authority, both of which tend to be rejected, ironically enough, on the grounds of requiring suspension of basic principles of empiricism, they are taken as following from the modern, Hegelian conception of freedom. If freedom of thought requires freedom from particularity, and freedom of thought is the essential, defining feature of humanity, particularity must be accidental to humanity and decisions and distinctions based on this particularity must be arbitrary. Said and his fellow critics contend their arguments against social scientific appeals to culture as an explanation of behavior are both scientific and moral. These arguments are considered scientific because they argue that distinctions based on race or nationality or culture are arbitrary and not objective. They are considered moral because this failure to be objective both harms the subjects of the study and suggests impure motives by those conducting it. But as should now be clear, it is this same view that distinctions based on any particularizing properties are arbitrary that makes necessary the conclusion that non-modern cultures or societies, though contemporary, are nevertheless primitive and irrational. Unless and until we are able to understand that rationality is necessarily embodied in human communities, not in unencumbered individuals, and that particularity is therefore necessary for freedom rather than an obstacle to it, we will be unable to escape the vicious circle of critique and unable to attain any significant understanding of cultures as different from that of the West as is Arab Middle Eastern culture. One of Salzman’s more significant (and likely controversial) conclusions is that “The culture of balanced opposition precludes democracy by its unwavering commitment to group loyalty and interests, and its disregard for other groups and their interests, and for any inclusive framework and process” [69, p. 209]. Given the preceding discussion of the pervasive, though sometimes latent, Hegelianism in contemporary social science, it is not difficult to see how this conclusion could be taken as entailing the inferiority and irrationality of Middle Eastern peoples. From the modern perspective Salzman’s conclusion suggests that these peoples either do not desire freedom or are incapable of recognizing the freedom provided by the modern state, or perhaps that they are incapable of the self-control necessary to act rationally in pursuit of freedom. Salzman, however, endorses none of these conclusions. His argument is that rationality is embodied in culture and that the particular nature of Arab culture is such that “like all cultures, it opens some paths and closes others” [69, p. 9]. This culture shaped by balanced opposition meets many basic human needs and accomplishes this feat in ingenious ways, but the rationality peculiar to this culture emphasizes particularity over universality, which renders it incongruent with democracy and constitutionalism.

raise this question to dispute the reality or the goodness of human equality, but instead to note that because such equality has not been, nor could it be, established empirically, Fukuyama’s contention that rationality demands recognition of this equality needs argument. My contention here is that the attempt to establish this equality by deriving it from the nature of freedom (and thereby attempt to side-step the challenge of providing a metaphysical basis of equality) is a clever move but depends on a specific conception of freedom that itself is in need of support.

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Salzman maintains, “it is not the job of anthropologists to laud societies or criticize them, to celebrate or to demean them” [69, p. 17]. I too want to reiterate that my arguments about rationality and my conclusions such as those in the preceding paragraph are not meant to be pejorative. This is not to say that a project evaluating the relative merits and faults of various cultures and rationalities would not be an interesting and important one, it is just not the project of this book. My purpose in the remainder of this chapter is, drawing on Salzman, to explore some important differences in the rationalities of Western and Arab cultures and examine the ways in which attention to differences in fundamental institutions can help us understand these differences in rationalities, and perhaps facilitate communication. We have seen how the modern state is both founded on and strengthens modern convictions about universalism and freedom. In fact, the pervasiveness of the modern state succeeds in strengthening these convictions to such a degree that I have argued that, for those of us who live under these states, they should be included along with the family, burial, and religion as fundamental institutions necessary for understanding action and rationality. On the other hand, the tribal culture of the Middle East is so dominated by the institution of the family, conceived in a broad, intricate way, that the embrace of the modern state is difficult if not impossible to conceive. Individual identity in this culture is determined by one’s lineage. The roles and duties one has in virtue of this lineage are contingent upon whatever conflict is at hand. This is because “for each affiliation, there is always an enemy. For each act, the important questions are who acted, who was affected, and who is closest to me” [69, p. 211]. The individual’s framework of ends is always that which is provided by relationship to some group, which group is determined by the system of balanced opposition. This reality is captured by a proverbial Arab saying, “I against my brother; I and my brother against my cousins [37]; I and my brothers and my cousins against the world” [69, p. 211]. The prominence of particularity in shaping the individual’s sense of identity and the contingency of stances of loyalty and opposition that are ever shifting and which determine one’s roles and duties explain Salzman’s observation that In the tribal framework, the conception of “my group right or wrong” does not exist, because the question of whether “my group” is right or wrong does not come up. Allegiance is to “my group,” period, full stop. Most important, “my group,” is defined by and always stands against, “the other.” An overarching, universalistic, inclusive constitution is not possible. [69, pp. 159–160]

As I said above, this conclusion is controversial. From the modern, Western perspective this suggests some form of irrationality or inferiority on the part of tribal cultures. It also calls into question the universality of the values and worldview proclaimed by the modern West. For example, the United Nations proclaims that its Universal Declaration of Human Rights affirms “universal values that transcend cultures and traditions”. The UN holds that the rights declared in this document

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“have become nowadays universal values”.12 The European Union also proclaims its foundation on “universal values”.13 If Salzman is right, then these claims about these values being universally shared are mistaken.14 It is not difficult to see why this would be troubling. Among other concerns, if these basic values are not universal and do not “transcend cultures and traditions”, what basis will there be for interaction, negotiation and cooperation between cultures? If these basic values are not universally shared, how can we ensure peaceful, respectful interaction? How can two cultures or nations negotiate and cooperate if they do not understand each other’s values and ends? As to the first question, the proclamation of universal values has not been terribly successful in ensuring peaceful and respectful interactions and it is difficult to see how refuting this proclamation would worsen the situation. As to the second question, once again the answer is provided by Vico. It is possible to understand the actions and rationality of others whose cultural frameworks are radically different than ours because despite their many differences, these frameworks include the three fundamental institutions that provide an orientation for the exercise of imagination. As we have seen, Salzman’s research provides us with at least the beginnings of a good picture of the institutional structure of Arab Middle Eastern culture. This picture is what we need if we are to position ourselves for fruitful exercise of imaginative historical inquiry. Above I said that self-awareness is necessary for such exercise because we must pay attention to features of other cultures that are unique as well as those familiar aspects of our own culture that are absent in the other culture. To further demonstrate the necessity and difficulty of this self-awareness for imaginative historical inquiry, I want to conclude by suggesting a promising point of departure for such scholarship. One feature of Arab Middle Eastern culture that quickly becomes apparent upon observation is the prominence of honor as a binding and motivating force. Though this quickly becomes apparent, it may not as immediately be obvious just how significant this is. After all, honor is not a foreign concept in the West. The term is certainly familiar; we talk of honoring commitments and bestowing honors on those who have achieved at a high level or served with dedication for long periods. Unfortunately, this familiarity may obscure the very real and significant differences between the conception of honor at work in these common manners of speech and

12 http://www.un.org/events/humanrights/2007/udhr.shtml.

February 10, 2009. Constitution, p. 18. 14 I take these claims by the UN and EU to be empirical claims. That is, though they may also be understood as normative – stating that these values ought to be universally embraced – they are presented as observations about what rights are “nowadays” actually valued. (In fact, I take it that these empirical observations are proffered as enhancing the legitimacy of these bodies and as evidence that they are not “imposing” these values on peoples who do not embrace them.) The fact that not all cultures really do embrace these values is evidence that they are not universal. Of course, were these claims of universality merely normative, the fact that not all cultures embrace the values in question would not serve as counterevidence to these claims. 13 EU

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that which plays such a crucial role in the institutional structure of the Middle East. Further complicating matters is the perceived similarity between “honor” and “dignity”. “Dignity” is featured frequently in contemporary Western political language. It is a primary concern of political philosophers and policy makers, it is guaranteed by the UN and the EU, and there are a plethora of NGOs hard at work to make sure everyone is treated with it. English dictionaries at least define “dignity” as having to do with honor, and vice versa. Thus it may seem as if the emphasis on honor in the Middle East is not an important point of difference. This is unfortunate because these two concepts that are of definitive importance to their respective cultures are actually radically different. Furthermore, appreciation of this fact is critical for achieving imaginative understanding of Middle Eastern rationality. Peter Berger provides a helpful analysis of these two concepts and their respective cultural significance in an article titled, “On the Obsolescence of the Concept of Honor” [8]. In this piece he shows how in the modern West, the concept of honor is merely a remnant of the distant past; it has no intelligible role in a culture shaped by the modern understandings of reason and the self. Berger says, “Both honor and dignity are concepts that bridge self and society”, but they perform this function in different ways [8, p. 176]. In the modern state, laws and the centralized authority that enforces these laws serve to hold the society together, motivating appropriate types of behavior and discouraging inappropriate types of behavior. Because tribal cultures lack such laws and authority, some other means for motivating and discouraging behavior must take its place. In the Arab Middle East, honor plays this role. As Salzman tells us, “The notion of honor is the cultural persuader of individuals in favor of acting for their group rather than for their own individual interests” [69, p. 205]. Honor has such persuasive force because it is not some special achievement bestowed on a few, but instead “is a constant concern and worry, as it is easily challenged and lost. But at the same time, honor can be increased by timely and effective action, by assertion and courage” [69, p. 107]. Honor is absolutely essential in this culture, it can be achieved and lost, and one’s measure of honor is a measure of one’s worth. Salzman notes an apparent similarity between Middle Eastern and Western cultures in that both are fundamentally egalitarian. But his explanation of the role of honor in Middle Eastern culture shows that this egalitarianism takes a significantly different form than in the West. In the former, “each man, being in principle equal to all others, is also in principle autonomous. . . Honor is deemed to reside with those who are able to maintain their equality, independence and freedom. . . Subordination of any kind results in a loss of honor, a sense of shame” [69, p. 106]. Insofar as no man is deemed naturally or officially subordinate to anyone else, this culture is egalitarian. However, this equality must be maintained and can be lost. This stands in stark contrast to the Western notion of equality wherein equality is innate and dignity inheres inalienably in each individual. An offense against someone’s honor is both an insult and an injury because, if left unchallenged, it can result in the actual loss of honor, and therefore status. On the other hand, in the West, failing to treat an individual with

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dignity may be an injury to the extent that it hinders the development of his or her full personality, but it does not effect the actual possession of dignity nor render the individual undeserving of being treated with dignity. Whereas honor serves as the bridge between self and society by providing motivation for the individual to act contrary to his perceived immediate interests, dignity serves as a bridge between self and society by providing the justification for the state’s broad authority. As Berger says, “Dignity, as against honor, always relates to the intrinsic humanity divested of all socially imposed roles or norms”. Because each individual possesses dignity in equal measure, and because “In a world of dignity, the individual can only discover his true identity by emancipating himself from his socially imposed rules”, the state is necessary [8, p. 176]. This is because, as Hegel articulates so clearly, the state allows (at least in theory) the individual to be a free, unencumbered individual. When we begin to see the significance of the difference between the concepts of honor and dignity, we also begin to see how and why the understanding of freedom associated with these two concepts is so different. In a world of honor, subordination of any kind damages one’s honor insofar as it renders one no longer autonomous [69, p. 106].15 In a world of dignity, subordination to the state is gladly exchanged for the freedom from institutional roles that the state provides. To the extent that the modern state succeeds in liberating the individual from institutional roles, that is, from having his identity determined by his particularity, the concept of honor becomes obsolete. Berger argues, “The obsolescence of the concept of honor is revealed very sharply in the inability of most contemporaries to understand insult, which in essence is an assault on honor” [8, p. 172]. In fact, “The contemporary denial of the reality of honor and of offenses against honor is so much part of a taken-for-granted world that a deliberate effort is required to even see it as a problem” [8, p. 173]. However, the urgency of making this effort is made evident by Salzman’s research. Our ability to succeed, at least to some degree, in making this effort is determined by our willingness to recognize, develop, and apply the intellectual faculty Vico names fantasia, imagination. Once we understand the way the concept of honor has become obsolete in modern society and has been replaced by the concept of dignity, we can trace this development backwards, and in so doing notice the societal changes along the way. This process will allow us to begin to appreciate the perspective of persons for whom our concept of dignity is unintelligible and for whom the concept of honor is of paramount importance. Achieving this perspective may not result in approval of such a society – we may conclude that the change from defending honor to caring

15 “Subordination”

here does not necessarily include showing respect or honor to others, nor does it necessarily preclude following another’s lead. Salzman explains, “Subordination is regarded as a loss of manhood, as manhood and manly virtues – assertiveness, strength, courage, tenacity, endurance, and capability – are equated with honor. . . in any confrontation, conflict, or combat, honor comes with victory and shame comes with defeat”.

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about dignity was an improvement – but it should enable us to understand the interests and actions of this other society, which in turn would enable communication, argument, and the type of anticipation necessary for choosing a course of action. I leave it to his peers to determine whether Salzman’s claims about the prominent role of honor are fully supported by the research; my interest has been to show how his work embodies imaginative historical inquiry and to suggest how such inquiry might proceed further. By presenting Salzman’s work as a contrast to the post-colonialist orthodoxy that dominates the social sciences, we have demonstrated that the study of foreign culture need not be based on racism or in the service of imperialism. The examination of the assumptions of post-colonialism in particular, and critique in general, also demonstrates the importance of philosophy for the social sciences. Put bluntly, bad philosophy leads to bad history, sociology and anthropology, which in turn lead to bad politics, whether domestic or international. The political virtues of prudence and justice require the exercise of imagination, as opposed to critique, to provide the type of understanding that is essential for decision-making. The understanding that such inquiry attains, especially regarding foreign cultures, will necessarily remain at a level of generality that, though regrettable, is nonetheless unavoidable. Salzman acknowledges this fact, writing, “All knowledge is based on abstraction, and abstraction draws on commonalities and averages that exist beyond the acknowledged variations of the particulars” [69, p. 15]. Because all knowledge, and all common nouns, are based on abstraction, the important point to remember is that within the version of historical inquiry for which I have been arguing, these abstractions further, rather than hinder, our ability to understand individuals as free agents rather than as tokens determined by their type. Moreover, the communication made possible and fostered by this understanding should, in turn, enable more precise understanding.

Chapter 10

Imagination and the Possibility of Civil Politics

As I have maintained from the outset, my aim has been to provide a philosophical analysis of historical inquiry that has clear practical applications for practitioners such as historians, political scientists and policy makers. Nevertheless, the argument of this book has, of necessity, been wide ranging and, at times, fairly technical. Therefore, I want to use this final chapter to provide an overview that, through reiteration and concentration, may serve to clarify and crystallize my argument and its practical significance. Historical inquiry is inquiry about the past, but not necessarily the distant past, and not necessarily about events of grand significance in the past. All of us engage in historical inquiry everyday, most often, probably, without even thinking about it. Whenever we respond to another’s action or act with the hope of producing a response from another, historical inquiry provides direction for our action. This is because such actions require us to have some understanding of the other person’s intentions and of how the other person will perceive our actions. Because a single action can be performed with different types of behavior, and because a single type of behavior can count as different actions depending on the situation, all actions must be placed in some larger context in order to be intelligible. As Alasdair MacIntyre says, “action itself has a basically historical character” [39, p. 212]. “Historical inquiry” just describes this attempt to provide the context for our observations. Most times, this attempt is done automatically, instantly, and with very little at stake. Sometimes, as when we are contemplating official political action, or conducting international diplomacy, this inquiry must be more deliberate and careful. Historical inquiry is not necessarily about attempting to discern grand patterns in history or to discover laws that history follows. It is also not necessarily about prediction. That is, its purpose is not to gather information to use for predicting the outcomes of wars or elections the way a bookmaker might lay odds on a prizefight. It is, however, necessary for anticipation. If every action aims at some end, then a necessary condition for acting rationally is to have some basis for anticipating the consequences of one’s actions. Among these consequences are other people’s reactions and responses to one’s actions. Without this ability to anticipate responses we would never be able to engage in such commonplace activities as greeting friends

J.R.L. Noland, Imagination and Critique, Philosophical Studies in Contemporary Culture 19, DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-3804-3_10,  C Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010

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or introducing ourselves to strangers. We would also be unable to debate over the wisdom of policies or make overtures to foreign peoples. Historical inquiry is something that we all do, that we all must do, and that we all must do well if we are to achieve any measure of order in our interactions with each other. In other words, historical inquiry is basic and necessary for political – i.e. communal – life. A more conscious and deliberate form of historical inquiry undertaken with the purpose of evaluating, explaining and directing political life is the work of historians, anthropologists, political scientists, and politicians. In these more systematic and rigorous endeavors it is possible to discern two basic methods of inquiry, each with different sets of assumptions about freedom, rationality, and personal identity. What distinguishes historical inquiry from other forms of inquiry that may have to do with human behavior, such as physics, biology, chemistry, and anatomy, is that historical inquiry has to do with the types of human behavior that are, or at least can be, free and rational. In other words, the subject matter of historical inquiry is human actions – speech, invention, art, and so on. Even those who disagree about how to define freedom and rationality can agree upon this general claim. I say there are two basic forms of historical inquiry because in undertaking this inquiry one must either begin with the assumption that the behavior one means to study was actually performed freely and rationally, or that, though it may on the surface appear to have been so, it was not. In the first case the appropriate method is “imagination”, in the second it is “critique”. In the first case, the context that historical inquiry seeks is provided by stories, in the second case it is provided by ideology, or “The Story”. Though there are many variations in the way these two basic methods are practiced, any historical inquiry will necessarily begin with one assumption or the other. The two methods that proceed from the two basic alternative assumptions are necessarily rivals because they are incommensurable. That is, there is no way to apply both methods to a particular question and then evaluate them according to the accuracy of their results because there is no independent standard against which to measure them. The two methods do not provide alternate routes to the same destination or competing means to the same end. Each version explicitly disavows the ends of the other. In contemporary parlance, the aim of imagination is to stand in the shoes of the persons one is studying, or if this is not possible, to at least look over their shoulders. From the perspective of critique, this is equivalent to a doctor aiming to heal a patient by contracting the patient’s disease. Though we cannot choose between these two rival versions on the basis of which gives us the most accurate accounting of history, we must choose nevertheless. It just is not possible coherently to employ both simultaneously. Because the task of choosing is too important to be left to chance, the way we must evaluate the two versions is by assessing their internal coherence and consistency. One aspect of this assessment is determining whether or not the proponent theorists of the respective versions can make sense of their own observations and behavior according to the terms of their own theory.

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Famously, the theorist of ideology, otherwise known herein as the critic, must claim to be exempt from the ideology and causal forces that plague the people he studies. Just as Marx had to claim a privileged perspective from which to discern the false consciousness of the masses, Thomas Frank must claim sanity in order to diagnose delusion; and Edward Said must claim benign neutrality when uncovering the biased, racist, and imperialist motivations of orientalists. Accounting for this special status is a considerable concern for any critic. It is not, however, their biggest problem. The biggest problem is the common premise of all critique, which is that true freedom is only possible for the individual self when divested of all particularity. This individual self is a chimerical creation of the Enlightenment that has been described as “unencumbered” [71], “disengaged” [73], and “characterless” [79, p. 159]. As I have argued at length, for such an entity rationality and freedom would be impossible to exercise. The entire project of critique depends upon exposing false consciousness by contrasting it to true rationality and freedom. If the conditions the critic holds up as ideal are, in fact, impossible and incoherent, the critic’s basis for identifying the errors manifest in false consciousness, and thereby accounting for the behavior of those benighted, is defeated. The theorist of imagination, as illustrated best by Vico, does not have such problems of theoretical internal coherence. He explains others’ behavior in the same way he explains his own. He develops his method through a systematic examination of his own ability to understand himself and his community, which understanding he necessarily and undeniably pursues and operates upon daily. A second aspect of the project of assessing the two rival versions of historical inquiry is the test of reflective equilibrium. This test is perhaps the most important for illustrating the practical and moral significance of choosing between these rival versions. Speaking generally, one fails to achieve reflective equilibrium when the version of inquiry one employs renders either the objects one sets out to study or the motives for one’s study unintelligible. Marx, for example, fails this test when he sets out empirically to understand persons as they really are and concludes that the truly free and rational person, manifesting undistorted universal human nature – which person Marx calls a “species-being” – is in fact a being who is entirely unfamiliar to experience and whose agency is entirely unintelligible. Said fails this test when he sets out to achieve a “humanistic critique” that will result in true understanding of other peoples and then proceeds to offer an argument that denies the very possibility of such understanding. Due to the basic conceptions of freedom and reason common to all critique, it will always fail to achieve reflective equilibrium. I believe that understanding how and why this is so will help us to understand an unfortunate feature of most contemporary political discourse. As we have seen, one of the primary motivations for critical projects is moral. Though this motivation is sometimes only implicit, and though it is, in fact, sometimes explicitly denied, it is nonetheless evident. Indeed, critique is unintelligible apart from moral motivation. This is because, by definition, its goal is not just to understand, but to unmask and uncover the truth, thereby liberating those suffering under false consciousness and exposing the perpetrators of this offense against freedom.

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This moral motivation must remain merely implicit, however, because the foundational premise of critique, that of the unencumbered, or disengaged or characterless self, entails that any and all obligations or duties can only attach to an individual through an act of the individual’s own will. Therefore, the critic must forego any appeal to universal moral concepts such as justice. To argue that the alleged perpetrators of false consciousness are guilty of committing an act of injustice would be to attribute to them obligations independently of their consciously choosing them. Thus, while critics will make and demand sacrifices in order to expose false consciousness, restore freedom, and right wrongs, and though they frequently speak with obvious moral passion and fervor in making and demanding these sacrifices, they must officially deny the existence of moral truth and its motivating power. This denial has at least two important and unwelcome results. The first is that though critique begins with moral motivation, this moral motivation, because officially denied, is not available as a resource when the critic is through with the intellectual project of unmasking and turns to the practical project of remedying the situation. The second result of this denial is that the critic’s own motivation is now unintelligible to himself; he is now unable to fortify and justify the strength of his own conviction. This inability to provide rational justification means that he must find some other means of reassurance and that he will not, because he cannot, offer justifying arguments to his opponents. Both Frank and Said provide helpful examples of these results. Frank is clearly motivated by moral concern for the working class citizens of Kansas and elsewhere who he feels are contributing to their own financial ruin. He would not have taken the time and effort to research and write his book if he merely found their situation puzzling. His sympathy for those with whom he grew up and with whom he still identifies is just as apparent as is his indignation and outrage at the “villains” who are responsible for their plight. But he denies that moral concerns have any in place in politics, so his own behavior in writing the book makes no sense on his own terms. Because he assumes that moral motivation in politics is evidence of false consciousness, he attributes this motivation manifest in working class conservatives to their derangement. The logical implication of this attribution is that these people need psychiatric help, and paternalistic help in the meantime, rather than rational counterarguments. Frank rails against “the backlash”, the conservative mechanism for inducing false consciousness, detailing its insidiousness with statistics, interviews and anecdotes for well over 200 pages. He identifies the major mistake liberals made that allowed this to happen. But something that is conspicuous for its absence is any prescription for fixing the problem. Such absence is conspicuous because of Frank’s obvious worries about the well being of those suffering this false-consciousness and because he seems so confident in his diagnosis of the problem. After describing the problem and explaining how it came about, Frank ends his book abruptly, asking “Why shouldn’t our culture just get worse and worse, if making it worse will only cause the people who worsen it go grow wealthier and wealthier?” [22, p. 250]. He ultimately concludes that, “Kansas is ready to lead us singing into the apocalypse”

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[22, p. 251]. His ultimate resignation stands in stark contrast to his language and passion throughout the book, which is worthy of an Old Testament prophet. In fact, I think this earlier passion belies his final despair. His extensive effort makes no sense if it was expended in the absence of any hope of its efficacy. Though he does not offer an explanation for why he prescribes no plan for overcoming the false consciousness of conservatism, I suspect it is because the only conceivable countermeasures are coercive and paternalistic. Having described working class conservatives as delusional, deranged dupes who cannot be expected to recognize their own interests, and having accused conservative business leaders and politicians of exploiting these working class people and implementing ruinous polices, it would be beyond disingenuous to propose an intensive program of rational persuasion and debate as a solution to such a mess. The method of critique provided Frank with the resources to explain, and explain away, all that he needed to in order to reach a neat and tidy (albeit unfortunate) conclusion. However, once employed, critique left him without the moral resources to fix the problem he identified. His only recourse, which, to his credit, he declines, would be to recommend the very manipulative tactics he spends so much time denouncing. Said provides ample illustration of critique’s inherent blind spot when it comes to morality and moral motivation. Over and over he accuses historians and politicians of distorting the truth about the Orient, but nevertheless maintains that he has “no ‘real’ Orient to argue for”. He says that his “two fears are distortion and inaccuracy”, and takes extreme offense at the alleged mischaracterizations of the Orient, but insists that there is no actual truth that could be represented [68, p. 8]. Without apparent irony he proclaims an interest in fostering knowledge, understanding and debate, saying, “We still have at our disposal the rational interpretive skills that are the legacy of humanistic education” [68, p. xxix]. Yet, his contention that all abstraction and generalization is an attempt by the speaker to re-present a particular object in such a manner as to further the speaker’s own interests entails that knowledge is impossible and that debate can only be a charade. He is, at least, consistent then when he makes no attempt to offer arguments as to the falsity of generalizations about the Orient or for his claim that these generalizations are evidence of power plays by those who made them. Like Frank, Said uses the language of moral condemnation when discussing those scholars and politicians with whom he disagrees; his moral outrage and sense of self-righteousness are palpable. But, also like Frank, he makes no moral arguments and offers no moral alternatives. His stance, whether political or historical, is entirely oppositional; he offers no positive proposals. His commitment to critique leaves him with no basis for making any claims to truth about history, morality or politics. He gestures toward a scientific humanism, but his rhetoric about the generalizations and representations is so extreme that this gesture is mere affect. Thus, in the end, Said’s book leaves the reader with nothing to do but angrily and selfrighteously search for more victims and level more accusations. Maintaining this passion is essential because, should it wane, there is no underlying noetic foundation to offer reassurance.

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I’ve said that historical inquiry is basic and necessary for political life and what the foregoing examples of Frank and Said demonstrate is that critique not only fails to provide the knowledge and understanding necessary for such life, but its practice is actually destructive of such life. This is because its assumptions and conclusions necessarily lead to opposition and accusation rather than cooperation. Though based on an ideal of reason as pure and universal, critique inevitably leads to attributions of irrationality and an inability to engage others in rational argumentation because reason is always presumed to be in the service of material interests. The presumption against the legitimacy of moral motivation results in suspicion of others and requires that motivation and passion be maintained by other means. Though self-identifying Marxists are increasingly rare, at least in the United States, critique abounds in academia and political discourse, especially when these two arenas overlap. Since it was first published, the assertions and assumptions of Orientalism have been widely influential in the fields of anthropology, sociology and history, and Edward Said has achieved great respect and attention for his views. What’s the Matter with Kansas? was widely acclaimed upon its release and continues to be part of political discussions. Thomas Frank is a noted and respected regular columnist whose pieces are read in major newspapers and magazines around the US. Critique and its basic method and assumptions are commonplace, whether or not they are always recognized as such, even by those who employ them. This pervasiveness of critique is apparent in the prevailing tone, tenor and manner of much of today’s political speech. In After Virtue Alasdair MacIntyre observes that protest has become “a distinctive moral feature of the modern age” and that “indignation is a predominant modern emotion” [40, p. 71]. Anyone possessing even a passing familiarity with contemporary political discourse, whether domestic or international, will recognize the accuracy of these observations. MacIntyre suggests that the rise of protest as a form of political expression and the predominance of indignation result from the awareness on the part of the indignant protestor that his position is without any rational support. As such, he can neither win an argument through deductive demonstration nor forfeit an argument because of failure to engage. One need not pine with nostalgia for some mythical golden age of calm, rational political dialogue to notice that in today’s political arena there is often not even any pretense of engaging in such dialogue. As MacIntyre notes, more often than not the expression of protest is actually directed to those already in agreement with the speaker. Rallies, marches and speeches to crowds of cheering admirers are far more common than true petition or argumentation. Disagreements are more likely to be attributed to some moral failing such as racism or hatred on the part of one’s disputant than to inaccurate facts or faulty reasoning. Being the first to express offense and outrage at another’s statement is more important in a debate than demonstrating the statement’s error. Political policies and speeches are subjected to critique rather than analysis, with the primary questions having to do with what a politician or party hopes to gain rather than whether policies or ideas have any merit. In the domestic context, Frank’s confidence that “most of us think of politics as a Machiavellian drama in which actors make alliances and take practical steps

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to advance their material interests”, is probably justified and it communicates precisely the way critique is destructive of political life [22, p. 121]. Rather than understanding politics in the Aristotelian sense of determining rationally the ways we can and should live together as a community, it has become accepted that, as MacIntyre says, politics is simply “civil war carried on by other means” [40, p. 253]. This is because, from the perspective Frank expresses, politics cannot achieve the recognition of communal interests, it can only identify and settle on interests that coincide, and this settlement is not a consensus arrived at through rational deliberation but a treaty achieved by matching power with power. In the global arena, the damage caused by critique is not so much to the moral ideal of deliberative democracy but to the practical necessity of understanding the beliefs and practices of allies and adversaries alike. Said professes a desire to overcome Western caricatures of Oriental (Middle Eastern) peoples and bring about Western recognition of these peoples as free, rational peoples with whom the West should engage as equals. He proposes a “humanistic critique”, defining “humanism” as “centered upon the agency of human individuality and subjective intuition, rather than on received ideas and approved authority”. This humanism, he says, is the “final resistance we have against the inhuman practices and injustices that disfigure human history”. Yet, his adamant devotion to critiquing Western action renders it necessary that he deny the very agency and individuality of those he champions. In the “Preface to the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Edition” of Orientalism, he demonstrates his persistence in denying to his subjects the responsibility that accompanies agency, writing, Because the governments are relatively powerless to affect U.S. policy toward them, they turn their energies to repressing and keeping down their own populations, which results in resentment, anger, and helpless imprecations that do nothing to open up societies where secular ideas about human history and development have been overtaken by failure and frustration, as well as by an Islamism built out of rote learning, the obliteration of what are perceived to be other, competitive forms of secular knowledge, and an inability to analyze and exchange ideas within the generally discordant world of modern discourse. [68, p. xxviii]

So, the tyrannical repression perpetrated by Middle Eastern governments is the consequence of the United States’ misdeeds. This repression then causes violent attitudes that frustrate the ability of Middle Eastern peoples to overcome an ideology that prevents them from thinking and acting rationally. The alleged asymmetry of responsibility is astonishing when presented so starkly, but upon reflection it is sadly familiar. Not only is this denial of rationality and agency to Middle Eastern peoples condescending and dehumanizing, it presents manipulation as the only realistic manner of engagement with them. Furthermore, and quite ironically, it treats these peoples as monolithic, both across borders and within individual countries, completely ignoring differences of opinion and perspective among individual persons. Relying on this approach to inform international diplomacy is, at best, a formula for failure, and, at worst, a recipe for disaster. Though not all critics reach the same conclusions as Said, it is inherent to critique as a method of historical inquiry to produce the same types of observations about

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rationality and responsibility, and to obscure the stories of those one studies. What critique cannot produce is the type of understanding necessary to engage another in rational argumentation and to anticipate another’s responses to one’s overtures. In order to enter in to dialogue, including argument, with another, one must first possess enough understanding of the other’s identity and perspective to recognize and propose some common point or points of agreement upon which to build. We see awareness of this fundamental point at work in Plato’s denuciation of Protagoras and it is the foundation of Aristotle’s Ethics. Explaining the ability to achieve this common point is Vico’s purpose in his identification and description of the faculty of fantasia. This understanding through imagination is essential for action and for political life. It is also necessary if there is to be any hope of peaceful coexistence between countries. It is widely noted that never in history has one democratically governed nation launched a military attack on another such nation. Of the numerous possible reasons for this, one is surely that the practice of democracy requires the exercise of imagination in the pursuit of understanding. To the extent that critique overcomes and replaces imagination as the popular and professional means of historical inquiry, this should, therefore, be cause for concern, if not alarm. However, my sense is that despite the apparently widespread, if not universal, appeal of discerning The Story, which appeal critique exploits, the fact that imagination as detailed by Vico is, in fact, universal and fundamental to all human action and interaction suggests that though it may go unrecognized, it will never go unused. For this we should be quite grateful, for it suggests that despite appearances, there will always be some basis for hoping that understanding and rational, peaceful communal life is possible. Realizing this, we should be able to appreciate the significance of the fact that Vaclav Havel, a leader of the opposition to the communist rule of Czechoslovakia and the country’s first president after it emerged from under totalitarian rule, was, first and fundamentally, a playwright.

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Index

A Abstraction, 23, 25–26, 32, 40, 43–44, 121, 138, 143 Action, 10–11, 18, 23–24, 27–29, 31, 35–36, 46–47, 50–51, 56, 59, 61, 63–64, 71–76, 78, 80–81, 84, 99, 102, 105, 111, 113, 119–120, 126, 134, 136, 138–139, 145–146 Agency, 61, 80, 89, 97, 110, 141, 145 Agent, 1, 16, 45, 62, 64, 71, 73–75, 78–80, 95, 97, 105, 112–113, 121, 130, 138 Alford, C. F., 67–68 Anscombe, E., 73–74 Anthropology, 119–138, 144 Arab, 18, 119–120, 125–126, 133–136 Arendt, H., 131 Aristotelian, 40, 73, 84, 113, 145 Aristotle, 23–24, 34–35, 73, 84, 102, 146 Articles of Confederation, The, 16 Augustine, 73–74, 97 Authority, 4, 33–34, 39–40, 43, 82, 96, 124, 127–128, 133, 136–137, 145 Autonomy, 33, 56, 61–63, 69, 127 B Bailey, J., 13 Balanced opposition, 18, 127, 133–134 Baluch, 127–130 Berger, P., 136–137 Berlin, I., 22, 24, 83, 85, 87 Bierce, A., 10 Bloom, A., 54, 58, 62 Bryan, W. J., 9, 13, 87 Burial, 4, 24–26, 28–30, 83, 89, 134 Bush, G. W., 99–100 C Caldwell, J. C., 90–96 Carnegie, A., 12

Cause/causation formal, 23 material, 23, 28, 32 Chesterton, G.K., 73, 80 Class, social, 102–103, 105, 111, 116 Cockran, B., 12 Community, 24–25, 28–30, 35, 43, 60, 65–67, 72, 79, 82, 91, 93, 95, 102, 105–106, 141, 145 Consciousness false, 42–45, 54, 58–60, 70–71, 94, 100, 102–104, 107–109, 112, 119–120, 129, 141–143 Critic, 47, 102, 112–113, 119, 124–125, 141–142 Critique, 2, 4–7, 18, 21, 27, 39–51, 54, 62, 69, 77–78, 85, 90–91, 94, 99–100, 102, 104, 107–112, 117, 119–138, 140–146 Culture, 6–7, 11, 18, 21, 24, 27–28, 36, 39, 53, 69, 76–77, 85, 91, 95, 97, 99, 104–105, 119–127, 129–130, 133–136, 139, 142 D Dallas, A., 7, 87 Debate, 1, 3, 7, 10–12, 17, 19, 85, 109–110, 120, 140, 143–144 Deliberative democracy, 115, 117, 145 Democrat, 99, 101, 104–106, 108–109, 119, 128, 146 Demographic(s), 1, 90, 99, 100, 127 Derangement, 6, 17–18, 100–101, 103, 105–106, 108–109, 115, 142 Descartes, R., 22, 27–28, 82, 123, 129 Despair, 30, 75–78, 97, 125, 143 Dialogue, 110–111, 113, 144, 146 Dignity, 131, 136–138 Discernment, 31, 39, 119 Dye, T., 15

151

152 E Economics, 12, 103–104 Education, 34, 50, 66, 91–93, 95–96, 106, 109, 131, 143 Egalitarian, 127, 136 Elites, 15–16, 100 Elitism, 13–16, 100 Embodiment, 28, 65, 83, 124 Emotivism, 115 End, final, 94, 122 Epistemology, 28 Essence, 28, 31, 36, 39, 44–50, 56–59, 61, 67, 80, 121–124, 131, 137 Essentialism, 119, 121–124 European Union (E.U.), 131, 135 Experience, 4, 14, 18, 21–23, 26–29, 47, 58–59, 62, 66, 74–77, 80–81, 83, 86, 89, 103, 121, 123, 129, 141 F Fantasia, 3, 24, 46, 81–83, 137, 146 Fertility decline, 90, 92 Foucault, M., 122 Foundationalism, 21, 24, 26, 29, 32, 35, 68, 71, 75, 110, 113, 119–120, 125–126, 142 Frank, T., 6, 17–19, 95, 99–117, 124, 141–145 Freedom, 2, 4–5, 32–37, 40, 46–50, 54–60, 62–65, 67, 74, 80–81, 86, 102, 107, 113, 120, 123–125, 128–134, 136–137, 140–142 Fukuyama, F., 131–133 G Gellner, E., 126 God, 22–23, 25, 29–30, 33–34, 83, 132 Golba, T., 106–109, 116 Good, 12, 18–19, 24–25, 34–35, 41–43, 55, 61–62, 64–67, 75–76, 93, 102, 104–105, 108–110, 113, 123, 131, 133, 135 Gospel of Wealth, The, 12 Great Society, The, 2 Greene, G., 81 Gunton, C., 28, 81, 124 H Hall, U., 13 Havel, V., 80, 116, 146 Hegel, G.W.F., 36, 86, 128–131, 137 Hegelian, 129, 131–133 Historical Inquiry, 2–3, 5–6, 11–13, 16–19, 21–22, 25, 31–32, 37, 40–41, 50, 53, 67–70, 74, 77–78, 81, 84, 87, 89–90,

Index 96, 99–100, 108–111, 115, 119–120, 125, 135, 138–141, 144–146 History, pragmatic, 86 Hobbes, T., 30, 51, 71 Honor, 59, 130, 135–138 Humanism, 143, 145 Humanistic, 120, 123, 125, 141, 143, 145 Hume, D., 26–27, 35, 70–71 I Ideology, 5, 32, 40, 42–45, 47, 69–84, 91, 106, 121, 132, 140–141, 145 Imagination, 2–4, 21–37, 40–41, 47–48, 66, 69, 76–77, 83, 85–97, 107–108, 111, 116, 120, 126, 132, 135, 137–146 Imperialism, 123, 138 Income Tax, 2–3, 7–19, 85, 87–89, 93, 95, 105, 110 Individual, 1, 3, 6, 10–11, 13, 15–16, 21–22, 25, 27–30, 32–37, 40–65, 67, 70–71, 74–75, 78–81, 83, 90, 93, 95–97, 103, 107, 113, 116, 120–121, 123–124, 126–127, 129–134, 136–138, 141–142, 145 Institution, 4, 9, 23–26, 29–32, 35, 40, 44, 57, 59, 66, 80, 83–84, 88–93, 95–97, 121–122, 126–128, 134–137 Intelligible/intelligibility, 4, 21–22, 24–25, 29–33, 35, 40, 46–47, 50, 58–59, 61, 63–65, 67, 69–74, 77–79, 81–82, 91, 106, 115–117, 123–124, 136–137, 139, 141–142 Intention, 4, 10, 15, 17–18, 23–28, 30–31, 35–36, 41, 46–48, 50, 58, 66, 70–79, 81, 90, 92, 94, 97, 108, 110, 112, 119, 123–126, 128–129, 131, 139 Interest, material, 1, 10–11, 101, 104–105, 112, 144–145 Intuition, 1, 17, 58, 89, 115, 145 Irrationality, 103, 123, 133–134, 144 J Judgment, 4, 17, 26–29, 32–35, 47, 53, 62–64, 75–78, 82–83, 95–96, 104, 112, 128, 130 moral, 18, 71, 81, 114–115 Justice, 9–10, 13–14, 16, 34, 41, 44, 53–58, 60, 71, 87, 90, 92, 94, 113, 115, 125, 131, 138, 142, 145 K Kant, I., 4–5, 21–22, 26–28, 34–36, 56, 59, 61–64, 75–76, 80 Khawaja, I., 122

Index Knowledge, 3, 21–23, 26, 28, 31, 37, 45–46, 50, 56–57, 60–62, 66, 71, 73–75, 78–82, 85, 87, 107, 111, 116, 138, 143–145 personal, 97 L Labor, 5, 41–44, 46–48, 60, 102, 109, 114, 120 Language, 2–3, 11–12, 24–26, 29–30, 32, 41, 51, 71, 73, 100, 103, 108–110, 112, 114–115, 119, 121–122, 125, 136, 143 Law, 2, 4–5, 7–8, 12–13, 16, 18, 21–23, 25, 33–34, 37, 42, 44, 46, 56, 61–64, 74, 82, 84, 88, 100, 102, 110, 114, 116, 121, 123, 130, 136, 139 Locke, J., 22, 123 M MacIntyre, A., 2, 5, 21, 68–72, 75–78, 81, 95, 97, 115, 139, 144–145 Manicas, P., 95, 126, 130, 132 Marriage, 4, 24–26, 28–30, 34, 65–67, 83, 89, 93 Marxian, 4, 9, 18, 50, 64, 77, 97 Marx, K., 2, 4–5, 16–18, 21, 31–33, 36, 39–43, 45–50, 53–70, 74–75, 77, 80, 82, 101–102, 112, 123, 128–129, 141 Master-key, 3, 5, 25, 41, 70, 102, 108, 110, 116, 119–120 Mazlish, B., 31 Memory, 24, 83, 86 Metaphysical/Metaphysics, 4, 39, 41–42, 54–55, 58, 62, 64–65, 75–76, 83, 102, 121, 123–124, 132–133 Middle East, The, 3, 16, 18–19, 119, 120, 123, 125, 128, 134, 136 Middle Eastern, 6, 18, 120, 123, 125–126, 129, 133, 135–136, 145 Modern/modernity, 15, 18, 84, 90–92, 94, 109, 111, 123–124, 126, 128–134, 136–137, 144–145 Moral/Morality, 1–3, 5–6, 18, 26–27, 29, 34, 42, 44, 53–55, 63–64, 71, 75–76, 85, 89–90, 92–95, 100, 105–108, 111–115, 119–120, 123–124, 133, 141–145 inversion, 113, 125 Murdoch, I., 34 Mystery, 80, 99 N Names/naming, 2–3, 13, 23, 25, 27–28, 33, 35–36, 42, 48, 50–51, 53, 62, 65–66, 69–85, 88, 99, 101, 103, 107–108, 113, 115, 121–122, 130, 137

153 Narrative, 10, 66, 72, 77–78, 107–108, 112 National Tax Association, 14 Nature, human, 2, 4, 10, 12, 32, 35, 48, 54, 62–65, 69, 102, 107, 120, 124, 141 Necessity, 17, 29, 32, 36, 41, 46, 58–59, 78, 80, 82, 114, 120, 123, 125, 130–131, 135, 139, 145 New Deal, The, 2 Newton, I., 4, 21 New York Times, The, 9, 100 Nietzsche, F., 122 Nomos, 33 Norms, 51, 60, 66–67, 77, 126, 137 O Object, 2–3, 33, 36, 44–46, 49, 62, 64, 66, 74–75, 78, 87, 105, 116, 121, 143 Objective/Objectivity, 18, 77, 97, 111–113, 115, 125, 133 O’Connor, K., 107–109, 116 Ontological, 40, 55, 57–58, 61, 82, 88, 115, 121 Ontology, 40, 55, 57–58, 61, 82, 88, 115, 121 Orientalism, 120–124, 144–145 Orientation, 4, 26, 35, 83, 89, 135 Original position, 54–62, 65, 67–70 Other, the, 5, 16–17 P Particular/particularity, 2–6, 9–11, 13, 16–18, 25, 27–28, 33, 35–37, 46–50, 53–70, 72, 74–76, 79–83, 90, 93, 95, 111–112, 117, 119, 121–126, 129–134, 137–138, 140–141, 143 Passion, 25, 27–30, 33–36, 65–66, 112, 115, 121, 123, 125, 142–144 Philosophes, 82 Plato, 22, 75, 82, 109, 121–122, 146 Polanyi, M., 28, 79–80, 97, 112–113, 115–116, 125 Political debate, 19, 110 Politics, 6, 9–10, 55, 101, 103, 105–106, 108–111, 116, 119, 138–146 Pollock vs Farmer’s Loan and Trust Co., 7 Post-colonialism, 19, 120, 131, 138 Post-modern, 123 Power, 2, 5, 7, 9, 12–16, 26, 29, 31, 33–34, 63, 65, 80–81, 88, 93, 103, 107, 110, 113, 120–125, 127, 142–143, 145 Practice, 2, 11–12, 24, 28–29, 34–35, 39, 42–44, 48, 51, 57, 59–60, 65–67, 72–74, 77–79, 83, 85–97, 116, 122, 130, 132, 140, 144–146

154 Pragmatic/pragmatism, 86 Progressive/progressivism, 10, 14, 110 Purpose, 4–5, 23–24, 26, 29, 43, 45, 50, 53, 61, 67, 72–74, 76, 105, 121–122, 128, 131, 134, 139–140, 146 R Racism, 120, 123, 138, 144 Rationality, 4, 11, 80, 90–91, 94–95, 97, 102–103, 107, 110–111, 117, 123, 125–126, 128–129, 131–136, 140–141, 145–146 Rawls, J., 5, 51, 53–70, 78, 80, 123, 129 Realism/reality, 3, 11, 22–23, 27, 39–40, 42, 45, 48, 51, 70, 83, 95, 112, 122–123, 133–134, 137 Reason, 1–2, 4–5, 10, 21, 27–30, 32–36, 45, 48, 50–51, 53–70, 72, 74, 76, 82, 89–90, 92–94, 108, 110–111, 120–126, 129–131, 136, 141, 144 Reflective equilibrium, 78–79, 82, 111, 116, 141 Relativism, 76–77 cultural, 76 epistemological, 76–77 Religion, 4, 19, 24–26, 28–30, 42, 83, 89, 102, 105, 121, 124, 134 Representation, 57, 121–123, 143 Republican, 9, 14–17, 99–101, 107–108 Rights, 9, 14, 126, 131, 134–135 Roosevelt, T., 9, 14, 16, 87 S Said, E., 120–125, 128–131, 133, 141–145 Salzman, P. C., 6, 18–19, 95, 120, 125–130, 133–138 Sandel, M., 60–61, 64 Scanlon, T.M., 65 Schneewind, J.B., 72 Science, 2–4, 7, 21, 24–27, 31–32, 37, 39–40, 44–48, 50, 53, 58, 67, 69–70, 78, 80–82, 85, 99, 101, 111, 119–120, 124–126, 130–131, 133, 138 Segmentary lineage, 126–127 Self -awareness, 126, 135 disengaged, 123, 129, 141–142 -help, 127–128 -interest, 11–13, 15–16, 30, 88, 90, 94, 100–103, 111 -knowledge, 61, 80 unencumbered, 51, 59, 70, 81, 123–125, 129, 133, 137, 141–142

Index Shame, 136–137 Sixteenth Amendment, 2–3, 7–13, 15–17, 19, 84–90, 93, 95–97, 109 Skepticism, 39, 76–77, 116–117 Social science, 2, 78, 101, 111, 120, 124–126, 130–131, 133, 138 Sociology, 99, 103, 111, 115, 138, 144 Species-being, 49–50, 58–59, 64, 124, 141 State, 2, 7, 9, 14–15, 17, 30, 43–44, 47, 49–50, 54, 67–68, 71, 74, 86, 88, 91–92, 95–97, 99–101, 107, 112, 114, 126, 128–134, 136–137 of nature, 30, 54, 67–68, 71 Story/stories, 2–3, 7–19, 27, 31–32, 40–41, 46, 55, 63–64, 75, 77, 80–81, 83, 85–86, 88–89, 96, 99, 102–105, 107–109, 116–117, 140, 146 Subject, 2–4, 44–45, 51, 60, 62–64, 79, 82, 84, 91, 105, 109, 111, 124, 140 Subjective/subjectivity, 85, 97, 130, 145 T Taft, H., 14 Tammany H., 15 Taylor, C., 123 Teleology, 111 Theory, 6, 22, 31, 39, 41, 44, 47–48, 51, 53–54, 58, 70–71, 75, 83, 90, 111, 113, 115, 120, 137, 140 Tradition, 13, 16, 22, 30, 33, 39, 44, 46–47, 50–51, 54, 58–60, 62, 65–68, 74, 90–93, 115, 123–124, 134–135 Tribalism, 127–128, 130, 134, 136 Truth, 5, 21–22, 27, 34, 45, 55, 69, 79–81, 92, 94, 102, 104–105, 111–113, 115, 120–125, 131, 141–143 U Understanding, 1–5, 10, 18, 21, 23, 26–29, 32, 36–37, 40–41, 44–49, 53, 55, 62, 66–67, 69–71, 76–79, 81–83, 87–90, 92–93, 95, 97, 99–101, 106–108, 110–111, 113, 115–117, 119–121, 123–126, 130, 133–134, 136–139, 141, 143–146, 150 United Nations (U.N.), 90–91, 134 Universals, 22, 25, 28–29, 33, 41, 48, 82, 123–124 Unmasking, 39, 102, 112, 142 U.S. Constitution, 2, 7 Utilitarian, 112, 115

Index V Veil of ignorance, 54–55, 57, 69 Vico, G., 2–6, 16–19, 21–37, 41, 46, 50, 53, 58, 66–67, 70, 74–90, 93, 95–96, 116, 120, 126, 132, 135, 137, 141, 146 Voltaire, 82 W Waltman, J., 14 War of 1812, 2, 7–8 War Between The States, The, 7–8 Weil, S., 35 Weisman, S. R., 10–15, 87

155 Welfare, 14–15 Well-being, 18, 94, 102, 109 West, The, 96–97, 119, 121, 123, 125, 127–128, 133, 135–136, 145 Western, 6, 18–19, 120, 123–124, 126–130, 134, 136, 145 Will, free, 45–46, 62–63 Williams, B., 124, 129 Wilson-Gorman Tariff, 7 Wittgenstein, L., 73, 95 Z Ziegler, H., 15